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Byron's Role in Romantic Sexual Counter-Culture Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 Iconic Androgyne: Byron's Role in Romantic Sexual Counter Culture William M. Lofdahl Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ICONIC ANDROGYNE: BYRON’S ROLE IN ROMANTIC SEXUAL COUNTER CULTURE By 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. ii 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. iv 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 1 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 2 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
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