Byron's Role in Romantic Sexual Counter-Culture

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2005 Iconic Androgyne: Byron's Role in Romantic Sexual Counter Culture William M. Lofdahl

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

ICONIC ANDROGYNE:

BYRON’S ROLE IN ROMANTIC SEXUAL COUNTER CULTURE

WILLIAM M. LOFDAHL

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005

The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of William M. Lofdahl defended on May 2, 2005.

______James O’Rourke Professor Directing Thesis

______Eric Walker Committee Member

______Barry Faulk Committee Member

Approved:

______Bruce Boehrer, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iv

INTRODUCTION...... 1

1. BYRON THE CELEBRITY AND POP CULTURE ICON...... 8

2. REEVALUATING THE THIRD SEX…………………………………….. 26

3. THE REVOLUTION OF THE ANDROGYNE IN BYRON’S POETRY.. 39

4. CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………… 55

WORKS CITED ...... 58

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 62

iii

ABSTRACT

Iconic Androgyne explores the nature of androgyny in both the poetical works of Lord Byron and in his composition of Byron’s own persona. Most contemporary scholarship approaches androgyny from a queer theory or feminist theoretical base, and explore androgyny as a condition where a male character slides away from absolute masculine subjectivity to occupy a space that hovers somewhere between the masculine and feminine poles. The result of this idea is that scholars most often view the androgyne as lacking power. This paper seeks to reevaluate the androgyne and redefine it in a new environment wherein the persona incorporates the strongest elements of both genders to create a powerful third sex. Lord Byron helped to create himself as a mythical androgyne who was eagerly received by a counter-culture comprised of youth and the rising urban, working class whose radical agenda was to seek social equality, which included sexual democracy. Thus, the mythic Byron persona became a figure for a socio-sexual revolution behind which the counter-culture could rally. Byron’s influence is still felt in the modern day as androgynous or sexually ambiguous celebrities such as David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and other leaders of the Glam rock revolution took up the reins to drive the revolution that Byron began.

INTRODUCTION

A standard cliché in our society is that negative publicity is still publicity, and it keeps those persons being talked about in the minds and on the lips of the consuming public. In many instances public controversy does more for the popularity of a celebrity than repeated critical celebrations of skill or other merit based recognitions. The large circulation of tabloid press, news magazines, the continued presence of gossip columns, and the rating success of tabloid television programs, like Celebrity Justice, attest to the public’s craving for controversy. Take the relatively recent example of the basketball celebrity Dennis Rodman. Not many would disagree with the fact that he was a talented ball player, but his skill in the game was not what gave this man his name recognition. It was in fact the controversies that surrounded his personal life that led to his celebrity status. Most people know he played basketball, but only the most avid fans of the sport could relay detailed specifics of his performance on the court. What the mass culture associates with this man is the nature of his character. His name conjures up memories of a man in a white wedding dress with several body piercings and multi-colored hair. Rodman created this image to create controversy which kept him in the public eye. We should not undervalue shock-value. In much the same way, Lord Byron was one of the few poets who gained celebrity status, of mythic proportions at that, in his own lifetime and beyond. This fame, or infamy depending on the observer’s point of view, and the popularity of his writing were not mutually exclusive as in the separation of the persona and his craft in the Rodman example. What did occur, as Peter Manning points out, was a winning combination of a brilliant publication and promotion strategy conceived by John Murray, and the creation and rise of the Byronic myth, achieved partly by the contributions of Annabella Milbanke, Caroline Lamb and other women of prominence in Byron’s life whose writings and general gossip about their relations with the poet and his adeptness as a lover and a scoundrel gave birth to the myth. However, most of the credit for his meteoric rise should be given to Byron himself for developing a complex strategy

of self-promotion, which Francis Wilson contends began to spin out of Byron’s control when it fell into the hands of the public. In essence, Byron’s poetry and stories about the man himself, whether revealed or endorsed by the poet or invented from the imagination of the public through a process of fantasy, became publicly traded commodities. This kind of character creation is not a new concept in marketing the commodified self. Since the early nineteenth-century the growing consumer sphere moved out of neighborhood markets which carried products that satisfied a need, like offering soap to one who needed it, to a more crowded marketplace where there were choices in the soap that was bought. With more competition, the manufacturers of these commodities sought ways to ensure the popularity of their particular product. To continue with the example given, manufacturers of soap began branding their product to distinguish it from the competition and marketing that brand to increase its popularity with the consumer. This need for individuation also occurred in the creative marketplace. The author or composer or artist whose name appears on a piece is the brand name of that piece, and just like that bar of soap, artistic products were bought up based largely on brand recognition. However, distributors of these artistic products did little in the way of mass marketing. Nicolas Mason points out that the marketing of brand names was not widely practiced until the 1770s when branding itself actually took hold (419). What Mason calls the “commodification of the aesthetic” (413), or the marketing of artistic products, did not begin until branding took hold in other markets. It is true that publishing houses and pay- theaters existed long before the late eighteenth-century, and the name brand of the poem, play or painting played the key role in how well the product moved off the shelves or filled theater seats. In essence, the name of the artist was name brand of the piece. However, in these instances, the name brand mostly gained its recognition by the quality of the product rather than the marketing of that product. This early type of branding, based on audience response, is different than what Mason describes as happening later in the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century when publishers actively devised marketing campaigns to sell their represented artists. The popularity an author experienced was based on a

shared perception by the public of the work’s quality as well as a perceived reliability of the author to continue to produce such work. Any aesthetic judgment is a subjective one. The amount of public consensus is the measure of popularity; talented writers had a larger share of the audience. Even to this day the longevity of aesthetic commodities is most often merit based, the merit obviously subjectively ascribed. The marketing of a product can only go so far if its quality is substandard. This merit-based recognition takes time to develop. Prior to the mass advertising of these artistic products, sales of the pieces occurred relatively slowly. Specifically talking about literary products, readership or sales grew by the word-of-mouth reporting of the merits of the particular pieces. In this way, literary branding is a cumulative process. As more people liked the piece, a wider audience bought the piece based on the recommendation of others. This slow process of gaining fame as an author does not fit with the literal overnight success of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Mason rightly points out that having the original printing of the text sell out in three days based purely on its artistic merits is close to impossible (424). He continues by acknowledging that other scholars like Jerome Christensen and Peter Manning recognized that the sale of Childe Harold did not follow the regular pattern of mouth to ear advertising, but they primarily attributed the success of the piece to the shrewd business sense of John Murray (414). While Murray was no doubt a major factor in the work’s success, Mason noticed that there was considerable conversation about Byron prior to the release of the poem that prompted much of its instant success. Without retelling the circumstances related by Mason that created “Brand Byron,” it is that label itself which is important to this investigation. Just like Rodman, Byron’s character became the most recognizable feature of the poet. I am not by any means devaluing the work that Byron produced, because despite the sudden success of Childe Harold, the longevity of the poem’s popularity and the generally favorable critical responses to most of his poems, especially in the face of some objections about their morality or lack thereof, are testaments to their artistic merits and the talent of the poet. Rather what I am stating is that the

various controversies surrounding the poet are what kept his name in the mouth of the public and made him a legend in his own time. A great deal of scholarship has been produced about the star status of Lord Byron, much of which has become the foundation for this current investigation. Within the study of Byron’s celebrity, most scholars place their emphasis on the phenomenon that Frances Wilson calls “Byromania,” adopting the term coined by Annabella Milbanke. Lord Byron was elevated to the status of superstar in his own lifetime, and after his death, the legend lived on as embellishments of his deeds both in controversy and adoration. His mystique continues to the modern day. This mythic personage’s presence remains palpable in any of a number of cultural settings, modes of dress, behavioral mannerisms, and references to him in various media. No other literary figure has had his name attached so popularly and extensively as to become a stereotypical characterization for both fictional and real-life people, as the Byronic hero. Starting with literary characters invented during Byron’s lifetime and continuing through pop-celebrities like James Dean, Elvis and David Bowie, scholars, fans, and critics have made careers for themselves by identifying Byron in these later figures. The Byronic hero is an old notion that has fallen out of favor in contemporary Byron scholarship, partly because over the years that concept has undergone an almost exhaustive study and partly because the Byronic hero establishes a certain paradigm for primarily male behavior which is slowly beginning to break down in academic circles as more inquiries uncover the “queerness” of Byron. Queer theory scholarship concentrates on the elements of the homosexual or homoerotic themes in Byron’s life and work. Byron’s dubious sexual escapades serve as the springboard from which critics attempt to find imitations of Byron’s life in his art. Abigail Keegan and other critics work extensively with Byron’s sexual epic Don Juan since it is the piece where scholars agree that Byron most openly disclosed homoerotic themes through the characters’ various encounters and, as Jonathan Gross points out, through the narrator himself. Don Juan is also the epic in which the poet is most easily identifiable in the characters he creates, though once one becomes familiar with

the pattern, finding him in his other works becomes a relatively simple matter. In contemporary scholarship, Byron’s homosexual behavior has taken the spotlight, moving other episodes of “deviant” sexuality into the shadows. His numerous encounters with women often receive less attention than the few occasions where male/male relations are depicted or implied. A review of his actual liaisons, as recorded in his own journals as well as those with whom he came in contact, yields a seemingly clear preference for male/female relations, especially in his maturity. However, even during the nineteenth-century rumors of sodomitical activity helped to shape the mythical Byron. Though his major public scandal during his lifetime was his incestuous relationship with Augusta, Fiona MacCarthy notes that during that time “Byron’s homosexuality became a buried subject” (564). Just because it is a buried subject does not mean that the public was unaware of it. MacCarthy points out that the anonymous publication of the poem, Don Leon, in 1866 rather unflatteringly portrays the life of the poet as “a series of sodomitical episodes culminating in anal intercourse with Lady Byron” (564). The societal standards in Britain of the day kept same sex relations hidden and, in most cases, conducted outside a person’s public heterosexual lifestyle, yet it seems that the public as least speculated about Byron’s homosexuality. Though Byron was not blatant about his male liaisons, he was very outspoken about other social issues that contributed to his overall hedonism. He continually thumbed his nose at societal standards of morality and decorum and conducted his affairs in defiance of those cultural standards. This defiance actually contributes to what Peter Graham presents as Byron’s self- promotion or mythmaking, which leads into the central thesis of this essay. Byron’s popularity in the nineteenth-century, both in Britain and on the continent, especially within youth culture and the liberal, urban working class (I say urban to make the distinction between it and the more conservative rural working class), bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between youth and rock and roll stars of the “British Counter-Culture” between 1966 and 1973 that Daniel Foss and Ralph Larkin have called a “historically unprecedented . . . youth movement” (qtd. in Nelson 6). However, there are parallels between the youth-driven, cultural revolution of that period and the one that took place during

Byron’s lifetime, thereby contradicting Foss and Larkin’s assessment. Just as Nelson suggests that the more recent cultural uprising was a reaction against capitalistic systems, the counter-culture movement of the nineteenth-century was born out of the rising urban working class and carried by the youth culture as a reaction to capitalism and industrialization. In 1845 Frederick Engels wrote in his The Condition of the Working Class in England that Byron was popularly read among the working class. Engels states that “Byron attracts their sympathy by his sensuous fire and by the virulence of his satire against the existing social order. While the middle classes, on the other hand, have on their shelves only ruthlessly expurgated ‘family’ editions . . . prepared to suit the hypocritical moral standards of the bourgeoisie” (Critical Heritage 368). Though beginning humbly, Liberalism and Democratic thought were spreading throughout Britain as the Romantic counter-culture movement grew. Showing all of the parallels between the two counter-culture movements is far too expansive a task to wholly address here. This project will focus on the revolution of sexuality as part of the larger issues of social liberty that occurred during the nineteenth-century while drawing the connection between the counter-culture movement of the twentieth-century and its origins in Romantic Britain. Byron’s celebrity, his superstar status, his popularity among the youth and otherwise free spirits of Europe, and the degree to which his sexuality is an integral part of the Byronic mythos are strikingly similar to the atmosphere created by the Glam movement during the late 1960's and early 70's. During that movement, much of the pop, underground culture was represented by Glam-rock musicians who, like Byron, were shocking the conservative British hegemony with their questionable, ambiguous sexuality. In particular David Bowie’s alter ego during the period, Ziggy Stardust, became the poster-image for the movement and the symbol of social revolution. Stardust, and by association, Bowie seem to fit into the new Byronic male uncovered by queer scholarship. Both pop-icon figures not only represented socio-sexual revolution, but they became objects of sexual desire for the participants in that sexual revolution. An audience finding itself attracted to those images of revolution was forced to face its own ambiguous, and at least homosocial, nature. It was particularly

Stardust’s androgyny which made the character so appealing to a vast and diverse audience. In much the same way, on the level of character if not appearance, Byron had the same effect on his liberal, activistic, audience during the first half of the nineteenth-century, which continued to influence subsequent generations of social revolutionaries and as we will see the Glam movement itself. A second historical irony is that of the young, revolutionary Romantic poets, Byron was action-oriented. Where the rest talked of political revolution and reform, Byron actively took up the sword, yet it was his sexual politics which left a legacy behind. On the surface it appears that the androgynous, sexually dubious Byron overshadowed the politically volatile Byron. However, sexuality in the nineteenth-century was a hot-bed of political activity. The combination of the poet’s own open sexuality and the sexual issues presented in his work was as much a case of political activism as his involvement in Greek independence. Though unlike Greek independence, the cause of sexual liberation was a lifelong pursuit. This investigation reevaluates the role of Byron’s sexuality, specifically how Byron’s sexual persona elevated him to the status of celebrity and how that androgynous persona became an iconic figure for the popular culture which sought sexual democracy. The first chapter will firmly establish Byron’s role as an iconic figure in the youth-driven social movements of the nineteenth-century. The next will establish the androgynous persona of Byron and show the necessity to reevaluate the androgyne from a position of increased, rather than neutered, power. The section will conclude by showing how that figure reappeared in the British Counter-Culture movement of the twentieth-century, and will briefly describe its impact in that period so as to open the door to chapter three and a discussion of Byron’s poetry. Chapter three presents textual examples of the androgyne in its new context as a figure-head for youth-driven, liberal radicalism which envisioned not only social equality and economic stability in the face of Britain’s growing industrial economy, but also (and more specifically for this essay) a sexual equality which extended beyond simple gender equality to a complete freedom of sexuality, inclusive of gender identity and sexual practice.

CHAPTER 1

BYRON THE CELBRITY AND POP-CULTURE ICON

In order to fully embrace the idea that Byron became a pop-culture icon, this chapter must begin with a discussion of contemporary celebrity theory as it is focused on today’s electronic mass media and then reposition it to a nineteenth- century context in order to see pop-cultural studies’ applicability when discussing Byron and nineteenth-century counter-culture. Celebrity and pop-culture scholarship primarily focuses on the second-half of the twentieth century, since the rise in prominence and influence of electronic, mass media hyped-up or otherwise created these personalities and brought the public sphere face to face with them. While introducing the idea of the celebrity in his book Celebrity and Power, P. David Marshal draws from the work of Francesco Alberoni when he says that “stars are a modern phenomenon that has emerged from the developing complexity and social fluidity of modern society. They are an elite ‘whose institutional power is very limited or non-existent, but whose doings and way of life arouse a considerable and sometimes even maximum degree of interest’” (15). Byron clearly fits into the category of “star” as defined by Marshal who gives that epithet to one whose character “has transcended the films that he or she has performed in and created an aura” (12). Though his discussion concentrates on modern film stars, the definition is easily adaptable to Byron, since the poet’s persona extended far beyond his poems, though Byron’s star status works somewhat in the reverse because Byron’s aura was not created out of the characters in his poems. Instead, the characters like Don Juan, Manfred, and Lara, arouse more interest because the audience reads Byron in the character. As for the notion of limited or non-existent institutional power, that is perhaps true in contemporary western society where, as Marshal notes, the machinery of mass media was constructed to divide the social from the political so that the constructed celebrities with social power are prevented from carrying their influence over to the political arena. In the nineteenth-century no such

buffer existed, and often artists from various media held considerable sway over public opinion which gave them institutional power. Today’s mass media is largely responsible for the creation of our superstars; therefore they are controllable by the same institutions. The images created become the living embodiment of certain desires held by the public who live these fantasies vicariously through the stars whose lives they follow. At the same time these stars help to perpetuate the hope for the fulfillment of the public’s desires. Despite the diversity of the desires held, no matter what fantasy the public wishes to play out, there is an overriding theme that is found within and drives each one of them, the desire to be recognized, to stand apart, essentially, to be an individual. In his book Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer states, Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary society; that is they express the particular notion we hold of the person, of the ‘individual’. They do so complexly, variously—they are not straightforward affirmations of individualism. On the contrary, they articulate both the promise and the difficulty that the notion of individuality presents for all of us who live by it. (7) Dyer goes on to explain some of the complexity of individuality when one is trying not only to identify the individual but also identify the individual’s place in a constructed social order. The celebrity as a portrayer of individuality demonstrates to the public throng how to live and succeed in society. He goes on to explain: Stars represent typical ways of behaving, feeling, and thinking in contemporary society, ways that have been socially, culturally and historically constructed. Much of the ideological investment of the star phenomenon is in the stars seen as individuals, their qualities seen as natural. . . . Stars are also embodiments of the social categories in which people are placed and through which they have to make sense of their lives . . . categories of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. (16) What happens when the celebrity is primarily self-constructed with a propensity for subversion? Byromania moves beyond the realm of innocuous celebrity

worship and establishes itself in the political arena as an opposing force to the dominant social order. Byron created his persona purposefully to challenge gendered cultural norms, and the resulting character took its place at the head of rising social issue of sexual equality. By discussing the celebrity model and retroactively applying it to Byron’s lifetime, we can see how the ideas discussed above work with regards to Byron and his effect on his public with regard to its social struggles. Greame Turner and other academicians collaborated to produce Fame Games, the majority of which traces the emergence of a domestic brand of celebrity in Australia, whereas previously the Australian cult of celebrity worship relied on importing its icons from Hollywood. However, the authors are quick to notice a parallel in the birth of Australia’s own celebrity culture with the initial rise of popular culture in early nineteenth-century Britain. The introduction of the book devotes a number of pages to the development of the celebrity. Essentially, these authors also look at the explosion of the consumer class and the commodification of the aesthetic in much the same way that Nicholas Mason does in “Building Brand Byron,” but Turner focuses on the media’s role in the production and promotion of the celebrity, which (with the exception of semantic differences of media and journalism rather than commerce and commodification) are the same ideas. Just as Mason mapped and discussed the public sphere in the context of the marketplace, Fame Games discusses the public sphere in the context of the discourse of public affairs. The book adopts the model created by John Hartley in Popular Reality which shows how issues concerning British culture were pondered over by what Hartley called the “traditional public sphere.” According to Turner, Hartley explains that this incarnation of the public sphere was dominated by “a culturally homogenous group of Enlightenment intellectuals committed to the process of rational debate; their ideas circulating among a limited but influential public” (7). As Britain moved into the nineteenth century, the traditional public sphere gave way to a more democratic one. The public sphere truly became public. Hartley goes on to state that the “major contemporary, political issues of today (environmental, ethnic, sexual, and youth

movements)” (7) all arose outside of the traditional public sphere. Rather than coming out of intellectual, social or political elitist debates, they were “informed, shaped, developed, and contested within the privatized public sphere of suburban media consumerism” (qtd. in Turner 7). Referring back to Celebrity and Power, Marshal states that “the celebrity as a public individual who participates openly as a marketable commodity serves as a powerful type of legitimation of the political economic model of exchange and value --- the basis of capitalism --- and extends the model to include the individual” (x). For Byron, the commodified poet and his commodified poetry work conjunctively as a kind of two-handed engine. Both commodities work together to propel and enlarge the Byronic myth. Yet Byron’s iconic status does not rest solely on these two commodities. In Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer discusses the circumstances behind the popularity of a particular figure at a particular time. He believes that the celebrity “embodies what the discourses designate as the important-at-that-time central features of human existence” (18). Fame Games also explores this idea in what it calls “flashpoints” of culture “where a particular celebrity dominates media coverage, producing an excessively focused global culture” (3). In the converged context of journalistic media and consumerism the book continues by stating that “there is a common element which links the flashpoint moments with an industry that supports itself by producing celebrity for everyday consumption. That element is that appeal of the celebrity for media audiences” (5). Also, combining the two ideas, flashpoints are created when the celebrity figure embodies the ideas of what the focused culture views as the important features of human existence, in Bryon’s case sexual liberty. Making the leap from journalistic media to literary publicity, self-promotion, and character mimesis in the discussion of Byron as a pop-culture icon is relatively simple. Byron and Murray advertised his sexuality at a time when the youth-culture struggled for sexual democracy. The continued popularity of Byron throughout his life and continuing beyond his death to today is the result of a myth perpetuated by a sub-culture whose goal of sexual freedom, though making strong advances, has not been fully achieved, making Byron a rather long flashpoint.

We know that over the years Byron’s publisher, John Murray, played a significant role in the creation of the Byronic myth. However, Mason, drawing on evidence of Murray’s finances, points out that though he posted several advertisements in the days leading up to the publication of the first two cantos of Chile Harold, which surely contributed, in some degree, to the work’s rapid success, Murray spent considerably less money in the promotion of Chile Harold than was common at that time (425-426). The rapid success came from Byron himself. It was Byron’s own political or socially radical sense that led him to recognize the flashpoint in his own society which caused the new public sphere to welcome him with open arms. This new public sphere itself was representative of the growing interest in social democracy with the rise of an urban working class readership who sought social equality. Peter Schock draws from work of William St. Clair who demonstrates that “the poet’s readership expanded enormously in the 1820’s through cheap editions of Don Juan, which made them accessible to the working class” (100). Karen McGuire also points out the expanse of Byron’s readership. She notes that beyond the sales figures for Byron’s work a large percentage of his audience consisted of people who shared copies of his work with friends, people who borrowed copies from circulating libraries, and people who read copied passages in the more easily accessible commonplace books. She too utilized St. Clair’s study in which he estimates that Byron’s readership was actually five to ten times higher than the actual sales numbers (143). In 1900 Mark Rutherford wrote in “The Morality of Byron’s Poetry” on the comparison between Byron’s works and the poetry produced during his time. He states, A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class . . . Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equaled and never perhaps surpassed (Critical Heritage 372).

Whereas the public sphere of old was comprised of the socio-political and intellectual elite who were the arbiters of social issues who handed down their judgments to the lower orders, the new sphere of the nineteenth-century was centered in the lower orders whose judgments began exerting pressure upward. In providing a different perspective of the nature and workings of the public sphere in the nineteenth-century, Fame Games continues by drawing from the work of C. Lumby who contends that the nature of the popular reporting media is not a degradation of the eighteenth-century ideal (that ideal being the elitist centered sphere), but rather a transformation which reflects the “importance of the domestic, the feminine, the private and the personal” (qtd. in Turner 7, my emphasis). Lumby’s observation concisely summarizes the nature of the public sphere’s modulation to accommodate the growing, working class, commercial culture by focusing on the home-grown concerns of the populace. In this new arena, Turner considers the celebrity “a combination of the commercial interests of the cultural industry . . . and the shifting desires of the audience” (11), an audience which reflects the capitalistic and democratic desires of the rising working class consumers. Marshal presents the celebrity as the embodiment of the democratic age in that the notion of celebrity offers the possibility of open attainability (6). The public sphere that began to solidify its shape during the early nineteenth-century is solely responsible for the creation or destruction of the celebrity. Furthermore, the sign of celebrity offers the possibility that anyone may achieve that status within the public sphere. Marshal explains that “the restrictions of a former hierarchy [the aristocracy] are no longer valid in the new order that is determined by merit and/or the acquisition of wealth” (6). From this perspective, Byron’s aristocratic position had little to do with his celebrity status. His being of the aristocracy only added color to Byron’s character. Since his lifestyle and writings dealt with the same cultural issues as that of the urban working class, they perceived him to be more in touch with their own feeling, which removed some of the distance between the classes; he was counted amongst the radicals. In other words he was not a celebrity because he was an aristocrat but because he created himself as a voice and a figure of the counter-culture. His liberal views

went against the dominant political structure, and he realized that a growing segment of the public was also shifting its views. He recognized the flashpoint and promoted himself as the herald of this new democratic sensibility. In 1812 Byron made his last appearance and first speech in the House of Lords. His infamous speech opposing the Frame-Breaking Bill proved to be political suicide. Needless to say the speech had no measurable effect on the bill. After the speech the members of the Tory party scoffed at the young Byron for his eloquent yet irreverent rantings, while members of his own Whig party quickly scrambled to denounce Byron’s views as not part of the party’s agenda in an attempt to save their own reputations in the aftermath. Mason believes that Byron never meant to make any political gains by his participation in that meeting. He feels that Byron was already working his self-promotion as a poet. According to Mason, “Byron paid little attention to his critics, focusing instead on the encouraging words of radicals” (330). In the ten-odd days between Byron’s appearance in the House and the publication of Childe Harold, Byron’s name appeared quite conspicuously in the London newspapers and was the talk of the town. When his poem was released, the public, a broad cross-cut of the different social strata, rushed out to read what else this radical had to say. Though McGuire points out the initial printing of Childe Harold was not affordable to the working class, he showed that over time, through the publication of cheaper editions and copy-sharing, they too were able to at least read if not own a copy of that work. So a large segment of the higher and lower orders clearly fell in love with the Byron brand of socio-political commentary. It is at this point in 1812 that Byron had become a superstar, but it would be a few years before he truly became an icon for the youth driven counter-culture. The other important outcome of the frame-breaking speech was the actual death of his political career, an outcome that I argue was also part of his design. With Byron’s political bridges burned and his aristocratic station worth little more than a social pass card, the liberal public was free to adore him as one of its own. To answer the question posed earlier, this is what happens when a self- constructed celebrity has a propensity for subversion. He becomes a martyr for the radically liberal politicians in Parliament and eventually the iconic figure for

the Romantic counter-culture movement. What came after was natural. Readers of Childe Harold were looking for more examples of brazen social and political commentary in the text. They unpacked the cultural commentaries found in both Harold’s experiences and the narrator’s commentary and attributed these ideas to the author. Soon, the public began seeing not just Byron’s messages in the work, but the poet himself. So controversies present in the poem became a part of Byron’s life whether true or not, which helped to increase the myth. Even the negative criticisms of immorality were perceived by the radical public as something to be celebrated, if only because it offended the old guard. In Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer states, “no one aspect [of a persona] is more real than another. How we appear is no less real than how we have manufactured that appearance, or than the ‘we’ that is doing the manufacturing. Appearances are a kind of reality, just as manufacture and individual persons are”. He continues to say that the “whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of ‘really’” (2). The media construction in this case is like critical reviews of Byron’s work and Murray’s marketing, since tabloid press, though operating in the nineteenth-century, was not the media powerhouse it is currently. Marshal’s adaptation of phrases common to the contemporary cult of the celebrity helps to demonstrate the meaning of Dyer’s comment. We as endearing fans often ask if a certain star is “really” the same in person as he is on screen (17). What happens in the minds of Byron’s fans is to wonder if Harold is really Byron or whether it is the narrator or Don Juan who is really the poet. So, rather than trying to place aspects of the star’s performance personalities, we try to identify our perceived (often self-created) notions of Byron’s social mannerisms and personal philosophy in the fictive characters he creates. While it is commonplace for an audience, particularly literary scholars, to look for the author’s message in the body of any text, thereby assigning an agenda to that work, something more than that was happening with Byron. As he produced more works he did not just remain popular; his popularity as a persona grew wildly. Even works that were poorly received on the grounds of their aesthetic shortcomings and more importantly censured because of his

immorality were snatched up by the readership, like Don Juan which evidence shows sold less than some of his other works. However, some of the scandal concerning the poem’s immorality made it an important work for the underground social revolution. Another comment from “The Morality of Byron” states that it is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the people lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have [read a frightful lot], are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron. (Critical Heritage 372) From the publication of Childe Harold throughout the rest of his life, the public feverishly devoured every publication, every story, every sighting, anything associated with him, and as a result, the mythical or legendary Byron grew bigger than the flesh and blood author. After the publication of the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819, the public’s fantasy and his mythmaking was spinning out of control, sometimes in conjunction with his literary popularity and sometimes independent of it, and the hegemony began to see the threat to its stability as a result of Byromania. Ghislaine McDayter comments: The literary and real Byronic worlds began to collapse in the public imagination, making it possible for Byron’s seduction of his readership to slip from the metaphoric to the literal. Following the public’s lead, the critics hostile to Byron began to translate his literary seductiveness into material moral depravity, with Byron playing the role of lustful magus in a sexual debauch with a crowd of innocent victims. (47) Though these critics still celebrated the high aesthetic quality of Byron’s poetry, many of the themes fell on harsh criticism, which just added more fuel to the counter-cultural fire that was already white hot with youthful energy. Even John Murray feared the backlash that would come from the publication of Don Juan. The first printing was done without Byron’s or Murray’s name appearing

anywhere on the edition, though MacCarthy comments that the public generally knew the authorship of the poem (365). In fact, Murray’s concern for the reputation of his firm ran contrary to Byron’s desire to spread his radical social messages. MacCarthy relates that in 1822 Byron, fed up with Murray’s unauthorized edits to remove scandalous lines in his work and his continued trepidation over Don Juan, finally decommissioned Murray as his primary publisher in favor of John Hunt who published the bulk of Byron’s writing from that point on (440). Hunt worked with Byron to dispense his messages and aid in the promotion of Byron’s character and the growth of Byromania. In discussing the propensity then as well as now of discussing the man more than his work, Wilson states that “Byron’s poetry once had the same impact on his readers as his personality, for another effect of Byromania was the extraordinary and unparalleled counter-culture of imitations which his writing also inspired” (5). But even in these imitative texts, the focus was not on recreating the poet’s sense of expression, for many of these pieces like Don Leon are poor and half-hearted attempts to capture the poet’s genius. Mostly, the majority of these mimetic authors simply thought to put their own spin on the often scandalous aspects of Byron’s life through completely fictional scenarios, thereby cashing in on Byron’s popularity. McDayter comments that Byron’s “poetic career best exemplifies the nineteenth-century explosion of literary commodification” (44). Continuing the discussion of Byron’s unbridled success, Wilson writes that eventually the Byronic became detached from the actual character of the poet such that Byron lost complete ownership of the image. She states that the “Byronic became public property” (6). Though I do not doubt that this happened in some manner, I am not sure that it occurred to the extent that Wilson maintains. Byron as the self-promoter of his image may not be responsible for the imitations of his stories by others, but he is the catalyst for creating the brand. It is true he publicly denied any association with the counterfeit texts that were being produced. However, most of his objections come from his personal conceit; he did not want his name associated with what he would have surely considered work that displayed little if any of his talent for verse. In researching

this idea, I could not find any evidence that Byron posted any objections to the stories being produced that did not claim his authorship but where the significant character was patterned after the greatly exaggerated stories of his debauchery and lasciviousness. In actuality these stories were an integral part of the ever- expanding, cyclical Byronic universe which firmly established him as a cultural icon for the liberal counter-culture that began to worry the establishment. Even the once revolutionary William Wordsworth saw the direction that Byron was leading his readers. In a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson dated 1820, he fears that “Don Juan will do more harm to the English character, than anything of our time; not so much as a Book;--But thousands who would be afraid to have it in that shape, will batten upon choice bits of it, in the shape of Extracts” (Critical Heritage 164). Wordsworth’s fear was that Byron’s social criticism would spread to his audience who would instigate actual cultural rebellion to change the conservative British character, which did occur. However, Byron’s influence was not achieved by duping an innocent, unsuspecting public; his young and urban working class audience was prepared for just such a socio-political upheaval. To them, Byron’s ideals as presented in Don Juan and other works reflecting the growing dissatisfaction with British society that these two groups, in particular, felt. Marshall explains, “The celebrity sign effectively contains this tension between authentic and false cultural value. In its simultaneous embodiment of media construction, audience construction, and the real living and breathing human being, the celebrity sign negotiates the competing and contrasting definitions of its own significance” (xi). There had always been tension between the two poets. For Wordsworth, coming from a position supportive of the traditional English conservatism, Byron represented a false cultural value that he felt would undermine the foundation of English identity. Byron felt that Wordsworth was not a true revolutionary. Wordsworth promoted the idea that his poetry was the true voice of the people, since he made the decision to use plain language and versification to relate the messages in his work. Though his style did make his poems more accessible to common readers, Byron criticized the messages being presented. Byron felt that Wordsworth was representing the false cultural value,

at least the cultural value of the counter-culture. Byron saw his own significance being validated by Wordsworth’s disapproval. Byron believed that his Anti- Romanticism was the true voice of the revolution. Now that the iconic Bryon is in place it is time to investigate the parallel between him and his figurative descendant of the early 1970’s, David Bowie, who also took his place as a radical figurehead for the similarly liberal sexual revolution during the named “British counter-culture” movement. This movement has many explicit similarities to the youth movement that Byron fueled during the nineteenth century. In her book dealing with the late twentieth-century British counter-culture, Elizabeth Nelson states, “That the counter-culture activists were the heirs of the nineteenth-century Romantics . . . is suggested by their respective rejection of authority and restraint and insistence upon the autonomy of the individual and his/her freedom from traditions and conventions which had ceased to be liberating.” These conventions were opposed by promoting such social ideas as “interest in communal living” and the “abolition of institutionalized sexual relationships” (9). Both of these areas are completely interconnected producing a new order of social democracy. This democratic community was so much more than simply accepting divergent sexual and gender types. It was a homogenizing of these types into one community. It was not just recognizing homosexuals, heterosexuals, masculine women, and effeminate men. This community became an elaborate cross-connections of all these character types to produce entirely different classifications of sexuality wherein the old labels just mentioned ceased to exist. Essentially, those people were no longer identified by their various sexualities but by inclusion within this underground sexual democracy. This community passively brought about social change during the 1960’s and 70’s. Nelson states, “Revolutionary community control suggested that it might be possible to change society not by the traditional – and generally considered fraudulent – revolutionary practice, but by contracting relationships which were fundamentally different from those existing within ‘straight’ society. In other words, the revolution could take place while people continued to develop a different lifestyle which reflected the embryonic alternative society” (103). Nelson also speculates

that the messages of some rock musicians of the movement, of whom we can include Bowie, “suggested to many young people the inability of the ruling generation to continue to enforce the playing of life’s games according to its rules” (46), thus giving energy to the production of those revolutionary communities. In his book, Glam!, Barney Hoskyns states that “Ziggy enabled Bowie to turn himself into an icon of deviance” (33). Much as Byron had, Bowie created a public persona which propelled him to superstardom almost as quickly as his Romantic progenitor. In a very telling parallel to Byron’s recollection of Byromania where he proclaimed to have awoken and found himself famous, Bowiemania is described by Bowie’s on-stage partner, Mick Ronson. “The success was overnight. It was like waking up one morning and finding that we were suddenly superstars” (qtd. in Hoskyns 34). Bowie’s not-so-sudden, sudden rise in fame was the direct result of the creation of Bowie’s most famous alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust. In a very short amount of time, with the help of mass marketing and self-promotion, this character developed legions of fans who lived every word of social criticism and every call to cultural revolution that rang out from his voice over the microphone, and they too created fantastic stories of their hero which often completely misrepresented the actual artist. Toward the end of the 1960’s Bowie was a working musician, but had yet to achieve the status of star. Similarly to Byron’s Hours of Idleness, Bowie’s early projects received some positive accolades but on a much smaller scale than his later productions. As a result, he was not an unknown artist, but neither did he stand out in his profession. The advent of Ziggy changed all that. Bowie did not invent Glam as an extension of the British Counter-Culture movement toward its end. Rather he was inspired by the provocative sexuality of some of Andy Warhol’s projects like the band Velvet Underground. Bowie adopted some of the sexually ambiguous glamour and coupled it with his own bi-sexuality and liberalism to create a figure he knew represented the flashpoint in 1972 British youth culture. This shift in the counter-culture itself can be likened to the Anti- romanticism that Byron spearheaded in his own time where he engaged a radical shift in the Wordsworthian definition of Romanticism. In effect, that Glam culture

was reacting even against other British youths from the early years of the Counter-Culture of the hippie movement whom they viewed as puritanical in their own right, according to Hoskyns. In commenting on the rise of Glam, Hoskyns quotes B. P. Fallon who was the publicist for the popular band, T. Rex during the era. The members of T. Rex, like Bowie, reinvented themselves into glam personas. In much the same way that the Anti-Romantics challenged the rural conservativism of Wordsworth and the Lake-Romantics, Glam was a reaction to the rural, bluesy-folk music produced by artists like Bob Dylan who gained considerable influence in Britain. In the eyes of Bowie and other glam artists, Dylan, British Dylan-like artists, and the other naturists were far too conservative and restrained within the British socio-political order to truly cause a stir. Fallon states that “there was too much grey. What was needed after that was something flash and loud and vulgar and, to some people, annoying” (5). In much the same way that Byromania dominated the literary scene during the poet’s lifetime, Hoskyns proclaims that “Glam swept the nation in ways that were at once innocent and morally subversive. It called into question received notions of truth and authenticity, especially in the area of sexuality” (6). In the forward of Glam!, Todd Haynes, the director the Glam rock tribute movie, Velvet Goldmine, states that because of the Glam movement “for a brief time pop culture would proclaim that identities and sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed, and rock and roll paint its face and turn the mirror around, inverting in the process everything in sight” (x). As much as the atmosphere of that period was politically ripe for such a movement, and not trying to diminish the seriousness of the message that Bowie intended for his audience, we must remember that he was as much a showman as he was an activist. He was a product of his commercial environment and sought out the role of star. Bowie granted one of his most famous interviews to Michael Watts in 1972 right at the beginning of Ziggy’s creation. In the interview, Bowie made a proclamation with much of the same combination of vigor and feigned anxiety that Bryon displayed early on in his career. Where Byron wrote of himself as “a Man whose works are praised by Reviewers, admired by Duchesses, & sold by

every Bookseller of the Metropolis . . . in every Bookseller’s I see my own name, & say nothing, but enjoy my fame in secret” (BLJ 1:130-31, author’s emphasis), Bowie told Watts, “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way” (qtd. in Paytress 2). And huge he was. Bowie created a character that spoke to massive throngs of disenfranchised youths because of his purposeful androgyny, and despite Bowie’s attempt to remove all sexuality from the character, Ziggy had enormous sex appeal as evident in the vast legions of fans and imitators. Hoskyns explains, “To give Ziggy the kick-start he deserved, Bowie turned himself into a wild mutation, a polysexual space invader with a carrot-colored mullet, ‘snow-white tan’ and skin-tight PVC jumpsuits that only exaggerated his ectomorphic physique” (32). He plainly states that “From Bowie’s skeletal swish to [Iggy Pop’s] hard-core masochism, glam rock imposed a fierce, unnatural femininity on the masculine traditions of rock” (xi). Though the public was meant to receive Ziggy as a person separate from and distinctly different from Bowie, it is clear that Ziggy provided a mask by which Bowie could enact his personal beliefs while maintaining a safe distance from those beliefs. In his book outlining the significance of the album Ziggy Stardust, Mark Paytress states that “Ziggy personified several themes taken from Bowie’s own life” (83), especially his views on sexuality. The Ziggy mask provided a comfort zone for both Bowie and for those who wished to see Ziggy’s stage spectacle merely as a camp production. Hoskyns is quick to point out that what Bowie intended was not meant to be taken lightly. He states that “in the rare tradition of Oscar Wilde, artists like . . . Bowie were able to elevate artifice and irony in their work without sacrificing emotion in [his] music. Above all, in its parade of self- styled androgens and alter-egos, and in its declaration of ‘ch-ch-changes’ [the refrain of one of Bowie’s more popular songs from that era] as the defining aspect of teen experience, the glam era presented the world a new and radically fluid model for sexual identity” (xi). To this day, Ziggy Stardust is one of most recognizable names in the pop world. This feat of recognition is all the more impressive when we realize that Bowie killed off Ziggy after only one year. Yet his brief life left an indelible impression on pop culture. Twenty years after the birth of Ziggy, he was still the

first topic of conversation between a number of interviewers and Bowie. In 1992 Jim Jerome of Life magazine interviewed the star. The first topic discussed was the impact of Ziggy on the pop world. Bowie states that Ziggy came about because “everything was boring and conformist in the early ‘70’s.” He further states that it was the “English insistence on conventionality” that led him to want to shock the public. The result of Bowie’s efforts was that, though the Glam movement was fairly short lived, the idea of the androgyne persisted in rock music and pop culture circles in general. Bowie, through Ziggy Stardust, paved the way for the big-haired, leather-panted, made-up bands of the 1980’s like Poison, the Scorpions, and Twisted Sister. However, just as Bowie smoothed over the trail for the popularity of these artists, that trail had long before been blazed. The Glam movement itself was not wholly a new creation of the 1970’s. Even at the time, people involved in the movement were able to see that they were taking up the sword of a much older social struggle. In 1974, Albert Goldman wrote, “By whatever mysterious underground channels, the decadent sensibility [of the Glam movement] has been conveyed from nineteenth-century Paris and London” (qtd. in Hoskyns 7). Shelton Waldrep, in his book The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, traces the production of the self from Oscar Wilde to David Bowie and explains the process of popular character creations, particularly in the realm of sexual identity. Though Waldrep begins his investigation with Wilde, he does acknowledge that sexual self-invention does not begin with Wilde. He states that “a primary precursor for Wilde . . . may have been a particular strain of German romanticism that he was to embrace via the formulation of the Dandy—a concept and performance begun by Byron” (xiv). Bowie’s performance as Ziggy Stardust and even later sexually ambiguous characters like Aladdin Sane (A-lad-insane) worked in much the same way that Bowie’s mythic personas, both as an iconic image and as a messenger advocating and spreading the messages of the sexual revolution. Though the circumstantial evidence of Byron’s impact on Bowie is considerable in the similarities of their created personalities and their missions, one of Bowie’s post-Ziggy character creations stands as not only an irrefutable

link between Byron and Bowie, but also as proof that at Bowie himself saw Byron as a pop-star. In 1984, David Bowie broke ground in the pop world by creating the first music video that was a mini-movie. Instead of just having a music video loosely themed around the meaning of song, Bowie created a 20 minute featurette with a whole story line of which the song is only a part. In Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, Bowie plays the role of rock-star Screamin’ Lord Byron who is portrayed as an updated version of the Byronic myth. Before Lord Byron’s performance he is shown back stage popping pills in a similar fashion to the nineteenth century stories of Byron living to excess. For the extended video, Bowie chose to fashion Screamin’s image after one of Byron’s most memorable portraits. Screamin’ wears an iridescent, effeminate harem outfit which is an obvious nod to Byron’s oriental portrait where he is shown wearing Greek military garments. Bowie even attempted to recreate the myth of Byron’s personality. Screamin’s audience is completely enthralled by his performance on stage. And after the performance, Screamin’s off-stage personality is that of a pretentious and haughty queer. In addition to the obvious nod to the Byronic myth, the featurette is a self-examination wherein Bowie sees himself as a descendant of the poet and inheritor of his mission. Depicting Screamin’ in the oriental garb is more than just a comment on his sexuality. It is also acknowledging the revolutionary Byron. Like Byron, Bowie lived the life he wrote songs about. His acceptance and popularity within the counter-culture was the result of being believed by that culture. He was doing more than profiting from a certain segment of the youth culture by adopting a façade of its mannerisms. Sexual democracy was a cause he wholeheartedly supported. The honesty of his convictions allowed the subculture to view him as one of their own, and his notoriety as music celebrity worked with that acceptance to place him at the forefront of the movement. Waldrep confirms that musician’s “embracing of the sexual underground at the time was as responsible for Bowie’s influence on sexuality as his subsequent gender-bending styles” (107), because for all that an image is worth, having a lack of conviction for the ideas that one espouses is usually fairly easy for an audience to read. Strong convictions and a powerful delivery of those

convictions make the leaders rise to the surface. For all the masks that Bowie wore, it was his overriding sense of rebellion that stood out. Waldrep explains that “Bowie never let the radical members of his audience down as he continually metamorphosed into a succession of ever more literal—and politically astute— personae” (106). For all of Bowie’s personae and Byron’s audience created mythos, at the core of each is a person with the strong socio-political convictions that ran opposed to the dominant political atmosphere of their respective times. Creating these outrageous and powerful androgynous characters whether in person, print, or song, the two artists gave very public faces to many people’s personal struggles with identity and acceptance. McDayter recognizes that “Byron had created . . . a political mob: a new and powerful force – the ungoverned reading public – which was capable of destroying the carefully maintained hierarchies of cultural reproduction” (51). This statement is equally applicable to the revolutionary force that Bowie created in the 1970’s which fought for many of the same social liberties as the Romantic sexual counter- culture.

CHAPTER 2

REEVALUATING THE THIRD SEX

Ziggy Stardust’s considerable impact on youth culture, particularly in its expressions of sexual liberty, helps to demonstrate the potential power that an androgynous figure can have over a receptive audience. Unlike most critical treatments of the androgyne, this chapter will reclaim the third sex. In most cases androgyny in literature is perceived as a shift across a line-segment with absolute male and absolute female serving as the conceptual endpoints, with the androgyne hovering somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. In most instances scholarship focuses on androgyny as a lack or loss of full masculine subjectivity. Rarely have scholars approached the opposite where the androgyne represents a shift away from being fully feminine. When the mode of androgyny is addressed, such a shift is celebrated in feminist theory as an empowerment of the female, while the more common ex-male androgyne is seen as having slid away from potency, or the character is written as a comedic stock character, the eunuch or emasculated male. Byron’s use of the androgyne complicates these long established perceptions for both effeminate men and masculine women. In both Lara and The Giaour Byron’s central, sexually ambiguous page characters are women dressed as boys, yet Byron’s description intentionally presents them to the audience as soft male figures rather than women in men’s clothes. The audience does know that they are women, but Byron does not wish the audience to see them as women in drag. However, he does not wish the audience to view them simply as boys. Instead Byron is purposefully attempting to blur the gender distinctions. To further complicate the matter, each page has a powerful, heroic male lover who breaks the fully masculine paradigm by maintaining tender relations with the page characters. Byron is promoting the ideas that not only are there no absolutes when it comes to gender, but also that traditional gender typing and cross-matching does not work in these tragic love stories. The purpose of this chapter is to redefine androgyny by moving it off of the traditional linear spectrum and reestablishing it

in a multi-dimensional space which supports all variants of gender and sexuality. In this new definition, sexuality and gender are closely interconnected. Here, neither sexual preference nor sexual potency is dependent on gender stereotypes. The Byronic androgyne gains power after freeing itself from normative gender associations. Prior to recognizing androgyny as something different, as a third sex, scholars who ventured into the realm of sexual ambiguity did so from one of two established theoretical bases, feminism and queer theory. Though approaching androgyny from a feminist perspective yielded valuable insight into the nature and desires of the Romantic poet, the scholars who approached the topic from that perspective chose to ignore a great deal of the physical sexuality that pointed in the direction of homoeroticism, choosing instead to focus more on a Freudian or Lacanian reading of the texts to find either Oedipal or developmental-stage neuroses. Critics like Christina Dokou combine the two psychoanalytic approaches in an attempt to uncover the reason for androgyny’s presence. In Dokou’s investigation of Don Juan, she focuses most of her attention toward a Lacanian read in the lack of masculinity in Juan. The course of her investigation depicts the epic as journey towards male self-actualization for the title character who is constantly hampered along the way not only by the women he encounters in the narrative but also by the sexual situations in which he finds himself. All of these obstacles result in the protagonist ( I say protagonist here instead of hero because Dokou maintains that Don Juan begins as all stories begin, according to Lacan, with a lack—in the case of this epic, it lacks an epic hero) (1) not being able to move through the three stages of Lacanian development. Ultimately what this produces is an androgynous voice that is as effective as a woman’s in challenging the patriarchy. Short of retelling the whole of Dokou’s argument let the example of Juan’s upbringing suffice to explain the direction that Dokou takes when exploring androgyny. In looking at the relationship between Juan and Donna Inez during his formative years, Dokou draws attention to the lack of his father’s presence, which left Juan without a role model of the patriarchy. That combined with a stifling mother whose mission is to retain both the physical and mental innocence of the

boy keeps him from progressing beyond the early, pre-sexual stage of childhood development where the boy looks to the mother for nourishment and comfort, essentially wholeness. In much the same way, the other women in the epic start out representing that same maternal figure to Juan, and circumstances in their relationship do not allow him to pass beyond the second or mirror-stage of development, resulting in Juan never progressing from boyhood to manhood and taking up his socially rightful place in the patriarchy. Though Dokou’s investigation relied heavily on Lacanian theory, her book begins with a brief overview of another feminist theory which creates a pseudo- androgyne. This pseudo-androgyne only exists, in part, in the text. The text contains a stock, poetic female, like a muse, who is the other side of the male writer’s creative psyche. By reconciling the male poet and his muse a kind of androgyne is created, even though it is not represented in the artist or text. Dokou provides the most succinct description of a classical ideal derived from Aristophanes. She states that there were three sexes that were composite constructions, male/male, female/female, and male/female couples joined together. As a result of mankind’s arrogance the gods split each forming the binary gender arrangement we know (2). Aristophanes’ theory works well in conjunction with the Lacanian idea of beginning with a lack, since the separated genders lack their other half. Diane Hoeveler is another feminist critic whose important work, Romantic Androgyny, is grounded in Aristophanes’ theory. The book offers valuable insights to the various workings of androgyny in the male psyche of the six canonical male Romantic poets. She begins her treatment of the subject by tracing the classical philosophical and literary roots of androgyny. Based on the philosophy of Aristophanes, Hoeveler states that her study . . . will claim that male poets self-consciously employed the feminine as “Other” and as an alternative source of value in order to engage in a fictional completion of their own psyches, and that a large proportion of the “women” in the poetry of the major Romantics cannot be understood apart from this radical metaphoric tradition of literary absorption/cannibalization. (xiv)

She goes on to say that “The role of the feminine . . . is simple; she is the principle of reconciliation, grace, freedom, and wholeness, in other words the Eternal Feminine within the fallen male poet. The Romantic poets sought androgynous union with this feminine principle as an enlargement of their own being” (15). But more importantly she acknowledges the politically rebellious implications of the figure. “The English Romantic poets, however, were writing in the more immediately accessible environment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ social, political, economic, religious, and sexual revolutions” (5). In identifying the women who were not truly women but were figments used as tools by the Romantic poets, Hoeveler concentrates her attention on the female characters that have traditionally served as literary devices. Her book concentrates on discussions of the inspirational muse, ideal mother, idealized double, and soul mate. All of these characters are common female types in Romantic poetry, but these figures are not the only androgynes working in the genre, especially in Byron’s texts. There are other women characters who do not fall within these male constructions and are meant to be taken as they are presented, as identities separate and distinct from the male poet or hero. This disagreement of ideas is not particularly relevant. What is particularly important about Hoeveler’s idea is that her androgyne (the psyche of the poet when reconciled with the feminine) gains strength with the unification of masculinity and femininity. The male poet is made whole through reconciliation with the feminine. However, her work does not apply the same model to the sexually ambiguous characters found in the text. Those are still presented from a weaker position and are still viewed in terms of gender polarity, or lacking full masculinity. The other major academic arena where critics engage the matter of androgyny is queer theory. At this stage of Romantic scholarship finding the homosexual in the literature is fairly old hat, particularly when it comes to Byron’s works. Byronic queerness owes a debt to Louis Crompton whose Bryon and Greek Love brought together Byron’s personal philosophies and experiences with homosexuality and the reflection of those ideas in his poetry. For many who followed, Crompton effectively “outed” one of the most celebrated rakes in English literary traditions. Just as Keegan acknowledges the influence of

Crompton, I follow suit by acknowledging her work in helping me prepare my reading of Bryon. For though she does not truly tackle the issue of androgyny, her reading identifies and analyzes Byron’s various representations of sexuality. Specifically, her addressing of homosexuality as it differs in the particular contextual categories of “gender, class, nationality and race” (2) has touched on my reading of Byronic androgyny. Keegan identifies the varying political significance of homosexuality dependent on where and how it is placed in the text. In much the same way, androgyny can work as described by Hoeveler and Dokou, or it can also work outside of the feminist reading to include other social and political issues. However, before I embark on that discussion in the next chapter, the androgyne must undergo a redefinition to identify the political strength of the character. Keegan makes the statement that all the various discussions of sexuality will one day produce a state of what Derrida calls a “sexual otherwise.” In this concept “there would be no more sexes, there would be one sex for each time, One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift” (Derrida 199). The way I read this statement is to remove the binary constraints in discussions of gender. When it comes to our psyche we are not any more than the sum of our parts and not every part of our psyche is oriented in line with our physical sex. Keegan opens her investigation with a paraphrase of Virginia Woolf who recognized this idea long before it was adopted by critical theory. Keegan states that “it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple” (1). Though no one would honestly deny that each person’s psyche contains psychological elements of the opposite sex, those who strive to cultivate these aspects in their lives are most often labeled as homosexual, and those who explore these aspects in their writing are accused of reducing femininity to literary devices or stereotypes. Undoubtedly many of these conclusions have considerable merit, but they cannot be universally applied to all figures, fictional or flesh and blood. In her discussion of Gothic Masculinity, Ellen Brinks notices that “concomitant with increasingly codified gender norms, both literary

representations of the period [late eighteenth-century], as well as historical records, disclose a plethora of transgressive figures that manage to ‘escape’ these confines. And by virtue of its fantastic or non-mimetic mode, gothic conventions accommodate powerful affective or erotic energies identified with an ‘unrepresentative consciousness,’ without undermining the ‘reality’ of the sex- gender binarism expressed in dominant cultural ideologies of the time” (18). Brinks uses this idea to identify representations of masculinity that question the dominant views of gender during the Romantic Movement. She identifies a number of poets, including Byron, who produce male characters in their work who do not fit into the masculine paradigm and whose intention is to challenge it. Yet in order to do this safely, the writers work within the Gothic topos to protect themselves from censure. Incorporating the metaphysical or spectral creates the “unreal” as a distancing agent from reality. If the audience finds the issues being presented particularly disturbing, either they or the artist are able to dismiss the notions as fantastical. The Gothic supernatural works in much the same way as Hamlet’s mousetrap. Hamlet is free from judgment because the play is only fiction. It is not his fault that Claudius reacted so strongly to the ideas being presented. Brinks continues on to say that “Gothic tropes and tableaux cross a range of genres and perplex social and ‘natural’ distinctions concerning masculinity and male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications” (11). The brief exploration of Sardanapalus in the following paragraph clearly shows Brinks’ theory in action, though it should be remembered that Byron did, in fact, mask many of his less than popular ideas in Gothic devices. Many of his more biting commentaries were relegated to the world of codes and secrets, his preferred method. One thing that is interesting to note is that Hoeveler presents what appears at first to be an opposing position of the views expressed by Barbara Judson below. Hoeveler suggests that Sardanapalus might be “an exploration of the impossibility of androgyny in a society that ultimately values only the masculine characteristics of aggression and power” (163). What we have to remember is that both critics are looking at the text from a feminist perspective.

In that case both perspectives point out the failure of the masculine. It is just that in Judson’s reading it is the hegemony’s failure, not the protagonist’s. In discussing Byron’s play, Judson observes that “the play’s symbolic world is haunted by such phantom formations as the testicular woman, the hermaphrodite, and the queen who are duly conjured as soon as Sardanapalus takes the stage, disporting in drag at the head of his harem’s chorus line” (248). The feminization of the title character and the presence of the gender-neutral specter have serious political implications. One could read that by putting the “hero” figure in drag, Byron is attempting to effeminize patriarchal rule thereby castrating the established ideology. However, there is another possibility which moves away from the traditional psycho-feminist reading to one which Judson points out: the burlesque chorus line scene could be viewed in a positive light as a “prophetic vision of Sardanapalus as a messianic ruler—Prince of peace and good will to men” (248). It is this reading that helps to redefine the role of the androgyne both in Byron’s work and in his personality. Brinks states, “The disruption of patriarchal culture’s symbolic order from a place seemingly out of bounds—the place of the marginalized, effeminate male—instead of being a liability or loss, ironically becomes a part of culture’s highest symbolic functioning” (12). In this case it is the liberal counter-culture’s symbolic functioning. Rather than lampooning the patriarchal order, Sardanapalus presents an alternative social structure which proves to be as effective as the old order. One of the keys to this idea rests in the presentation of Sardanapalus. The play is a tragicomedy that presents serious political issues such as the present state of the ruling order in scenes of burlesque like the procession of specters, yet the title character remains heroic throughout the text and his state remains intact. It is possible to read the burlesque scenes as Byron’s way of deeming that the commentary is unimportant and only serves as comic relief between the scenes of true relevance. However Judson introduces the possibility that Byron might have considered that any commentary on British or continental European politics is “unworthy of tragic grandeur, subjecting it to the rough handling of burlesque” (248). Though Byron may not have felt that British

politics was worthy of high tragedy, it seems that he did not underestimate the importance of the issue. Instead, he presented marginalized political issues like sexuality in the marginalized form of burlesque. We might even say that Byron was attempting to add poignancy to the genre because of its treatment of the serious issue of gendered sexuality. In the introduction to this work, I commented that Byron lived his life of “deviance” openly; he flaunted his antics in the face of the ruling order. If we combine that idea with the ideas of self-invention and high burlesque and place them in the 1970’s, we can see how David Bowie continued the pattern begun by Byron in the creation of Ziggy Stardust and became the inheritor of this particular method of socio-political commentary. Hoeveler states that “the androgynous has always been a self-consciously artificial image” (4). As much as anything else Byron was a consummate performer. Though his image perhaps spun out of control in the hands of the public, his eroticized, self-referential poetry, and publicly displayed private life seem to suggest that Byron approved of the persona being created, even though he wrote a few unconvincing letters to the contrary. The more scandalous and arguably more recognized element of Byron’s persona which made a splash with his fanatic audience of youthful liberals was his apparent sexual magnetism which formed out of gossip about his prolific sexual career. A career that was mostly built upon relationships with women, according to his own statements and historical record, but his same sex liaisons were also part of the rumor-mill and added a quality to the rumors that his opponents called deviance and his supporters called sexual openness. Beyond the genders of his partners, his nontraditional, socially and sexually democratic audience also became attracted to the method of his success, perhaps as much as the degree of it. The rake was a popular literary character especially among Royalist works of the Restoration and even later into Gothic fiction. Why Byron differs is that he does not exactly fit into the rakish paradigm. He is a mix of traditionally masculine traits with feminine sensitivity, flair, and fire, all of the character traits he regularly performed for the benefit of his audience. Reverting back to gothic terminology to describe Byron, his mythical persona became something metaphysical, something transcendent of recognized gender and sexual

description. Like the Martian, Stardust, Byron was something more than human. Hoeveler states, “In the realm of images, the androgynous is unique in that it attempts to meld masculine and feminine in a new and radically unique manner, and yet it is founded on the very stereotypes it seeks to destroy. Hence, it is inherently flawed and persistently fails in the poetry to translate successfully humanity’s desire to escape the constraints of sexuality altogether” (7). Though I do not disagree with the symbolic or imagistic functions and shortcomings of androgyny in Romantic poetry, I do think that there is another facet of the androgyne particularly at work in Byron’s poetry and in his mythic persona. The function of this different androgyne is not, as Hoeveler theorizes, to portray “ideal sexual equality” (7), which she calls a failure because of the negative stereotypes attached to women from time immemorial, but rather to take up the position of the enigmatic figurehead of sexual possibility wherein the stereotypes that Hoeveler refers to are not the limitations of each gender. These traits that Hoeveler regards as gendered stereotypes become gender-interchangeable characteristics that liberate the youth and youthful from the yoke of conventional sexuality, further weighted by traditional British propriety. In other words, the androgyne represents sexual democracy. One of the pitfalls when exploring androgyny is the continuation of talking about this new, less constrained third-sex option which Leo Bersani calls “a radical open-endedness of being” (qtd. in Hoeveler 16) in binary and juxtaposed terminology. Though he was physically male and masculine in his mannerism (e.g. vulgar, athletic, and often violent), Byron exuded a feminine yet powerful, sexual presence, similar to Helen of Troy’s, which attracted both women and men who were utterly consumed by the Byronic fantasy. For a burgeoning subculture of social and sexual democrats whose agenda is to create true equality in all sociopolitical arenas, such a character would have enormous marketability as an iconic image for the movement. Hoeveler comments that “androgyny reemerged in the late eighteenth-century England not simply as an abstract image, but as a social, psychic, and political ideology that suddenly seemed within reach” (5). James Soderholm, in discussing the appeal of Byron, demonstrates that “treating of the poet as a cult object is not a particularly gendered phenomenon” (9). He

reminds us that Edward Trelawny slept with a copy of The Corsair under his pillow and “absorbed and became” (9) the character, and that Coleridge confessed to never seeing “so lovely a countenance as Byron” (9). The poet had considerable sex appeal for both men and women. When constructing oneself as an object of desire, building off of a foundation of feminine sensuality is often cited as one of the most powerful tools a woman possesses. The power of a woman’s allure has been the subject of innumerable fables from Cleopatra and Helen to the bomb-shells depicted in film noir. Men are portrayed as defenseless against someone practiced in manipulating her own sensuality. With this power residing in a man such as Byron, who also possesses a primal, dominant and masculine sexuality as well as a highly praised poetic eloquence and cunning intellect, it is no wonder that Byromania was and still is a powerful force in popular culture. He is Derrida’s dream, a “sexual otherwise,” a powerful third-sex which defies the previous definition of the androgyne as a weaker “other” whose foot in both male and female camps denies it the power of masculinity while stereotyping or devaluing femininity. Not wanting to overanalyze the other worldliness of the mythical Byron, one more comparison which has been made several times over deserves a brief mention in the new context of androgyny. Thanks to the influence of the gothic and the sexual frustrations of one particular physician, Byron has had a connection with the paranormal long before my associating him with Ziggy Stardust. Many critics like McDayter bring up the vampiric qualities of the Byron legend but do so to point out the general feeling of contempt held by people who aligned themselves with the conservative power structure whose goal in making the monstrous connection was to demonize the poet. Other critics like Tom Holland discuss the vampire as a contemporary incarnation of the Byronic legend. In commenting on Byron’s allure which affects both sexes, McDayter brings up William Polidori’s vampire tale and comments that the character of Aubrey, who is victimized by Lord Ruthven (Polidori’s imaginative manifestation of Byron), is a reflection of Polidori himself. As such, Polidori admits to his susceptibility to “the absorbing charms of the vampire,” (55) or an attraction to

Byron. Making the close association between the vampiric and the Byronic is a well-worn avenue in Byron scholarship. It begs mentioning here not because of the critically perceived similarities in the condition of those unfortunate individuals who come to cross paths with the vampire or Byron and find their life force somewhat lessened after the experience, but because of the eroticism attached to the vampire character in its most popular incarnation. In being undead, the vampire loses its connection to humanity, not in the sense of mannerisms but in its connection with being human. The vampire becomes something another than human whose appearance marks the end of the kinship. One distinct difference is the lack of sex. Most of the more predominant vampire figures in popular media lack the ability and/or desire to engage in physical sex. The desire for sex is replaced with a desire to consume, but that is not to say that the act of consuming is not sexual. Most depictions of the vampire’s embrace are almost overwhelmingly sexually charged. Most importantly in this transformation of desire, the vampire’s old sexual orientation (normally assumed to be heterosexual) is also transformed. It hunts for prey of both sexes, and there is no marked difference in the levels of eroticism between hetero- or homo-consumption. For the Vampire, too, at the point of transmigration from the human to subhuman or extra human, the vampire also loses its own gender. Linguistically, we refer to the vampire antecedent neutrally. Though it may physically appear gendered, being relegated to an otherness has effectively degendered the being; as such, homoeroticism becomes a permissible plot element in the literature. Though they are neutered both in the context of physical sex and gender, these figures possess a magnetism that draws their victims, of both sexes, to them in figuratively sexual intimacy, as in the case of Aubrey to Lord Ruthven or Lucy to Mina. For Polidori and others who first began making the vampire/Byron connection, they clearly saw more similarities between the two figures than the drain that they felt Byron inflicted. It was a way to deal with their own desires of an erotic encounter with Byron using many of the same Gothic devices to mask such desires and relegate them to the realm of fantasy. Using the vampire, however, does something else for the fantasy. For people like Polidori who

preferred to live within the normative society, such homoerotic fantasies run counter to that society. Thus it is possible that he felt guilt for his own desires, so he placed them in a monstrous setting as a sign of own feelings of monstrosity. Such a reading is possible if Polidori could not reconcile his desires with his English propriety. Part of the reason that the vampiric image of Byron was sustained by his critics is because the image of the vampire invokes fear which is supposed to lead to avoidance. These critics hoped that demonizing the poet would counteract his growing popularity and break the spell he had over his audience. It is obvious that the mainstream English sensibility recognized a threat to its value system and felt a need to demonize Byron in the hopes that the public would avoid him. Obviously, it did not work that way. The cult of the vampire began to form during this period and is still a strong youth sub-culture today, with images of the Byronic sensuality surging through it. Though Byron does not exist by name in the modern vampire narratives, the characters are infused with Byronic traits that start with the physical appearance of a being that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying who often wears flowing poet shirts relaxed at the collar and yet are stylish and elegant. Tom Holland points out that the vast majority of modern vampire characters in literature and film are not patterned after the original legends or even Stoker’s horribly disfigured count. The immense popularity of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the large contemporary subculture of youths who pattern their dress and mannerisms after her characters, who are very clearly derived from the Byronic vampire, are testaments to the failure by Byron’s critics as instruments of the conservative British establishment to counteract Byron’s popularity by marginalizing him. Very little work has been done to survey Byron’s modern readership. However, while his poems are still critically read in academia, his iconic image survives strongly in the Byronic vampire. Holland’s essay “Undead Byron” discusses this contemporary phenomenon. He shows how the modern image of the vampire in popular movie depictions comes out of the Byronic legend. Even the most famed creature, Dracula, did not retain the image he was born with. Holland points out that Stoker’s description of an old man with bushy hair and pointed ears was replaced by a younger more dashing Byronic figure (155). With

the vampire, just as with Byron, Dokou and others who have associated androgyny with a weakened or impotent character through the workings of the castration complex are not able to make the same case in this instance. The legends of the gender-neutral vampire and the androgynous poet actually gain powers of magic, seduction, and hypnotic manipulation as evidenced by the tremendous sex appeal of both Byron and his poetic characters. This strength is what led to the formation of the iconic androgyne in the sexual counter-culture of both the nineteenth- and twentieth century movements. Byron’s keen awareness of the social and political movement which sought to equalize Britain’s social and political system, joined with his knack for mythmaking and powerful writing set into motion the events that led him to be the cultural icon of a youth-driven movement toward social liberty and democratic sexuality. What remains is to look at how Byron implemented his poetic talents to deliver coded socio-sexual/political messages to his audience in the know. By looking at those poems already deemed important on issues of sexuality, primarily within homoerotic discourse, we will be able to see the androgyne at work in Lara, The Giaour, and Don Juan with the bulk of the chapter’s space devoted to the latter.

CHAPTER 3

THE REVOLUTION OF THE ANDROGYNE IN BYRON’S POETRY

As important as Byron’s persona was to the counter-culture movement it was not the man alone who impacted it. A great deal of his poetry advocated both social and sexual liberalism, so we must move beyond the man to look at the poetry the man produced. Particularly in instances where Byron, himself, becomes a character in literature or film, the authors decide to build the character based on the mythic elements of his personality. In various literary and film representations like Gothic and Haunted Summer, Byron’s more controversial qualities, especially his arrogance, temper, and lascivious sexuality are spotlighted at the expense of even the slightest hint that he ever put pen to paper. Within the circles of literary scholarship, many Romantic academicians are following Harold Bloom’s lead and devalue Byron’s literary importance in the era. Irregardless of his aesthetic sense to write stylized poetry rather than following the Wordsworthian idea of writing in a more naturalistic style, the people, using the Marxist sense of the word, more readily identified themselves in his work. Despite all their pretense of making their poetry more accessible to the common man, the Lake poets still maintained an artistic distance from their readership. One reason Wilson attributes to Byron’s academic disfavor despite his wild popularity is that he “appeals to the unconscious and to the pleasures of fantasy life before he is read for literary merit. Byron was a figure of identification and desire in the public imagination in a way that Southey and Wordsworth simply were not” (9-10). Perhaps in the eyes of some, his mythic persona completely obfuscated his literary talent, but we must remember that he was one of the most widely read writers of the Romantic era. Earlier I stated that hype and controversy can catapult a career, but the continued success of his pieces is a testament to the impact his messages had on his audience. Even many of his staunchest critics were forced to acknowledge his success. He truly had a way with words, and he used this gift to create beautiful poetry which housed and promoted those liberal ideals that his persona embodied.

William Ruddick in his book Byron’s Cultural and Political Influence states that “Byron’s most lasting benefaction to the English Liberal tradition” is perhaps that his “poetry played a most significant part” in “helping to establish a tradition of polemic in which skeptical analysis fulfills a purifying role in the service of an underlying vision of society as it might be” (37). For his audience Byron’s poems and plays addressed issues of social and sexual liberty and attacked traditional ideologies that hampered those cultural ideals. Byron’s critics often failed to grasp the political implications of his work, while they praised this talent and scorned his lack of morality. For his urban working class readers, the popularity of Byron’s poetry is attributed more to what he said rather than how he said it. Even a negative review of Byron’s work demonstrates how his poems were received. In 1832 Longfellow wrote an anonymous review of Byron’s work. From the negative criticism Longfellow gives on the effect of Byron’s work, we can see that Byron’s influence on his audience was felt even in America. Longfellow writes, “Minds that could not understand his beauties, could imitate his great and glaring defects . . . until at length every city, town, and village had its little Byron, its self- tormenting scoffer at morality, it gloomy misanthropist in song” (Critical Heritage 18). Ruddick also pinpoints the effect that his writing had on his audience. “Byron’s poetry often invites audience identification and the fact that his poems brought to the surface so many of the concealed urges and pressures of the age increased their appeal.” His poetry’s “amorous or erotic charge diverted Byron’s readers from their own political frustrations to the consideration of frustrations of a more directly personal kind” (29). Youth are naturally rebellious, and with liberal social issues beginning to emerge at the same time, it seems that Byron’s brazen efforts to bring personal, social issues to light in his poetry drew the attention of his audience away from economic and political issues because of the potential youth and the working class public saw in actually achieving success, at least with its concerns for social democracy. Apparently someone else saw the potential, too. McDayter quotes from the poem, “Uriel,” published anonymously by a contemporary of Byron, as evidence that identifies Byron’s primary and intended

sphere of influence. The poem also further articulates the fears of the mainstream culture stemming from Byron’s influence. You act the serpent’s part – you lead astray Each unsuspecting youth, who urged along By your too fascinating powers of song Join inadvertently, the thoughtless, dazzled throng. (qtd. on 57, my emphasis) Gary Dyer pointedly states that “his [Byron’s] readers, he acknowledges, are not an undifferentiated public but are publics---discrete if often overlapping subcultures and counterpublics” (574). I have included the youth in all of my descriptions thus far, but it behooves the argument, at this time, to qualify my statement. History has repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of counter-culture or rebellious movements were instigated and carried through by youth. The Watts Riots, the hippie movement, the Kent State protests, and the student uprising in Beijing all demonstrate the pattern, and the verse above is evidence that Byron’s revolution in Britain was no different. The youth in Britain and elsewhere throughout Europe turned the pages of Byron’s works looking for the socially radical ideas that would confirm the validity of their beliefs. For these youths Byron and the major characters in his poetry were interchangeable. His audience looked for the appearance of that powerful third sex in his work. They did not see themselves in these character creations. What they saw was potentiality. They saw the epitome of their struggle. Their goal was not for themselves to become androgynous, merely to become as sexually free and powerful as their icon. Wilson explains that “Byron was seen as giving a performance of himself in the persons of Childe Harold, Lara, Manfred, and Don Juan. Byron colluded with the idea that his work was a continuation of his life and he flirted with his readers, hinting at diabolical deeds in his past . . . whilst furiously protesting against any identification which was made between himself and his characters” (11). After all, his socio-political ideas were not for every one. The criticisms of his immorality attest to that. Hoeveler rightfully reminds us that “the androgynous is a myth, and therefore its use as a literary device is limited to the parameters and ideological content of mythology itself” (17). As a

literary device Byron uses the androgyne to reflect his mythological self in his characters, to exemplify sexual democracy and to attract an audience that is keen to this ideology. While the androgynous in these circumstances is limited to the Byronic mythos, that mythos is fluid and living on account of both public myth-making and Byron’s own talent for defying accurate characterization. Part of what made Byron and his poetry so popular with the radical, sexually open culture is what I and others have explained as the audience’s identification with the subjects and characters of the poems. A relatively recent study in behavioral psychology looked at television marketing and its overall effectiveness among traditional and nontraditional viewers. One of the hypotheses that Morrison and Shaffer were working with while performing the study suggested that “participants with nontraditional gender-role orientations (i.e. masculine women, feminine men, and androgynous individuals) should respond more favorably to nontraditional gender-role portrayals in advertisements” (268). In other words, a nontraditional audience will relate to a nontraditional presentation. The results showed that societal conditioning of the traditional gender roles through popular media contributed to a lower than expected positive response to the non-traditional stimulus, but there was a measurable receptiveness by the non-traditional audience to the non-traditional advertisement. As this applies to Byron’s iconic status among youth culture in nineteenth-century Britain, his sexual proclivities attracted an audience who identified with his sexual prowess not only in his numerous female conquests but the widely accepted rumors of an equally impressive number of male liaisons. Byron commodified himself and his ideal through his poetry; they became advertisements for the public. Looking at his poetry, this project will primarily focus on Don Juan and the depiction of the title character as androgynous, mainly as a way for Bryon to attract the target audience to the piece. However, before that I want to briefly look at both Lara and The Giaour to examine representations of androgyny contained within, firstly, to acknowledge the work that has already been done on androgynous representation as a political statement of same-sex sexuality.

Then, I want to focus on the importance of the Page character in both of these texts as a demonstrative representation in the broader scope of sexual freedom. Despite a number of places in these poems where one could find instances of androgyny, I want to focus on the most blatant manifestations in both of these plays. Likewise in both feminist and queer theory, the Page characters receive the most critical attention because they represent the reoccurring theme of gender revolution in both works. These two plays are treated simultaneously because the character is utilized in the exact same fashion in both productions. Brinks suggests that in both The Giaour and Lara the “Page figures are particularly important because the attention of the audience visually and psychologically shifts from the Byronic hero to them. They are the figures through whom the male protagonist—and the community, via their fascination with him—can project and measure the extent of his dispossession from the masculine estate” (70). As much as this reading is accurate on one level, the already attuned audience would find this idea a common place idea that many other authors like Shakespeare and others have portrayed to an inconsequential end. The Giaour opens with a call to radical reclamation. Byron wants his democratic audience to once again liberate itself from puritanical conservatism, to live in the light of its own ideology, to bring back the Greek social ideals. Arise, and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes of your sires The embers of their former fires; And he who in the strife expires Will add to theirs a name of fear That Tyranny shall quake to hear, And leave his sons a hope, a fame, They too will rather die than shame: For Freedom’s battle once begun, Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son Though baffled oft is ever won. Bear witness, Greece, thy living page! (115-126)

For his counter-culture audience, Byron’s call to action is given a specific socio- sexual direction with his reference to their Greek forbearers. Byron’s call is for a return to the Grecian social values wherein sexuality was much more liberal than in Britain and after the entrenchment of Puritan sensibilities. In another way, this section of the poem becomes the cornerstone to understanding the social implications of the whole text. Byron’s living Grecian page marks Byron, the narrator, and the Giaour as inheritors of Greek morality. However, the page is the prominent image to study in this work as well as in Lara, for in both cases, the character that the audience initially perceives as distinctly male becomes sexually involved with a heroic male figure. The importance of the page figure is more pronounced in The Giaour, while the similar circumstances in Lara only serve to emphasize the same idea. In the former, the action of the story hinges on the page figure. The Giaour has a sexual encounter with a girl from Hassan’s harem who disguises herself as a page to escape the wrath of Hassan. Yet Hassan kills the page which raises the fury in the Giaour for the loss of his love whose gender identity becomes complicated at this point. Brinks explains that “the practice of cross-dressing at (and as) the narrative’s critical moment succinctly aligns gender ambiguity with the flight from patriarchal sexual norms” (75). Beyond this the gender roles are further complicated when we remember the call to action early in the play. The last line of the call addresses both ancient Greece and the audience, and urges both to witness not only the events of the narrative as they are about to unfold, but also witness that Byron, as narrator, sets himself up as a page figure so when the audience encounters the complicated gender identification of the page character in the story they carry the confusion over to the narrator and Byron himself. To the audience who is already looking for representations of Byron in the characters of his poems, the sexuality of the narrator is as important as the Page or the Giaour. I submit that Byron’s purpose is to convolute the sexuality of the principal characters to blur binary gender distinctions. The Giaour and Lara then become love stories where the sexualities of the protagonist and the love interest lose relevance.

In Lara, Kaled, the page, is introduced as male, and the charade is maintained through the bulk of the work. However, Byron’s descriptions are mismatched to a male character: “Light was his form, and darkly delicate / That brow . . . “(I:vvvii.528), even more so his hands are described as “So femininely white it might bespeak / Another sex, when match’d with that / smooth cheek”( I:xxvii.576-78). Though the gender identity clues are not as complicated in Lara, the message that love can exist without the binary constraints of sexuality, as recognized by English social standards, is just as strong in this poem. The scenes of loving, though not sexual, intimacy in Canto I, stanza xiv where Lara rests his hand on the page’s as a comforting symbol of constancy helps to show the beauty and purity of the relationship between Lara and the page. By this point in the poem (nearly to the end) the true gender of the page is not revealed. The audience, though aware of the reality, is invited to view the page at face value. Even though Lara’s gender identity is not as confusing as that of the Giaour, his effeminate name hints at the same lack of distinct maleness. However, for both Lara and the Giaour being intimate with the page figure is not a dispossession of their masculine strength. Rather the incorporation of the feminine into their characters actually adds to their heroism. Thus, as the audience identifies with these heroes, they must by association identify those elements within themselves that do not fit into the stereotypes. This self-identification of the audience with the principal characters in Byron’s poems carries over into Don Juan, which was more widely accepted as a work of sexual exploration. In discussing the breakdown of gender norms in Don Juan, Brinks works off of a theory presented by Alan Richardson when she suggests that “cross-dressing in Don Juan functions as a series of negations, the evasion of ordinary gender norms: ‘not simply a temporary exchange of sexual roles, but the vehicle of a more profound questioning of the grounds of sexual difference’” (167). In this way, Don Juan works much the same way as Lara and The Giaour. Don Juan has probably received more critical attention than any other text from Bryon. Scholars have cited it as a portrayal for everything from romantic love and sexual promiscuity, to political subversion and homoeroticism. What

follows is to take up the tradition where Christina Dokou and others left off in uncovering the workings of androgyny within the poem. In his book Romanticism and Male Fantasy, Charles Donelan calls Don Juan “the Romantic period’s most comprehensive defense of freedom of expression and liberty of the imagination. The poem satirizes and resists the state-sponsored evangelical censorship of popular culture” (1-2). He goes on to talk about how Byron’s mock-epic was on the tournament field opposite “puritan aestheticism” fighting for the honor of an “emerging hedonistic consumerism” (2). That the poem is a criticism of political and social issues, specifically the conservative value system is nothing new. What has received little attention is the idea that Byron had a much smaller audience in mind when he wrote this and many of his other pieces. It is true that the sheer popularity of the poem stands as evidence that it appealed to and was at least partially understood by a large and diverse audience. But many people have discussed the codified language that Byron uses in his writing to segregate his audience between those who do and do not “get it.” Judson, in recounting Freud, states, The joke [satire disguised by coded language] . . . exploits incongruity, but to a more aggressive purpose, seeking to outmaneuver the many faces of repressive Power vested in personal inhibition, social manners, or political oppression by disguising the ‘offense’ of meaning in a witty or nonsensical form that enables the speaker to slip subversive material past the censor (or Cant), as Byron characteristically puts it. (247) There are many levels of understanding in his work and a different set of codes for each level, each tier becoming increasingly culturally specific. Donelan’s subtitle to his work is “A Marketable Vice” reflecting the last words of stanza thirty-four of Canto I and foreshadowing the direction that he is driving his reading. He explains that one has to look at the whole of that stanza and the one which precedes it to see Byron’s criticism of the conservative aesthetic. These stanzas are not particularly codified. The poet’s criticism seems fairly superficial, yet there are definite coded messages here. The interesting thing to note here is that the coded message is almost identical to the

one easily read by the general public; what is different is who the poet is addressing. ‘Tis a sad thing, I cannot choose but say, And all the fault of that indecent sun, Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay, But will keep baking, broiling, burning on, That howsoever people fast and pray The flesh is frail, and the soul undone: What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.

Happy the nations of the moral north! Where all is virtue, and the winter season Sends sin, without a rag on, shivering forth; (‘Twas snow that brought St. Francis back to reason); Where juries cast up what a wife is worth By laying whate’er sum, in mulct, they please on The lover, who must pay a handsome price, Because it is a marketable vice. (I:lxiii-lxiv) The satirical criticism is easy to spot. From one stanza to the next we can see the establishment of the “us vs. them” pattern. The question becomes who comprises the “us?” A typical queer theorist reading will immediately identify the sultry climates and sun as images of Mediterranean or “oriental” settings. Keegan’s whole book is dedicated to how Byron staged the action of many of his works in the Orient because of the ease in which it afforded the use of homoerotic themes, hence the satirical “indecent sun.” Keegan explains that the oriental heathen worked in much the same way as Brink’s Gothic specter. Both served to create distance between the characters and audience thereby avoiding any unwanted associations too close to home and alerting the censors. However, there is more to identifying the audience of Byron’s works than pointing to the homosexual, though he or she is surely part of it. What must be remembered is Byron’s almost obsessive love for all things Grecian. He pored

over Plato and other philosophers. He makes numerous references to his beloved Greece (which I will discuss shortly), and filled much of his musings with Greek mythology. In Byron’s Mediterranean images, the sun works also to refer to Greece specifically, also known as the island of the sun. Greece as a poetic image often is a sign of homosexuality, as in Greek love, but the Greeks of the Symposium did not simply advocate the love between men. Plato’s work promoted the pursuit of happiness however that is best accomplished. Hedonism, in its truest sense, is the indulgence in all of life’s pleasures, which include but are not limited to sex. Such is the goal for the liberal youth culture of nineteenth century Britain. Byron is not necessarily directing his commentary only to the homosexual but to homosexuals as one group of people who are looking for that sexual and social democracy. By the time of Don Juan’s publication, the cult of Byron was in full effect, as was his androgynous image. The androgyne attracted the audience to whom Byron was aiming his message. Not only did the androgyne attract both free- spirited men and women on a sexual level, the figure attracted liberal-minded people who did not have their own personal struggles with sexuality, but were drawn to Byron on the level of social consciousness. While Gary Dyer explains that “ the manner in which Don Juan slyly alludes to same-sex sexuality leaves open the possibility of reading from a sodomite’s perspective,” he also includes, “There were readers who were prepared to allow for a sodomite’s perspective, either those who had heard rumors about Byron’s sexuality or, more interesting, men who since school had relied on classical literature for a history of others feeling as they felt and who now were ready to interpret Don Juan similarly” (573). Then there were still others open to the sexual and social freedoms that would equalize sodomy’s status within the dominant culture’s list of accepted sexual practices. The idea that Byron’s work served a broader purpose than the exploration of homosexuality and actually endorsed all social freedoms requires a closer look into the particular culture of homosexuality. One chapter in David Gross’ work in particular stands out to help with this idea. The chapter looks at the “gay narrator” at work in Don Juan. What are particularly important are his reasons for

choosing the term “gay” over homosexual and/or sodomite. Foucault explains that the homosexual as a tangible, living thing is a modern construct, a classification that serves to segregate one segment of the population because of a sexual practice. Thus a homosexual is one who engages in the act of same- sex intercourse. By the same token, sodomy denotes a sexual activity that is politically and dogmatically illegal, and the label sodomite also ostracizes an individual from the general population. The result of both of these epithets is a limiting of people’s character. Not wanting to perpetuate this idea is the reasoning for uncovering the gay narrator. He is using gaiety in its original connotation, as a description of vibrancy. Gross still includes the homosexual allusions made by the narrator, but such occurrences do not limit the dimensionality of the narrator. Gaiety is not gendered or limited to sexual practice; it is a characterization that is derived from a state of being, of openness, a youthful vigor. Gross notices that “Byron’s gay narrator surveys both sexes with an eroticized eye” (130). The result of this characterization is that Don Juan “yields important insights into Byron’s vexed endorsement of political liberalism” (129). The most effective way to begin seeing Byron’s political liberalism is to look at androgyny as it works in Juan himself. I briefly discussed earlier Dokou’s feminist reading of Juan as a criticism of the masculine regime. What I want to look at now is the eroticized androgyne who, like Byron, Stardust, or the vampire, has the ability to draw in its audience, to tantalize the audience with a certain mindset so that it may receive the messages already identified. By seeing Byron in the character of Juan, the audience’s attraction for the one transfers over to the other. In discussing the distinctions between Byron’s public and private personae (the statement also applies to Byron and his literary characters), Peter Graham concludes that the two are not easily differentiated, “Only when taken together can the two translations encompass the range of Don Juan’s subjects and perspectives. This blending of the private and public, of mystification and revelation, is part of the method and myth of Don Juan” (34). The audience gets its first taste of Juan’s purpose in the text early on. The first descriptions we get

of him (at least when he is of appropriate age to discuss him so) is purposefully undecided. Young Juan was now sixteen years of age, Tall, handsome, slender, but well knit: he seem’d Active, through not sprightly, as a page; And everybody but his mother deem’d Him almost a man; but she flew in a rage And bit her lips (for else she might have scream’d) If any said so, for to be precocious Was in her eyes a thing the most atrocious. (I: liv) The first thing to note here is Juan’s physical description. Attributing slenderness to a male character is effectively effeminizing that character. Then we couple that with the description of Juan being well-knit as opposed to being called strong; a woman is more often referred to as being well put together. The caesura forces us to pause unnaturally for the enjambment of the line. This technique shows that “knit” was a specific word choice since he had to carry the line over to make the rhyme. The continuation of the line throws a wrinkle into the fabric of the description. It is not Byron’s intention to completely emasculate the youth, so he only “seem’d” to be as the narrator described. He is not even sure. From looking at Lara and The Giaour, we know the importance of the Page image in Byron’s work as a symbol of androgyny. The fact that the Page image is negated at this point is not a negation of Juan’s androgyny but rather, a commentary on his sober mannerisms. Not being sprightly shows his lack of gaiety, which will change as his role as lover is fully realized and life begins to blossom for the youth. Donna Julia is the vehicle for his indoctrination into his role in the world, and the audience begins to see the melding of the Don Juan legend with the Byronic legend. Dokou observes that “Byron’s twist on the legend is that his Don does not acquire his status through the seduction of women, but through being seduced by and into femininity; that is, he displays traits, such as sexual passivity and vulnerability, that are traditionally deemed

feminine” (1). Beyond this he is also seduced by women themselves, thus reversing traditional gender roles in the rituals of love, mirroring much of Byron’s sexual career where a majority of his female lovers like the Countess were the sexual aggressors. Having the target audience identify the hero with Byron and themselves is only the beginning of the sexual counter-culture’s attraction to Don Juan. The brief mention of codified language in Byron only paved the way to this second degree of identification between the work and the audience. The two most often talked about code words for deviant sexuality are “secret” and “knowledge,” both of which are euphemisms for homosexuality, the former being the act itself and the latter being knowledge of (participation in) the lifestyle. Byron’s particular brand of using this coded language is a little more complicated than simply substituting one word for another. Brinks comments that by employing secrets as both a literary and language device, “Byron thus fashions a more extensive intersection between the rhetoric of the secret and prevailing cultural mystifications of homosexuality and non-normative gender identifications” (22). Part of having his audience identify with the characters in his work is identifying with what they say. Later in her work Brinks explains that Byron “displays the fact that he is exposing a fascinated and complicitous audience to the secret, which significantly, is not the same as revealing it. In doing so, however, Byron critically ‘outs’ his audience to itself” (72, author’s emphasis). Those members of the audience who understand the nature of the secrets do so only from recognition of their own secrets; while those who are intrigued enough to search for understanding come face to face with their own homoerotic curiosity because of their attraction to the ideas being displayed. Gary Dyer uncovers another level to this codified language in Byron’s use of “flash” language. He maintains that since simple sexual ideas were codified, the truly tabooed sub-sects of sexual practice and identity had to be further camouflaged. As a result he states, “instead of sodomy’s standing in for secrets in general, other secrets had to stand in for sodomy and other disguises for sodomy’s disguises” (563). Dyer admits that the concept can get convoluted and complex. Essentially, the standard code words were not sufficient to express the

various manifestations of sexual secrets. As a result, Byron borrowed the cant from other socially unacceptable activities to stand in for specifically homosexual, but generally other sexually deviant ideas that he wished to express. How this idea benefits this investigation is that Dyer shows later that such codified language advertises as much as it conceals (569). “Flash,” as it is termed, is both a noun representing a kind of language of concealment and identification and an adjective describing someone in the know. If someone is flash they are privy to the true meaning of the jargon and are of that culture. Flash is very similar to jive or other distinctive language patterns codified for the understanding of a limited audience. In Byron’s case, he was concealing true meanings from the censors and critics as representatives of the conservative, British hegemony, while drawing in his target audience of the hip, sexually liberal counter-culture. Dyer spotlights one episode in Don Juan to stand as the example of flash’s usage throughout the text. In discussing the English Cantos of Don Juan, his investigation into flash language comes from a note Byron gives on a passage of flash that he writes in Canto XI, verse xix. He from the world had cut off a great man, Who in his time had made heroic bustle. Who in a row like Tom could lead the van, Booze in the ken, or at the spellken hustle? Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bow- street’s ban) On the high toby-spice so flash the muzzle? Who on a lark, with black-eyed Sal (his blowing), So prime, so well, so nutty, and so knowing? The flash of this passage draws heavily from the jargon used among participants in boxing, and as some of the more popular fighting occurred in the underground

because of certain legal restrictions, flash was adopted by not only the underground but also other marginalized subcultures. Students of Byron commonly know that his explanatory notations within his texts are all but useless. In the case of the note for the flash passage, it too is designed to hide the true meaning from all but his intended audience. Dyer’s article points out how that note’s intent is to explain the flash language as an attempt to create authenticity in the mugger character by having him speak in the manner of the English, criminal underworld and not to shed light on the sexual implication of sodomy─essentially the one is a decoy for the other. Yet the audience in the know reads the code for the poet’s true meaning, which does not rely on the words written (even in translation) but on his use of flash at all because if his persona had not done so already, Byron has now identified himself as flash and therefore, an ally to the underground. Dyer also shows how the note should be read as an autobiographical reference to the days of his youth spent in boxing and other activities. He explains, “When Byron’s note refers to boxing flash as a vestige of his ‘early days,’ . . . he implicitly distinguishes the sodomitical Byron of 1806-12 from the Byron of 1822, who is in all appearances monogamous and exclusively heterosexual” (571). Dyer is kind enough to go through the trouble of translating the passage into standard English for the benefit of his readers though he points out the meaning of the passages is not as significant as the meaning of its inclusion. Juan had removed from the world a great man, who in his day had made considerable commo- tion. Who could lead the thieves in attack in a fight, drink in the thieves’ hideout, or steal at the theater as Tom could? Who could cheat a fool as well or rob on horseback despite the threat of constables? Who when out with his girlfriend Sal, was so lusty, so well dressed, so devoted, and so clued in? (564) If his intention was really to make the distinction, why unearth that aspect of his life again in the flash advertisements? One possible answer is that he is still

attempting to perpetuate those character traits that had become iconic by that point in his life since he was not scandalized by rumors of sodomy by that time. However more than likely he is using flash to make that connection to the socially radical audience who is forced to live in the underground until the revolution is won and the counter-culture’s idea of democracy becomes legitimized in the mainstream.

CONCLUSION

Did Byron’s revolution succeed? William Ruddick states that “it has to be admitted that while on the Continent Byron’s powerful scorn of oppression and his lyrical celebrations of the inevitability and beauty of national regenerative processes inspired by liberal forces in half a dozen counties, and while at home his cries of impatience with the old and assertions of the need to change excited young readers and put heart into struggling working class self-educators, the majority of responsible people remained resolutely unconvinced by his words” (25). In the short term, after his death, that may be true, because the Victorian scholars and critics who followed either disavowed any knowledge of the poet ever having existed or continually downplayed his popularity and/ or influence in what Wilson calls “a feverish anti-Byronism” (1). Yet, in Gender and Citizenship, Claudia Moscovici points out that today, more than, ever, we appear to live in an androgynous age. Women vote and hold office while also being maternal. Men are masculine yet sensitive. What seemed to be an impossible combination of masculine and feminine characteristics has become, through historical and dialectical development, simply a new definition of sexual identity. (111) I might add that even more recently the popular revolution of the metrosexual to challenge masculine stereotypes is another indication of Byron’s success. So if our society is a reflection of his efforts that blazed the trail for other revolutionaries like Ziggy Stardust, what prevented a more immediate and palpable change in Britain at the time? By looking at sales figures of his Byron’s work, the demand to have his work translated into French, Italian, and German, and other evidence, scholars commonly know that Byronmania was a stronger force in continental Europe than in Britain. Goethe once commented on the immense popularity of Byron among youths in Germany. Some of this could be attributed to continental Europe being more liberal in general, but Byron also spent most of his career living on the continent in exile from Britain. Perhaps his absence as the living embodiment of

his sexual politics weakened the icon in Britain. Camille Paglia believes that “Byron was full of political ideas, which led him to sacrifice his life in the cause of liberty. But he was an Alcibiades whose glamour was too intense for his own society. England could not tolerate Byron’s presence and convulsively expelled him” (363). The connection that she makes from Byron to Alcibiades is surprising, but the comparison works on both a social and political level. By historical accounts, both Alcibiades and Byron had similar characters. In fact, when Alcibiades enters The Symposium he is seen wearing garlands made of ivy and violets. If we remember that ivy is associated with Dionysus and violets with Aphrodite, then it can be argued that Alcibiades is presented as an androgyne. I am not suggesting the Byron patterned his persona after Alcibiades, but we do know that The Symposium was highly influential for the poet. The Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos was one of many who wrote on the legend of this amazing man who changed the face of the Peloponnesian War. He did not accomplish such a feat by his military efforts, though he was a gifted general, but by his social character. The first lines of Nepos’ biography describes him thusly, Alcibiades the Athenian was the son of Clinius. In this man, nature seemed to have tried all possibilities, for it is agreed by all who have written about him that no one was more exceptional than him in both virtues and vices. He was born in the most distinguished city, of the highest family, and by far the most beautiful of all the men. Of his age, he was qualified for any occupation, and he was full of good counsel (for he was the greatest commander on sea or land); he was eloquent, so as to produce the greatest effect by his speeches. For such indeed was the persuasiveness of his looks and language, that in oratory no one was a match for him. He was rich, and when occasion required, laborious, patient, liberal, and splendid, no less in his public than in his private life. He was also approachable and courteous, most shrewdly adapting to circumstances, but when relaxing, and no reason offered why he should endure the labor of thought, he was seen to be extravagant, dissolute, licentious, and self-indulgent, such that all wondered that

there should be such dissimilitude, and so contradictory a nature, in the same man. (16 my translation)

He was a companion to the greatest men and women on both sides of the conflict, and his seductiveness gave him considerable power over these men. Paglia has a much more poignant summation than I could possibly come up with. “Alcibiades helped bring down the Athenian empire. . . . Byron, the Romantic exile, did England a favor” (364).

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

William M. Lofdahl earned his Master’s degree in 2005 and is continuing to focus his research on British Romantic Literature, particularly the work of Lord Byron. Currently, he is a doctoral student at Marquette University where he investigating Byron’s early translations of Horace and other Roman poets in an attempt to discover word choice patterns in his translations which may provide a psychological pattern reoccurs in his later work. Such work may uncover the poet’s predilections for hedonism.