Representations of Identity and the Other Selves in Byron's Major

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2014-06-10 Representations of Identity and the Other Selves in Byron’s Major Works of 1812-1815

Radhwi, Mariam

Radhwi, M. (2014). Representations of Identity and the Other Selves in Byron’s Major Works of 1812-1815 (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27635 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/1570 doctoral thesis

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Representations of Identity and the Other Selves in Byron’s Major Works of 1812-1815

Mariam Mohammad Radhwi

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

MAY, 2014

In his visual and verbal works of 1812-1815, Byron’s conception about personal and political identity progresses steadily. When observing the identities he had encountered during his travels, he realizes the flaws in existing binary definitions of self and other and represents identity in what I describe as the other selves. Manipulating the nineteenth-century metaphor of the separation between the outside and the inside, stereotypes about appearance, and prevalent literary conventions, Byron challenges his audience to read these works. His complex construction of both his protagonists and his tales about the lands which were under Ottoman rule generate multiple, and perhaps contrary, readings. The writings accompanying these texts and their numerous revised editions further enhance the multiple readings these works propose. I have interpreted Byron’s representations by using a historical approach, which correlates both his visual and verbal works with his personal writings and with the occurrences in the political and national spheres, especially the French revolution, the fall of Napoleon, and the Ottoman occupation of Greece. Identity in Byron’s major works of this period is an elusive construct which changes according to the changes in temporal and personal perspectives, and according to context.

ii Preface

September 1988. At an Elementary school in Saudi Arabia: “Who are you and where are you from?” Having grown up in Florida, where my father did his doctorate degree, I was puzzled by this question and did not know what to say, so I asked my father who told me that we were

Saudis. His answer troubled me because I thought it disregarded our life in America, our Indian origins, our accent and appearance, and the fact that neither his family nor we spoke Arabic at home. Shortly after our move, my mother passed away, and my father re-married a “Saudi” woman to help us adjust to the culture and language. But I still never felt comfortable with my father’s answer because I could see that we were different from her family as well as from the kids at school. Despite the gradual improvement in my language and accent, this question about my identity seemed persistent everywhere I went, whether to playgrounds, social events, or even the doctor’s office. No matter how much I did, everybody continued to point out that I was different from them—the Saudis.

September 2005. First day of classes at U of C as a Master’s student: I am asked the same question again. At classes, social functions, and even the mall, the same question pops up again and again. However, the simple answer that my father had taught me still did not seem right to me. Also, various people questioned my identity as a Saudi because of my different behaviour and views from the supposed Saudi women whom they have encountered. I have been wondering for a long time about my identity, especially when everybody, including my “Saudi” in-laws and acquaintances, comments on how different I still look, dress, act and speak from supposed Saudi women. So, my answer started getting different: “I am a Saudi of Indian origins and I grew up partly in America.” Even though the answer is unconventional and long, and raises lots of questions, I have started getting some relief.

iii This public obsession with identity has always puzzled me. In many occasions, it has caused me to ponder the relationship of the self to the political, social and historical context. I have thus wondered if an individual can choose the identity she wants, and if she can choose to belong to the place that suits her regardless of the choices of her family and the regulations of law makers. Most importantly, I have wondered if one’s personal and social values change with the identity one assumes, or to which one ascribes. Despite my temporal, cultural and national differences from Byron, and despite my not being a part of his intended audience, his experiences in the early nineteenth century seemed to reverberate with mine. His personal and major works of 1812-1815 raise the same questions about identity which I have been contemplating since my childhood.

When I started researching my PhD thesis, I was intrigued by Byron’s struggles to balance the requirements which his status prescribed with the identity which he desired. He was an orphan of an impoverished heiress but suddenly gained wealth and status when he was ten years old. His personal writings reveal his struggles to adapt to his new identity as a member of the British nobility, revealing his ambivalence towards his Scottish origins and his poor beginnings. In addition to his double desire for fame as a skillful writer and recognition as a nobleman, his upbringing caused him to be sensitive about his own identity as well as that of others. During his Grand Tour, he scrutinized the identities of the people he had encountered whether in Western Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean, realizing that the political, social and cultural changes which the raging wars were causing redefined and re-prescribed their identity.

Such interest in identity attracted me because it has been a struggle and a question which I have always failed to understand, but have come to appreciate by tracing the historical factors which shaped Byron’s views.

iv Although Byron’s writings are based on his belief that a person can manipulate observers by assuming a visual mask (disguise) and/or a verbal mask (speech or silence), the final doom of his protagonists also warns that political and social factors impede that subjectivity because identity has been increasingly institutionalized. To understand the current institutionalization of personal and political identity, I have traced the way it was perceived and contested in the early nineteenth century, or during and after the Napoleonic wars, through Byron’s writings which explore the English self in relationship to what modern scholarship has called the foreign, or the other. Disregarding prevalent debates about the truthfulness and authenticity of his representations, I focus on the way he deconstructs existing definitions of identity and proposes other ways to categorize the self. Despite the open-endedness of his views, his works of 1812-

1815 are helpful in providing a background not only for the way identity was perceived in the early nineteenth century, but also for understanding the flaws in that construction, which can be used to understand present constructions of identity.

Quite interestingly, I discovered while working on my thesis that the postcolonial construction of the Byronic persona is more complex than its construction in Western scholarship. Byron’s aristocratic origin is an indispensible part of his identity for those who have attended private schools in former British colonies, like India. For my maternal grandfather, who majored in law after doing an undergraduate degree in English at an institution in India in the early 1940s, Byron was “always Lord Byron,” as my uncle solemnly told me when I was discussing my research with him back in 2012. Having gone to British schools, too, and receiving a doctorate from Britain in the early 1970s, my uncle remembered that his father would never permit anybody to refer to neither Byron nor any of the British nobility without their proper titles. Although I have noticed that most educated Indians with whom I have talked

v cannot refer to “Lord” Byron without acknowledging his aristocratic status, they like my maternal uncles and aunts have greatly surprised me for being familiar with such works of Byron as CHP 3 and Don Juan as well as the popular works of other canonical Romantic writers like

William Wordsworth and P.B. Shelley—but I do not know the degree of their familiarity.

This concern about, or reverence towards, Byron’s status as a British writer and member of the nobility shows that his identity is perceived differently not only by different geo-political groups, but also in different political and cultural contexts. Although in some contexts Byron’s identity has been closely connected to the construct of the English self, I will be arguing that he scrutinized this same identity in his major, though less known, works of 1812-1815. While writing this thesis, my own multiple ethnic, cultural and national backgrounds have enabled me to balance the different perspectives about Byron with his own views about identity. Examining the diverse ways Byron categorizes identity in these works has also enabled me to not only make sense of my own diverse background but also take comfort in it. Instead of forcing myself to match any certain ethnic or cultural identity, which I have repeatedly failed to do, I have learned to accept my difference and perhaps uniqueness from the groups around me.

vi Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Anne McWhir, for the diligent support and guidance she has offered. I also greatly benefited from the services of the Taylor Family Digital

Library at the University of Calgary. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Saudi

Arabian Cultural attaché for their financial support during my stay in Calgary.

I am also deeply grateful to my extended family who have always encouraged me to finish my degree despite the hardships I have faced during my career. And despite the present craze for wealth and fame, the words of my maternal grandmother, who has a college education, has helped me persevere. She has always reminded me that “education is the one thing no thief can steal!”

vii Dedication

To my husband, Mohammed, and my beautiful daughters, Ritaj and Rital, for the joy and happiness they bring me, and for their continued patience and support for me to finish this project. And to my parents who implemented in me the love of reading since my childhood, hoping I will do a PhD one day. And despite her inability to finish her own education, my mother had lots of plans and dreams for mine since I was six years old. However, she could not live to see this!

viii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Preface...... iii Acknowledgements ...... vii Dedication ...... viii Table of Contents ...... ix Abbreviations ...... x Epigraph ...... xi

INTRODUCTION: IDENTITY, THE BINARIES OF “SELF” AND “OTHER,” AND BYRON...... 1

CHAPTER 1: “SO I SHALL SOON BE AMONGST THE MUSSULMEN”: BYRON’S RE- REPRESENTATION OF THE SELF AND OTHER IN CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE 1 AND 2 ...... 18

CHAPTER 2: THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION, 1814: THOMAS PHILLIPS’ PORTRAITS OF BYRON AND BYRON’S OTHER SELVES ...... 47

CHAPTER 3: “BUT LOOK—’TIS WRITTEN ON MY BROW!”: MASKS AND PORTRAITS OF GIAOURS IN THE GIAOUR ...... 73

CHAPTER 4: “THINK NOT I AM WHAT I APPEAR”: IDENTITY AND PORTRAITS OF THE SELF IN THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS ...... 101

CHAPTER 5: “—AND WHAT AM I?”: CONRAD, “CORSAIR,” AND PERSONAL IDENTITY IN THE CORSAIR ...... 126

CHAPTER 6: THE (UN)TOLD STORY OF LARA: IDENTITY THROUGH SPEECH/SILENCE ...... 158

CONCLUDING REMARKS: LARA ...... 188

REFERENCES Primary Works by Byron ...... 195 Primary Works by Byron’s Contemporaries ...... 195 Secondary Works ...... 197

ix Abbreviations

BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand. This includes

Byron’s texts and Marchand’s notes

The Bride The Bride of Abydos

CHP Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

CPW The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann. This includes

Byron’s texts and McGann’s notes.

WLB, EHC The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge.

OED Oxford English Dictionary

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Although Byron’s spelling for such terms as “Qur’an,” “Muhammad” and “Mecca” varies, I use the normalizing spelling in the OED.

x Epigraph

“Alla! Viva! For Ever! Hourra! [or] Huzza!”—which is the most rational or musical of these

cries? (Byron’s Journal, midnight entry of 23 Nov 1813)

INTRODUCTION

IDENTITY, THE BINARIES OF “SELF” AND “OTHER,” AND BYRON

According to a marginal note in his copy of Isaac D’Israeli’s The Literary Character

(1795),1 Lord Byron claimed to have read “‘Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M. W. Montague

[sic], Hawkins’s Translation from Mignot’s History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights,2 all travels, or histories, or books upon the East . . . , as well as Rycaut, before [he] was ten years old’” (102).

This note asserts Byron’s familiarity with popular European scholars who had written historical, and/or imaginative tracts based on their travels into Turkey and the Levant.3 During his Grand

Tour of 1809-1811, as I will discuss in Chapter 1, Byron also visited such unconventional places as “Malta, Albania, Greece, Asia Minor, . . . Troad, Athens, [and] Ephesus” (BLJ 1: 255).

Byron’s interest in these regions continued into his adulthood when he not only visited them, but also wrote about their people and cultures in his works of 1812 to 1815, and exhibited himself in the guise of an Albanian soldier in 1814. While various scholars read Byron’s representations according to the modern binaries of “self” and “other,” I will demonstrate that he disrupts existing definitions of identity by representing identity in other ways.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, who relied only on scholarly and/or imaginative writings when representing the East, whether the Islamic, Chinese or Indian,4 Byron based his

1 Byron wrote this note to refute D’Israeli’s claims that his childhood reading of Rycaut’s political writings on the Ottoman Empire had alone enriched his Turkish tales. D’Israeli apologized by quoting Byron’s note and correcting his oversights in his third edition of 1822. 2 In BLJ, Marchand notes that Byron read Jonathan Scott’s six vol. ed. of 1811 (5: 62n3). However, Harold S. L. Wiener notes that Byron read the Nights in Antoine Galland’s original French (91). 3 The “Levant” was a fourteenth-century French term that referred to the regions in the Eastern Mediterranean. 4 D’Israeli bases his Romances (1797) on the translations of the Persian epic poet Nizami Ganjavi and Sir William Ouseley. D’Israeli’s “Mejnoun and Leila,” for example, retells the seventh-century Arabic story of doomed love. Despite the imaginative quality of D’Israeli’s version, which he compares to M. de Cardonne’s, he quotes various translated texts to explain Eastern traditions and beliefs. Also, his contemporary, Isaac Brandon, bases his opera 1

writings on his first-hand knowledge of the regions he had visited during his Grand Tour besides the writings which he had read according to the introductory quote. In 1809, for example, he purchased an Arabic grammar book and took lessons with a monk when residing in Valletta,

Malta. And as the advertisement to The Giaour (1813) and his letters reveal, Byron was involved in the welfare of a local Turkish girl when he was residing in Athens (CPW 414-15). She would have been executed for adultery if it was not for Byron’s interference to free her—I will discuss the significance of this incident in Chapter 3. Byron also kept Muslim servants at various times, such as Dervish Tahiri, to whom Byron became attached according to the footnotes of CHP 1

(CPW 2: 192-93n338).

Reflecting on his writings on 17 November 1813 as different from those of his contemporaries,5 Byron believed that he had “no one to contend against” because he had seen and experienced what his contemporaries “must copy from the drawings of others only” (BLJ 3:

168). On multiple occasions, Byron accused his contemporaries of “copying” from one another’s

“drawings,” which not only demonstrated Byron’s perception of the East in terms of the visual, but also denounced his contemporaries’ representations as non-creative and as distanced from the source. For example, Byron believed that such narratives as Robert Southey’s Thalaba (1801) produced only derivative plots which he enhanced by elements of the supernatural and the fantastic.6 Byron thus criticized Southey for “adopting only their most outrageous fictions” (BLJ

3: 101). Byron’s “their” refers to both the “outrageous fictions” of the East, which he believed to

Kais (1808) on D’Israeli’s romance. He, however, differs from the translated versions by ending the tale with the happy union of the lovers. 5 Harold S. L. Wiener notes that such contemporaries included Robert Southey and Thomas Moore both of whom he describes as being “completely dependent upon second-hand information for their Oriental materials” (129). 6 While writing about a Muslim orphan who avenges his father over his murderers—the demons—Southey represents his Eastern characters in binaries of self and other: they are either moral guides or socially and morally deviant. And he represents the Eastern/Islamic culture as inferior to the Western/Christian one. 2

be untrue representations of the people residing in the lands under Ottoman rule, and the

“outrageous fictions” of the West, which he believed his contemporaries located in those lands by using stock characters and elements.

Since his return from his tour, Byron sought to be what he would call a “good Oriental scholar” (BLJ 2: 163). As his personal and public writings reveal, Byron’s perception of the so- called Orient was loose like his contemporaries’. The Orient included such near places as

Ireland, whose significance I will discuss in Chapter 5, and such remote places as India and

China. However, in his own writings of 1812-1815, Byron used the term “Orient” to refer to those regions which he had visited or to which he had come in close proximity like Arabia, and regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. He thus represented the so-called Orient as a dynamic space with characters whose speech and actions questioned the limitations in their personal and political surroundings. Although Byron was restricted by conventions of travelogues in CHP 1 and 2 (1812), he disrupted these conventions when comparing and contrasting his surroundings with his knowledge about the regions he had visited in his letters, as I will discuss in Chapter 1.

Three years after his return, Byron wrote a series of verse narratives—The Giaour

(1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814)—which he set in the

Levant and Turkey. Representing the East in what Marilyn Butler considers a relatively positive light (87-88), Byron’s Turkish tales, as modern scholars call them, refer to both Eastern and

Western scholarly writings. They not only quote romances, geographical and political tracts, and travel narratives, but also refer to such popular Eastern tales as the Kais and Leila story, Qur’an- based stories about Biblical prophets and the afterlife, and Muhammad, the Islamic prophet. As

Byron repeatedly boasted, his intellectual scope aligned his romances with such scholarly texts as those of Sir William Jones and Isaac D’Israeli besides the Eastern and Western scholars he

listed in the note with which I have begun this chapter. These facts point to the reason why

Byron was offended by D’Israeli’s comment in The Literary Character.

In line with his concern to be a good scholar, Byron also sought to be a good versifier, or a literary and scholarly authority, as his letters assert. Using the metaphor of the separation of the outside from the inside, Byron not only aligns the content of his verse narratives with the writings of popular scholars on the Orient, but also aligns the form with the metric schemes of popular versifiers. As I will discuss in Chapter 5, Byron associated himself and his acquaintances with popular eighteenth-century writers like the Scriblerians, and wrote various verse works in

Spenserian stanzas. But his reviewers criticized his inconsistent use of Spenserian stanzas and his occasional use of heroic couplets—as in The Corsair—as pointing to his poor versification skills.

Byron justified choosing each poetic measure according to the effect he sought to convey, and claimed to base his measures on Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry (1702), which was the major reference for versification in the early nineteenth century (BLJ 5: 29 and n1).

Byron’s nineteenth-century reviewers7 and such modern critics as Wallace Cable Brown

(63-64) failed to recognize Byron’s scholarly and versification efforts especially Byron’s concern for authenticity, and treated his verse as led by his interest for wealth and fame. Byron responded to the accusations of his contemporary reviewers by asserting that “I don’t care one lump of Sugar for my poetry—but for my costume—and my correctness on those points . . . I will combat lustily” (BLJ 3: 165). This particular response was triggered by Murray’s suspecting the propriety of having Selim—the Muslim protagonist in The Bride—compare himself to Cain, a Biblical character (2.686). Byron claims that he based this reference on the Muslims’

7 The Antijacobin Review and The Courier—like in the issue of February 1814—frequently published negative reviews of Byron and his work, which not only disparaged his writings but also his person. 4

familiarity with Biblical stories, and claims that he borrowed the female protagonist’s name,

Zuleika from the story of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph that he had read in Persian folklore. Byron refers Murray, and his skeptical readers, to “Jones—D’Herbelot—Vathek—or the Notes to the

Arabian N[ight]s” (BLJ 3: 164) for further evidence about his syncretic understanding of religions and cultures, which he believed his contemporaries lacked, as his accusing them of producing mere copies in the previous instance also indicates.

The previous quote points to Byron’s perceiving his works as based on the metaphor of separating the outside from the inside: he separates the “poetry” (aesthetic form) from the

“costume” and “correctness” (the content including his references to the East). As I will discuss, the inside or content of his verse consists of multiple levels of narration which require the readers to pay special attention to the unspoken/unspeakable facts shaping each narrative. Byron manipulates literary conventions, stereotypes about appearance and the discourse of Orientalism to represent identity according to his own re-figurations of what he called his “story & [his]

East” (BLJ 3: 167-68). While various critics use Byron’s writings to debate the truthfulness and authenticity of his representations especially of Islam,8 I will use his representations to understand the historical and aesthetic background relating to the composition of his tales. The historical aspect on which I base this project includes such political and personal occurrences as the Napoleonic wars, Britain’s imperialistic policies, the rising national and social unrest within

Britain, and the turbulences in Byron’s personal life, as I will discuss on 44. Because Byron’s

8 While Marandi reads Byron’s tales about the Orient as merely imitating popular narratives about the East (“Bride of the East” 227-28), Sharafuddin (243) and Wiener (90) assert the accuracy of Byron’s references to the Eastern cultures and people (243). However, Oueijan notes that despite Byron’s “genuine knowledge of Eastern histories and literature,” he uses that knowledge like “Oriental poets” (“Byron” par. 1). Similarly, Brown treats Byron’s writings and those of his contemporaries as travel guides which not only had an intertextual relationship with each other, but also confirmed the views of each other (61). 5

personal writings had undergone heavy censorship, as Benita Eisler asserts,9 I will correlate

Byron’s works with his available writings as well as the historical background to establish a context for reading his evolving perspectives about identity in his major works of 1812-1815. I end with 1815 because it was the year when he published the last revised versions of The Bride,

The Corsair and Lara.

Before proceeding with Byron, I will provide a background for such concepts as identity, nationalism, and Europe in the nineteenth century, and the way they had shaped prevalent ideas about identity. The increasing expansion of Britain as an imperial power caused the British to define their identity in relationship to those residing outside the borders of Britain in particular and of Europe in general. Accordingly, members belonging to a certain region were expected to share a communal or national identity based on “ethnic, historic and linguistic criteria, as well as political notions such as legitimacy, bureaucracy and presence of definable borders” (Edgar 254-

55). However, the Napoleonic aggressions defied existing definitions of identity by threatening the national, ethnic and religious boundaries of not only European states but also non-European ones. As a result, modern scholars have read identity in such binaries as Edward Said’s binary of

“Orient” and “Occident” (Orientalism 5), or “East” and “West” (Culture and Imperialism xi- xii); Saree Makdisi’s binaries of “settlers and natives, [or] Europeans and others” (122-23) by which difference is understood in terms of “cultural otherness” (11); or Frederick Garber’s binaries of “self” and “other” (72-73).

9 A month after his death, Byron’s close friends burned the only manuscript of “The memoirs of George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron.” Byron had permitted Thomas Moore to publish this memoir a few years before his death, but Murray withheld publishing it because of what he thought was its explicit and scandalous content (3-4). 6

The binaries of self and other have been popular ways to understand British identity—as it evolves in nineteenth-century writings—in relationship to other, or perhaps foreign, ethnic, national and religious groups. In this project, the self is the subjective, or the inner aspect of a person which remains hidden from public scrutiny and thus remains relatively stable in different contexts. On the other hand, identity consists of the self or different selves which a person performs for the observers, who may perceive or misperceive that self. Donald Hall also notes that identity refers to a “particular set of traits, beliefs, and allegiances that, in short- or long-term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being.” However, such a being changes according to one’s “subjectivity” which is shaped by “the tension between choice and illusion,” “imposed definitions and individual interrogations of them,” and “old formulae and new responsibilities” (3). Because Byron considers these factors when questioning prevalent definitions of identity, his understanding of identity progresses with the changes in his personal and political circumstances. Although he perceives identity elusively in his early writings from his Grand Tour, his later writings propose a different conception from the binary of the self and other.

When defining the nineteenth-century construction of British identity, various definitions emerge to the extent that the meanings of British, European, Asian, Turkish and Muslim become elusive. To illustrate, Andrew Edgar warns that the so-called other was a highly ambiguous term, which, in the context of Orientalism, referred to a “form of cultural projection” based on power relationships that subjugated the non-European other (266). Because the self was considered as superior to the other according to Makdisi (11), writers associated the other with any social, political and/or religious differences, rendering it a circumstantial reference that changed according to the context. Kari Winters notes that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “self” in

male Gothic texts referred to the English male while the “other” referred to “women, Catholics,

Jews and ultimately the devil” (21). But because of the rise in literacy and the current developments in printing, female readers were included in definitions of the self indirectly. In the context of reform movements and industrial riots, the “other” referred to men and women of the laboring-class; in the context of Catholic emancipation, the “other” referred to Catholics; in the context of slavery, the “other” referred to slaves while in the context of emancipation, it referred to slave-owners; and in the context of the Napoleonic wars, the “other” referred to the French. In fact, these were the popular national debates with which Byron had engaged through his parliamentary speeches of 1812.

On the other hand, definitions of the self and other were equally unstable in the international context. While British identity was defined against the European ethnicities with whom Britain had past or ongoing conflicts, the self in the context of European colonial enterprises referred to Western Europeans and the other to Eastern Europeans, residents of the

Levant, Turkey, Persia and India, and the indigenous groups of the Americas and Australia. But because Europe included lands which were under Muslim rule—Moorish Spain in medieval times and the Ottomans in the nineteenth century—the writers of The Idea of Europe assert that early scholars defined Europe as those neighboring states with common commercial, intellectual and military interests, and those sharing such key experiences of European history as “the

Roman Empire, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Industrialization” (Asad 214-15). On the other hand, the othered groups were considered as a threat to the religious, commercial and intellectual integrity of what may be considered western European nations/states. Despite their

internal conflicts and frequent wars, Western European nations asserted their superiority over their others, including non-European Christians.10

Other scholars like J. G. A. Pocock undermine the role of religion in defining the

European states by emphasizing the role of Latin civilization. He defines Europe as a “secular civilization” separate from the Protestant and the Catholic Church, or a “states-system” based on shared commerce despite their military conflicts (62-63). Europe for Pocock thus includes those nations further west from their mother Roman Empire, or what had become the European imperial nations, and excludes the Eastern European nations which the Arabs had ruled since the middle ages. Because Enlightenment thinkers perceived those residing in what Nigel Leask calls the “imaginary geography” of the East as Muslim (Romantic Writers 17), which they believed to be populated by the despotic and irrational, these thinkers distinguished what Pocock calls the

“Catholic-Protestant-Enlightened ‘Europe’” from the “Orthodox-Muslim Europes” (69). This so- called “Muslim Europes” was a loose construction which included regions of Eastern Europe under Ottoman rule like Albania and parts of Greece. However, this construction overlooked the fact that neither were all of the people residing in these regions Muslims, nor were all of them ethnically Arabic.

The nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism was based on the prevalent discourse of

Empire, representing the East as fallen and thus needing to be controlled and guided by Western, imperial powers despite the former advancements and ancient civilizations of its people. Saree

Makdisi asserts that this discourse, which controlled the British conception of the East in

10 Since the medieval ages, other sects of Christianity, like Coptic and Byzantine/Persian Christianity, co-existed with Islam in the Mediterranean regions, Persia, and Arabia, but European writers and scholars overlooked them by treating all residents of those lands as Muslim. 9

Byron’s time, was shaped by not only “the imaginary maps of the Orient” but also both the

“colonial and mercantile/industrial networks and paradigms and the role that various Eastern colonial and semi-colonial spaces and societies played in the British empire” (22). Geoffrey

Nash adds that while this discourse was influenced by the prevalent interest in travel writing which achieved various “aesthetic and political motifs” (57), the contrary interests of what he calls “imperialists” and “anti-imperialists travellers” (65-66) disrupted Said’s binary views about

Western representation of the Orient. Caroline Franklin actually reads Byron as disrupting Said’s binaries by the contrary imperial and anti-imperial attitudes his works project (“Byronic

Philhellenism” 221). As I will discuss in the next chapters, Byron not only frequently sympathized with those residing in the East, whether Ottomans or Arabs, but also conflated the

French—a supposed European self—with the Ottomans based on their similar moral and religious differences from the British, and their similar military threat. To understand the way

Byron disrupts binaries of East and West or self and other, I will trace the way such concepts as

Islam, Muslims, and Christianity were introduced in popular dictionaries of the period.

Islam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was perceived as both a political and a religious identity and was associated loosely with all those residing in the East, especially the

Ottomans/Turks. Accordingly, popular dictionaries, like John Richardson’s A Dictionary,

Persian, Arabic and English (1777-1780), which Byron had commended to Thomas Moore in a

28 August 1813 letter (BLJ 3: 101),11 defined Christianity and Islam not only in binary terms, but also in terms of the political conflicts Western Europeans had with their supposed other. While it defined the Arabic terms for Christianity and for Christians without localizing or pre-determining

11 Moore was secretly working on his romance about the East, Lalla Rookh, which he published in 1817. 10

its people, it defined Islam and Muslims as merely being Ottoman. Accordingly, for Richardson,

“Islam” meant to be “faithful, orthodox, a Mahometan, [and] Ottoman,” and the term “Islamic nations” referred to the “Ottoman Empire” (116). This generalization overlooked the existence of other sects of Islam that discredited Muhammad, and denied the existence of Islamic states that were not affiliated with the Ottoman Empire, like the Wahabee state in Arabia, to which Byron refers in his notes to the second canto of CHP.12

Richardson’s dictionary also failed to recognize the different sects of Christianity or any other religion existing in the East, as when defining the Christian Copts as “Egypt and the

Egyptians” (1361), and the Persians—whether Muslims, Christians or non-Muslims and non-

Christians—according to their geographical location and language, too (1306). This dictionary then defined “Kafir,” which is the Arabic equivalent of “Giaour” in Byron’s texts, as “an infidel, a pagan, [and] an impious wretch” (1426). But it limited the term when explaining later that

“Arabian writers” used “Kafir” to refer to the “Christian Chiefs, especially those who were engaged in the Cruzades [sic].” This definition reversed the Western gaze when defining

Christians as infidels from the viewpoint of Muslims. It also emphasized the religious and political animosity between Europeans and non-Europeans, whom Richardson described loosely as Muslims and Ottomans. But as I will show in Chapter 1, Byron rejected such a conception of identity once he had interacted with the peoples and cultures of the East—the supposed

“Mussulmen” of his letters—because he realized then that those residing in the lands under

Ottoman rule neither behaved nor appeared according to such definitions.

12 See CHP 2.733-34 and Byron’s note. McGann describes the Wahabee as an eighteenth-century religious movement which consisted of “puritanical zealots determined to reform Muslim practice,” and “were at the height of their power during B’s visit to the area [the Islamic East]” (2: 290). In fact, they had already subdued parts of Arabia at that time. 11

In their narratives, nineteenth-century writers like Southey and Beckford referred to those living in the Levant and Turkey loosely by using such terms as “Oriental,” “Turk,” “Mussulmen” and the “Osmanlies,” or what modern scholars like Nigel Leask call the “oriental Other”

(Romantic Writers 2). These terms merely signified the non-Christianity of Eastern people and overlooked the ethnic, religious and social differences among them, especially the coexistence of such other religions as Christianity and Judaism with Islam, as I have noted. I partly agree with

Garber’s view that the Orient for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers like Byron and

Beckford symbolized “the other,” which they recognized through its difference from the self. As a result the Orient became a “curious, magic mirror” through which Western scholars and writers stared at otherness as a “process of self-making” (72-73). This process was essential for Western

“consciousness [to] seek out its opposite and thereby make it possible for the self to realize itself” (73). Accordingly, Byron observed the so-called Orient, whether real or imaginary, to realize the flaws in contemporary definitions of identity and experiment with other ways to define identity. He thus locates his critical views, which disrupted existing norms, in his imaginary space of the Orient in the Turkish tales.

Critics have used different approaches to interpret Byron’s representations of Muslim characters whom they have perceived as the other. For example, Meyer H. Abrams reads

Byron’s representations about the East as simultaneously expressing his real experiences and his

“unrealized desires” (141). Peter Cochrane interprets Byron’s nonconforming views in the

Turkish tales as stemming from his desire to “shock or upset” his readers (45), while Richard A.

Cardwell discards any postcolonial readings of the texts, asserting that the Orient serves as a fantastic background to project Byron’s inner feelings and his vision of worldly injustice (172).

Other critics, like Yohannon (156-60) Sharafuddin (223-24) and Marchand (Byron’s Poetry 24-

27), read Byron’s representations as imitating prevalent texts about the Orient, and as allegorical representations both of Byron’s personal desires and of the prevalent international conflicts.

Moreover, Yohannan notes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers neither comprehended nor appreciated the Oriental cultures they represented in their texts (154). He argues that writers like Southey and Byron merely imitated what they had picked from the writings of such scholars as Sir William Jones, and travellers such as Lady Mary Montagu. He notes that Byron’s referring to his first-hand knowledge about the East and to various Eastern texts could have stemmed from his desire to draw attention to his own works, or to sound outlandish, as his early reviewers of The Giaour—like Francis Jeffrey’s review (276-80) and

George Agar Ellis’ (332)—had pointed out when criticizing Byron’s extensive use of unfamiliar terms and concepts (Yohannan 156-58). Despite the debatable basis of such observations, my study will not evaluate the authenticity of Byron’s references or knowledge. In fact, these readings discard Byron’s scholarly and aesthetic efforts, as I have previously discussed, by reading Byron as reinforcing the prevalent discourse of imperialism, the aesthetic discourse of the Romantic writer as a wanderer and an outsider, and/or the discourse of the “Byronic hero,” which I will discuss further in Chapter 5.

I realize that Byron was unable to fully engage with the cultures and peoples he had encountered during his travels because of his background, and his ethnic, religious and cultural differences from those surrounding him. But because he was fascinated by the co-existence of different literatures, cultures, and religions in the lands he had visited, as his writings reveal, he attempted to understand the identity of those he had met in relationship to his own. The writings on which my thesis will focus reveal the progression of Byron’s views about identity since his first encounters with those whom he was educated into viewing as the other, or the

“Mussulmen.” After his return to England, he questioned contemporary perspectives about

Western culture and religion by constructing characters who acted in ways which disrupted binary definitions of the self and other, and epitomized what modern scholarship regards as the

Byronic persona.

I will interpret the changes in Byron’s perspectives and his unique characterization by adapting Homi Bhabha’s (100-105) and Frantz Fanon’s (158-59) views on colonial discourse.

One view on which I focus in this project is their assertion that because of Europe’s increasing imperialistic expansion into the East and the resulting need to subdue those residing in the colonized lands, British and French colonialists partly converted or assimilated the colonized residents into the culture and religion of the Western colonizers, or the mother nation. But

Bhabha believed that such strategies only forced the colonized to mimic their Western masters to the extent of mocking them covertly (122-23). As I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, Byron questions existing definitions of identity by using multiple layers of mimicry in his works of

1812-1815, or what I call reversed mimicry, which he bases on the merging of characters and events from different historical periods. His representations thus slip between classical Greece and contemporary Europe. Because Byron embraces the prevalent view that the British were the inheritors of Greek heritage—as I will discuss in Chapter 1 (20)—he identifies with the plight of modern Greeks while they were colonized by the Ottomans, a cultural and political other.

Adapting an Eastern perspective, Byron represents his characters as doubly masked Western and

Eastern personae: his characters mimic the nineteenth-century colonial powers, who include both

Western Europeans and the Ottomans, and mimic the colonized other, who include modern

Greeks, Albanians, and other residents of the Levant. The masks of his characters also enable

them to cross the boundaries of gender, ethnicity and religion, and experiment with different roles and identities than their usual ones.

The rising complexity from Byron’s method of representation results, too, from his attempts to understand identity at a time when contemporary political changes caused multiple social, national, political and personal reverberations. Byron was so troubled by these changes that he rejected all slogans of liberty in 1814, concluding that he did not know “what liberty means,—never having seen it,” rather favoring “wealth [which] is power all over the world”

(BLJ 3: 213). This remark also points to Byron’s ambivalent feelings towards the rise of the middle and merchant classes who were as well educated as the old-world gentry, and more financially secure than those like Byron. Such socio-political changes further defied existing definitions of identity as based on social distinction, education, and wealth, aspects of identity which Byron’s verse narratives negotiate.

In his verse tales, Byron assumes the first-person voices of multiple Eastern and Western narrators, expressing the same multiplicity of perspectives through the different masks he wears as when he writes to his mother, his financial advisor, his publisher, his future wife, and his friends. I will use the term “masks” in the sense of metaphorical coverings which Byron uses to appropriate his real identity, and the term “disguise” in the sense of costumes in which Byron dresses his characters, or self in his portraits, to define or manipulate their supposed identities.

Byron’s masks and disguises not only represent but also misrepresent the self through their flexible ability to define, change and/or blur the identities Byron projects in each instance.

Because the identities which the masks project maybe different from the identity of the wearer according to Meg Twyscross (10), Byron’s masks permitted him to both try different identities— as he does in Thomas Phillips’ portraits which I will discuss in Chapter 2—and deny

responsibility for such disruptive behaviour as associating with outlaws, championing pirates, and criticizing the defeat of Napoleon—as he does in The Corsair which I will discuss in

Chapter 5. While McGann reads Byron’s masks in his later works in terms of Oscar Wilde’s use of masks to “objectify himself to himself; [or] in order to see himself more clearly” (307), I read

Byron’s masks of 1812-1815 as a tool to scrutinize his social and political surroundings, and his scholarly knowledge by gazing at and mimicking British identity as it was constructed in that period through a doubly masked perspective: an Eastern and a British one.

Through his masked characters and my notion of reversed mimicry, Byron provides multiple perspectives on not only the ensuing action but also prevalent views about identity.

While he blurs Western and Eastern identities, and fictional and real visualizations, by appearing as both an English nobleman and an Albanian soldier in Phillips’ portraits of 1813-1814, for example, the Turkish tales represent Western characters as outsiders whom the Eastern characters condemn not only for their quasi-European appearance, but also for their non-civility, violence, and violations of social and cultural norms. This outsider is a Christian Venetian who abandons his faith in the The Giaour, is an orphaned son of a non-Muslim/Christian mother in

The Bride, is a nonconforming Muslim warrior/gypsy in The Corsair, and is the supposed returned exile who remains a stranger with an unnamed religion in Lara. Various critics like

Franklin (“Byronic Philhellenism” 229-30) and Sharafuddin (263-74) identify these outsiders as the Byronic hero, whom Peter L. Thorslev defines as embodying both the “Romantic rebel” and the “Noble Outlaw” with their defiant behaviour, solitude, and mysterious past, but susceptibility to the oppressed and the beloved, causing this hero to act according to his personal version of justice (163-64). Rather than merely foregrounding the notion of the Byronic hero, I will propose reading Byron’s characters as versions of other selves, who perform a form of reversed mimicry.

After discussing the way Byron questions the prevalent discourses of identity and nationalism in CHP 1 and 2, I will correlate the historical and political situations of the early nineteenth century and Byron’s personal circumstances to his works of 1812-1815 to propose that Byron perceived identity in terms of the other selves. My approach is thus not a specifically postcolonial approach because I read Byron’s works in relationship to the political and personal circumstances shaping his views about identity. Although I take into account Bhabha’s warnings about the supposed differences between the colonized groups, my study realizes the elusive and unstable status of those residing in the lands under Ottoman rule: these people consisted of colonizers (the Ottoman rulers), colonized (Greeks, Albanians and Arabs), and the local residents who belonged to a variety of ethnicities. I emphasize the ethnic and religious differences among those Byron represents in his works because he takes advantage of the confusions such instability in identity causes. I will avoid the limitations which previous studies of Byron like those I have discussed in this part commit (12-13) by focusing on the way Byron’s representations of identity evolve through different mediums in this period. Although he leaves the question of identity open, his experiences and travels cause him to question the binaries of self and other differently in each work: his letters of 1809-1815, CHP 1 and 2, Thomas Phillips’ portraits of 1813-1814, and the Turkish tales.

CHAPTER 1

“SO I SHALL SOON BE AMONGST THE MUSSULMEN”:13 BYRON’S RE-

REPRESENTATION OF THE SELF AND OTHER IN CHILDE HAROLD’S

PILGRIMAGE 1 AND 2

On 2 July 1809, the twenty-one year old Lord Byron embarked on his Grand Tour of two years with his twenty-three-year-old friend, John Cam Hobhouse.14 They went to extremes to access certain sites at a time when the military and geographical conditions limited travel.

Starting their journey with a stop in Lisbon, Portugal, Byron and Hobhouse proceeded to Spain and Gibraltar. From there, they sailed to Malta, and then to Greece, Albania and Turkey despite the raging Napoleonic wars and the wars with the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon had conquered

Italy in May and would occupy parts of Spain by August, while the Ottomans had Malta and

Greece under their rule. Byron did not travel beyond Constantinople and its surrounding vicinity despite his plans to visit Arabia and the Eastern Mediterranean regions. I start by discussing this trip because Byron’s writings from the trip and after his return reveal a drastic change in the way he perceived personal and national identity. In this chapter, I will read his letters and select episodes from CHP 1 and 2 to establish the background for the experiments with identity which

Phillips’ 1813 portraits of Byron and Byron’s Turkish tales attempt as a result of the insights

Byron gains from this trip.

Considering Byron’s and Hobhouse’s itinerary in relationship to the sites which their peers visited during their Grand Tours, I believe that Byron and Hobhouse travelled to highly

13 From Byron’s letter to his mother on 15 Sep. 1809 (BLJ 1: 224-25). 14 Hobhouse only spent a year with Byron before returning to England. In fact, he was Byron’s close friend since their years in Cambridge, and was the executor of Byron’s will after his death in 1824. 18

uncommon sites/regions. I attribute their interest in visiting Delphi and the ruins of Nicopolis in

Greece, for example, to what Nigel Leask describes as the prevalent belief in “Greece [being] the mother of Roman art and civilisation” despite its occupation by the Ottomans (103). But besides philhellenism, both nineteenth-century politics and their own readings about the so-called Orient shaped their itinerary. Although their letters reveal that British and Ottoman authorities directed their visit, sending parcels to their allies through the unsuspecting friends, as Cochrane notes

(“Greece” Hobhouse’s Diary 43), Byron and Hobhouse visited “the principle mosques” of

Constantinople which Lady Mary Montagu had described in her Letters (BLJ 1: 249-50). While visiting the Continent like their contemporaries, they visited such sites as the medieval Oriental palace in which William Beckford had resided during his exile in Montserrat, Portugal. He was the writer of what modern critics consider as one of the major texts which shaped the nineteenth- century discourse of Orientalism, Vathek (1786).15 They also rode to Seville and Cadiz, and then sailed to Gibraltar (BLJ 1: 217), all of which were not only sites of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, but were also central cities during the Muslim (Moorish) rule of 711 to 1492 and central Spanish ports during the Napoleonic wars. I believe that Byron’s fulfilling such a diverse itinerary during a period of civil and military unrest enabled him not only to observe the way identity functioned on different cultural, ethnic and religious levels, but also to compare and contrast the identities which he was taught to perceive as different from, and perhaps inferior to, his own as a member of British nobility.

15 This text offers an imaginary account of the ninth-century Abbasid ruler. However, it represents the so-called Orient negatively: it criticizes Islamic practices, and constructs the characters as either moral guides or socially and morally deviant. 19

Byron’s prose and verse from his trip pay special attention to the different people he had encountered, especially those whom his contemporaries called loosely Muslims, Ottomans or

Turks. Before leaving Malta on 15 September 1809, for example, Byron anticipates his trip to

Janina by writing to his mother that he “shall soon be amongst the Mussulmen” (BLJ 1: 224-25).

Janina was a historic city in north-west Greece which the Ottomans had conquered from the

Roman Christians in the fifteenth century, and became the place where Ali Pasha held his court.16 Byron’s use of “Mussulmen” not only geographically differentiates those residing in

Janina from those residing to the west of Malta, whom Byron and his contemporaries perceived as examples of the European self, but also perceives the supposed “Mussulmen” as collectively the same as, and inferior to, the European self. Although the British viewed themselves as inheritors of Greek culture and civilization, they perceived modern Greeks ambiguously despite their being different from the surrounding Mussulmen in descent, ethnicity and religion. Because of their present bondage to the Ottomans and their different recent history from Western

Europeans according to Talal Asad (see Introduction 8), modern Greeks were perceived as separate from the so-called European self. However, a month later in CHP 1 and 2, Byron realizes the error of defining those considered as the other, especially the Greeks, as collectively the same, and hence questions existing definitions of identity.

Observing the ethnicities in Europe, Byron starts the first canto while residing in Janina,

Albania on 31 October 1809, and finishes the second one, observing the ethnicities in Greece and

Turkey, on 28 March 1810 while still touring Greece (CPW 2: 266n93). However, he publishes the poem on 10 March 1812 after revising it extensively with his literary agent, Robert Charles

16 Like his contemporaries, Byron wrote extensively about this feudal-like Turkish ruler, revealing a deep, yet ambiguous, fascination for both his status and his despotism. 20

Dallas.17 Because Harold’s pilgrimage had many parallels with Byron’s own trip, readers and critics have debated the factual and fictional basis of the poem. McGann, for example, asserts that Byron called his protagonist Childe Burun in the early manuscripts after an old version of his family name (CPW 2: 9n19) despite his assertions, as in the preface, that Harold was “the child of imagination” and thus separate from him.18 But Byron collapses the distinction between them when commanding the “Critic” to “hear what he beheld / In other lands” (1.949), referring both to his own trip to the Orient and to the imaginary trip of his protagonist.

Although most scholars read Harold as Byron’s double or alter-ego, gradually disappearing in the third and fourth cantos of 1816 and 1818, I read Harold as a literary mask which enables Byron to gaze not only at his Eastern surroundings, but also at his Western ones.

Saree Makdisi reads CHP 1 and 2 in terms of a twofold voyage that separates “the Levant as the cultural and historical ancestor of Europe” from “the Levant as the space and territory of the

Oriental other” (Romantic Imperialism 127). But I read this travelogue as tracing the way Byron establishes both a metaphorical and a physical distance from the supposed self, when he crosses the familiar physical and intellectual boundaries of his nation to arrive in Turkey and Greece.

Thus, Byron’s evolving portraits in CHP 1 and 2 revise his former limited views of those he had called the “Mussulmen” in his letters, and whom Makdisi calls the Oriental other. Besides exploring stereotypes of cultural difference, as Diego Saglia notes (378), I believe that Byron questions the discourse of British identity, which I have explained in the Introduction (8-10), by turning Harold’s pilgrimage into a pilgrimage through ancient times—his classical education—

17 Dallas (1754-1824) had arranged for the publications of English Bards (1809) and the two cantos of CHP with Murray. Byron had gifted the copyrights of many works to Dallas as well as Murray. 18 Byron denies this connection in his letters too. For example, he writes to Dallas on 31 Oct. 1811 that he “by no means intend[s] to identify [himself] with Harold, but to deny all connexion with him. [And] If in parts [Byron] may be thought to have drawn from [himself], . . . it is but in parts, and [he] shall not own even to that” (BLJ 2: 121-22). 21

and the present Levant. I start by discussing this particular narrative because Harold foreshadows the exiles in Byron’s later narratives about the East—the Turkish tales—and their experiences which address the same questions about identity which Harold raises.

Various critics have noted that Byron’s trip to the East was not only a scholarly search for the origins of his classical education and Western culture. Paul Stock, for example, asserts that

Byron with Hobhouse embarked on this trip to re-evaluate the concept of the glorious past. By travelling through Napoleonic Europe, they could observe “both the connection and the separations between peoples across Europe” (24) and across those nations under Ottoman rule

(30). He reads their writings as revealing their shock at the inability of the current system of identification, which favors the British self over their European and non-European others, to account for the multiplicity of ethnicities and religions they encountered in the Ottoman states.

Stock attributes this complexity to their being educated into identifying themselves as Europeans or “Franks,” who were superior to the “Turks” of CHP 1 and the “Osmanlies” of Hobhouse’s

Journals. Stock, however, warns the readers that Byron uses these terms elusively when referring to the Europeans—including the French—both as the “Franks” and the “Giaour” to signify

“Western European Christians in conflict with ‘Othman’s race’” (27). Because of such difficulties in defining identity, especially of the modern Greeks, who were under Ottoman rule,

Byron, according to Stock, develops an ambiguously “uncertain conception of Europeans” (28).

I differ from Stock by arguing that Byron overcomes ambiguities in defining identity by representing the European self as acting in similar ways to the different groups of others he encounters during his travels. To account for the social, political, religious or ethnic variations and/or similarities a self may embody, Byron questions binaries by representing the different groups he observes in terms of other selves. I use this notion because Byron’s letters and CHP 1

and 2 show that his experiences cause a gradual realization that people in both Europe and the

East are different from what he has been taught. Although he initially uses religion and ethnicity and even his classical education to favor the British upper- or middle-class male self over its supposed others, he questions these views by comparing and contrasting the values of select

European nations—the British, the Spanish and the French—from ancient times to the present.

Because the concept of the self in its opposing relationship to the other was embedded in the nineteenth-century construction of British identity, which was based on the discourse of nationalism, Byron questions this construction through Harold. The following scenes illustrate the way the binaries of self and other blur when Byron applies them to his national and international context: the British self and the European self are the same when uniting against the ancient Moors and the present Ottomans, but these selves separate when each fights for their own military and colonial interests during the Napoleonic wars. Byron’s contemporary Europeans thus act no better than their past and present religious others: the medieval Moors and contemporary Turks.

Byron starts CHP 1 and 2 by imitating the Spenserian stanza in form and archaic language. Playing on the separation between the outside, which in this instance symbolizes the form of the text, and the inside, which symbolizes the content as he asserts in his later verse tales, Byron uses a prestigious verse form, uses archaic language, and foregrounds the classical world to scrutinize not only his political and military present but also existing verse forms. As he states more directly in the writings accompanying each Turkish tale, Byron problematizes the separation between the form and content of his verse by his particular use of the Spenserian stanza, for example. Although writers were expected to convey part of the meaning through their choice of form, Byron not only ridicules the aesthetic and literary expectations of his audience by

his innovative, perhaps disruptive use of traditional forms, but also demonstrates that a form like the Spenserian stanza can be used for other contents than religious pilgrimages. This particular use of form will cause further confusions about the protagonists of his Turkish tales, as I will discuss in the following chapters.

Byron introduces the title-character’s journey when leaving his “native shore” (1.125) as

“cross[ing] the brine, / And travers[ing] Paynim shores, and pass[ing] Earth’s central line” (98-

99). Using the archaic term “Paynim” for “pagan,” which Spenser also uses, Byron has Harold cross what he considers a distinct line which separates the self from the other. This line, including the line of the equator, marks the unfamiliar, “Paynim” spaces of religions, cultures and peoples, or the lands of those Byron calls loosely the “Mussulmen.” At this point, the poem locates these “Paynim shores” beyond the familiar shores of the speaker’s home—Britain— which the narrative will reveal to be lands associated loosely with the despotisms of both

Catholicism in Portugal and Spain, and with Islam in Turkey, Albania and Greece. At this point,

Byron represents the self as referring to those belonging to the nineteenth-century British version of Protestantism, and the foreign/other as those residing in the lands outside of Britain whether

Europe or the lands under Ottoman rule.

The speaker, however, almost immediately broadens the meaning of “Paynim” from referring to non-British to non-Western people by recalling the Spanish Moors of the medieval ages. The shores of the Iberian Peninsula are thus transformed into a shared “Christian shore”

(1.685), and the speaker demonstrates the union of Western European nations against their historic enemy, the Muslims. The significance of the previous line can also be understood by reference to Diego Saglia who argues that there was a rising tendency in select nineteenth- century texts to base the discourse of British nationalism on such historic achievements as the

ancient Spanish wars which were embraced not only as national achievements, but also as a medium to “displace violence outside the reader’s horizon of experience” (364).19 Such associations justified the blood-shed resulting from British participation in the current wars as a continuation of their national and religious mission.

The Spanish victory over the Spanish Moors was also embraced in Byron’s time because it recalled the end of the medieval Islamic rule of the Iberian Peninsula which promised the end of the present Ottoman rule of Greece. Unlike his later engagement with the Ottomans, Byron’s references to the Moors in CHP are limited to the context of British nationalism.20 Although various critics read Byron’s writings as merely representing the conflict between East and West, or the Ottoman Muslims and the Europeans,21 I believe his writings re-represent the ancient, supposedly glorious wars through a present context to deconstruct the motives driving the discourse of nationalism. By scrutinizing this discourse, Byron questions existing definitions of personal and political identity, which he further examines in his later works, as my next chapters will discuss.

In the tradition of nineteenth-century narratives, Byron appears to condemn the Moors as the unlawful conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula while commending the ancient Spaniards for expelling them in the thirteenth century. But glossing over the well-known victory, Byron scrutinizes the ancient battlefields and evaluates the material and human losses on both sides.

19 Saglia cites such texts as Mary Hill’s The Forest of Comalva, a Novel (1819), Honoria Scott's The Fair Andalusian (1810), and Alexander R. C. Dallas's Felix Alvarez; or, Manners in Spain (1818). 20 On 25 Feb. 1817, Byron sent his publisher “A Very Mournful Ballad on the Siege and Conquest of Alhama,” which he published with the fourth canto of CHP in 1818. Byron based this ballad loosely on translations of Spanish and Arabic ballads describing the 1492 fall of the Islamic rule in Spain. Byron described the Moorish king’s tears at losing Alhama, or Alhambra, again in the first canto of Don Juan. For a historical background on the manuscript and publication history of this ballad, see McGann (CPW 5: 475n309) and Marchand (BLJ 5: 174n2). 21 See Introd. 25

Whilome upon his banks did legions throng

Of Moor and Knight, in mailed splendour drest:

Here ceased the swift their race, here sunk the strong;

The Paynim turban and the Christian crest

Mix’d on the bleeding stream, by floating hosts oppress’d. (1.382-86)

While memorializing the victorious battles of the Spaniards, these lines allegorize the present struggles with the Ottomans, as Harold demonstrates later. Also, instead of signifying

Christianity, or European identity, by referring to the traditional cross, Byron refers to “the

Christian crest.” However, “crest” according to this particular usage puns on the binaries of self and other by referring to both the particular war shield of the Spanish troops in Middle English usage of “crest,” and the traditional “crescent” moon of the Muslims in nineteenth-century usage.

This double use questions the language of British patriotism by suggesting the Moors to be

Christians, a traditional attribute associated with the self. The ambiguity in this instance shows that religion—Christianity—is not a correct measure to define the European self against its other because not all those perceived as Muslims are Muslims. Moreover, despite their magnificent appearance and power, the “hosts” of medieval battles—the Spaniards and the Moors—suffer comparable material and human losses when the blood of their victims and their specific symbols mingle on the battlefields. Byron thus disrupts the discourse of nationalism by emphasizing the similarities between the medieval Spanish and the Moors in their motives and religions, re- representing the Spanish—and hence European—victory against the Muslims as a defeat.

When associating the aggression of the Spanish Moors with that of the Ottomans, Byron also recalls the Napoleonic aggressions in the Iberian Peninsula. He indirectly conflates

Napoleon—a supposed European self—with the Moors and the Ottomans—supposed others—by

reminding the readers that Western Europeans behave like the Ottomans if not worse than them.

In the first canto and the accompanying notes, Byron condemns the way both the French and the

British display the same material and aesthetic greed whether in their colonial conquests or their encouraging the excavations of ancient ruins in Greece, a desecration Byron would declare that the Ottomans had never committed (2.100-101).

Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;

Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high;

Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;

The shouts are France, Spain, Albion, Victory!

The foe, the victim, and the fond ally

That fights for all, but ever fights in vain. (1.441-46)

These lines draw a grim image when representing the interests of the present fighting “hosts,” who act like the hosts of ancient wars in the previous scene: the medieval Spanish and the

Moors. Atheist France claims to fight Protestant Britain, which claims to aid Catholic Spain.

Despite its historical, religious and military conflicts with its neighboring European nations,

Britain—as Byron and some of his contemporaries believed—participated in these battles, only to further its own military and financial interests, and ignoring its dying soldiers. The speaker mocks the religious claims of the fighters by representing them as pagans, or followers of an ancient faith, because they persist in sacrificing their people to an irrational and barbaric cause, a cause which resembles those to which the illiterate tribes of the so-called Orient were accused of sacrificing their people. After representing the fighting hosts like Pagans—the non-Christian other—the speaker further denigrates the three European nations leading the present wars as

equally being “Ambition’s honoured fools” (1.450). Byron’s later representations of the supposed European self repeatedly recall this accusation.

After setting shared grounds for the British self and the past and present selves of its neighboring nations in aspects of cultural and military heritage, the speaker focuses on Spain as a microcosm of European identity. Although Seville and Cadiz were central Spanish ports since ancient times, Harold realizes the error of perceiving their residents according to the supposed glorious past, or the bravery of their ancestors, who had subdued the Moors. Byron’s notes reveal that he was upset at Britain’s aiding Spain to defy the Napoleonic aggressions despite their supposed military prowess in the past.22 Observing the different classes in Spain, Byron condemns the urban classes for ignoring the raging wars and indulging in worldly joys; and he condemns the rustics for shunning the worldly to the extent of ignoring their fields and their daily necessities. He then separates the past from the present Spanish women by commending the bravery and heroism of the ancient female warriors despite their beauty, favoring them not only over present Spanish women, but also over British women. However, he again belittles

British women by condemning the Spanish women’s non-feminine enjoyment of bull-fighting on the Sabbath. This scene, which concludes the first canto, actually requires further attention.

A severe shift occurs in the speaker’s perspective when observing the bull-fight, an event which not only questions medieval chivalry, but also reminds readers of the classical matador fight (1.729-91). Byron bases the scene on a bull-fight he had attended with Hobhouse in Puerto

Maria on 30 July 1809. While Hobhouse refers briefly to the “bull-feast” in his Diary (“Spain”

22 According to McGann, Byron’s original note for the first edition of CHP attacked the European nations to which the British government was offering military aid at length. Byron also condemned the imperial interests of the British government when leading such expeditions. He was, however, advised to remove that note in his succeeding editions (CPW 2: 274-76n269). 28

22 and n35), Byron represents it from different personal, national and classical perspectives. On the one hand, the bull-fight was a popular Sabbath recreation in Cadiz, Spain, which Harold, however, perceives as not only a non-Christian violent act but also a desecration of nature.

Despite the speaker’s revulsion, he declares that “all have their fooleries” (1.711), comparing this event to such popular Sunday recreational activities in Britain as sailing and drinking games

(1.693-710). But this parallel mocks both the British and the Spanish for their equal indulgences in bodily pleasures on their alleged holy days. The reference to a typical Sabbath in Britain and in Cadiz, which is based on bullfights, not only assumes a shared mental and cultural space among the Europeans, but also levels Western cultures as fallen and violent.

Through his mask, Byron mocks this interest in bullfighting as resulting from the Spanish swain’s being “Nurtured in blood betimes, [that] his heart delights / In vengeance, gloating on another’s pain” (1.794-95). The speaker believes that the unstable political and religious surroundings, which have been oppressing the Spanish youth, turn them also into oppressors.

Christine Kenyon-Jones reads this scene as a “microcosm for a country at war.” She argues that

“by practicing and watching cruelty to animals,” humans “are made cruel towards each other,” and by imposing a “chivalric glamour . . . over bloodshed,” they also “disguise from themselves the reality of slaughter,” which the Napoleonic wars were causing (“Byron and Bullfighting” 4-

5). McGann, however, reads the bullfight, which is committed like a Sabbath pastime, as “a parody of the rites of chivalry” (CPW 2: 280). Chivalry was an aspect of the discourse of British nationalism besides chivalry, honor and gentleness, which Byron directly denounces in his

“Addition to the Preface,” which he adds to the fourth edition of this poem six months after the original, published on 14 September 1814. In the new edition, he mocks the values of the classical and medieval worlds, asserting according to McGann that “the good old times . . . were

the most profligate of all possible centuries.” But I add to Kenyon-Jones and McGann that

Byron’s parallel to the classical matador fight in this scene actually de-glorifies classical and medieval values to question the construction of the British self as a separate from and superior to its supposed others with whom Britain had military and cultural conflicts.

Byron’s classical education formed the discourse of British nationalism actually loses grounds the more Byron delves into the foreign cultures he visits. As Byron discovers from his encounters, the Greeks—the supposed descendants of antiquity—were either ignorant of the classics or they did not care about what Byron and his scholarly acquaintances considered as the

Greeks’ glorious lineage. His writings reveal his gradual realization that the supposed classical inheritance is actually a myth. Since ancient times, its alleged inheritors—the British—have indulged only in colonial and material pursuits, as the previous scenes demonstrate, which are indulgences not better than those of their supposed past and present rivals. Despite the comic representation of Harold at the bullfight, I read this scene as a microcosm of the military and material conflicts which the European states commit on a regular basis. Clinging to slogans of nationalism, which are claimed to be rooted in medieval values of chivalry, European states ruthlessly slaughter their citizens like animals with the encouragement of the spectators, who are blinded by their repeated encounters with violence. Unfortunately, such glorification of war still persists regardless of culture, religion or ethnicity.

After reading present Europe through the classical past, Byron through Harold observes the remains of ancient Greece to declare again that the world of antiquity exists only in the

European/British psyche of the elite classes. Despite his sympathizing with the plight of Greece while under Ottoman occupation, as his later participation in the Greek war of independence indicates, Byron continues to question his classical education by rejecting the classical gods of

antiquity. He thus uses history to legitimize the Ottomans/Muslims under the leadership of

“Mahomet” as the rightful rulers, or the god of Greece: “Even gods must yield—religions take their turn: / ’Twas Jove’s—’tis Mahomet’s—and other creeds / Will rise with other years” (2.23-

25). Because Byron realizes the delusion of his classical heritage, he embraces the Turkish occupation—though through his mask of Harold in this instance—blaming the fall of Greece on the cyclical nature of history, or the inevitable rise of some nations in the place of others. He then justifies his disruptive views in the first canto by representing what he had seen—or learned— about the people residing in the lands under Ottoman rule, and their modes of behaviour which disrupt contemporary representations.

After leveling, and perhaps disrupting, the supposed identity of the self—British or

European—by reference to the values forming the discourse of nationalism, Byron levels

Europe’s supposed others again by re-representing their moments of social solidarity as he did when observing the Spanish bullfight. He thus scrutinizes Ali Pasha’s court on a Ramadan day

(2.496-576), a night celebration of the Suliotes or the “Albanian Mussulmans” (1.632) after escaping a sea storm (1.595-691), and the Grecian Lenten celebrations (738-82), which he adds to the seventh edition of 1814 (CPW 2: 268-69). Because Byron postpones addressing the meaning of “Greek” in the two cantos of CHP until he writes the tales of 1814, I will postpone discussing Byron’s evolving understanding of “Greek” until Chapters 3 and 4. In the next section, I will discuss the way the other three scenes construct carnivalesque and comic images of the different national groups Byron encounters to assert that the supposed other consists of endless variations which may resemble the self, and thus can be understood in terms of other selves rather than a homogenous whole.

* * * * *

The first thing Byron notices after crossing over to what he had called the “Paynim shores” is the court of Ali Pasha of Tepelene, which he represents as a moment of realization.23

By offering conventional images of corruption, wealth and abundance, Byron draws his readers’ attention to the multiple ethnic, religious and cultural identities co-existing in these regions. He especially emphasizes that religion—Islam—is not the defining feature of those whom he had formerly perceived as the “Mussulmen,” residing in the Paynim lands. But he realizes here, too, that multiple identities exist in the East as in Western Europe. His two cantos of CHP and his letters since his arrival in the lands under Ottoman rule reveal his growing consciousness about the inherent differences between those people and their similarity to the supposed

British/European self. For example, in his letters, Byron describes his entrance into Tepelene,

Albania, by focusing on its people who appeared like a “new & delightful spectacle” of

Albanians, Tartars, Turks and “soldiers & black slaves with the horses” (BLJ 1: 227). He also takes care to define the local ethnicities to the addressees of his letters and later to the readers of his verse, as when he defines the Albanians by asserting that “not all [are] Turks, [because] some tribes are Christians, but their religion makes little difference in their manner or conduct” (BLJ 1:

230). This remark rejects defining the different people residing in Albania according to the tradition of writings about the East, which ascribe them all to a monolithic religion: Islam.

In the second canto, the speaker introduces the court of Ali Pasha as a place where “men of every clime appear to make resort” (2.504). He then observes his surroundings from his

23 Marchand describes this Ali Pasha (1741-1822) as a despotic, local ruler under the command of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan, however, had him executed in 1822, fearing him for his treachery and violence which enabled him to rule “what is now modern Greece as far south as the Gulf of Corinth” and “parts of Albania” (BLJ 1: 226n1). 32

Western perspective, scrutinizing the public merging of “the Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor” (511) in terms of a strange, or unexpected mingling.

The wild Albanian kirtled to his knee,

With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun,

And gold-embroider’d garments, fair to see:

The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon;

The Delhi with his cap of terror on,

And crooked glaive; the lively, supple Greek;

And swarthy Nubia’s mutilated son;

The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns to speak,

Master of all around, too potent to be meek. (2.514-22)

I read these lines according to Jean H. Hagstrum’s view of “pictorial” description, which he applies to any literary description or image that is “capable of translation into painting or some other visual art” (xxi-xxii). Accordingly, Byron offers a lively scene of the court, which documents the different sights and sounds the speaker perceives, as the speakers in the Turkish tales would also do. Here, Byron transcends the binary way of representing identity by re- representing the other as other selves rather than a recognizable and homogenous whole.

Discarding the vague terms of “Moors” and “Paynim,” and the symbolic “turban” and “crescent” of the first canto, the speaker distinguishes the different groups he encounters by using such identity referents as “Albanian”/“Arnaut,” “Greek,” “Suliotes,” “Persian,” “people of Macedon,”

“Tartar,” and “Giaour.” Byron also goes to great lengths to distinguish those groups geographically and historically in his letters and in the footnotes to his verse narratives.

The scene of the court in the second canto levels the people Byron had observed by drawing a Bakhtinian “carnivalesque” image where different groups co-exist and interact despite their religious, ethnic and cultural differences, and despite their difference from their observers,

Byron and his audience. By minutely documenting the religions existing among different levels of the Eastern society—whether Ali Pasha and his family or the “Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons” (2.502)—the speaker notes the way each group disrupts the Western view of them as all being Muslims.

[Childe Harold scanned] the motley scene that varies round;

There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops,

And some that smoke, and some that play, are found;

Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground;

Half-whispering there the Greek is heard to prate. (2.524-28)

Harold realizes that the people in the court, and perhaps in the Turkish lands too, belong to different religions and ethnicities, whether Islam, orthodox Christianity, or a moderate form of either religion. The comic-like representation emphasizes that these groups not only share traits with each other, but also violate the dictates of their supposed beliefs. In this scene, Harold notices that the alleged Muslim groups, for example, dress and behave differently from each other, and from the expectations associated with Islam, by drinking and gaming. This simultaneously de-emphasizes the role of Islam in defining the identity of those residing in

Ottoman lands, and emphasizes the similar breaches of religion which both the supposed

Muslims in Ottoman lands and the Christians of Western Europe perform. Although such scenes can be read as evidence of Byron’s debatable knowledge of Islamic doctrines and the Eastern cultures, they can also be read as Byron’s experiments with identity. By demonstrating that no

one definition is able to describe any group as separate from and hence superior to the others,

Byron suggests leveling the identities he observes in his travels because people in both Western and Eastern lands behave in similar ways and commit comparable violations against their religious beliefs.

The speaker further questions existing definitions of the supposed other by questioning the sexual non-conformities which were supposed to be characteristic of Eastern courts.

Although Byron describes at length the luxurious furnishings and clothing, and the excesses in food and drink Harold observes in the court, Byron only hints at the homosexuality among men of the court in the manner of writings about the Orient. Unlike other writers like Beckford, Byron refrains from describing any sexually explicit scenes involving women. In his notes and letters,

Byron justifies this restraint on the basis of authenticity: he asserts that women in the East belonged to the harem enclosure and were thus separate from and veiled from strangers, or foreign observers like him. This tradition, he claims, prevents him from observing and thus documenting any sexually explicit scenes, unlike writings about the Orient, which Byron had regularly condemned for offering non-truthful representations.

After providing his own perspective of the East through which he rejects the category of the other as a homogenous group, Byron demonstrates that these people actually share values— whether good or bad—with the supposed European self.

Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound,

The muezzin’s call doth shake the minaret,

“There is no god but God!—to prayer—lo! God is great!”

Just at this season Ramazani’s fast

Through the long day its penance did maintain.

But when the lingering twilight hour was past,

Revel and feast assumed the rule again:

Now all was bustle, and the menial train

Prepared and spread the plenteous board within. (2.529-36)

Before focusing on the comparable flaws of both Eastern and Western people, the speaker levels the deities of Christianity and Islam to which each group claims alliance. Harold translates the

Muslim call to prayer into English in a manner of which an English Protestant might approve. He replaces the term Allah, which contemporary writings about the East used when referring to the

Islamic deity, with “God” which Byron’s readers will recognize, to show possible shared grounds between Western Europeans and the supposed Muslims of the East. After this double image of prayer, the speaker provides an insider’s look at what he perceives not only as violating the real meaning of fasting in Ramadan for Muslims, but also as indulging in forms of excess.

After finishing their daily fasting, which required abstinence from all forms of bodily pleasures of food, drink and revelry, the Muslims indulge in those very pleasures by the feast which Ali

Pasha holds in his court daily. The indulgences that Harold notices here recall the ones that

Europeans also commit during their Christian holy days or the Sabbath in the first canto. Rather than abiding by the holy sacrifices and spiritual dictates each holy days entails, the British

Protestants, the Catholics of Cadiz, and the Muslims in Ali Pasha’s court submit equally to bodily temptations. Thus, by representing aspects of excess as similar in both the East and the

West, Harold transforms the other into an extension of other selves.

I admit that reading this scene in terms of Byron’s comparing the flaws in Islamic holidays—a holy day of Ramadan—to the flaws in Christian holidays—the Sabbath of the

Protestants of Britain and of the Catholics of Cadiz—may be inaccurate because they may point

to possible flaws in his own limited perspective on each group. I believe that Byron could have achieved a more balanced comparison between Christian and Islamic holidays by comparing the

Western observation of the Sabbath with the Islamic one of Friday, or by comparing Christmas day/eve with the Ramadan day of the previous scene. But despite Byron’s mismatching his examples in this scene, they still strongly mock both Eastern and Western cultures for equally losing the spiritual meaning of their holy occasions despite their claims of ascribing to a certain religion and rejecting another. The previous scenes reveal the comparable institutionalization of religion: Western European nations have claimed to defend Christianity in their military pursuits against such medieval Eastern nations as Moorish Spain and the present Ottomans, and against such European nations as Napoleonic France in the same manner such Islam-associated nations as Moorish Spain and the Ottomans have claimed to defend Islam. But CHP 1 and 2 and Byron’s letters show that both Eastern and Western countries have been motivated by the same colonial and material interests on account of their announced religious ideals.

* * *

After establishing the concept of the other selves by representing the self as resembling those residing in Turkish lands, Byron again questions differences between Christianity and

Islam—or the supposed differences between the self and other—by narrating his near shipwreck by the “coast of Suli’s shaggy shore” (2.596). Byron bases this incident on his near-drowning experience during his trip to Prevesa on 3-8 November 1809. In both his personal and public writings, Byron offers a carnivalesque representation not only of the different ethnic groups involved in the scene, but also of their different religious values to which each member prescribed. In his letters, he notes that besides the local sailors and the captain of the “Turkish ship of war,” his suit consisted of “Fletcher [his English servant], a Greek, Two Albanians [a

Greek Orthodox servant and a Muslim one], a Greek Priest and [Byron’s] companion Mr.

Hobhouse.” Jokingly, Byron tells his mother the different appeals his companions make when they had thought that they were approaching death: “Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the Saints, the Musselmen on Alla, [and] the Captain . . . on God.” Byron, however, claims lying down in his “Albanian capote”—an immense Eastern cloak—because he believed

“complaint was useless” (BLJ 1: 229-30). Using this cloak, Byron establishes not only a physical and spiritual distance from his threatening surroundings, but also a personal distance from his companions and their contrary ideals. Byron uses this cloak as a mask, which enables him to assume the identity of the aloof observer. He observes members of the different groups travelling with him to question again the national and religious differences between the self and other, and thus represent his companions as variations of other selves.

By the detachment he achieves in the previous scene, Byron scrutinizes the different objects to which his shipmates cling in times of need. While his British servant clings to his wife—despite Byron’s repeated hints of Fletcher’s infidelity during the trip—his other companions cling to the sacred deity belonging to each one’s faith: the Greeks to the Saints of

Greek Orthodox Christianity, the British captain to the Protestant God and the Muslims to the

Islamic God, or Allah.24 By using the different, perhaps competing, sacred symbols associated with each faith, Byron turns those symbols into mere subjective and unstable constructs which fail in providing any assistance or relief to his fellow-passengers. Also, by associating God with

24 By the second canto of CHP, Byron changes his reference for the Muslim deity from Allah to God as I have noted when discussing Ali Pasha’s court in the previous scene. In fact, Byron’s reporting his real travels in CHP may differ from its original report in the letters because Byron narrates his trip loosely through Harold in the poem. 38

Fletcher’s wife in this instance, Byron mocks the efficacy of religion, a point he makes repeatedly throughout his two cantos of CHP, and will address again in the Turkish tales.

Besides leveling, and perhaps rejecting, values associated with Eastern and Western religious when describing this scene in his letters, Byron levels the cultural and religious markers defining each when describing the monolithic religions of Christianity and Islam again through his mask of Harold. Byron recalls the institutionalization of religion and the resulting loss of its values right before describing his shipwreck scene in the poem. He deconstructs the major symbols associated with the discourse of Orientalism and with the discourse of British identity to represent them as equally useless.

Foul Superstition! Howsoe’er disguised,

Idol, saint, virgin, prophet, crescent, cross,

For whatsoever symbol thou art prized,

Thou sacerdotal gain, but general loss!

Who from true worship’s gold can separate thy dross? (2.392-96)

The speaker renounces the conventional signs of both Christianity and Islam, treating the turban, the crescent and the cross as signs of superstition and thus lack any real value. By randomly listing the sacred objects belonging to each faith, the speaker not only separates Christianity and

Islam from their religious associations, but also scrutinizes the spiritual and material values attached to each. Byron re-represents these icons as rather equally subjective constructs with fake values, and hence unable to define any ethnicities—Eastern or Western—as separate from or superior to the other.

Besides Byron’s observations about the variety and uselessness of the competing deities in the near shipwreck scene as he describes in his letters, Byron reinforces suh views by his

mocking tone when narrating it in CHP 2. Byron describes their ordeal at sea in the Spenserian manner of allegorizing one’s deviance from the path of righteousness—Protestantism in this case—and one’s eventual return to the kingdom of God through His divine aid.

It chanced that adverse winds once drove his bark

Full on the coast of Suli’s shaggy shore,

When all around was desolate and dark;

To land was perilous, to sojourn more;

Yet for awhile the mariners forbore,

Dubious to trust where treachery might lurk:

At length they ventured forth, though doubting sore

That those who loathe alike the Frank and Turk

Might once again renew their ancient butcher-work. (2.595-603)

Although Byron returns to his supposed overall scheme of a pilgrimage in the Spenserian manner in this part, he disrupts it again when foregrounding the anti-spiritual discoveries he makes during his near shipwreck. The absurd reaction of the travellers at times of danger violate the announced religious ideals each claims, and their comic end mocks the literary associations with religious, didactic journeys, with which the Spenserian stanzas are associated. The speaker describes their suffering adverse winds by using an allegorical language that raises associations with the winds of temptation and seduction, and with humans’ suffering material and spiritual desolation for their continuing in their wrong, sinful paths. But rather than the right religion/deity rescuing the bewildered sailors/pilgrims according to conventions of didactic narratives, the

bravery of the Suliotes enables Harold and his companions to escape the perilous storm in the previous scene.25

In this scene of contradictions, the speaker draws an ambivalent image of their Eastern saviours. Despite their hostile reputation as outlaws among the local residents, Harold admires the way this particular ethnicity—the Suliotes—aid the travellers, who belonged to different non-

Eastern ethnicities and faiths, despite the Suliotes’ supposed animosity against “the pale Franks”

(2.666). In fact, Harold reports a translated version of their war song in the next scene, which promises to conquer the Danube and subdue its “yellow-hair’d Giaours” (2.685-86). It is noteworthy that Byron refrains from commenting on the supposed hostile content of this song, leaving it to the interpretation of his western readers. By including it immediately after the

Suliotes saved Byron/Harold and his companions, Byron questions the animosity which the translator reports between the supposed Muslims residing in those lands and the foreign non-

Muslim travellers. Also, this particular translation questions the authenticity of the narratives that

European travellers report/construct when visiting the so-called Orient, as Byron repeatedly warns in his letters and his notes to canto 2. Regardless of its content, the narrator transforms the supposed war song into a form of entertainment through which both the warriors and the foreign travellers celebrate that night. The song thus functions as a further narrative about the Orient whose authenticity remains questionable.

Contrary to Byron’s letters, which focus merely on the shipwreck, the second canto documents the subsequent festivities besides the changes which the speaker experiences. Byron

25 Hobhouse’s Journals, however, note that their saviors were the Greek mariners, who steered them away from danger while the Muslim sailors did not do anything except indulge in the Eid celebrations even before arriving at the shore (86-87). 41

probably bases this festive scene on the “Bayram Feast,” or Eid festivities, which had occurred on the eve of their shipwreck, as he will describe again in his next verse narrative The Giaour

(1813). Although the speaker is impressed by the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Suliotes, the speaker is surprised when observing the contrary side of their serious, brave self, or their playful, festive self.

On the smooth shore the night-fires brightly blazed,

The feast was done, the red wine circling fast,

And he that unawares had there ygazed

With gaping wonderment had stared aghast;

For ere night’s midmost, stillest hour was past,

The native revels of the troop began;

Each Palikar his sabre from him cast,

And bounding hand in hand, man link’d to man,

Yelling their uncouth dirge, long danced the kirtled clan. (2.631-47)

With shock, Harold realizes the existence of some universal humanity as an alternative to

“binary” between the self and the supposed others he observes in the different moments of social solidarity. The religious and ethnic differences between his fellow-travellers, including those supposed to be the Eastern ones, disappear once the festivities commence. All the people around

Harold partake in the feast and red wine and the accompanying singing and dancing, which seems to disregard the supposed military conflicts between the Eastern ethnicities and Western powers as the translated version of the war song indicates. But the night vigil still points to the transformation of the Suliotes from brave Eastern warriors to jolly, friendly beings, who act like the British at times of celebration. In fact, this scene recalls Harold’s associating the Sabbath

bullfight in Cadiz with Sabbath recreations in Britain, appearing to conflate the British self with its European others, and turning both into variations of other selves. When Harold realizes that the supposed others in the Orient behave like the European selves at times of celebration, or recreation, they too are transformed into variations of other selves.

Besides representing a carnivalesque-like scene where national, religious and ethnic rivalries collapse, the scene displays the change of perspectives which the Western self—Byron through Harold—experiences when observing those who were considered as the foreign and primitive other.

Childe Harold at a little distance stood,

And view’d, but not displeased, the revelrie,

Nor hated harmless mirth, however rude:

In sooth, it was no vulgar sight to see

Their barbarous, yet their not indecent, glee:

And, as the flames along their faces gleam’d,

Their gestures nimble, dark eyes flashing free,

The long wild locks that to their girdles stream’d,

While thus in concert they this lay half sang, half scream’d. (2.640-48)

By using a double negative, Harold, or Byron, asserts that he was “not displeased” by the

“revelrie” because he did not mind harmless mirth. The Suliotes are also both rude though not vulgar, and barbarous though not indecent. The negatives in this part raise enough confusion as to conflate the British self with its Other even though very ambivalently. Although the Suliote warriors behave in a similar manner to Europeans, they remain dissimilar or distanced by the repeated negatives. By focusing on their faces when reflecting the flames, Byron allegorizes the

reflection of the Western gaze by representing it as doubly distanced from reality. This representation, like others in the poem, does not represent the Eastern people in a positive light, especially when Harold remarks that they sang and screamed during their night vigil, and appeared like wild, or supernatural beings. However, upon closer look, this scene questions

Western perspectives of the other, too, by interpreting the Suliote dancers based on the double reflection of the flames at night. Besides the visual challenges the night supposedly imposes in this scene, the double negatives Byron uses when narrating his impressions, and the contrary descriptions by which he represents the dancers all point to the uncertainty and ambivalence of representation in this instance. This also dissociates the dancers from the negative associations which the narrative seems to propose. The visual becomes an unreliable medium to judge identity including that of the other, as I will assert when discussing Byron’s romances. By offering a reflection of the performances of the supposed others at times of danger and mirth, which also resemble what Europeans do in similar occasions, the speaker conflates the Western and Eastern groups he meets. Also, the double reflection of the supposed other through the reported gazes of Byron through Harold and then through the faces of the Eastern dancers transform the supposed others again into variations of other selves rather than binary groups.

Byron concludes this scene by translating the War Song of the Albanian warriors. As I have explained on 41, the translation disrupts the voice and tone associated with Spenserian stanzas. Peter Cochran, for example, proposes reading this song as a ballad, and thus as a less prestigious form of versification than the Spenserian stanzas. He reads the song as pointing to

Byron’s separating his scholarly, educated, Western voice from that of the supposed illiterate voice of the other whom only the British, educated elite were expected to represent. Accordingly,

Byron discards the Spenserian stanza in favor of the form of folk song in his version of the War

Song to reflect his confusion between “modern Greece, a product of Byron’s raw experience” and “Ancient Greece, a product of his English public school learning,” both of which he fails to reconcile at this time (“Song and Stanzas” 173).

However, I propose that this song be perceived like Harold’s introductory “Good Night” song (1.117), because Byron’s meters in both parts convey aspects of his versification rather than signaling the otherness of the Eastern warriors. By including a version of their song, as he claims in the accompanying footnote, Byron levels the different forms of mirth in which different ethnicities engage despite the raging wars and the supposed political and religious differences between them. The song can be read as acknowledging the existence of other forms of entertainment, including versification, in the regions he had visited than the forms of mirth his audience thought to exist in the East like drinking and sexual promiscuity. Byron’s particular scheme in the supposed translated song also displays his own mastery of versification. He writes the song in eleven tetrameter quatrains whose lines start frequently by an iambic foot followed by three anapestic feet, thus distancing these stanzas from the conventional scheme of folk ballads. Byron also writes Harold’s initial departing song in alternating iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters. I read both songs, which interrupt his Spenserian stanzas, as blurring the binaries between self and other by representing—or translating—those around him through his own innovative versification.

The scenes I have discussed in this chapter demonstrate Byron’s interest in the visual and the implications that different perspectives raise, an interest which my next chapters will discuss further by emphasizing the possible visual impairments which impede or enhance the perception of identity. His interest in the visual can be further understood through his changing appearance throughout the trip. Although he initially dressed like “an English nobleman in an English

uniform” (BLJ 1: 219), he dressed in an Eastern “full suit of Staff uniform with a very magnificent sabre &c” (BLJ 1: 227) in his first meeting with Ali Pasha. His letters reveal that upon his arrival in the lands under Ottoman rule, Byron wore and purchased numerous Turkish and Albanian dresses, even though he was taken by the veneration which the local rulers offered to his noble lineage, which they had mistaken as pointing to his high political rank. Although the political situations were as unstable in this part of the world as they were in Western Europe, and

British diplomats and officers like Captain Leake sent letters of introduction before the arrival of

Byron and his “suit,” it is noteworthy that Byron did not seek to impress his Ottoman hosts with his appearance as a member of the British nobility as he had sought to do when touring the

Iberian Peninsula. Such appropriation of appearance resulted from his experimenting with identity through the use of disguise, as he will continue doing in his Turkish tales. Dressing like an Albanian official, for example, permitted Byron to his national, ethnic and religious boundaries. This enabled him to scrutinize not only the ethnicities he had encountered and observed during his travels but also the British self.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the way Byron employed a different artistic medium— portraits—to demonstrate that personal identity is an unstable construct which changes according to the changes in perspective, and can be thus read as representing other selves, too. I will discuss Thomas Phillips’ two portraits before discussing the Turkish tales because the portraits are essential to understanding the representations which Byron provides in his tales. In fact, the portraits influenced the tales adversely during his life and after his death by acquiring a different meaning from what Byron had intended when he sat to Phillips in 1813.

CHAPTER 2

THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION, 1814: THOMAS PHILLIPS’ PORTRAITS OF

BYRON AND BYRON’S OTHER SELVES

Byron triggered a deep interest in both his self and his writings with the publication of his two cantos of CHP (1812). His publisher sought to capitalize on Byron’s fame and the rising popularity of the visual by republishing Byron’s works with frontispieces of him.26 But because

Byron rejected the engravings Murray had produced from existing portraits (BLJ 3: 167), he had

Byron sit to Thomas Phillips (1770-1845) in June and July 1813. Then from 2 May to 9 July

1814, Phillips displayed the two portraits he had painted at the summer exhibition of the Royal

Academy.27 In his Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, Byron posed like an

Albanian soldier,28 “standing in Arnaout costume” (Walker 80), which he had purchased during his continental tour of 1809 (BLJ 1: 231).29 And in his Portrait of a Nobleman, Byron appeared in a “poetic pose,” wearing a “midnight blue cloak flung nonchalantly over his open-neck white shirt” (MacCarthy 216). Fiona MacCarthy (216) and Richard Walker (80) note that the “head” is identical in both portraits except for the moustache and head-dress in the Albanian one. Although

Annette Peach asserts that the cloak portrait resembles George Henry Harlow’s 1809 portrait of

26 Murray benefitted from his business alliance with Byron, especially because Byron declined payment for his writings until 1816, and had gifted Murray besides others the copyrights for many of his works (Carpenter 69-71). 27 Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts promoted arts education and hosted annual exhibitions of contemporary art in London. 28 Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer notes that the Turks distinguished the Albanian Muslims (Arnauts), who occupied the mountains of Epirus from the Albanian Christians (Suliots), who occupied the mountains near Janina (487n1). Because Byron and his contemporaries use both terms loosely, I use the generic term “Albanian.” 29 In his 12 Nov. 1809 letter, Byron bragged to his mother about the “‘magnifique’ Albanian dresses” that had “cost [him] 50 guineas each & [had] so much gold they would cost in England two hundred.” 47

Charles Mayne Young posing like Hamlet (64),30 Tom Mole asserts that this pose became known as the “Byronic pose” (Byron’s Celebrity 82). Because both have been reproduced multiple times, I focus on the originals Walker identifies: the Albanian which is at the British Embassy in

Athens, and the cloak portrait which is at Murray’s publishing premises in London.31

Byron became a celebrated literary, social and political figure after returning from his

Grand Tour on 14 July 1811. He not only published his two cantos of CHP, but also claimed his seat in the House of Lords. He delivered his maiden speech on 27 February and his second one on 21 April 1812. However, his personal life was in havoc with the unexpected losses of his mother and three of his Harlow friends,32 his deteriorating finances and his turbulent sexual affairs. Byron had borrowed money irresponsibly since his days at Harlow, compelling him to sell his ancestral home—Newstead Abbey—shortly after his return from the East. However, his purchaser—Thomas Cloughton—regretted the purchase, worsening Byron’s finances until he sold the property later to a Harlow acquaintance—Thomas Wildman—on 10 December 1817.

Byron dealt with his sexual affairs as irresponsibly as his financial ones. Soon after ending his affair of April to July 1812 with Lady Caroline Lamb, he courted her kinswoman and his future wife, Annabella Milbanke, while having relationships with numerous others. Such mismanagement of his affairs alongside the breakdown of his one-year marriage in 1815 would destroy his reputation, and cause his self-exile to the Continent in April 1816.

30 Young (1777–1856) was a popular nineteenth-century tragedy actor, who specialized in performing the roles of Hamlet and Macbeth. 31 The original Albanian is available on the UK Government Art Collection website and the poetic pose one on the BBC: Your Paintings website. Both are also available in Kenyon-Jones’ Byron (83-84). According to Walker, there is a continuing debate about whether or not Phillips had produced three versions of the cloak portrait in 1813, and a debate about the “prime” version. For more on the different reproductions of both portraits, see Walker (Regency Portraits 79-81), and for their posthumous variants, see Mole (“Ways of Seeing” 83-97). 32 Lady Byron died on 1 Aug. 1811 while John Skinner Matthews on 3 Aug, John Wingfield on 10 Aug, and John Edleston—Byron’s choirboy lover—on 9 Oct. 48

Despite these increasing challenges, which Byron (mis)handled while writing the Turkish tales, as I will discuss in the following chapters, his portraits caused a sensation at the 1814

Royal Academy exhibition. By appearing in the guise of a so-called racial other—an Albanian—

Byron confused his spectators, who sought to understand him and his narratives through his portraits. As I will discuss in this chapter, their confusion resulted from the multiple disruptions

Byron had committed on this occasion: he displayed the portraits, which were produced for his texts, in a national gallery; he wore multiple masks and disguises in each portrait; and he appeared in his portraits in a manner which disrupted conventions of portrait-painting and conventions of national galleries. The portraits’ peculiar titles and positioning in the gallery hall also pointed to Byron’s challenging prevalent views about representation and questioned constructions of national and personal identity. Although his letters do not justify why he had chosen Phillips in particular to paint him, or who had suggested the masks which Byron assumed in each portrait, my discussion will use the historical and social context to discuss Phillips’ portraits, and the messages they convey in relationship to Byron’s Turkish tales.

Part of the significance of Phillips’ portraits stems from the historical circumstances pertaining to their public portrayal during what MacCarthy calls “the summer of sovereigns” and the “summer of masquerades in London” (217). The allied Sovereigns were visiting England as part of their celebrating what they thought was the end of the Napoleonic wars,33 turning the

1814 exhibition into a site of national, cultural heritage and pride. Also, numerous masquerades were held this summer, especially the great masquerade of the Watier’s Club at Burlington

33 After Napoleon’s exile to Elba in 6 Apr. and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in May, the allied sovereigns—Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sweden and various German States—sojourned in England before proceeding to the Congress of Vienna. Little they knew that Napoleon would escape on 26 Feb. 1815, resuming his aggressions until his final defeat at Waterloo and re-exile on 18 June. 49

House on 1 July 1814. Besides the 1700 attendees who had attended in honor of Wellington’s victory, Hobhouse attended dressed up like an Albanian, but Byron attended dressed up like a monk, lending the garments with which he had posed in the Albanian portrait to a friend, as I will discuss later.34 The disappointment his acquaintances felt at the party reveals the layers of masking that Phillips’ portraits involved and which his acquaintances associated with not only

Byron’s art, but also with his daily behaviour and appearance.

In fact, Byron’s continuing to be a shape-shifter in Phillips’ portraits, which were part of the 1814 national exhibition, triggered a great disappointment on a national scale because they violated expectations associated with such exhibitions. Portraits in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were “representations that select, collapse, and layer details of a unique identity” (Fay

86). For this reason, portraits exhibited in national galleries were expected not only to capture the sitter’s character and inner self, but also to follow certain conventions of pose and symbolism which fulfilled the cultural, social and national goals associated with these galleries.

Accordingly, national galleries championed “head portraits,” for example, because they accentuated the heads of significant national and cultural figures by teaching the observers “how individuals should be seen, [and] how events are experienced” (Fay 41). These galleries also arranged portraits chronologically, turning the “monumental body as historical-cultural icon” into “the screen that translates difference into sameness” (86). However, Byron challenges expectations about national sameness in his verse as he does in Phillips’ portraits. While his initial two cantos of CHP emphasize the universal humanity between the British and those Byron had encountered in his trip by proposing perceiving them as other selves, his portraits question

34 For Byron’s input about this event, see his letter to Lady Melbourne in BLJ 4: 135-37. 50

national sameness, too, by representing Byron in multiple, yet different and conflicting guises, as

I will discuss further in the next section. He will perform similar disruptions regarding the self when representing the supposed binaries of identity in his verse narratives of 1813 to 1815, as I will discuss in the next chapters.

If Phillips’ portraits of Byron in the Royal Academy are read within the historical context of the “summer of sovereigns,” and read within the literary context of Byron’s portraits in his

Turkish tales, the portraits further disrupt the end of normalizing national identity, as Fay describes in the former instance. Although the observers recognized the multiple disguises Byron had assumed in the portraits, many critics have interpreted them as a publicity stunt to market his narratives about the Orient—which was a popular but not prestigious form of writing (Peach

64)—or interpreted them as stemming from Byron’s exhibitionism and theatricality, which commodified his self for public consumption (Fay 190-93). However, I read his masks as representing a calculated aspect of his self which he negotiates progressively according to his personal, social and political circumstances. Byron’s representations in his verse narratives appropriate identity, or the other selves, by emphasizing the discrepancy between appearance and reality, or between speech (narrative) and reality. Although each of Phillips’ portraits depict

Byron as a performer, and as artistically (aesthetically) submitting to his materialist culture, his masks require further attention because Byron challenges his consumers to read them. The portraits are as complex as his verse narratives where Byron, the writer, directly asks the observers/readers to interpret his protagonists using the little or conflicting narration that the narrators provide, especially in the final Turkish tale, Lara.

I base this chapter on my view that Phillips’ portraits of Byron are essential to understanding the complexities in Byron’s representations of personal and national identity in the

Turkish tales. The portraits complement the tales because of their comparable theatrical representation of characters, their proximate composition and portrayal times, and their similar use of masks whether literary or visual. I agree with the view that because Byron was “both eager to be represented and anxious about the result, . . . he attempted to exert control over how his image was reproduced” (Mole, Romantic Celebrity 82). He thus closely monitored Phillips’ portraits as he monitored Murray’s publication of his texts and of the frontispieces for his collections. Whether Byron’s repeated editing sought to correct typographical errors and clarify the meaning or catered to the demands of his audience, his repeated editing of CHP 1 and 2, and

The Giaour, for example, obliterated from his readers’ minds the original political and personal connections they had, and obscured the original production date of each work. His contemporaries and many modern critics, like Diane Long Hoeveler (5-6), believed that Byron sat for the portraits in 1814 while composing or preparing the Corsair and/or Lara for publication. But Byron sat for Phillips shortly after he had finished composing the 5 June 1813 first edition of The Giaour, which he re-published fourteen more times over the next two years

(BLJ 3: 33n1). Phillips’ portraits then appeared a year after the initial publications of The Bride in November 1813, and a few months after The Corsair in February and Lara in April 1814. To avoid this confusion, I will historicize the works by separating their original publication dates from their republications.

* * *

My interdisciplinary approach of engaging text to image when examining Byron’s works is based on classical interpretations of art. While Aristotle and Plato associated poetry with portrait (painting) for their common mimetic qualities—painting imitated color and form, and poetry imitated the rhythm and harmony of language—eighteenth-century theorists extended the

classical views by treating art as imitating both nature and other arts. They thus coined the term sister arts to establish a close relationship between “pictorial visualization” and “total poetic structure” (Hagstrum xvii). Jean H. Hagstrum defines “pictorial” as referring to a literary image that is “capable of translation into painting or some other visual art,” and whose “leading details” and “manner and order of presentation” can be “imaginable as a painting or sculpture” (xxi-xxii).

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were so interested in the “pictorial” in poetry and the poetic in portraits, that they read poetry according to theories of graphic art (xvii-xx).35

As a writer, Byron manipulates this association between the visual and the verbal—or the sister arts—by the way he collaborates with Phillips—a painter—to produce his portraits.

Because spectators perceived portraits according to popular theories of physiognomy and phrenology,36 they evaluated their acquaintances’ inner selves according to their countenances, facial expressions and poses (John Graham 562). Despite the limitations of the current technology of representation, the audience expected the artists to assist them by “show[ing] the truth of character and experience in the faces of their sitters,” especially when sitters were social and political figures (Pearl 91-92). Artists thus drew on popular conventions of “character presentation,” infusing their subjects with “biographical information” and conventional status markers, pleasing the observers simultaneously by their art and by imparting knowledge of the sitters (87-88). But sitters of higher ranks had their painters portray them in their best character and appearance, an aspect Byron uses when sitting to Phillips in 1813. However, Byron questions such manipulation of portrait-painters the following year in Lara (1814). As I will

35 By the early nineteenth century, the “sister arts” were perceived in further ways. Such theorists as Edmund Burke associated poetry with music, an association Byron’s Turkish tales also suggest. 36 Physiognomy focused on the facial features to predict morals while phrenology focused on the shape of the skull. The handbooks of the Swiss physiognomist, Johann Caspar Lavater, “Essays on Physiognomy” (1789) were popular in the early nineteenth century because they offered readers/observers models for analyzing human character. 53

discuss in Chapter 6, the returned exile realizes the discrepancy between reality and the portraits of his ancestors, and his later behaviour questions his relationship to his own former portrait (see

173-75).

Various resources—like Byron’s letters and the writings of his acquaintances—reveal the disappointment his audience had felt when observing Phillips’ portraits closely. Spectators realized that the portraits introduced identities associated with figures of popular culture.

Because these were products of imagination, they were variations of unreal selves. Although

Byron was limited by prevalent conventions of portrait-painting and by the abilities of his painter, who, according to John Clubbe, was not classified among the best painters at that time

(34-35), Byron used both to his advantage. He had Phillips disguise what his audience sought to see: his real self and identity. Byron regulated his portraits as he regulated his daily appearance whether by controlling his weight, following and/or adjusting fashion trends, or disguising his left foot and the supposed unequal size of his eyes. In fact, Byron disguised his physical imperfections so well that even Thomas Moore was unable to determine which foot, for example, was the deformed one when preparing his biography of Byron (Kenyon-Jones, “Fantasy and

Transfiguration” 116). In fact, Byron destroyed any paintings or engravings that violated his self- perception or failed to disguise what he perceived to be his physical flaws. Germaine Greer reads such attention to appearance as Byron’s “adopt[ing] poses and expressions that he considered appropriate to young genius” (31). However, I read Byron’s manipulations as his demonstrating that artists, whether writers or painters, can shape their own identities—personal or political— through art, writings or portraits.

Accordingly, Byron capitalized on Phillips’ position and his complicit behaviour to manipulate conventions of portrait-painting to his own advantage. Phillips was known for having

less experience and skill with painting aristocratic figures than his fellow-painters whom Clubbe notes (37).37 Byron, on the other hand, was careless about his appointments, and was restless during his portrait sessions, forcing Phillips to use props, substitute sitters and previous portraits of Byron (Greer 31-32). For example, Byron tells Murray: “I am sorry to say that it will not be in my power to sit to Mr. P[hillips] this day—but (if he can) tomorrow or Monday I will be disengaged—later in the week I fear I shall have left town—so that perhaps you had better give it up altogether” (BLJ 3: 68). Such letters show that Byron was busy socializing: he was meeting his half-sister, Augusta, that day and then seeing his mistress, Lady Oxford, before her final departure from England. The next day, he was taking Augusta to a party, and then visiting an acquaintance at his country house (BLJ 3: 67-69). Despite his regular absences from Phillips’ studio, Byron did not entrust the portrait-painting process to Phillips’ “own better judgement,” as he had assured Phillips (BLJ 3: 113). On the contrary, Byron monitored Phillips closely, as when noting that “the nose of the smaller portrait [the Albanian] [was] too much turned up,” asking him to “retouch it” even though Phillips was nearly finished painting (BLJ 4: 79).

I believe Byron chose Phillips over the more prestigious painters whom Murray had originally commissioned—like Thomas Lawrence—because Phillips was serving on the hanging committee of the Royal Academy, which not only ensured his exhibiting his portraits, but also enabled Byron to control the way he was perceived publicly. Phillips enabled Byron to challenge the expectation of revealing one’s emotions and real identity in pictorial representations. By having Phillips, as Byron had his other painters, model him on classical figures and on popular paintings, Byron adopted such identities as those of romance, classical antiquity and/or popular

37 Clubbe lists Sir Martin Archer Shee, Sir William Beechey and Thomas Lawrence as the pre-eminent portrait painters for noble personages in 1813. 55

culture. Although most of his paintings were loosely in the “profile pose,” he had his painters apply loose versions of such other conventions as Reynold’s “Grand Style” pose and the “heroic pose.” However, as a member of the House of Lords, Byron’s appearing to both his country-men and foreign sovereigns, who were attending the exhibition, in the guises of an Albanian soldier and an actor of Shakespearean heroes could be interpreted as immature and distasteful, or as I will demonstrate, bold and defiant.

To understand Byron’s complex conception of his identity in his portraits, I will trace the social, personal and historical implications of Byron’s choices of pose, and the adjustments he had Phillips perform to conventions of portrait painting. Germaine Greer asserts that the “profile pose” was originally a historical mode of self-representation, which Alexander the Great had established to capture his image as his people saw him (33). Clubbe notes that this pose became popular again during the Enlightenment due to the rising interest in Renaissance painting conventions, which “epitomized belief in reason and order, as particularly truthful representations” (48). While spectators believed that this pose could represent the subjects naturally by portraying their side views, Lawrence advocated this pose particularly for Byron because, as he and Byron’s other acquaintances believed, it could hide the imperfections in a sitter’s countenance, thus masking the unequal size of Byron’s eyes (Clubbe 48). I believe that

Byron’s adopting, though loosely, the profile pose thus triggered classical, historical and literary associations besides the physiognomic one of hiding his physical imperfections.

As early as 1807, popular painters, like Richard Westall and George Sanders,38 associated

Byron’s profile with that of Apollo, the god of poetry, according to Christine Kenyon-Jones.

38 Richard Westall painted Byron early in 1813; and George Sanders painted him in 1807 and 1809. 56

Analyzing their paintings, she argues that both appropriated Byron’s image to resemble

Lavater’s illustrations of Apollo through the “statue of the Apollo Belvedere,” located in the

Vatican Museum in Rome, which Lavater championed as representing the “ideal of manly beauty” (Byron 20). These were concepts that Byron particularly sought to achieve in his portraits besides internalizing them in his daily character and behavior. His painters’ encouraging a resemblance between Apollo and Byron associated Byron with perfection, power and divinity.

Appearing like an Apollo-like figure, Byron could be read metaphorically as assuming the authority to disrupt existing conventions of portrait painting and existing definitions of identity by embracing other, imaginative identities.

Besides the former advantages of the profile pose, I believe that this pose enabled Byron to ensure a physical and class distance between the gazers and him, the noble sitter. In fact, the self-congratulatory tone in his writings emphasizes this distinction. Also, by exhibiting the two portraits during an important political event, Byron invites his audience to gaze at his masked self which points to his multiple personae, or re-representations of the East in his verse tales.

Because the frontal pose may assume a reciprocal relationship with the gazers, Byron favored the profile, or semi-profile pose, which conveyed indifference towards his observers, and challenged the gazers to probe into his supposed inner self by shunning direct eye contact. Although this pose may render the sitter vulnerable to the audience’s unregulated gaze and hence their interpretive powers, as Byron would examine in Lara (see 175-77), Byron’s double masks empower him in this instance. He defies, and perhaps mocks, the audience’s attempts at reading him by assuming multiple, imaginative identities other than what his audience associated with him, or his socially-imposed identity, a concept which I will introduce in Chapter 4.

Although Byron had Phillips apply a loose version of the profile pose by drawing him in half profile, Byron had Phillips apply other pose conventions more loosely than the profile one when working on such details as his costume and the colors in the paintings. Byron admired

Joshua Reynolds’ “Grand Style” pose, which was a conventional pose for poets and authors, and drew on seventeenth-century representations of Shakespeare and Milton. According to this style, the sitter appeared in “black or dark clothes set off by white linen at the neck and wrists,” wore a

“draped cloak,” assumed an “abstracted expression,” and showed poetic status indicators like pens, papers or books (Kenyon-Jones, “Fantasy and Transfiguration” 113). Reynolds also undressed the subject of current fashion and place indicators to divest his of time and place associations, like the closely-related “heroic portrayal” pose. But Byron adjusted Reynold’s style by warning Phillips twice that he “[did not] care what becomes of the arms so that pens [&] books are not upon ye. canvas” (BLJ 3: 113). While he forbad Phillips from adding any poetic markers, he had him add place and time indicators. I attribute this adjustment to Byron’s fearing that poetic status indicators might foreground his poetic status over of his class status.

However, Byron’s avoidance of poetic markers risked dissociating the represented Byron from Shakespeare as a writer, and thus disrupted Byron’s interest in being aligned with the popular literary figures which Reynold’s “Grand Style” recalled. But Byron’s so-called cloak portrait reminded his spectators of Shakespeare in a different, yet subtle manner. Although various critics note that imitating former or contemporary portraits, whether by copying the background or the sitters’ poses and costumes, was a common tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Phillips imitated a portrait of the famous Hamlet and Macbeth impersonator, Charles Mayne Young, posing like Hamlet. From the multiple portraits Phillips may have had imitated, he chose this particular one, drawn in 1809 by his contemporary, George

Henry Harlow, whose paintings were frequently exhibited in Royal Academy exhibitions. As a result, Phillips’ portrait associated Byron both with Shakespeare’s fictional character—Hamlet— and with Young—the contemporary Hamlet actor. In fact, Byron’s masked persona in the cloak portrait re-represented Young, thus offering doubles again by imitating not only an existing portrait, but also Hamlet, a literary representation from the Renaissance.

This representation from the Renaissance, which was a period known for championing natural representations, simultaneously aligns Byron with the literary figures of that period, and recalls issues of representation. Byron’s masks not only challenge his observers’ perception of his identity, but also reveal his own complicated perception of the self as non- homogeneous, violating the concept of sameness on which national portrait galleries were based, as I have discussed earlier in this chapter. Byron’s exhibiting himself in the guises of a writer

(Shakespeare), a tragic protagonist (Hamlet) and a contemporary actor (Young) disrupt the conventional binaries between different art forms, i.e. poetry, drama and portraits, and between visual and verbal representation. Identity for Byron thus changes according to time, place, and medium of exhibition, whether it is a national gallery, his domestic sphere, a publishing house, or a poetry collection.

Byron further disrupts Reynold’s conventions by imposing time and place markers in

Phillips’ portraits by his particular choice of dress in each. According to Roland Barthes, clothing fashions not only have a literal meaning related to their usefulness to the wearer, but also have a communicative and mythological meaning (41-48).39 He argues that clothing defines

39 Using theories of semiology, Barthes asserts that clothing followed conventional codes and marked social order and status. Although the French revolution disrupted the visual cues associated with social order because of their views of democracy and equality, the upper classes maintained their rank visually by such “discreet signs” as the lavish detailing on their dresses and the superior quality of their fabrics (65). 59

the wearers’ appearance, and hence their identity within the social and economic systems.

Byron’s Albanian clothing is thus especially significant because few eighteenth- and nineteenth- century men sat for portraits while dressed in Eastern dresses despite the popularity of such costumes amongst male and female travellers in the East, and in masquerades. Aileen Ribeiro notes that “compared to the many portraits of Englishwomen in Turkish or quasi-oriental costume, there are relatively few of men.” Her few men were Edward Wortley Montagu, Thomas

Hope, and William Beckford. Despite their unpopularity among men for daily life, Eastern dresses were popular among women as a sign of luxury and status (222-28). Byron thus not only disrupts norms of posing for national exhibitions by violating conventions of portrait painting— according to my previous discussion—but also disrupts norms of male fashion by posing publicly in the costume of a supposed Eastern other. Although this action risks emasculation for imitating women’s fashion trends, his posing like an Albanian soldier of rank not only marks his wealth and status, but also associates him with the worldly sphere of action and violence due to his carrying such signifiers of war and travel into foreign lands as an Albanian sword.

Walker describes Byron in the Albanian portrait as wearing what appears to be a lavish

“crimson and gold” costume, a “red-gold” head-dress, a “bluish-green, white shirt” and a brooch with a “large black jewel,” and as carrying a “purple tinge[d] sword (Regency Portraits 79). He merely describes Byron in his other portrait as “seated in a blue cloak” with his right hand on the table (80). However, I add that Byron’s Albanian costume shows heavy, golden embroidery and that his sword is noticeably golden with detailed craftsmanship on its edge and below its handle.

Despite the simplicity of his dress in the cloak portrait, Byron wears a golden ring and a noticeably large red brooch beneath his open neck collar. Such observations show that Byron participates in what Fay describes as the consumerist trend of early nineteenth-century culture.

She notes that those belonging to the rising middle classes used and displayed their exotic goods to reinvent their identity, treating them as a sign of gentility and respectability (25). By posing in one of his “magnifique Albanian dresses,” as he tells his mother (BLJ 1: 231), Byron—an economically impoverished aristocrat—asserts his social status, his supposed wealth, and his extensive education, which he claimed to have based on empirical and theoretical knowledge of both Western and Eastern cultures, as he asserted continuously in his notes to his texts.

Byron’s appearing like an Albanian soldier of rank enhanced by his carrying a lavish

Turkish sword instead of pen, paper or books is additionally significant. The Eastern origins of this dress and the sword with which he poses represents Byron as enacting the personality of a wealthy Oriental man of action, and thus severing the boundaries between the national and the foreign. Besides symbolizing Eastern despotism, the sword reminds the observers of Britain’s material interest in the East as well as reminding them of such foreign dangers as war, plague and sectarian violence, all of which were associated with the regions outside Britain, especially the lands under Ottoman rule. Despite this glimpse of reality the sword offers, both portraits generate a fantastic aura by representing Byron in the guises of the fictional personae that had fascinated him and his contemporaries. In fact, Byron’s appearance resembles that of Selim in

The Bride when he prepares for his insurrection by dressing up in an attractive, Eastern military costume and by carrying striking weaponry, as I will discuss in Chapter 4 (116-17).

The lavish dress Byron wears besides the exotic possessions he carries in the Albanian portrait contrast with the simple dress and pose of his cloak portrait. Doris Langley Moore interprets this portrait as following the “principle of non-utility” which painters applied to the portraits of the nobility (4). According to this principle, painters signified the wealth and status of the sitters by separating them visually from those engaged in manual work. The subjects thus

wore lavish jewelry, and fabrics that were light-colored and delicate, both of which were expected to become soiled by manual labour. To maintain the timelessness of the portrait, painters avoided “literal representations of dress” by having their subjects wear “mantles” (6).

Although Byron applied this convention loosely by posing with his noticeable “open neckline,” as Mole notes (Romantic Celebrity 82), which Moore reads as associating him with the lower ranks, Byron wore a bright red, lavish brooch directly beneath the open collar, which aligned him again with the wealthy. Moore actually notes that Byron introduced many innovations to portrait painting, stemming from his own personal utility. For example, he wore and posed in long, loose trousers instead of short trousers, or breeches, to hide his clubbed foot; and he wore dark-colored suits to enhance his white complexion, disrupting the convention of wearing light suits for evening functions (7).

On the other hand, by having Phillips use the Young portrait as a template for his cloak portrait, Byron reveals an indirect desire to rival Young while performing or posing like Hamlet.

In fact, Boleslaw Taborski describes Byron as a “very keen theatre-goer” (30), an interest which his mother reinforced by taking him regularly to the theatre in his childhood. Besides revealing his life-long interest in the theatre, and especially Shakespearean plays, having Phillips paint him like the famous Hamlet actor evokes the spirit of national pride and cultural heritage.40 But juxtaposing that portrait with his Albanian one suggests that Byron had a comparable, and perhaps better, ability to Young’s when impersonating multiple characters whether those associated with Eastern or Western imaginative works. Byron authenticates the identity he

40Taborski notes that Byron sat on a Drury Lane sub-committee acting as “the executive of the body of share- holders” from June 1815 to Apr. 1816 (43). However, he took great interest in the performances that he was “attending rehearsals,” and “reading and judging . . . plays, as well as dealing with the authors” (55). 62

claims by posing in real Eastern disguise and with a sword, both of which he claims to have purchased from the East. His choice of clothing also marks his wealth and status which supposedly exceed Young’s.

I interpret Byron’s exhibiting himself like an English fictional character and an Albanian one in further ways. The aesthetic doubling that the portraits perform can be understood according to Francis Wilson’s view that Byron lived in a “hall of mirrors” where he negotiated multiple identities, which belonged to different psychic or imaginative stages of his life (15).

Peach reads Byron’s pose and clothing, especially in the Albanian portrait, as emphasizing his

“self-dramatizing mobility, [by] portraying him as an actor en rôle” (64). However, I add to these readings that by exhibiting both portraits in a national gallery, which is supposed to promote national sameness, Byron blurs the traditional binaries of the national and the foreign by posing as multiple other selves, as I have defined in Chapter 1. At first look, the portraits define identity in binary terms: the cloak one can be read as representing the self while the Albanian one can be read as representing the other. Also, by basing each portrait on figures of popular culture Phillips promotes contrary nationalistic associations: Shakespearean characters triggered cultural and historical associations and a sense of national pride while Eastern figures triggered cultural and historical associations with the other. But at closer look, Byron poses as a popular actor in one portrait, and poses as an Albanian soldier of rank in the other, both of which question his own identity as a member of the British nobility. His portraits thus blur the binaries of the self and other by exemplifying the different range of other selves that a person may be.

The fact that the two portraits were exhibited on different walls in the exhibition hall is also significant. The Albanian portrait was exhibited on the east wall of the museum hall while the cloak one was exhibited on the north wall (Peach 64). This physical positioning enhanced

Byron’s message of the elusiveness of identity because the spectators had to move from the north wall of the gallery to the east one or vice versa to see what I read as the two versions of Byron.

Such positioning suggested that the identity/identities a person reveals relies on one’s own perspective of the self as well as on the changing perspectives of his observers, who may

(mis)interpret the identity the person projects. Byron further focuses on this issue in his tales on the Orient, as I will discuss in the following chapters.

On the other hand, Byron performs a double act of mimicry in his portraits. The Albanian one appears to mimic the present aggressors—the Turks—by identifying with Byron’s and his audiences’ supposed Greek ancestors whom the Turks had subdued. Byron also claims to base his representations on his interactions with those he had encountered during his travels, and on his studying the local languages, cultures and religions, as I have discussed in Chapter 1. Byron thus assumes the identity of an Albanian soldier of rank, self-fashioning himself like an Eastern character. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, Byron could be performing an act of colonial imitation or mimicry by imitating the aggressors, the Turks. However, because of Byron’s privileged political and social position as an English nobleman, and his membership in the ruling class of another colonial nation (Britain), I suggest using the concept of “reversed mimicry,” which I have explained in the Introduction (14-15). Reversed mimicry occurs when a British—Byron—both mimics or imitates the colonizer, the Ottomans, who are also the supposed Eastern other, and looks back at the colonizers, which are Eastern (the Ottomans) or Western Europeans. Despite his appearing to criticize Ottoman occupation and their religious and cultural ideals in his tales, he uses this mask of otherness to criticize Western colonizers as well. By simultaneously representing/mimicking Western and Eastern colonizers, Byron reveals the elusiveness of identity in his present colonial world, which is true about our present times too. This kind of

mimicry disrupts the traditional binaries of the self and other, which Byron’s tales also commit, as I will discuss in the next chapters.

I have illustrated in this section that Byron’s portraits re-represent his identity as fictional despite his supposed class and poetic status. Both portraits represent Byron as performing contrary roles: he appears like a hero of English heritage by imitating Hamlet, and appears like a hero of narratives about the so-called Orient by posing like an Albanian. In fact, Byron represents himself as both a scholar and a traveller, who had not only studied European cultures and histories, as his noble upbringing necessitated, but had also studied the Eastern ones, as his footnotes and personal writings assert. By having Phillips adjust different aspects of portrait painting, Byron recalls his rejecting the binaries of self and other in his two cantos of CHP in favor of the notion of the other selves, and foreshadow his exploring the question of identity again in his Turkish tales. His impersonations point to his belief that opposites may exist within the same identity—as his representations in his tales further reveal—and that he can appear in any guise he likes—as his protagonists would attempt in the tales. The next section focuses on the ways the portraits have influenced, intentionally or unintentionally, their contemporary and posthumous reception, and the way this has influenced the reception of Byron’s Turkish tales.

* * *

Because Byron’s portraits appeared while his Turkish tales were circulating, Phillips’ portraits associated Byron with both exotic wealth, and popular romances about the Orient. This is the point where the economic and aesthetic value of Byron’s works—his texts and Phillips’ portraits—become complex and indiscernible. The portraits have received mixed reviews by

Byron’s contemporaries and modern critics. For example, in his Morning Chronicle article on the “Royal Academy (1814),” William Hazlitt evaluated twenty portraits in the exhibition by

criticizing some for “produc[ing] effect” on account of the sitters’ “truth and refinement of character” (17). Hazlitt based his analysis on prevalent views of physiognomy, and on nineteenth-century interpretations of the sister arts, which he described in a later article by declaring that “portrait-painting is the biography of the pencil” (qtd. in Fay 72).41 He associated the “brush” in portraying the subject’s outer and inner traits with the pencil in documenting the subject’s known and unknown traits. Hazlitt thus scrutinized Phillips’ portraits of Byron, and

Byron’s role in shaping those portraits.

They [Phillips’ portraits of Byron] are both fine. They are said to be the portrait[s] of

Lord Byron, though in that case we do not see why they should be incognito. They are

too smooth, and seem, as [they] were “barbered ten times o’er,” both in the face and the

expression. Here is, however, much that conveys the idea of the softness and the wildness

of character of the popular poet of the East. (18-19)

In this excerpt, Hazlitt points out that the portraits are not original, according to nineteenth- century conventions of portrait-painting. He accuses Phillips of modifying, or enhancing,

Byron’s real features from the original and veiling his inner emotions and thoughts. He denounces Phillips’ supposed adjustments, claiming that the portraits fail to represent the real

Byron. Despite the negative tone of his review, I believe that Hazlitt overlooks the multiple identities that Byron projects by reading Byron’s portraits in such binaries as those of “soft” and

“wild.” By criticizing the “incognito” feature of the portraits, he also questions nineteenth- century conventions of “exhibition culture,” which required the subjects’ identities to remain anonymous. Peach notes that the spectators were expected to identify the sitters from such

41 Fay quotes from Hazlitt’s Dec. 1814 article in The Champion. 66

surrounding cues as the portraits’ titles and catalogue listings (61). Hazlitt dismisses the portraits as amateurish, rather attributing the flaws he notes to Byron’s manipulating the artist.

Other acquaintances, like Byron’s ex-lover Caroline Lamb, accused Phillips too of failing to disclose Byron’s real self and inner thoughts. Lamb lamented that Byron did not sit for

Thomas Lawrence, whom Clubbe describes as the most prestigious portrait painter of the early nineteenth century (34-35). Despite Murray’s commissioning Lawrence first, as I have discussed,

Byron changed his sitting appointments repeatedly until Lawrence quit this task. However, in a personal letter to a Mrs. Jens Wolff42 in summer 1814, Lawrence provided a verbal sketch of

Byron, or “a visual sketch in words,” which his contemporaries believed to be as vivid as

Lawrence’s renowned portraits (Williams 68-72).

Lawrence had constructed a pen portrait of Byron as a response to his rising fame. Based on observing Byron in a social event, as Clubbe claims (35), Lawrence described Byron as both a

“genius” and an “object of apprehension and disgust” (Williams 70). He thus analyzed each part of Byron’s countenance—his forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, chin and hair—in a way that justified his negative insights into Byron’s supposed inner self.

Lavater’s system never asserted its truth more forcibly than in Lord Byron’s countenance,

in which you see all the character: its keen and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its

profligacy and its bitterness—its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of

mingled merriment and scorn—the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent,

the eyes bright and dissimilar . . .—the mouth well-formed, but wide, and contemptuous

42 A great admirer of Byron, Mrs Wolff was the English wife of the Danish Ambassador. 67

even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful

expression, heightened by the massive firmness of the Chin. . . .43 (70-71)

Lawrence’s verbal sketch pays vivid attention to each part of his subject’s face as if he were painting Byron. Lawrence’s analysis relies on Lavater’s physiognomy to point out the negative traits Byron’s rivals associated with him. Although his dislike of Byron might have resulted from personal or professional disagreements with Byron, Lawrence’s portrait is an evidence of the way poetry and portraits were interconnected in the early nineteenth century. Like Byron’s verbal representations, Lawrence’s verbal sketch was equally celebrated as his pictorial ones, and was widely circulated. Most importantly, Lawrence’s sketch not only provided a visual image of

Byron, but also revealed the similar ways artists relied on appearance to define identity whether in their verbal or pictorial representations.

Later, Byron’s acquaintance and former literary agent, R. C. Dallas,44 pondered Phillips’ portraits of Byron in his Recollections (1824) of Byron in a different manner from Hazlitt, Lamb and Lawrence. Although Dallas expressed, too, the same expectation of portraits to portray both the facial features of the subject and capture the “mind” of the sitter, he asserted that to perceive the meaning of Phillips’ portraits, they must be read alongside Byron’s verse tales.

These portraits combine all that depends upon the pencil to transmit of personal

resemblance and all of mind that it can catch for posterity or the stranger. . . . But the

power with which no pencil is endowed is displayed by the pen of Byron himself, and to

this must these pictures be indebted for the completion of their effect. (286-88)

43 I found no evidence showing Byron’s familiarity with Lawrence’s verbal portrait, and found no evidence justifying Lawrence’s negative representation of Byron. He might have been offended by Byron’s treating him carelessly when Murray had commissioned him, or he might have had sympathies with Byron’s rivals or his mistresses, like Caroline Lamb, whom Lawrence knew through his position as a painter of the nobility. 44 For more on Dallas, see Chapter 1 (p.16). 68

Unlike other acquaintances of Byron, Dallas admits Byron’s assuming multiple identities in his works and daily life. He reads the portraits as succeeding in capturing one of those faces, or masks, as I have discussed in this Chapter. He also reads the portraits as complementing the verse tales, thus transforming the portraits into a key to understand Byron’s texts.

Phillips’ portraits gained yet a different meaning and fulfilled different roles in the Byron corpus after the 1814 exhibition. According to his letters, Byron gave the portrait with the poetic pose to his publisher (BLJ 3: 166-67), and gave the Albanian garments he wore in the other portrait to an acquaintance, Miss Elphinstone45 (BLJ 4: 112-13). Later, Byron either gave the

Albanian to his future mother-in-law, as Peach notes; or he left it with Phillips who sold it to her, as Richard Walker claims (80). While the cloak portrait was favored by Byron and his publisher and was reproduced multiple times since Byron’s lifetime (Walker, Regency Portraits 81),

Byron’s Albanian portrait hung “over a chimney-piece” behind a green curtain at the house of

Lady Byron’s parents until Lady Noel bequeathed it to Byron’s daughter, Ada, at her marriage.

Holmes also notes that Phillips later made additional copies of the Albanian portrait for personal circulation, varying the color and style of the costumes from the original. For example, he reproduced one for Murray in 1835-1840 which is still at the Murray publishing premises; and he produced one which his son later donated to the National Portrait Gallery (8-9). The original, which now hangs in the British Embassy in Athens, was forgotten until 1841 when the famous nineteenth-century engraver and illustrator, William Finden, based an engraving on it for the posthumous publication of CHP.46 This image popularized Byron’s Albanian persona and

45 Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, a wealthy Scottish heiress and noblewoman, was one of Byron’s friends during 1813-1816. 46 This particular engraving is available on the National Portrait Gallery website. 69

established the mid-nineteenth-century notion of “Byron as Corsair, Byron as Oriental hero, . . . and Byron as Other” (Clubbe 50).

In spite of Byron’s intentions, the Albanian portrait and the peculiar circumstances surrounding his death in Missolonghi (19 April 1824) have misshaped the future reception of

Byron. Although Byron contracted a fatal fever soon after arriving, the posthumous representation of Byron as a freedom-fighter overshadowed the original circumstances surrounding the production of the Albanian portrait and the Turkish tales. The Albanian portrait, for example, came to symbolize Byron’s support of Greek independence, a cause which modern critics believed that his earlier writings, especially the two cantos of CHP, had supported ambiguously. Other critics, like Richard Holmes, dismiss the Albanian portrait as a “deliberate piece of theatrical staging” (8). Michael Benton also reads Phillips’ portraits as representing

Byron in the guise of a “performer” (100), because he imitated such popular performers as

Young in his impersonation of Hamlet, and characters from popular narratives about the East.

Richard Wendorf, however, treats the Albanian portrait as complex and inconsistent with

Byron’s character and status (14) because he, the announced nobleman, embodied different identities which were, however, multiply othered by race, class or religion.

Tom Mole (Romantic Celebrity 97) and Clubbe argue that Phillips’ portraits and those by

George Westall were reproduced so many times that they were simplified and turned into mere icons to represent the Byronic hero, which readers increasingly conflated with Byron. In fact,

Mole asserts that the adjustments which Byron had his painters implement in his portraits became signifiers, or painting conventions, by which Byron became popular. Those conventions also turned into what Suzanne K. Hyman calls the “Byron pose” (qtd. in Mole 82). This pose identified Byron by the profile, or near profile, and by “an open neckline,” aspects which only a

few of Byron’s earlier portraits had applied, but his later ones maintained (81-82). Thus, the reproductions of Byron not only misrepresented the real Byron, but also treated his portraits as mere ornament for his poetry collections. Modern editions of Byron’s works introduce the

Turkish tales with one “version” of his Albanian portrait without, however, acknowledging the existence of several versions of the original, without mentioning the cloak portrait that accompanied the Albanian one, and without considering the circumstances pertaining to the original portrait’s composition and exhibition, all of which have encouraged the false associations the portraits developed after Byron’s death.

I interpret such oversight as resulting from the popular tendency of reading Byron’s narratives about the East as separate from Phillips’ portraits, and as separate from the historical and social circumstances that I have examined in this and the previous chapters. In their studies, various critics have also disregarded the different media—like autobiography, letters, portraits and poetry—that Byron had used to scrutinize identity as it was perceived in that period. At first look, his lavish Albanian costume appeared to mimic and perhaps mock the characters in his

Turkish tales as well as the characters of popular writings about the East, as various critics have noted. I, however, read the Byron of the portraits as the disguised creator, who not only distanced his real self from the audience by embodying imaginative figures, but also questioned definitions of identity by assuming different masks. By disrupting the popular view of a coherent and homogenous identity across national representations, as the exhibition implied, Byron embodied different versions of identity which had fascinated him, challenging the audience to read them from his own perspective.

I have discussed Phillips’ portraits before discussing Byron’s Turkish tales to compare

Byron’s masks and disguises in both media—portraits and poetry—and to establish the

chronological progression of his views about identity. His first tale about the East, The Giaour, the subject of my next chapter, treats identity in a similar manner to Byron’s portraits by defining identity according to the supposed binaries of self and other, as Byron had examined in the initial two cantos of CHP. However, he challenges the readers to categorize his characters according to those binaries because their appearance and actions disrupt prevalent definitions of identity.

CHAPTER 3

“BUT LOOK—’TIS WRITTEN ON MY BROW!”:47 MASKS AND PORTRAITS OF

GIAOURS IN THE GIAOUR

A few weeks before sitting to Phillips, Byron constructed his “snake of a poem—which has been lengthening its rattles every month” (BLJ 3: 100).48 Byron enhanced and perhaps complicated his first Turkish tale, The Giaour, by the multiple editions he had Murray publish from its 5 June edition of 685 lines to its December 1813 seventh edition of 1334 lines. Although the revisions, according to a reviewer in the Quarterly, succeeded in “softening what was too coarse in the first sketch, or of supplying what was defective, or of explaining what was obscure”

(354), the fragments failed to provide closure especially about the protagonist.49 I interpret this complexity as a result of Byron’s rising awareness about identity, which resulted—in turn—from his observing the effects of political and national turbulence during his travels,50 and from the public response to his portraits by Phillips. In the same manner the portraits reveal other personae of Byron than the English nobleman, the fragments in The Giaour reveal different personae of the title-character: both his Muslim and Christian observers perceive him as a

Giaour, or infidel; his arch-enemy Hassan perceives him as an Arnaut pirate (or an Albanian

47 From The Giaour (1052). I discuss this line further on page 59. 48 The Giaour ran into three editions of 344 lines during its private circulation, and twelve public editions until 5 Nov. 1814. Byron did not make further changes after the seventh edition of Dec. 1813 possibly because he was occupied by his marriage and his turbulent financial affairs. For more on the different variants, see McGann (CPW 3: 406-411). 49 Byron attempts this narrative complexity again in his last Turkish tale, Lara, as I will discuss in Chap 6. 50 Wellington’s victories in the peninsular war caused Napoleon to start his retreat from Russia in Oct. 1814, raising hopes about his defeat. See Marilyn Butler for more on the ways such political conditions as well as the rising controversy about the Evangelical mission in India shaped this romance (84-85). 73

Muslim); and he perceives himself as a grieving lover.51 Byron bases these perspectives on such external elements as those which Abby Lillethun believes observers use to read identity like dress, facial expression, ethnicity and social status.52 I read the different perspectives about the protagonist in this tale as Byron’s urging the readers to re-evaluate the cultural, religious and ethnic prejudices that influence the narrators’ perspectives, and as his recalling the elusiveness of existing binaries of identity which he demonstrates in CHP 1 and 2.

Byron foregrounds his questions about identity through the personal and public writings accompanying The Giaour, which he added or acknowledged with the publication of each new edition. The “Advertisement,” for example, situates the tale historically and politically in the late eighteenth century by describing it as “the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the

Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity.”53 But by delivering the tale in incomplete fragments and through various narrators, Byron starts with eulogizing the loss of ancient Greece.

The narrator represents Greece as a dying female body on which a male observer gazes intently before switching to the dead but absent body of Leila. The narrators then discuss Leila’s murder only indirectly, focusing instead on the rising animosity against her Venetian lover—the so- called Giaour—and his wretchedness at losing her. Even murdering her husband/master with the

51 As I have noted on 47n22, I will be using the inclusive term Albanian for both “Arnaut” and “Suliot,” because of Byron’s loose use of both terms in this tale. He abandons the distinction he had made between both in this tale, as I will discuss later in this chapter. 52 For more on the ways components of appearance form identity and hence take part in the nonverbal communication system, see Lillethun (189). 53 Byron justifies Leila’s master/husband drowning her as stemming from “the Mussulman manner” of punishing adultery. However, this punishment stems from an honor-killing practice because according to George Sale’s translation of The Koran, adultery should be proved by “four witnesses” after which adulterous women are imprisoned in “separate apartments until death release them, or God affordeth them a way to escape”(61). Sale notes that this punishment was replaced by having the maidens “scourged with a hundred stripes and . . . banished for a full year; and [having] the married to be stoned” (61-62). But according to the original Arabic version of the Qur’an, adultery is proved by two witnesses after which both the male and female accomplice receive a hundred whippings; unless the female is a slave, then she receives fifty. But in practice, women have been executed even upon suspicions of adultery while the male accomplice has been set free. 74

help of his band of pirates does not relieve his pain, and he spends his life in a monastery, questioning the ideals of both Christianity and Islam.

Besides the “Advertisement,” Byron’s final footnote authenticates the romance further as a story that he had overheard during his travels in the Levant from a coffee-house story-teller.

McGann describes this narrator as “an anonymous and itinerant balladeer from a strange and distant country” (Fiery Dust 143). Byron, the speaker in this instance, attributes the tale’s fragmentary form to his failing memory and translation efforts. But unbeknown to Byron, another acquaintance, Lord Sligo, visited the same places Byron had visited and told a different version of the story than what Byron had claimed. Because readers conflated Byron with his protagonists—Childe Harold and the Giaour—and were influenced by the stories his abandoned lover Lady Lamb and others were fabricating about his travels (BLJ 3: 102n2), Byron used Sligo to his advantage by asking him to document his version of the story to which The Giaour refers.

Sligo sent his account to Byron on 31 August 1813.

As you were returning from bathing in the Piraeus, you met the procession going down to

execute the sentence of the Waywode on this unhappy girl. Report continues to say, that

on finding out what the object of their journey was, and who was the miserable sufferer,

you immediately interfered. . . . Such is the story I heard, as nearly as I can recollect it.

(CPW 3: 414-15)

While Byron’s note collapses the poet-self with the speaker of the poem, Sligo’s letter collapses the speaker with the protagonist of the tale by claiming that Byron had directly participated in the events and saved the condemned maiden. Besides countering rumors about his supposed illicit behaviour, this account portrays Byron as a conscientious, Western traveller, who is chivalric towards the abused Eastern female, and is also knowledgeable of the Eastern languages and

cultures, as he claims in his personal and public writings. Rather than rejecting or approving

Sligo’s story, Byron shows this report to his close acquaintances as a plausible version of the original.

When sending Sligo’s letter to the Eastern traveller, Edward Daniel Clarke,54 for example, Byron states that “the Athenian account of our adventure . . . certainly first suggested to me the story of The Giaour. It was a strange and not a very long story, and his [Lord Sligo’s] report of the reports . . . is not very far from the truth” (BLJ 3: 199-200). McGann notes that although Sligo’s account and Byron’s do not reveal his “personal” role in the girl’s condemnation, there is no evidence to prove it (BLJ 3: 415). Byron merely calls Sligo’s story a version of the original, and refrains from commenting on it or disclosing the original incident. He only admits his loose appropriation of the story in his romance, which, however, disrupts his claims of authenticity. Although I do not evaluate the authenticity or truthfulness of Byron’s references, the uncertainty about the original event points to his loose use of his sources—

Eastern or Western—when composing his Turkish tales, an aspect to which I return when interpreting the ambiguities in the construction of Lara in Chapter 6.

Byron also integrates Sligo’s letter into what McGann calls a revised edition of his final note, which he had prepared for either the fifth edition of September 1813, or the seventh one of

December 1813 (CPW 3: 422-24n1334). Although this note remained in manuscript form for unknown reasons, the revision is interesting because it dismisses Sligo for telling “the tale as it was told to him.” Byron calls into question the authenticity and truthfulness of Sligo’s account, too, by noting that Sligo had relied on the oral tradition, or the circulating rumors in a distant,

54 A Professor of Mineralogy at Cambridge, Dr. Clarke was a famous traveler and writer about the East (BLJ 3: 63n3). 76

foreign place—Athens—to narrate the events. In fact, this is the same action which Byron performs in the tale, as his Advertisement and final footnote reveal. Byron acts as a reporter who overhears and translates the story from an Eastern balladeer, who had overheard the story from other observers of the so-called real events. However, the translator attributes the inconsistencies and flaws in the narrative to the balladeer, who attributes them to the observers of the events.

I trace these variant, yet incomplete, accounts of the source not only to emphasize the issue of the multiple perspectives they provide about the original, but also to recall the second- hand and perhaps third-hand nature of the story in The Giaour. Byron’s conflicting reports about the source demonstrate that translations and second-hand reports are flawed because, whether they are Western or Eastern, the observers’ personal biases and worldly knowledge shape the way they perceive and report events. Byron’s construction of identity in this tale not only defies

“assumptions about binaries and about the nature and possibility of knowing,” which the narrators’ representations reveal, according to Emily A. Bernhard Jackson (79), but his construction also challenges assumptions about appearance. Although Sligo’s account questions

Byron’s version of the tale, I believe Byron utilizes the letter to support his motif of the visual.

As I will emphasize in this chapter, Byron demonstrates the close relationship between the verbal—overhearing and retelling the story—and the visual—witnessing the events unfold.

Rather than using fragments to give “cultural authenticity to the events of the story” (McGann,

Fiery Dust 142-43), Byron uses fragments to compel his readers to observe closely such external texts he associates with the narrative as his Advertisement, notes, letters and even his revisions.

These texts serve as clues to decode the mysteries and questions his narrative leaves unanswered.

When the Giaour refers to words “written on [his] brow,” he associates speech with writing, or with the visual. He thus urges his listener to read the unspeakable murder of his

beloved on his face, which acts like a canvas, rather than have him speak about it (1052). This treatment of appearance as revealing the hidden or the unspeakable is a recurring motif in this romance. Byron indirectly states this motif in a footnote to the second edition of The Giaour, by declaring that “few of [his] readers have ever had an opportunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description.” He then describes a recently dead female, whose body allegorizes

Greece under Ottoman occupation, to demonstrate the “painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead,” as he further explains in his note (CPW 3: 416n89). Byron’s choice of words in this tale further foregrounds his interest in appearance by repeating the stems of “see” twenty-nine times besides repeating such other terms associated with sight as “eye(s)” twenty-two times, “vision/view” ten times, “gaze” eleven times,

“watch” ten times, “look” nine times, and “observe” and “espy” once. By emphasizing the contrary sides—the external and the internal, or the distant and the close—of each character and circumstance, these terms propose unconventional associations not only through Leila’s tragic murder, but also through Byron’s choice of the title—The Giaour—and his introductory image of the dead and dying body of Greece, which precedes Leila’s story.

Although such contemporary reviewers as William Gifford, Francis Jeffrey and George

Ellis commended Byron’s revisions of The Giaour,55 others complained about the tale’s supposedly offensive title, besides its fragmentary form, and its unfamiliar, non-English terms.

As in CHP 1 and 2, Byron blurs binaries of self and other in this work not by identifying aspects of similarity between the different ethnic, religious and national groups he traces, but by

55 William Gifford was the editor of The Quarterly Review, a journal published by Murray’s publishing house, from 1809 to 1824. Gifford admired the fifth edition for its “passages of exquisite—extraordinary beauty,” and urged Ellis to review the tale positively (Murray 42-44 and 44n1). 78

reversing the usual application of those binaries, and representing them as inadequate to separate the European self from the non-European ones. This reversal starts from the title which is originally a Turkish term, meaning infidel. Readers soon discover that most of the narrative enfolds through an Eastern observer—the fisherman—who is represented as the self besides

Hassan and his associates, who are the enemies of the young Venetian. In fact, all of them will other the Giaour—the supposed European self—considering him as an infidel to their Islamic faith. But Byron further appropriates the title not only by having the Muslims call the Venetian a

Giaour—or a non-Muslim—but also by having the residents of the monastery call him a Giaour for rejecting their forms of worship and for questioning their interpretation of Christian dogma.

By reversing conventional binaries of the Western self and representing both Islam and

Christianity as possibly reversible maxims to define identity, Byron proposes that the title describes both Muslims and Christians depending on the perspective the observer/reader assumes.

In fact, such modern critics as Seyed Mohammed Marandi overlook this double use of the title by reading it as serving decorative and aesthetic purposes and as merely proving the

“irreconcilable ‘Otherness’ of the Orient” (“Byron’s Infidel” 146). I disagree with Marandi because Byron’s notes actually urge his readers to perceive the supposed self from a different cultural and ethnic perspective, that of the Turkish Muslims. The romance also foregrounds the

Eastern term “Giaour” through the non-conforming actions and speech of the title-character, who disrupts the forms of behaviour associated with the two religions—Islam and Christianity— dominating the discourse of Orientalism, and hence demonstrating their elusiveness as categories of identity. In his dying confession, for example, the Giaour rejects all forms of religion because they equally fail to compensate for the loss of his beloved. He then notes the different, yet

corrupt ways followers of both Islam and Christianity interpret the teachings of their faiths to serve their personal ends. His narrative about Leila and the resulting changes he experiences represent his acquaintances as infidels to their faiths, whether Islam or Christianity. The Giaour’s confession, as Jackson also notes (75), demonstrates that he is wrongfully called the Giaour, or an infidel, because he is the only one loyal to his principles, which, despite their secular/sexual basis, are based on his undying love for Leila. I read the confusion about the Venetian being a believer or an infidel as an essential aspect of the narrative by which Byron blurs Western definitions of the self as he does in CHP 1 and 2. Through the complexities Byron imposes, the narrative represents the Giaour as well as the Muslim characters as different versions of the self, or other selves rather than binary opposites.

Besides the confusion that the title causes when applying it to a Venetian, Byron’s introductory image of Greece as a dead female implicitly contrasts the image of beautiful death with the body of the gruesomely murdered Leila. Starting the romance from where CHP 2 ends—the image of Greece ruined by its present occupants—Byron eulogizes Greece for the bravery of its ancient heroes, condemning again the corruptness of its Ottoman and Greek inhabitants and the greed of European travellers.56 Byron invites the readers to decode the multiple layers of meaning with which he endows his metaphor of the dying body of Greece before narrating his “mournful tale” of Leila (165). The lines on Greece foreshadow the corpses of Leila and Hassan, which preoccupy the characters of the tale, especially the Giaour.

56 As I have discussed in Chapter 1, Byron criticizes Lord Elgin’s dismantling the Parthenon marbles, and transferring them to England without consideration of their rightful owners—the Greeks—and without consideration of the damage he had caused to the historic site. 80

While sitting to Phillips for his portraits, Byron adds lines 7-29 to his second edition of

The Giaour on July 1813. These lines contrast the blooming natural surroundings of Greece with the dead and dying landscape of line 68. While Byron foregrounds his interest in the visual through the footnote to these lines, as I have discussed, his verse follows conventions of sensibility romances when personifying Greece as a female. The speaker metaphorically hails such aspects of her “fair clime” (7) as her harmonious natural elements and her smiling seasons

(7), her “benignant” weather (8), and her enchanting landscape which “gladdens” her observers

(10-11). This portrait engages all senses: sight by the vivid colors and charming appearance, the aural by the “laughing tides” (14), touch by the “transient breeze” (16), and smell by the fresh

“odours” (20). Immediately afterwards, the narrator provides a closer, though grim, description of the same lands which emphasizes the present occupation of Greece by the Turks. This double view enshrines her different appearance by portraying her in terms of beautiful death.

He who hath bent him o’er the dead,

Ere the first day of death is fled;

......

(Before Decay’s effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where Beauty lingers)

And mark’d the mild angelic air—

The rapture of repose that’s there—

The fixed yet tender traits that streak

The languor of the placid cheek,

And—but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not—wins not—weeps not—now—

And but for that chill changeless brow,

Where cold Obstruction’s apathy

Appals the gazing mourner’s heart . . . (68-69, 72-81)

These lines, which Byron’s early biographer Karl Elze commends as “the celebrated passage”

(134), eulogize the dead female by focusing on such feminine traits as mildness of temper, submissiveness and beauty. The gazing speaker urges the readers to read her supposedly enchanting inner self through her face before “decay” effaces the external traces of her “Beauty.”

Although the observer can see that her “tender traits” and her “placid cheek” still reveal her mild behaviour and rapture, he realizes that death defies his gaze by silencing the expression in her eyes and her brows (or face). This sudden inability to read the inside appals the gazer more than the loss of the female herself. But the narrative replaces this corpse abruptly with that of the real and already drowned one of Leila, who is, however, beyond visual scrutiny. Unlike the dead and dying body of Greece, Leila’s appearance disguises the inner rather than reveals it, because, as the fragments reveal, she is inaccessible to the gaze of her male narrators. They rather interpret her appearance from memory despite her limited status as belonging to the Harem, her disguise as a Georgian page when meeting her lover stealthily, and her subsequent drowning. Her murder generates further corpses, which are, however, as disturbing as Leila’s.

I partly agree with the reading that Byron personifies Greece—the source of European civilization and culture—as a dead female body while under Turkish rule. Byron represents

Greece as the center of conflict since ancient times whether through the wars of the Spartans with the Persians, or the present wars of the supposed Muslim Ottomans with the supposed

Christian Greeks and Western Europeans. Michael Franklin and others read the introductory image of Greece as an allegorical representation of Greece that foreshadows Leila’s unjust

murder (25).57 Using the “myth of the beautiful, sexually accomplished ‘Circassian’ slave- concubine” (Ballaster 72), the tale represents Leila as “Circassia’s daughter” (505) to symbolize her being a beautiful and enchanting slave brought from the Northern Caucasus. Alan

Richardson notes that Circassia was a region located “on the imaginary geopolitical line between

Europe and Asia,” and thus a region where “Muslim and Christian traditions had long existed”

(220-21). Accordingly, Greece and Leila are objects of desire and conflict, which are, however, similarly ruined by institutional or individual male greed and despotism. Thus, her Muslim master murders her for her infidelity, an action her Venetian lover admits that he would imitate if she were disloyal to him.

Besides this reading of the tale, I believe that Byron covertly disrupts conventions associated with appearance—or the binaries of self and other—by constructing his representations of identity in doubles, which eventually collapse: his fragments juxtapose the distant with the close snapshot, or the outer with the inner, to contest binary categories of identification, which he disrupts further in his later Turkish tales. As in the previous instance, the narrator observes the beautiful Greek lands only to realize that what he perceives is its current fallen state. He contrasts its natural landscape with the social landscape before contrasting its ancient and present people. He then identifies its present occupants, who act as the characters of the tale. Accordingly, the narrator and the local community represent the Giaour as a stranger, and only in terms of what they perceive as his two major deviances—adultery and murder— regardless of the inner pain and guilt he suffers, and the possibility of his being a member of the nobility in his own hometown. They, however, revere his rival, the local ruler Hassan, and expect

57 See Mohja Kahf (8) and Mohammed Sharafuddin (233-34). 83

him to go to the Muslim paradise, overlooking his abusive behaviour towards Leila and his drowning her. Despite rumors about the unfair circumstances that had betrothed her to Hassan and the abuses she had endured, the community supports him executing her for adultery.

In the same manner Phillips’ portraits reveal multiple identities of Byron, and the external material relating to this tale offers different versions of Byron’s supposed adventures, the narrators disclose the events through multiple frame narratives. Although these are based on third-hand reports, various critics interpret the fragments as narrated mainly by the fisherman who retells the story to the balladeer, both of whose own worldly and religious biases influence the versions of the tales they narrate. Although the narrator of the notes, who is possibly the

Western traveller translating the story, disclaims responsibility for this narrative by claiming to maintain the biases and flaws in the original version, I read his fragments as providing clues to the way he expects the readers to treat his reported tale. The conflicting material surrounding the beginning of this tale actually guides the readers towards forming their own enlightened perspective on the events by encouraging them to actively evaluate rather than passively perceive the narratives of each speaker.

The romance starts by documenting the close escape of a fisherman from what he supposes to be an “island-pirate or Mainote” (171). Although the speaker notes that he is “worn and weary with his toil” when returning to the “near but doubtful creek” at night (174), the fisherman interprets the shadows he perceives as being pirates and sails further away to what he perceives to be “Port Leon’s safer shore” (177). This is the only instance when the fisherman appears in the third-person. According to my view of the necessity to use external material to understand Byron’s tales, the text recalls peculiarities pertaining to this narrator which Byron had noted in his letters (BLJ 1: 229-30) and in CHP when narrating his near drowning experience by

the “coast of Suli’s shaggy shore” (2.596). As I have discussed in Chapter 1, Byron emphasizes the discrepancy between appearance and reality when questioning stereotypes about the ethnicities he encounters during his tour, especially of those who were believed to be outlaws, like the Suliotes and the Mainotes. Byron thus commends the bravery of Suliote sailors when saving them during a storm and disparages the cowardice of the English captain, the

Turkish/Greek mariners and his English fellow-travellers (40-41). In The Giaour, which he writes a year after the two cantos of CHP, Byron expects the readers to realize that the views of this particular narrator—the fisherman—are untrue and prejudiced. He enhances this view by offering a comic-like introductory portrait of this narrator which shows that he misinterprets the shapes he sees in the dark based on his irrational fears and prejudices, a misinterpretation the narrative suggests he might commit again when observing Leila’s lover, the Giaour.

In the next fragment, the fisherman draws the readers’ attention to the Venetian youth whom he perceives as a stranger, or a Giaour, by marking his difference from and threat to the local, Muslim populace. Byron’s Advertisement foreshadows the ensuing hostility towards the

Venetian youth by locating the tale during the 1770-1779 conflicts between the “Republic of

Venice,” the “Arnauts” (Muslim Albanians) and the “Mainotes.” This historical background associates the so-called Giaour with those who were believed to have “ravaged” the local residents. The text also recalls this animosity when having the fisherman introduce the Giaour by asking rhetorically “Who thundering comes on blackest steed / With slacken’d bit and hoof of speed?” (180-81). He then reveals their contrary political, religious and cultural alliances when he blurts, “I know thee not, I loathe thy race” (191).

This remark has shocked numerous modern critics. Marandi, for example, contrasts the fisherman’s language with the scholarly one of the speaker of the footnotes to assert that Byron

represents binary voices to emphasize the Muslims’ “racial hatred, backwardness, and belief in superstition” (“Byron’s Infidel” 146-47). By borrowing the voice of a “native informant,” in

Gayatri Spivak’s terms, Marandi warns that Byron cannot “possibly present a truthful and fully authentic representation of the Orient or a typical Oriental point of view” because of his “limited knowledge and ideological baggage” (“Byron’s Infidel” 145). He, however, overlooks what

Marilyn Butler describes as the speaker’s “undisguised admiration for the warlike qualities taught by Mohammedanism” in the notes to the tale (87). She proposes reading the romance as critiquing Christian outsiders, or British policies in the East, by revealing the consequences of

European intervention in other cultures and religions. Tim Youngs can be read as supporting

Butler’s view when he notes that in nineteenth-century travel writings the Turks were admired as

“an ancient imperial race with whom the British shared common characteristics of stoicism and taciturnity” (59-60).

As I have warned in each chapter, critics like Marandi overlook the masking Byron performs in his tales. Although Byron writes within the nineteenth-century discourse on the

Orient, and within current debates about the Evangelical mission in India, which he rejects, as

Butler argues (84-85), Byron’s voice fluctuates between moments when he is serious and others when he is not. These moments reveal discrepancies between appearance and reality, especially when scrutinizing both the Muslim and Christian characters and their respective ideals. Byron uses a narrator whose veracity and story-telling abilities he questions through the flaws and prejudices in his narrative. Regardless of the critical controversy on the truthfulness of this voice,

I believe that Byron performs a reversed mimicry, as I have explained in the Introduction (16-17) and explained when discussing Phillips’ portraits of Byron (64-65). Byron uses an Eastern character, who belongs to the laboring classes, to disguise his criticism of the political and

religious aspects of the European self. He had discussed these issues, though unsuccessfully, in his parliamentary speeches of 1813. Despite using multiple frame narratives, Byron imitates the voice of a so-called other—a Muslim fisherman—who not only reflects on the vices of the non-

Muslim character, the Giaour, from the perspectives of both a Muslim and a Western observer, but also reveals his own flaws from both perspectives, too. By having an Eastern character observe a Western one, Byron not only disrupts existing binaries of identification, but also foregrounds the parallels between both religions and ethnicities. Such instances represent the self and other as fluid and unstable constructs, or as other selves, which the two cantos of CHP and

Phillips’ portraits have also suggested.

Although the fisherman and the other narrators may be read as representatives of the different competing creeds that fight in the romance—Islam, Christianity and anti-Christian/anti-

Islam—I read the fisherman as being just as mistaken about the real events as the other narrators are. By representing each character from the perspective of his/her opponents, the resulting perspectives ridicule both the observer and the observed. The Muslim speaker, for example, demeans the Giaour and his beliefs; the Giaour demeans his Muslim opponents and their beliefs; and the narrator of the footnotes demeans his Western acquaintances by displaying his scholarly and first-hand knowledge of the East as exceeding theirs, and demeans his audience, too, by claiming that they misapply their religion like the Muslims he represents in the tale. By the end of the narrative, the fragments undermine the ethnic rivalry between the characters, rather foregrounding the changes each one experiences as a reaction to their surroundings and circumstances, especially the Giaour. Also, by having the fisherman associate the deterioration in the Giaour’s inner self—morals and beliefs—with the deterioration in his appearance, Byron

questions using the outside to read the inside, an aspect of identity I will discuss further when reading his later Turkish tales.

Despite the Giaour’s disguise in each encounter and the passage of time, the fragments show that the fisherman observes the Giaour closely and recognizes him wherever he goes. Each fragment starts by the fisherman asking about the identity of the perceived stranger in a mock rhetorical way, followed by the moment of recognition. The fisherman then analyzes the

Giaour’s appearance only to reconfirm his initial negative perspective.

. . . [I]n thy lineaments I trace

What time shall strengthen, not efface;

Though young and pale, that sallow front

Is scath’d by fiery passion’s brunt,

Though bent on earth thine evil eye

As meteor-like thou glidest by,

Right well I view, and deem thee one

Whom Othman’s sons should slay or shun. (192-99)

As all the fisherman’s fragments do, this emphasizes the stranger’s racial and religious difference from the locals. He infers the Giaour’s supposed evil from what he perceives to be his two distinctive facial “lineaments”: his pale face and “evil eye.” He reads both as pointing to the

Giaour’s threat to the local community, accusing him of seducing the wife of the local ruler—

Hassan—and then murdering him. The fisherman believes that the stranger’s “fiery passion[s]” shape his eyes which he disguises by looking down when passing him by. Although the Giaour’s physiognomic difference could be attributed to his ethnic difference, or the supposed physiognomic difference of Western Europeans from Eastern Europeans including the Turks, the

narrative never provides any details about the Giaour’s physiognomy, except for those features which the fisherman foregrounds when correlating his eyes and brows with evil.

In a later fragment discussing the ambush that the Giaour and his pirate accomplices prepare for his opponent, Hassan, the Giaour’s disguise challenges his observers and they initially fail to recognize him.

Who leads them on with foreign brand,

Far flashing in his red right hand?

‘’Tis he—’tis he—I know him now,

I know him by his pallid brow;

I know him by the evil eye

That aids his envious treachery;

I know him by his jet-black barb,

Though now array’d in Arnaut garb,

Apostate from his own vile faith,

It shall not save him from the death:

’Tis he, well met in any hour,

Lost Leila’s love—accursed Giaour!’ (608-19)

The rhetorical question with which this fragment starts recalls the one introducing the Giaour’s initial entry into the community as dangerous. Despite his riding a “jet-black barb” and disguising in “Arnaut garb” (614-15), the fisherman identifies him again as the “accursed

Giaour” from his distinctive “pallid brow” and his “evil eye” (611-12). In fact, his change of clothing is significant because he dresses like Albanian outlaws, whom Alan Richardson considers as neither Muslims nor Christians. He interprets this change of clothing as signifying a

change in loyalties and allegiances, which the Giaour cannot reverse as the next scene proves when the friars treat him as an outsider (319). Because of his infatuation with Leila, he favors secular love over Christian forbearance and moderation, rather questioning the spiritual comfort that the friars attempt to offer him. As a result, his disguise not only camouflages his real

Western identity, but also signals his rejection of authority, whether religious or political, and signals that he chooses his own form of justice. The fisherman interprets the gradual changes in the Giaour’s appearance and behaviour from a forbidden lover into an assassin as transforming him into an “Apostate from his own vile faith” (616). Despite the validity of this insight of the outside revealing the inside in this instance, the translator recalls the partiality of the fisherman when discrediting his claims of the Giaour’s two eternal punishments: the vampire curse in life

(755-86), and “Monkir and Nekir” after death (747-49).

Using the voice of a friar, Byron adds a contrary representation of the Giaour and of his

Muslim observers/opponents, which he develops from the fifth to the seventh editions of

September to December 1813. One of the friars residing in the same monastery where the Giaour resides after having murdered Hassan narrates part of the Giaour’s story to the curious fisherman who identifies the stranger again, by asking, “How name ye yon lone Caloyer? / His features I have scann’d before / In mine own land” (787-89). Although this friar negates the fisherman’s predictions about the Giaour’s future punishments, he shares with the fisherman the same negative perception about the Giaour, like his “breath[ing] the same dark spirit now, / As death were stamped upon his brow” (796-97). The friar then offers his perspective on the Giaour, by reading his appearance as being peculiar, and his silence about the past as disguising an unspeakable crime.

The flash of that dilating eye

Reveals too much of times gone by—

Though varying—indistinct its hue,

Oft will his glance the gazer rue—

For in it lurks that nameless spell

Which speaks—itself unspeakable—

A spirit yet unquelled and high

That claims and keeps ascendancy,

And like the bird whose pinions quake—

But cannot fly the gazing snake—

Will others quail beneath his look,

Nor ’scape the glance they scarce can brook. (834-45)

After the lapse of six years from the murder of Hassan, his observers, especially the fisherman, not only perceive the Giaour’s eyes as concealing evil, but also as acquiring other abilities. His eyes seem both to reveal the murderous past events which he had witnessed and/or committed, and to mesmerize his observers with his mysterious appearance and look. The brethren at the monastery, however, shun him because they believe his eyes expose and condemn the flaws in their beliefs and practices. Not knowing his anguish at losing his beloved, those residing in the monastery treat him as an outlaw whom they only condemn further because he rejects penance and questions their ideals. They fear his distinctive appearance, especially his eyes, whose mystery results from his pain which they cannot perceive nor comprehend due to his silence.

They thus shun him because they fear that his supposed sin would consume him and those surrounding him.

Although the representations of the fisherman and the friar coincide when interpreting the

Giaour’s features as masking his evil self, as Emily A. Bernhard Jackson asserts when reading their narratives as based on “false knowing” (59-60), their interpretations diverge because each reads the same features according to their own worldly and after-worldly perspectives about violators of Islam or Christianity. Their narratives assume knowledge of the Giaour, but the fragments reveal flaws in their knowledge because it is based on popular beliefs about personal and national identity, and on rumors about the young Venetian. Moreover, the friar’s narrative breaches the supposed confidentiality of confessions, rendering him no different from the

Muslims who violate their religious ideals throughout the romance. Like the breaches his Muslim observers commit against their religion in the previous fragments, the friar and his brethren at the monastery commit similar breaches. For example, their supposed abstinence from worldly pleasures—or their religious perseverance—contrasts with their permitting the Giaour to purchase his post in this monastery despite suspicions about the source of his wealth, and his disruptive behavior towards their particular forms of worship.

The common crowd but see the gloom

Of wayward deeds—and fitting doom—

The close observer can espy

A noble soul, and lineage high. (866-869)

I read these lines as Byron’s reminding the readers of the possible flaws in the narratives of both the fisherman and the friar. The speaker of these lines, who is perhaps the western translator, questions the negative representations of the Giaour by disregarding the initial reading of him as an evil force. Although his observers have read the gloom that his loss and worldly hardships had marked on his physique as merely resulting from his evil self, this fragment suggests that perhaps

a close observation may point to a noble soul and high lineage which the fisherman and the friar had failed to perceive. Although I admit that the fragmented narratives, including those Byron adds later, are told by the friar to the fisherman, who retells it to the balladeer from whom the

Western speaker translates the tale, the Giaour’s own self-portrait, which the friar, however, also reports, is still significant because it emphasizes the discrepancy between the outer and the inner, and questions the authenticity of the narrators.

The Giaour’s dying confession, which can be read as a self-portrait, offers his perspective on the mysteries enfolding this narrative: his relationship to the deceased Leila and Hassan, his justification for murdering Hassan, his self-condemnation for failing to save Leila, and his rejection of Christianity as a solace for his loss. This confession not only illuminates the ambiguities in his former actions and feelings, but also questions former readings of him as evil and as eternally condemned. The Giaour also asks the friar to describe him to his long-lost friend as he presently sees him.

. . . [T]ell him—what thou dost behold!

The wither’d frame, the ruined mind,

The wrack by passion left behind—

A shrivelled scroll, a scatter’d leaf,

Sear’d by the autumn blast of grief! (1252-56)

Besides the unexpected existence of a devoted friend from his past, the Giaour offers a sympathetic portrayal of the self, which not only justifies his supposedly dark deeds, but also represents him as a victim of his consuming passions rather than a perpetuator of evil. He thus perceives himself as a disintegrating landscape, which is in ruins and desolation after a war, indirectly recalling the introductory scene of dying Greece. The Giaour interprets the

disintegration of his inner self as resulting from the extreme passions of love and hatred he had suffered. This version not only differs from what others had perceived, but also differs from the corpse with which the romance starts. Rather than appearing as Greece in terms of beautiful death, the Giaour describes his body as withered from the outside and ruined from the inside by his passions. His metaphor of the crumbled corpse contrasts with the view of Greece as beautiful from a distance but corrupt and ruined by her present occupants upon close scrutiny.

Referring back to the initial corpse of the dead and dying Greece, the romance ends with two corpses, that of Hassan from the Giaour’s perspective and of the Giaour from his own.

Because both corpses are products of uncontrollable passions, which cause violence and bloodshed, neither is beautiful like the body of Greece on which the speaker of the introductory lines ponders through the metaphor of a recently dead, yet enchanting, female. This scene performs a reversal of the gaze which contrasts with the gaze in the introductory lines. Unlike the initial observer, the observer here—the Giaour—is unable to gaze at the beautiful face of Leila whether dead or alive, and thus pursues and murders her murderer and gazes at him instead. But when he scrutinizes each feature of the dying Hassan’s “sullen corse” to trace repentance for murdering Leila, and possibly a reflection of his own pain for losing her, the Giaour is greatly disappointed that each feature only “Betrayed his [Hassan] rage, but no remorse.” This gaze thus fails to offer the Giaour any closure for losing his beloved, a pain which rather haunts him until he dies. He laments that “what had [his] Vengeance given to trace / Despair upon his [Hassan’s] dying face!” (1090-94). Unlike the narrator of the introductory lines who is appalled at his inability to grasp the inside beauty of the dying female by gazing at her face, the Giaour is appalled at both his inability to gaze at his beloved’s face, and his failure to read remorse or despair on his opponent’s face.

According to my ongoing argument in this part, this portrayal of Hassan should not be taken for granted like the portrayals of the fisherman and the friar when representing the Giaour.

This is because of the indirect, third-hand nature of these reports which is enhanced by the existing animosity between the speaker here—the Giaour—and Hassan, and between the speaker—the Giaour—and the reporter of this part—the friar. I discuss this part to demonstrate the way Byron treats the visual as a tricky and double-edged medium to understand the inner, or identity. Also, while Byron gives his title-character a voice to express his supposed inner self in the final fragments of this romance, which should still be taken as another version of the other self—the Giaour—Byron deprives both Hassan and Leila of any opportunity for self-expression.

Hassan is eulogized by those surrounding him during his personal and public pursuits while Leila is silenced and drowned before the narrative proper starts. She can be read as a silent agent of change and a Romantic female rebel, whose death causes her lover to kill her master, and undergo a spiritual transformation. Although the observers overlook her and her murder, they foreground the deeds and struggles of her lovers. However, within his own narrative, the Giaour provides not only a self-portrait, which traces the emotional and physical changes he undergoes, but also a portrait of Leila, which differs from those of her observers.

Hassan, her master and husband, perceives her as his passive “lovely toy” (404), but executes her when she acts on her will by harboring emotions for another, whom she meets by disguising as a “Georgian page” (456). Her different clothing, according to Alan Richardson’s interpretation of the Giaour’s “Arnaut garb,” demonstrates a non-reversible change in alliances and thus in identity. Her cross-dressing in a different gender and ethnicity thus diminishes her value as a woman and thus a supposedly passive lover, causing her spouse to feel betrayed and compelled to punish her (319). On the other hand, the fisherman focuses on Leila’s enchanting

appearance, representing her in a misogynist manner as actively seducing her gazers. He thus introduces her by asking “who young Leila’s glance could read / And keep that portion of his creed” (487-89). He represents her according to conventions of Eastern courtly poetry, called

Ghazels, which compare beautiful women to the gazelle, or Arabian deer. In Arabian culture, the gazelle was glorified for its wide, dark eyes and its swift, light physique, which were also desirable physical qualities in a woman (Melikian 48).58 By describing Leila’s eyes as having an exceedingly “dark charm” (474), the speaker borrows a metaphorical hyperbole typically used in

Arabian Ghazals, or love lyrics, to eulogize female beauty. Although the fisherman claims that an accurate reading of Leila’s exceeding beauty would destroy one’s Islamic faith, it unintentionally destroys the title character’s Christian faith, as the final fragments reveal.

Although he holds the Giaour responsible for Hassan’s death, the fisherman represents Leila as responsible for seducing both her Muslim observers—admirers—and such non-Muslim ones as the Giaour.

Unlike Hassan and the fisherman, the Giaour represents Leila not as a seducer but as an oppressed female whom he sought to save. Although she was his forbidden lover, she continues to be his lover though in a spectre, non-physical form after her death.59 His narrative reveals that he never recovers from his losing her despite their relationship being socially forbidden, and despite her suffering the conventional punishment for adultery in the East, as Byron explains in the Preface. In its first edition, Byron concludes the romance with the hallucination-like reverie

58 For more on the use of “gazelle,” see Naji Oueijan (92-93). 59 It is noteworthy that Byron’s representation of Leila in the Giaour’s narrative foreshadows the representation of his dead, yet forbidden, female protagonists, like Astarte in Manfred. Both Leila and Astarte appear in vampire-like form to haunt their lovers and summon them to death. 96

in which the title-character describes their visual encounters. In this part, the dead Leila appears like an enchanting spectre which teases him in abstract form.

I saw her, friar! and I rose,

......

And clasp her to my desperate heart;

I clasp—what is it that I clasp?

No breathing form within my grasp,

No heart that beats reply to mine,

Yet, Leila! yet the form is thine!

And art thou, dearest, chang’d so much,

As meet my eye, yet mock my touch?

Ah! were thy beauties e’er so cold,

I care not—so my arms enfold

The all they ever wish’d to hold.

Alas! around a shadow prest,

They shrink upon my lonely breast;

Yet still—’tis there—in silence stands,

And beckons with beseeching hands!

With braided hair, and bright-black eye. . . . (1283, 1286-300)

In his encounters, Leila’s lover realizes that while his senses of touch, hearing, smell and taste fail him, sight becomes the sole medium to experience her. He repeatedly emphasizes his enjoying her visually but is ambivalent about her appearance, which he perceives as the same yet

“changed so much” from her appearance in life (1291). Although she appears in her usual “white

symar” or shroud (1273), and in her usual “braided hair, and bright-black eye[s]” (1299), he soon realizes that she is elusive to his touch, does not breath, and her heart does not beat. Like the beautiful Greece of the introductory lines, which is different when observed from far and from nearby, Leila appears the same enchanting being from a distance, but acquires the different identity of a ghost when her lover gazes at her closely. Her “form” finally summons him to her, causing him to hail death as the only way to unite with her. His fixation on the visual level shows his gradual physical decline and loss of senses, and perhaps his approaching death.

I include a long excerpt from his portrait of Leila in death to demonstrate the Giaour’s possible unstable state of mind. In this fragment, Byron raises doubts about the truthfulness of the Giaour’s former narrators—the fisherman and the friar—by attracting sympathy for his ordeals, and raises doubts about the truthfulness of the Giaour’s own narrative as well. By providing conflicting perspectives about the same events/characters, Byron recalls the conflicting reports about the origins of this tale which he had highlighted while publishing the various revised editions of this text, as I have discussed in the beginning of this chapter.

Byron enhanced this portrait of Leila with his final additions of December 1813, which he situated before this fragment. The Giaour starts his confession in the seventh edition by describing his beloved during her life as being “a form of life and light— / That seen—became a part of sight” (1127-28). Undermining her beautiful appearance and physique, as her other observers emphasize, the Giaour rather perceives her in her abstract state with life, light and sight. The verbal effect of these particular terms through their rhyming cannot be denied nor the visual resemblance of the first two terms to Leila’s name. In this instance, the heart-broken lover slips between the supposed binaries of the verbal and the visual to represent their relationship after her death. Despite the narrator’s direct warning about the misinterpretations which the

Giaour’s observers may have committed when reading his appearance as pointing to his supposed inner evil, the Giaour commits the same when representing Leila in death. As this instance reveals, he is fixated on the visual level, reading his beloved merely according to his past knowledge of her appearance and her former vows of passion for him. Instead of his turning into a vampire—as the fisherman had predicted—the Giaour is pursued by a vampire whom he perceives as his dead lover even though she never confirms her identity verbally, as the Giaour also notes.

However, the Giaour finally believes that he had overcome the supposed social boundaries that had impeded his relationship with Leila in her life by disrupting the boundaries of life and death when meeting her in his dreams or reveries. Although she remains silent in these encounters despite his pleas, merely waving to him to follow her, he embraces her different ethereal-like appearance, and her possibly changing identity into a vampire. He thus hails her in whichever form she appears because he persists in clinging to his knowledge of her former loving self, or what Jackson calls “false knowing” (59-60) when analyzing the narratives of the fisherman and the friar, as I have discussed (96). In this instance, the Giaour embraces Leila as he had perceived her in the past in the same manner the fisherman and the friar cling to their own perspectives about, or supposed knowledge of, the Giaour and his behaviour regardless of his own perspective on the events.

As a result of the multiple narrative frames which accompany this romance and the multiple narrative frames which Byron integrates within it, identity in The Giaour remains inconclusive, and the tale remains open to interpretation. I, however, read the Giaour’s frustration at his inability to possess his beloved physically in the final scene as mirroring

Byron’s own frustration regarding what his acquaintances had perceived as his socially forbidden

relationship with his half-sister. In fact, critics have pointed out more direct parallels between

Byron’s life and his The Bride of Abydos than this parallel I propose with The Giaour. Byron claimed to have written the second tale as an escape from his attachment to Augusta about which his confidante and counsellor, Lady Melbourne, had severely warned him. To escape from these social restrictions, his letters indicate that he was planning to live abroad with Augusta but she refused to part from her children as he had demanded. Using his letters and the dates of his manuscripts, I assert that this forbidden attachment had actually started while he was writing his final editions of 1813 which represent Leila as the forbidden yet inaccessible love. During this time, Byron was torn between social codes and his personal desires, a struggle which dooms the

Giaour in this tale and a struggle which Byron explores further in the next tale.

Although Byron constructs a similarly complex protagonist with a mysterious identity in his fourth Turkish tale, Lara, Byron offers a linear narration in the next two romances which continue to explore identity through the masking and doubling which their protagonists perform.

In the next chapter, I focus on how Byron perceives identity differently from the binaries of self and other which he revises in The Giaour by reversing the norms associated with each, hence transforming the self and other into versions of other selves. The final frustration the protagonist suffers in this romance hints at the rising tension between the self-chosen identity and the socially-chosen one which Byron explores further in The Bride. In the next tale, the visual remains an important component to understand identity, which the protagonist repeatedly manipulates through his masks and disguises.

100

CHAPTER 4

“THINK NOT I AM WHAT I APPEAR”:60 IDENTITY AND PORTRAITS OF THE

SELF IN THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

In one of his letters reflecting back on The Bride, Byron told Edward Daniel Clarke61 that

“as far as Memory and an Oriental twist in [his] imagination have permitted—it has been [his] endeavor to present to the Franks—a sketch of that with which you have [The Bride] & will present them a complete picture” (BLJ 3: 199).62 This letter, besides the quotation from the tale which I insert in the title of this chapter, foregrounds Byron’s direct concern in this tale: appearance and its relationship to identity. The quote is also central to Byron’s works of 1812-

1815 because it reveals Byron’s own evolving perception of identity in terms of appearance. In this tale, Byron shows that existing definitions of identity not only fail to account for the range of possible similarities and/or differences between different people—or other selves—but also fail to account for the personal choices which may shape identity. Unfolding the tale through

“sketches,” Byron manipulates public perceptions about physiognomy by emphasizing the discrepancy between the outer and the inner. He thus traces the double life of the central protagonist, Selim, who balances his socially imposed identity with his personally constructed one.63 Selim’s use of masks and disguises demonstrates that appearances can be misleading because the gazer may misread appearance, as do his family members: Giaffir and Zuleika. By discussing identity through the binaries of the personal and the public, Byron broadens the

60 The protagonist, Selim, makes this claim in 1.381, and repeats different versions of it in 1.482 and 2.633. 61 For more on Clarke, see Chap. 3 (72n48). 62 In this letter, as in others to William Gifford and Lady Melbourne, Byron comments on and justifies various aspects of the tale which he feared his readers would fail to understand (BLJ 3: 161 and 173-75). 63 As I have discussed in Chap. 1, Byron questions judging others according to stereotypes and to existing views of physiognomy. He returns to criticizing such aspects more directly in his next tale, The Corsair, which I will discuss in Chap. 5. 101

application of the other selves to demonstrate that identity takes on different forms, meanings and roles in different contexts.

Byron published his second tale on the Orient, The Bride of Abydos, on 2 December

1813: it went through multiple editions but did not receive major additions as The Giaour did.64

Despite its simple narrative structure in comparison to its predecessor The Bride is more complex in its use of appearance to explore identity. Byron’s sketches rely heavily on images of sight and hearing. Byron draws attention to the outer by relying on such terms as “appear,” “aspect” and

“face.” He repeats the stems of “see” forty-seven times, “eye(s)” thirty-two, “vision/view” five,

“gaze” six, “watch” seven, “look” six, and “image” once. But in eight instances, he replaces references to the outer with the term “seem” to mark an uncertainty, and in nineteen instances, he replaces them with “change,” “turn” and “alter” to mark an unexpected change in appearance.

Although less often used than terms related to sight, Byron repeats “hear” twelve times, “ear(s)” six, “sound” seven, and “voice” six times. Unlike The Giaour, The Bride is abundant with acoustic terms related to music like “melody,” “chant,” “whistle,” “harmony,” “hymn,” “tune,”

“lute,” “nightingale,” and such melancholic sounds as “wail” and “groan.”

Constructing the sketches with the use of these terms, Byron represents Selim, the non- favorite son and rebel, through the perspectives of two observers: Giaffir, who claims to be

Selim’s father and is the despotic head of a Turkish tribe, and his daughter Zuleika, who turns into Selim’s cousin and then object of love. The tale starts with Giaffir plotting her marriage to a head of a neighboring tribe, but he is enraged when he discovers that Selim was roaming with

64 Byron started composing The Bride on 1 Nov. 1813 while working on the seventh edition of The Giaour, which appeared at the end of the same month. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, this last proof-corrected edition, as McGann calls, was followed by seven “re-print” eds. (CPW 2: 413). Similarly, The Bride went through numerous editions and re-prints: five in 1813, four in 1814 and one in 1815. I quote from McGann’s ninth ed. (late Nov 1814) but refer to EHC’s seventh (31 Jan or 9 Apr 1814) when a discrepancy between both arises. 102

Zuleika outside the borders of the Harem enclosure. Upon seeing Selim’s despondency, Zuleika relieves him only by swearing loyalty to him and rejecting her father’s plans. Selim then asks for secrecy about her oath and claims to have a different identity from that of the subservient son, whom Giaffir and Zuleika have known. He then promises to reveal his mysterious identity in his secret grotto at midnight. There, Selim claims that her father’s Nubian slave, Haroun, who is the

Harem guard and Selim’s care-giver, had disclosed to him that Giaffir had murdered his real father, Abdullah, who was Giaffir’s brother and political rival. Embracing the identity of the wronged nephew and avenger of his father, Selim becomes the leader of a band of outlaws who seek to overthrow Giaffir’s reign in favor of a republican society. However, before Zuleika is able to respond to Selim’s plea to join him, her father’s guards surround them and kill Selim. She dies almost immediately upon hearing the gunshots.

Although Selim achieves his self-chosen identity only outside the borders of the patriarchal palace, the narrative reveals his assuming a mask in the court and also in the Harem enclosure. In fact, the tale deemphasizes his physiognomy as well as the physiognomies of his supposed father and sister. Their portraits focus on such other aspects of their appearance, which

Abby Lillethun considers as essential in constructing identity, as dress, facial expression, behaviour (speech and action) and social status, as I have discussed in Chapter 3 (74 and n52). In these instances, Byron reveals the discrepancy between the socially imposed identity and the personally chosen one by foregrounding the elements that a person may modify rather than the naturally endowed ones which Lavaterian physiognomy emphasizes, like the outline of the nose, the shape and color of the eyes, and the profile of the forehead. Like The Giaour, this tale too requires the readers to be sensitive about the discrepancies that arise in the narrative by noticing the changes not only in the characters and their surroundings but also in their relationships.

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In his first appearance, Selim is a conventional figure of the Orient, appearing to the casual observer or outsider as a Muslim son of rank who abides by the tradition of respecting the elderly or the patriarch. Selim thus approaches his supposed father by “First lowly rendering reverence meet!” and then addresses him with a downcast look while “standing at the Pacha’s feet,” as good Muslim sons are supposed to do (1.47-52). However, his usual identity of the obedient son, which he has embraced as a conventional role, is soon thwarted when Giaffir reacts violently to Selim’s apologizing for Zuleika’s absence from her abode—the Harem enclosure— because they had been wandering outdoors while reading such Eastern romances as “Mejnoun’s tale, or Sadi’s song” (1.71). Giaffir is greatly angered at discovering that Selim has crossed the borders of the Harem with Zuleika regularly. At first look, their transgression not only violates

Giaffir’s strict orders about his daughter’s remaining within the Harem enclosure, but also risks strangers seeing her unveiled, which is a cultural and religious violation among both Arabs and

Turks. He thus fears that her non-conforming appearance, or transgression, will threaten the marriage he had been plotting for her, and thus jeopardize his own financial and military interests. On a different level, Selim’s transgressing the borders regularly with his supposed sister also points to his achieving a level of freedom from the tyrant’s restrictions, as well as possible intimacy with his sister despite their captivity by the supposed murderer of his father.

The discovery of their transgression suggests Selim’s involvement in other forms of disruptive behaviour, and foreshadows his role in their eventual rebellion against their patriarch.

Despite Selim’s secret life that his cousin and the readers would discover in the second canto, Selim tries to soothe the patriarch in this scene by asking him gently, “Nay, Father, rage not” (1.78). In line with his interest in constructing sketches, Byron replaces this line from its original version in the seventh edition of April 1814 into “Nay, father, frown not” in the ninth

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edition of December. Byron’s later choice of “frown,” which is the manifestation of disapprobation, over “rage,” which points to the violent action, prioritizes the visual aspect of

Giaffir’s response over his emotional one. This change also shifts Giaffir’s response from the inner and hence hidden, to the outer and hence the facial, which foreshadows the visual contempt that evolves in the following lines. The readers thus perceive Giaffir’s response not only verbally, but also on his face, thus complementing his frowning image with that of the verbally abusing tyrant. In fact, this revision also coincides with Thomas Phillips’ exhibiting his portraits of Byron in May-July 1814, which possibly triggered Byron’s interest in the visual, causing him to change “rage” into the more visually striking “frown.”

In this scene, Selim’s soothing words not only trigger Giaffir’s visual contempt, but also his verbal one, which represents Selim as not only a disliked son, but also as a probably duplicitous rival threatening the interests of his supposed father. Giaffir calls Selim the “son of a slave” (1.81), questions his faith, and accuses him of cowardice and effeminacy. Deeply humiliated at the non-manly and public accusations, Selim discards his previous visual subservience and compliant behavior by challenging Giaffir visually. The scene then applies what Lillethun describes as a “nonverbal communication system” (189) by which the characters use such elements of appearance as facial gestures, body movement, and clothing to reveal their inner thoughts and emotions. Discarding speech as a medium of interaction, Selim uses visual signs to respond to Giaffir’s “every frown and every [visual or verbal] word” (1.107), retorting visually “Son of a slave!—and who my sire?” (1.110). Although at this point, this response can be taken as referring to Giaffir as being his sire, father, Selim claims in the second canto that he is not. He will tell Zuleika that Haroun had revealed to him that Giaffir murdered his brother—

Abdullah—who was the lawful ruler and Selim’s real father. Haroun claims that Giaffir had

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killed all their acquaintances except the orphaned nephew, and then moved the tribe from

“Roumelie”65—a town in ancient Greece—to the “Asiatic side” of the Ottoman Empire to conceal his fratricide (2.293-95).

This move may be read allegorically as pointing to the occupation of ancient Greek lands by the Ottomans, a historical reality which Byron integrates within his narratives on the East,

The Giaour, The Bride, and The Corsair. Although the antagonist in this tale is Giaffir, the

Turkish patriarch who asserts his animosity towards the Arabs, and is rumored to have murdered his brother Abdullah, Byron’s choice of Abdullah’s name is significant, too, because of its direct

Arabic associations, meaning the servant of God/Alla. I admit that this tale raises doubts about

Giaffir’s murder by keeping it a rumored secret which is never confirmed or denied by the supposed perpetuator. But because Byron’s letters reveal his interest in choosing the names of his characters, I read Byron’s choice of the names for the brothers as pointing to the conflicts between the ethnicities in the East, whose conflicts are, however, incomprehensible and unclear to the foreign/distant observer.66 In this instance, the multiple interpretations of the visual exchange between Selim and his supposed sister, and the input that Haroun provides about their secret past points to the fact that each response—whether verbal, visual or physical—can be interpreted in different ways according to the observer. This recalls Byron’s view of the complexity of defining identity based on appearance. As in The Giaour, Byron again requires his readers to be cautious when perceiving the characters and their narratives because the reported events may be flawed or incomplete, as the changing portraits of Selim as well as his father/uncle through their different observers continue to demonstrate.

65 McGann explains that the ancient town of Roumelie was on the Gulf of Corinth (CPW 2: 293n441). 66 See Byron’s input on his intentional choice of name for Zuleika, for example, in my Introd. (4). 106

Although “no sound from Selim’s lip was heard” (1.105), Selim’s bold “glances” (1.111) not only challenge Giaffir’s paternity claims, but also challenge his social and political status.

Upon the change of his mask of subservience, Selim appears to threaten exposing Giaffir’s dark secret. Giaffir then justifies his former accusations by explaining the reason he forbids Selim from participating in masculine endeavors: because of his youth and his supposed lack of interest in warfare. Despite his outward assertions of good will, Giaffir perceives Selim as “an Arab to

[his] sight, / or Christian crouching in the fight” (1.144-45). He thus notes a discrepancy between

Selim’s outer appearance and inner self by perceiving him as both a racial and religious enemy of the Turks.67 The text then foreshadows the duplicity in Selim’s identity when interpreting his interest in Eastern romances as resulting from his being what Giaffir calls “Greek in soul, if not in creed,” or descending from mixed origins (1.87). Although Giaffir admits that Selim’s “blood

[is] so near [his] own” (1.141)—due to his being his own son as the narrative suggests, or the son of his brother as Haroun claims—I read Giaffir’s accusing him of being an Arab, a Christian, or an Arab Christian as stemming from his mother’s ethnicity and/or his upbringing by a foreigner, or non-Turkish care-giver. His mother might have been a Greek or an Arab maiden, who was enslaved and forced into the Harem during Ottoman aggressions. Giaffir may also be pointing to

Selim’s status as the orphan whom his Harem guard and Nubian slave—Haroun—had raised. In the second canto, Selim recalls the emotional and physical neglect he had suffered while Giaffir

“ever went to war alone, / And pent [him] here [at home] untried—unknown— / To Haroun’s care with women left” (2.329-31). Selim accuses Giaffir of leaving him intentionally with

67 Byron’s writings frequently note the racial and religious animosity between the different ethnicities residing in the lands under Ottoman rule. His footnote to these lines states that “the Turks abhor the Arabs (who return the compliment a hundred fold) even more than they hate the Christians” (CPW 3: 144n436). 107

women and slaves to deny him any opportunities to develop his masculinity, worldly knowledge or expertise in warfare.

This scene is a good example of Byron’s transforming verbal expression or speech into visual expression, or a “sketch” as he had described the tale in his letter to Clarke, which I had quoted in the beginning of this chapter. Byron delineates his “sketch,” or the visually-based conversation, with the use of verbal representation. Although W. J. T. Mitchell asserts that words are deficient in describing a visual object because of their inability to replace the visual or the presence of an artifact, especially in ekphrastic texts (152-59), Byron challenges this relationship between the visual object and its representation in the previous instance. As Byron would continue doing in the following scenes, he ignores the facial features of his characters by emphasizing their visual responses to external and internal stimuli. When constructing these sketches, Byron also uses the languages of metaphor, metonymy and sensibility. His language invites the readers to see and feel the plight of his characters, especially Selim, whose self- portrait later foregrounds the emotional and physical abuses or deprivations he had endured, and thus justifies his future rebellion.

The doubling that Giaffir perceives in Selim in the previous scene appears again in the next scene with Zuleika, who, like her father, is startled at the behavioral and facial changes she notes. Failing to comprehend the “nonverbal communication system,” which Giaffir and Selim had used in the previous scene, Zuleika is rather alarmed by Selim’s initial silence. She asks him repeatedly about his emotional and physical turmoil because “little from his aspect [she] learned”

(1.258). Unlike her father, who responds to Selim’s visual change with verbal abuse, she responds with attempting to reverse or eradicate those changes which trouble her especially his uncustomary silence. She first wonders why Selim is so upset at Giaffir’s outburst against him

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since they are not unusual. Using the language of sensibility, which champions emotional display and bodily gestures to reveal the state of the mind, Zuleika traces the changes in Selim’s appearance from the “gentle Selim” (1.278) into the “pale, mute, and mournfully sedate” Selim

(1.256). Zuleika thus relates his physiognomic changes, each of which is associated with sensibility romances, to emotional disturbance: his pale color indicates ill-health, and his silence and motionlessness indicate emotional and physical disturbance. This unconscious-like state makes him oblivious to his surroundings, including Zuleika’s supplications and cries.

After failing to use speech to revive Selim, Zuleika attracts his attention by other sensory means, which are associated not only with the feminine and emotions but also with the exotic.

She first uses smell, sprinkling the “Persian Atar-gul’s perfume” (270); and then offers a rose, a doubly visual and olfactory Eastern icon, which, she claims, carries “a message from the

Bulbul.” This is also an aural icon, meaning nightingale in Arabic and Persian, and is associated with Eastern love poetry (1.288-94).68 But upon the failure of these Eastern possessions, which are associated with different sensory stimuli and are supposed to trigger his love according to conventions of Orientalism, she rebels against their patriarch. She thus vows her life-long devotion to Selim and renounces her arranged marriage. Only her verbal rebellion succeeds in triggering a response from the deeply disturbed Selim, compelling him into speech and action.

Byron marks Selim’s abandoning his state of motionlessness by the flash in his eyes, a conventional element in physiognomic analysis. His eyes flash when an external factor breaks through his mask of the subservient son. In the introductory scene, his eyes had flashed with indignation when Giaffir had accused him of cowardice and effeminacy, and had questioned his

68 For more on the significance of the rose and the nightingale (Bulbul) in Eastern poetry, see Oueijan 93-94. 109

humble origins and faith (1.113-14). In this second occurrence, however, Selim’s eyes flash with animation and passion because Zuleika vows her fidelity to him and rebels against her father’s ruling. The present flash generates different metaphors of emotions, which foreshadow the physical and emotional transformations not only in Selim but also in Zuleika, which occur in the next canto. No longer being the “pale, mute, and mournfully sedate” youth of the previous scene

(1.256), Selim disrupts Zuleika’s portrait of the emotionally and physically impaired brother.

He lived—he breathed—he moved—he felt—

He raised the maid from where she knelt—

His trance was gone—his keen eye shone

With thoughts that long in darkness dwelt—

With thoughts that burn—in rays that melt. (1.327-30)

Selim overcomes “the black cloud” that had “bound” him to motionlessness and despondency once “the soul of that eye” flashes (1.337-38). He first becomes active physically and emotionally by sympathizing with Zuleika’s anguish and raising her to him; and then he becomes active mentally and verbally by responding to her vows in a manner which endows him with a different identity. Rather than focusing on the exact physical changes he experiences upon his return to life, this sketch focuses on the metaphorical changes relating to Selim’s flashing eyes.

The narrative thus marks the way Selim’s eyes simultaneously endow him with the appearance and the power of a war horse called into war, a lion attacking its prey, and a tyrant being assaulted. The shared feature in these examples is the swiftness and relentlessness with which each is associated. This image also unveils a different identity from the effeminate and submissive one with which Giaffir had associated Selim in the opening scene. The present associations transform him into a verbally and physically active figure.

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Instead of embracing his supposed sister’s voluntary vow of fidelity to him, Selim is extremely disturbed and he demands secrecy, especially from her father. Although she vows without considering her personal or social surroundings, her vow not only violates the interests of their shared patriarch, but also problematizes their current sibling relationship by its verging into incest, which she, however, fails to realize.69 In fact, Byron admits to Clarke and later to

John Galt (BLJ 3: 196) that he had originally made Selim and Zuleika siblings in the early manuscripts because women in the East were not permitted to associate with men outside their family circle; and because Eastern women submitted to arranged marriages which ensured the interests of their patriarchs. Byron justified his constructing them as siblings by believing that only a brother would be able to achieve the familiarity for any passionate relationship to develop.

But he claims altering that relationship into cousinship because portraits of incest would be censored in his contemporary society even if the tale was located in the East. Despite the plausibility of this justification, it still overlooks the fact that while incest existed in ancient cultures—like Egypt and Greece—to ensure the purity of the family line and the political and financial interests of the patriarchy, such relationships were, however, never tolerated in the East, and were severely punished whether in Islam or in Eastern cultures. Byron’s choice of cousinship for this tale also overlooks the fact that marriages between first cousins have not only been permissible but also preferable in the Middle East since those times for the same reasons incest was permitted in ancient cultures: to maintain political and financial interests.

69 When reflecting on the composition of The Bride, Byron writes that “It was written in four nights to distract my dreams from * *. Were it not thus, it had never been composed” (BLJ 3: 208). Various critics, like Marchand (BLJ 3: 175n2 and Byron 155) interpret the initial sibling relationship between Selim and Zuleika as mirroring Byron’s with his half-sister, Augusta. Other critics like Filiz Turhan (61-68) and Marandi (“Concubine” 103) use this reference to incest to justify their postcolonial reading of the text as displaced colonial desire. 111

Regardless of the nature of their relationship at this point, as it would evolve in the next canto, Zuleika fails to perceive that unveiling the inner, hidden self whether with words, actions or even looks not only changes a person’s identity and status, but also causes patriarchal disapproval and perhaps contempt, as in Selim’s case. Selim thus first warns Zuleika to conceal her vow and her passion for him, and then he comforts her by telling her not to worry about her impending marriage because he and his friends can rid her of the groom, announcing that “Think not I am what I appear” (1.381). In this declaration, Byron plays on classical views of the separation between body and soul by having Selim announce that his self, “I,” and his body,

“appearance,” do not coincide, thus disrupting Giaffir’s and Zuleika’s reading, or observing him in the previous scenes. In this fourth sketch, Selim not only verbalizes his own identity for the first time, but also achieves other ends through his declaration: he renounces the effeminate identity that Giaffir’s and Zuleika’s sketches had been claiming; and he reclaims his masculinity by asserting power and status against his rival, and embracing a brave, chivalric stance for the sake of his beloved.

Selim’s statement about his identity here, like his next ones, questions nineteenth-century attitudes about appearance, or prevalent views about physiognomy. Through Selim, Byron questions such views by demonstrating that both appearance and identity can be controlled by the individual, as they can be shaped intentionally or unintentionally by external changes. Selim thus warns Zuleika of the possible discrepancy between his real identity and his customary appearance, covertly hinting at his life outside the confines of her father’s court and the Harem, and hinting at his mysterious “friends.” Although Giaffir detains Selim and Zuleika within the borders of the Harem, Selim gains limited movement whether by Giaffir’s permission or not.

Selim thus roams the surrounding islands in Giaffir’s absence, and attends his court during his

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presence unlike Zuleika who is strictly veiled and restrained within the border of her domestic circle in the tradition of Muslim women, as her father asserts in the introductory scene when promising “woe to the head whose eye beheld / My child Zuleika’s face unveiled!” (1.38-39).

Despite the apparent restriction on their movements and his initial outward obedience to Giaffir,

Selim and Zuleika not only cross the physical borders of the domestic enclosure, but also transgress other boundaries which the patriarch had imposed, such as nourishing a forbidden emotional attachment, and defying Zuleika’s arranged marriage.

Selim’s first verbalization about the discrepancy between his appearance and inner self shocks Zuleika, who first retorts “Think not thou art what thou appearest!” His claim not only implies a different identity from the one she knows, but also threatens the supposed reciprocal trust and confidence in their sibling relationship. Although his declaration disturbs her, she discards his troubling implications, rather stating “My Selim, thou art sadly changed; / This morn

I saw thee gentlest, dearest, / But now thou’rt from thyself estranged” (1.383-86). She then deconstructs the physical implication of his claim, asserting that she “saw” him that morning unchanged and in harmony with his self. For her, the mind (inner) and body (appearance) are not only inseparable, but reflect each other according to prevalent conventions of physiognomy. She switches the pronouns in Selim’s initial statement to reconfirm the relationship between the outer and the inner, which Selim’s declaration disrupts. She concludes that “thou,” Selim’s inner self, is estranged from “thyself,” his outer, physical self. To her, behaving and speaking differently from his customary self put Selim’s inner self (mind) in a disharmonious relationship with his appearance, or physical self (body), which she finally concludes to be physically ill.

In this scene, a severe clash occurs between the domestic, feminine ideals of the sensual

Zuleika and the worldly masculine ones, with which the now rational Selim identifies. Zuleika

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not only uses sensually related means to revive her despondent brother/lover in the beginning of this scene, but also believes in the permanence of her domestic surroundings, including Selim.

She thus wishes “to be what [she has] ever been” (1.419) by resisting changes coming from outside the Harem enclosure, as when rejecting her father’s arrangements, and vowing loyalty to

Selim and to her domestic circle. However, her clinging to her familiar surroundings shows her failure to mature into the kind of adult relationships which her father believes her husband would teach, or perhaps enforce (1.217). Accordingly, she persists in believing that Selim is physically ill or emotionally disturbed, and seeks evidence by examining his physiognomic features visually and manually. When she kisses his cheeks, eyes and lips as a token of her fidelity, she attributes the fact that his “lips are [like] flame” and a “fever in [his] veins is flushing” (1.396-98) to his supposed sickness. Although this physical contact is the first one after she confesses her love for him, she discards the physical/sexual aspect of that passion. Despite their passion verging on incest at this point, Zuleika believes that their emotional attachment must be a known fact, and must be legal since her father and the Harem guards had neither forbidden their comradeship nor their growing attachment since their childhood.

Besides her inability to understand the implications of Selim’s different identity, Zuleika fails to understand his need for secrecy, and persistently asks for an explanation. Fearing the spies of her father, Selim asks Zuleika to escape with him to the secret grotto because only “then shalt [she] learn of Selim more / Than [she] hast heard or thought before” (1.472-73). Although he comforts her not to fear him, and promises her fidelity like her own, he urges her to keep their present revelations and their night meeting a secret, luring her again with the promise that “To- night, Zuleika, thou shalt hear / My tale, my purpose, and my fear— / I am not, love! what I appear” (1.480-82). Selim’s second assertion about the discrepancy in his identity denotes a

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different meaning from his previous one. He not only warns Zuleika of the seriousness of his claims, but also prepares her for the changes in his identity including their sibling relationship at which he hints by addressing her as his “love.” In fact, his mysterious reconfirmation of the discrepancy in his identity triggers Zuleika’s curiosity about his mysterious status, which he represents as powerful and horrific, or sublime-like, yet attractive enough to seduce her into crossing the boundaries of her domestic enclosure again despite risking disobedience to her father and possibly her own safety.

To explore the implications of claiming a self-chosen identity, the second canto balances three close-up sketches of Selim: Selim in the past and in the present in Zuleika’s view, and

Selim to a casual observer. Like Selim’s later change of his customary clothing, she also changes her appearance in the second canto by cross-dressing “in the darkest sable vest / Which none save noblest Moslem wear” (2.86-87). But before focusing on the changes in Selim, whom

Zuleika believed in the previous canto she knew well, this canto traces the changes in Selim’s grotto from her perspective. Her destination not only contrasts with her own room, which the tale describes to be like a “Peri cell” (2.84) with its promised security, wealth and light, but also differs from the grotto where “oft her lute she wont to tune, / And oft her Koran conned apart; /

And oft in youthful reverie / She dream’d what Paradise might be” (2.102-105). The present grotto is dark with the light that the “brazen lamp but dimly threw,” which to her eyes was “a ray of no celestial hue” (2.118-19). At first, Zuleika discards the surrounding changes as unreal and attributes them to the pervading darkness, which disguises everything as different from what each item is “by better light” (2.116-17). Although Selim had hinted at this change when asserting the discrepancy between his appearance and his self claimed identity, only now does

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Zuleika question sight as an unreliable medium of perception and realize its vulnerability to light/dark, and to differences in perspectives.

Zuleika’s moment of recognition occurs when she notes such “stranger objects” than she was used to seeing as the weaponry of “brands of foreign blade and hilt,” of which “one was red—perchance with guilt,” and a cup “that did not seem to hold sherbet” (2.121-28). This recognition greatly frightens her and she seeks Selim to understand “what may this mean.”

However, when gazing at him, she only exclaims, “Oh! can this be he?” (2.129-30). Her rhetorical question actually points to the changes in each aspect of his appearance: his dress, physiognomic features and status among his accomplices. In fact, the unconventional appearance of the poem’s lines also enhances the changes which she is shocked at observing.

His robe of pride was thrown aside,

His brow no high-crown’d turban bore,

But in its stead a shawl of red,

Wreath’d lightly round, his temples wore:—

That dagger, on whose hilt the gem

Were worthy of a diadem,

No longer glitter’d at his waist,

Where pistols unadorn’d were braced.

And from his belt a sabre swung,

And from his shoulder loosely hung

The cloak of white—the thin capote

That decks the wandering Candiote:

Beneath—his golden plated vest

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Clung like a cuirass to his breast—

The greaves below his knee that wound

With silvery scales were sheathed and bound.

But were it not that high command

Spake in his eye—and tone, and hand—

All that a careless eye could see

In him was some young Galiongée. (2.131-50)

Zuleika contrasts Selim’s present appearance with his customary one, using external appearance as indicative of his inner self. She not only realizes his power and status among the rebels, but also notices his different clothing. He discards his luxurious dress items like his customary fancy robe, lavish turban and jewelry because they associate him with Giaffir’s reign and probably imply his effeminacy and inaction. Instead, he wears such garments as a red shawl around his temple, a protective metallic shield on his chest and his ankles, and a white thin cloak or capote to cover his shoulders in the manner of Candiotes or Cretans, as McGann explains (CPW 3:

142n439). Selim also carries more efficient weapons than his usual dagger, which was decorated with gems, by replacing it with plain pistols and a sabre. This change of dress and weaponry indicates Selim’s readiness for violent action and especially battle.

Selim’s sketch ends with the perspective of a “careless eye” or a bystander. Rather than appearing in the identity of the son of the local ruler—as the initial casual observer represented him—or as Giaffir’s non-favorite, effeminate son—as Giaffir and Zuleika represented him—

Selim’s final appearance not only emphasizes his power and status among his followers, but also conflates him with the identity of a “Galiongée,” which Byron explains in his notes to be a

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Turkish sailor and an Arnaut/Albanian robber.70 Selim’s changed appearance at this point mirrors the changes in the title-character of The Giaour when he not only changes physically, but also transforms into a blood-thirsty revengeful lover, pursuing the murderer of his beloved as

Selim pursues now the murderer of his father. Both protagonists change into violent avengers when each discovers the murder of a loved one. In fact, the Candiote and Galiongée were marginalized groups belonging to the lower orders of the Turkish patriarchal and political system. By imitating their appearance, Selim rejects his predefined status within Giaffir’s patriarchy and repositions himself as a social and political rebel, or outcast. Accordingly, Selim leads his pirates to replace Giaffir’s despotic reign with his own republican ideals. He also rejects

Giaffir’s paternal claims and his status as Zuleika’s brother by claiming to be her cousin, which would sanctify their emotional attachment according to Eastern cultures.

After the two confusing sketches of Selim’s appearance as a rebel and as a “Galiongée,”

Selim interrupts Zuleika’s narrative to remind her and perhaps the readers that “I said I was not what I seemed— / And now thou seest my words were true” (2.151-52). Recalling his two warnings about the untruthfulness of his former identity, Selim unveils what he claims to be his real identity. This statement prioritizes speech over the visual, or seeing, by asserting that appearance is an unreliable maxim to define identity—the inner—because appearances may change or be modified by the subject, or by external circumstances. However, Selim’s statement recalls the Giaour’s confession, too, when he refers the friar to words written on his brow, as I have discussed in Chapter 3 (77-78). Unlike Selim, who prefers speech, the Giaour is unable to

70 Many of Byron’s contemporaries were offended at his claiming familiarity with the Turkish lower classes, especially outlaws, because of his membership in the British nobility. They read Selim as mirroring Byron’s disruptive views about social and political order because Selim disregarded his social and political rank, which resembled Byron’s, learned republican ideals of equality and freedom from rebels, like Byron, and revolted against his uncle, or people, to which they feared Byron aspired. For more, see Mel Campbell (12) and Deborah Lutz (30). 118

talk about the murder of Leila and thus refers his observers to the visual, his brow, but his two observers, the fisherman and the friar, both fail to read his pain, rather focusing on his atrocious murder of Hassan and his rejection of their forms of worship. Although the Giaour prioritizes the visual over speech, the tale demonstrates the way his observers, like Selim’s, interpret his appearance differently from his own perception. By representing the multiple perspectives about each character as resulting from the failure of the verbal and the visual, Byron challenges his readers to read both tales, foreshadowing the more complex narratives of his later ones, as I will discuss in Chapters 5 and 6.

Besides the change in his appearance in the previous instance, Selim uses the declaration about his identity (2.151-52) to disclose the last and most important change in his identity: his relationship to Zuleika. Selim thus uses the past tense, “was,” in this reassertion and switches the term “appear” into “seem” to denote a further discrepancy about their past. He then declares his new identity as a cousin, which he uses to sanction their emotional attachment. But Zuleika’s emotional and visual disappointment and her trance-like state compels Selim to narrate his story of adoption and the atrocities he claims her father had committed against his father and their family, as Haroun had told him. The now verbally expressive Selim describes the way he grew up in the limited sphere of Giaffir’s Harem enclosure and his court, evolving emotionally and mentally only when Haroun released him during Giaffir’s absences.

’Tis vain—my tongue can not impart

My almost drunkenness of heart,

When first this liberated eye

Surveyed Earth—Ocean—Sun and Sky!

As if my spirit pierced them through,

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And all their inmost wonders knew—

One word alone can paint to thee

That more than feeling—I was Free!

Ev’n for thy presence ceased to pine—

The World—nay—Heaven itself was mine! (2.343-52)

These lines mirror and then question the freedom and harmony “man” achieves when communing with nature. Upon encountering the outside world, Selim experiences multiple sensual, emotional and mental perceptions. He is first speechless and emotionally overwhelmed and then he perceives his surrounding natural elements, grasping their “inmost wonders.” He gradually realizes that his freedom not only liberates him from the physical bondage of his supposed father, but also from the political and institutional suppression of the patriarchy. This enables him to acquire mental and intellectual freedom, or the ability to think and act independently. Selim admits that during his secret trips, he becomes acquainted with members of different ethnicities and religions, including Giaffir’s rivals, like the “trusty Moor,” who tours him around the neighboring islands, and might have introduced him to the rebels, whom Selim befriends and eventually leads.

According to Wordsworthian views of identity, communing with nature enables a person’s introspective development because the internal world, or self, is an extension of the natural world. Selim’s internalizing the secrets of nature enables him to understand his self and thus embrace his self-chosen identity, which, however, disrupts the identity imposed by his patriarch. But instead of learning to sympathize with and understand his fellow humans, his harmony with the outer world causes the reverse effect of Wordsworthian views. Selim revolts against his uncle by promoting his own idealistic, republican views, seeking to overthrow the

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supposed tyranny of Giaffir militarily and to promote equality and freedom. His slogans resemble those which had driven different revolutionary groups across Europe during Byron’s times, especially the French Revolution.

Basing this scene on the prevalent political and military instabilities and the rising tensions between the ideals of the old-world order and republicanism,71 Byron has Selim sanction his rebellion by emphasizing his chivalric ends: to avenge his father, thwart Giaffir’s despotic reign, and protect Zuleika from an unhappy marriage. However, Selim idealizes the life of the nomad by claiming not to be interested in political or social endeavors, thus choosing an unconventional life, in which he neither proposes marriage nor offers a stable domestic, family life. From my perspective, the alternative Selim offers her is not better than what her father had originally intended. This scene, besides Selim’s long tirade against the political atrocities of

Giaffir and his advertising his own republican ideals, mirrors the turbulent nineteenth-century political scene when Byron wrote his Turkish tales. Selim’s freedom and equality slogans resemble those which had motivated the French revolutionaries against the Bourbon monarchy and those of the 1821 Greek revolutionaries revolting against the Turkish occupation, in which

Byron would participate in 1823.72 However, Selim’s eventual failure to achieve any of his political or personal promises mirrors the failure of those revolutionary groups, specifically the

71 Byron’s journals reveal his anxiety about the current political conditions, i.e. the peninsular wars and the allies’ fighting to end Napoleon’s reign. Although such conditions triggered mixed responses from writers, Byron’s personal life was also unstable with his juggling his turbulent finances, and his multiple sexual affairs, as I have discussed in Chapter 1. 72 Byron’s support of the Greek revolution would fail because he contracted a fatal fever before actually joining the war. 121

French whose bloody revolutionary aftermath was approaching its end with Wellington’s victories in the peninsular wars.73

Selim’s long narrative reveals that he had crossed multiple physical, political, cultural and educational boundaries which his patriarch, or the despot, had imposed. As the opening lines reveal, he freely accesses the Harem palace to meet Zuleika even when she is sleeping (1.65).

Selim also sneaks away from the palace to join a band of pirates and roams the seas when his uncle is away on his raids. He then learns about republican ideals from his acquaintances who are a mixture of different races and creeds. Selim also acquires military skills, which Giaffir forbids him to acquire. And Selim leads a pirate band and seduces his cousin—Zuleika—into eloping with him. Selim then claims to lead a rebellion to avenge his father and help his band form a republic. In short, his transgressions enable him to replace what he perceives as his imposed identity of the silenced and marginalized member of the Harem enclosure with the identity of the eloquent orator, violent insurgent and active lover.

Despite her willingness to thwart her arranged marriage and her agreeing to meet Selim at his grotto, Zuleika is physically and verbally non-respondent upon hearing Selim’s confession about his supposed identity. Selim embraces his unveiled self proudly, reconfirming that “this

Galiongée, / To whom thy plighted vow is sworn, / Is leader of those pirate hordes” (2.309-311).

With her rising anguish at this discovery, he reminds her of her vow with which she had innocently attached herself to his person, which implicates both his masked and his unmasked selves. He then persistently asks her to elope “this hour away—away!” with him (2.485).

Although Selim offers her to “recal [her] willing vow” if she is “appalled by truths imparted

73 For more on the Napoleonic wars, see Chap. 2 (45n27). 122

now” (2.487-88), he threatens to commit suicide if she rejects him. The narrative then describes her as she appears to the casual eye, probably of the Western reader,74 resembling “a younger

Niobè” (2.491-496). Like that mythological “statue of distress,” Zuleika remains “mute and motionless” while Selim asks her to choose either her father or him. Obedience to her father means submitting to his plans of an arranged marriage and losing Selim, who threatens suicide; but eloping with Selim means not only nonconformity to the patriarchy and leading an unpredictable life with Selim, but also the execution of her father by her proposed suitor.

The truth that Zuleika had persistently sought in the previous canto simultaneously causes her extreme despair, and hinders her physical and mental abilities. She finally realizes that her domestic circle is not immune to change and is not safe from worldly dangers, as she had claimed in the first canto. She also discovers that her patriarch, father and supposed protector is possibly a murderer and so is Selim. But the supposed brother, to whom she had vowed fidelity, claims now to be her cousin and reintroduces himself as a lover. Despite her strict Harem upbringing, Selim expects Zuleika to abandon everything, accompanying him as a wanderer, exile and probably social outcast. In the midst of such tumultuous changes, she is caught within a rebellion headed by her lover against her father. She recovers from her trance only with the sight and sound of the blazing torches seeking the leader of the band, Selim. She then shouts for his safety, yelling in a confused voice, “Oh! Fly—no more—yet now my more than brother!”

(2.501) and then dies before the shots even kill him.

74 Byron compares Zuleika to the mythological Niobè, who is associated with extreme despair resulting from her losing her twelve children. In fact, The Bride is abundant with references to Greek mythology, especially Ovid’s Hero and Leander from which Byron borrows such elements as the title of Abydos, and various excerpts which he includes before key scenes to foreshadow the unhappy destiny of the Eastern lovers. Although Byron refers to Eastern culture and religion and provides lengthy footnotes, his borrowing from Ovid points to his balancing his imagined, Ottoman-dominated Greece with classical Greece, as he does in The Giaour. 123

The narrative briefly glosses over this double moment of Zuleika’s decision and indecision, focusing on the aftermath of the conflict which she fails to resolve, or perhaps resolves by escaping with death. This moment when Zuleika speaks and then almost immediately dies marks an essential moment of realization, awareness, maturity, change and long-awaited reaction to her surroundings, or the worldly. Selim’s yelling the start of the battle and the fatal shots force Zuleika to abandon her frozen-like state, which resembles the motionless state of

Selim in the previous canto. However, while Selim moves into action and speech upon hearing

Zuleika’s vow of rebellion against her patriarch, she moves into death with his applauding the battle. At that moment, she realizes the ongoing change around her and perhaps in her own self, which she had denied by overlooking the changes in Selim in the beginning of the tale. She finally realizes that the public sphere implies change, a reality Byron and his contemporaries had realized in their present times of war with France and the struggles with the Ottomans. But she had been resisting change so long that when she perceives it, she only acts like conventional heroines of romance, who die as a result of, or escape from, the injustices they suffer.

Negotiating the prevalent nineteenth-century discourses of identity, the sketches of Selim and Zuleika reveal the way their identities gradually change from the socially imposed identity of immature and naive siblings into the self-chosen one of rebellious lovers despite Zuleika’s final reiteration from that identity. Through his repeated statements about appearance as an unreliable maxim to define identity, Selim asserts that appearance may not only mask the inner self, but also reflect a false or misconstrued identity. However, the tale leaves the question of identity open with Selim’s rhetorical question before his murder, “What could I be?” (2.321). After the series of conflicting identities which Selim veils and unveils, this question suggests his embodying additional identities, or multiple other selves, using the inanimate reference “what”

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instead of “who.” This question also enquires about the nature of identity, proposing that the being under the well-known mask could be human or non-human, like the vampire being into which Leila is transformed in the Giaour’s confession. Such elusiveness about identity haunts

Byron and his protagonists in all his tales about the East because of the vulnerability of identity to the changes in perspectives and contexts. In fact, before composing his next tale about the

East, The Corsair, barely a month after the initial publication of The Bride, Byron ponders this question about the nature of identity again in his Journal through the context of his own travels and experiences. In the next chapter, I will focus on the implications of Byron’s examining this question in both the Journal and the tale, and the way he replaces the binary way of defining identity which he had proposed in The Bride.

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CHAPTER 5

“—AND WHAT AM I?”:75 CONRAD, “CORSAIR,” AND PERSONAL IDENTITY IN

THE CORSAIR

A month before starting his third romance on the orient, The Corsair (1814), and while revising the proofs for The Bride, Byron started his “Journal: November 14, 1813—April 19,

1814.” The Journal reveals Byron’s multiple struggles with his financial and sexual affairs and his parliamentary duties. It also reveals his discontent with the tensions between the Tories and the Whigs, and with Napoleon’s impending defeat.76 While McGann recommends using this

Journal to understand the political and personal contexts shaping this tale (CPW 3: 445),77 I read it as a document with a goal: exploring identity. Re-phrasing Selim’s question “What could I be,” Byron starts the Journal by pondering his identity and that of others again.

At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over, one should be something; —and

what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty—and the odd months. What have I seen? The

same man all over the world;—ay, and woman too” (BLJ 3: 204).

Embracing the slogans of liberty and equality that the French revolution initially announced,

Byron claims that no one is of extraordinary value, not even himself. As I have demonstrated in the previous chapters, his works conflate representations of people from the East with those of his fellow Europeans despite the supposed ethnic, religious and social differences among them.

75 This quote is from Byron’s opening lines to his Journal of 1813-1814 (BLJ 3: 204), which I will discuss in this chapter. 76 The impending end of Napoleon’s reign to which I refer in this part is the temporary one of 6 Apr 1814 to 26 Feb 1815, when the allies had exiled Napoleon to Elba and the Bourbon monarchy resumed the throne of France. But as I have noted in Chap. 2 (49n33), Napoleon escaped in Feb 1815, and resumed his aggressions until he was defeated at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. He was then confined in Saint Helena where he died. 77 Marchand notes that the only extant version of the Journal is the one that Thomas Moore had included in his 1830 collection, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (BLJ 3: xii). 126

In his Journal, Byron levels those differences again, and represents himself as both observer and observed by not only comparing his perception of his self with those of his acquaintances, but also controlling his appearance to influence their perceptions. As I will discuss in the second part, Byron represents the title-character in The Corsair in the same self-conscious manner.

Reading Byron’s Journal, critics like Daniel P. Watkins (69-88) and McGann (445-46) argue that the Journal reveals the influence of Sismonde de Sismondi’s writings about the medieval Italian revolution, after which the citizens replaced their republican ideals with the tyranny of despots, strains which both critics trace in The Corsair. They thus situate the tale

“between two openly political statements (the dedication and ‘To a Lady Weeping’)” (Watkins

69-70). In his Dedication to Moore, Byron ponders various ethnic and cultural issues; and in his formerly published eight-line poem of March 1812, “Lines to a Lady Weeping,”78 he eulogizes the Princess Charlotte, who had Whig sympathies, against her father King George (Wolfson,

Lord Byron 788-89). Byron’s acknowledging this poem with his tale caused the Tory press to condemn not only The Corsair, but also its writer.79 Although I partly agree with these critics’ reading of this tale, I suggest considering the prevalent repercussions of the French

Revolutionary ideals and the Ottoman occupation of Greece, too, besides medieval Italian politics. Byron might have republished “Lines” from his habit of republishing old works with new ones, and might have republished it to hint at the interference of the national by the personal when eulogizing the Princess’ emotional response publicly. I thus advocate reading the poem

78 McGann notes that Murray published the early editions of The Corsair with five supplementary poems besides “Lines,” which he removed after the political uproar it caused (3: 444-45). EHC lists those poems in WLB 3: 221. 79 Marchand notes the negative responses of various Tory led journals, like the Antijacobin and the True Churchman, which used Byron’s works, his character and his physical deformity to assert his immorality (BLJ 4: 95n2). His acquaintances also circulated rumors about his being “the actual Conrad, the veritable Corsair” during his residence in the East after Hobhouse’s departure to England on 17 July 1810 (BLJ 3: 250). 127

alongside not only the Dedication but also the Journal and the seventh edition of CHP, because both provide a background to Byron’s evolving views about identity in The Corsair.

In such entries as the 17 November 1813 one of the Journal, Byron introduces the issue of identity by meditating on the unstable identity of Napoleon. Byron and his acquaintances had initially admired Napoleon as the invincible general, reformer and defender of the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, which they attributed to classical Greece. But when Napoleon submitted to worldly greed and crowned himself emperor, Byron believed that he replaced his identity of “Anakim80 of anarchy” (BLJ 3: 210) with monarch and thus acted like members of

European monarchic dynasties. Moreover, with his later defeats and his fleeing from battlefields,

Napoleon’s identity changed further for Byron from “Héros de Roman” (210) to coward.

Reflecting on Napoleon’s initial fall in the 18 February 1814 entry, Byron expects him to at least defend his people against those he calls “the Invaders” (243). Byron is frustrated at Napoleon’s abandoning his former ideals, and apprehends the allies’ replacing him with the Bourbon monarchy, against whom the French had originally revolted. Because he considered all imperial powers, whether European or Eastern—Ottoman or Wahabi—81 as corrupt and enemies of liberty and freedom, he treats the fall of Napoleon as representing the second loss of Hellenistic ideals. However, his writings reveal his increasing mixed feelings towards Napoleon which continued beyond his second and final fall at Waterloo, as CHP 3 reveals in 1816.

After historicizing the question of identity by pondering the changes in the identity of

Napoleon, Byron rejects defining identity according to social class as he had done in CHP 1. He ponders the identities of the European sovereigns, who had condemned and subdued Napoleon,

80 McGann explains that “Anakim” is “the plural of Anak, an Old Testament race of Giants” (BLJ 3: 210n4). 81 For Byron’s attitude towards these political-religious groups, see CHP 2:729-35. 128

to question their public and personal merit in relationship to Napoleon’s. Embracing republican ideals, Byron criticizes the current social and political system for unjustly favoring such classes as dandies, “kings—and fellows of colleges—and women of ‘a certain age’—and many men of any age—and [himself], most of all!” (BLJ 3:244). He is uncomfortable that society favors the descendants of certain classes, like the gentry, based on their supposed birthright, and overlooks their personal merit or qualifications, especially in the case of monarchs. He notes the same flaw in prevalent attitudes towards appearance which he criticizes directly in The Corsair and Lara.

Despite his own advantageous status, which he, too, gained by chance—as he admits in this quote—Byron takes a grim stance on what he perceives as the lack of liberty and equality which ideals of the old-world order impose. He thus refers to Horace to remind his readers in a grim way that death levels all classes despite their social or political status and their wealth.

A month after examining identity in his Journal, Byron examines it again in The Corsair and its Dedication while he was also revising the two cantos of CHP.82 In fact, the seventh edition of CHP 1 and 2 examines Greek identity closely, an issue which The Corsair would examine through the multiple identities its title-character embraces. The additional ten stanzas in

CHP 2 compare and contrast the identities of the ancient and the present Greeks. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, the first canto argues the existence of multiple others whether in the lands under European rule or those under Ottoman rule. The second canto distinguishes between the ancient Greeks and modern Greeks: the ancient Greeks resemble the Western Europeans because Byron and his British readers identified with the classical heritage of which the present

Greeks were, however, ignorant. He also notes that the ignorance of modern Greeks about their

82 Byron had finished his seventh edition of CHP 1 and 2 in Dec 1813, but Murray published it in Jan 1814. 129

cultural heritage resembles that of their Ottoman occupiers who did not understand the value of the Greek remains in the lands they were occupying (2.82-90). Moreover, while he accepts the fall of ancient Greece in CHP 2 as resulting from the cyclical nature of history (2.729-37), as I have discussed on 30-31, Byron reveals an emotional crisis towards the second fall of Greece in his Journal and this tale, a fall which he perceives allegorically through the present fall of

Napoleon. This disappointment foreshadows the political and personal tensions on which Byron constructs The Corsair. Unlike the two cantos of CHP, The Corsair examines the identity of ancient Greece not in relationship to the Ottomans, but as a representation of Britishness.

While having Murray publish the seventh edition of CHP 1 and 2, Byron asks Thomas

Moore, and perhaps other readers of the Dedication, to permit him to “add a few words on a subject on which all men are supposed to be fluent, and none agreeable ?—Self” (CPW 3: 149).

Using the binaries of identity as he had proposed in The Bride, Byron contrasts the way his acquaintances perceive him as the creator of immoral characters83 with the way he perceives himself as a skillful versifier. He claims association with heroic couplets, originally connected with eighteenth-century writers in the same manner such poets as Spenser, Milton and Thomson were each associated with particular metrical forms.84 Byron was so fascinated by the eighteenth-

83 Some reviewers read the title-characters of Childe Harold and The Giaour as mirroring the immoralities in Byron. He refuted such claims by proposing that if his characters were based on his self, which his contemporaries believed to be fallen like his creation, then he and his creations were not worse than his acquaintances, whom he claimed to be also the source of his representations. 84 Although Byron fulfills this claim in The Corsair and Lara, he uses this measure inconsistently in his future verse narratives. He uses the Spenserian stanza, which he claims in the Dedication to be “too slow and dignified for narrative,” in CHP 3 (1816) and 4 (1818), as he does in the initial two cantos, which I have discussed in Chapter 1. Hermann Fischer describes the rhythm in his later works like The Siege of Corinth (1816) as greatly irregular (48), and considers Beppo (1818) and Don Juan (1819-22) as Byron’s “ottava rima narratives” (51). 130

century Scriblerians,85 whether for their literary merit, wit, or satire that he identified himself and his acquaintances by each member. In his letters, he compares himself to Alexander Pope, who was popular for his rhyming heroic couplets and social satires86 (BLJ 1: 113-14). Although

Byron adopts different metres in his narratives87 to the extent of changing his feet within a single poem from iambic octosyllabics to trochaics and dactylics as in The Bride, and his schemes from rhyming to alternating heroic couplets, Byron writes The Corsair and later Lara in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets despite a few trochaic reversals, which heighten the emotions and dramatize the ensuing action.88

When aligning his prosodic abilities with the popular writers he lists in the Dedication,

Byron recalls the concept of the “British self,” which his initial two cantos of CHP had questioned. Spenser was originally Irish, Milton was English and Thomson was Scots. Byron’s

Dedication not only hints at the inherent ethnic differences among the literary elite whom he believes to resemble in prosodic merit, but also foregrounds the ethnic origins of Moore and

Scott whom Byron directly discusses. He refers to this ethno-literary class construct in the

Journal as the “English bards” to whom Byron indirectly claims membership. Although Byron appears ignorant when using the limited category of “English” to refer to the succeeding popular

“British” writers, I will discuss the implications of what I believe is Byron’s intentional misuse of the expression in the next section.

85 The early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club consisted of six members, sharing political, social and literary interests: John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Robert Harley, Thomas Parnell, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. 86 Pope (1688–1744) was an English Catholic and an invalid who, despite his marginalized social, religious and physical status, wrote extensively during his short life. Byron not only thought of Pope’s struggles as resembling his own, but also aspired to imitate Pope’s literary merit and extensive production. 87 See Hermann Fischer for more on the way Byron varies his meter, especially the Spenserian stanza despite his claiming to replace it with the heroic couplets in the Dedication to The Corsair. 88 See the Introd. for the negative reaction to such metric use and Byron’s response (4). 131

Although briefly addressing Moore, Byron uses the Dedication to reinstate his interest in ethnic and literary identity, especially among the national, literary elite. Byron had Murray publish the original version despite his political reservations about Byron’s ethnic and political references.89 For instance, when congratulating Moore for his literary achievements and especially his forthcoming Lalla Rookh (1817), Byron commends Moore’s literary skills by asserting that such traits as “wildness, tenderness, and originality,” which are Byron’s requirements for a skillful writer, “are part of [Moore’s] national claim of oriental descent.”

When analyzing the manuscripts, McGann also adds that in the proof of the seventh edition

Byron replaces this reference to Moore’s descent with referring to his “nation’s oriental inheritance” (BLJ 3: 149n24). Both versions refer to the myth of the Irish as descending from ancient middle Asian and Phoenician tribes, which had supposedly migrated to Ireland. Despite their being a part of British ethnicity, various English people treated the Irish as ethnic others.

Accordingly, Byron’s first reference emphasizes Moore’s ethnicity as separate from British, and his second treats the myth of Irish origins by praising the literary merits that this ethnicity supposedly grants its descendants. Despite Byron’s previous negative attitude towards natural gifts in the instance of monarchs, Byron claims that Moore uses his gifts so skillfully that he expects Moore to excel other writers when writing about the so-called Orient.

Another popular bard to whose ethnic origins Byron similarly refers is Sir Walter Scott, the nominee for Poet Laureate in 1813.90 Byron claims familiarity with Scott to whose skills he compares his own. In fact, McGann notes that after Byron asserts in the Dedication that “Scott alone” had mastered the difficult “octosyllabic verse,” his proof for the seventh edition adds that

89 For Byron’s revised version of the Dedication, see CPW 3: 446. 90 Scott declined the post, recommending Robert Southey, whose laureateship continued from 1813 to 1843. 132

“He [Scott] will excuse the ‘Mr.’—we do not say Mr Caesar” (CPW 3: 149n36 and 444).

Although Byron dropped this part in the printed editions, this assertion demonstrates double rivalry and respect. In both his letters and Journal, Byron represents himself as an equally skillful writer as Scott, whom reviewers compared to Scott and Southey (BLJ 3: 219-20). This rivalry might have caused Byron to reject Scott’s measures and adopt heroic couplets, a decision which

Byron, however, only fulfills in The Corsair and Lara. Moreover, Byron indirectly recalls

Scott’s ethnic origins, which he shares, by discussing him immediately after attributing Moore’s literary skills to his Irish-Oriental origins. Byron also calls Scott loosely English in the 24

November 1813 entry when calling him the “Monarch of Parnassus, and the most English of bards” (BLJ 3: 219-20).91 However, this reference is equally offensive for a Scottish as for the non-English writers Byron had discussed in the same entry.92

I read Byron’s direct and indirect references to Moore’s and Scott’s origins as reminding readers that they—like other national writers—are not “English” which would exclude them from the limited and loose category of “English bards.” By treating identities associated with the

“Eastern other,” i.e. Irish, as an invaluable part of the “British self,” Byron disrupts binary definitions of self and other again in this text. His referring to Irish identity in the Dedication allegorically represents Ireland’s conflict with England in a tale which doubly represents the conflicts among Eastern identities—the Turkish and the Greeks—and represents the conflicts among European identities: the British, the allies and Napoleon. By recalling the existing ethnic

91 Byron’s 24 Nov 1813 entry provides a literary hierarchy, which he claims to base on “popular opinion” about contemporary writers (220). Neglecting to classify himself among them, Byron places Scott at the top above Samuel Rogers, and then Moore and Thomas Campbell, and finally the first generation Romantics: Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byron leaves the base of the pyramid for those he calls “The Many.” However, his later conflicting comments about these writers refute this hierarchy. 92 Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was Scottish, and Moore was Irish. 133

otherness within the national, literary heritage, Byron challenges the construct of Englishness and proposes having multiple other selves, as he proposes in the two cantos of CHP.

The Dedication foreshadows the blurring of identities which the title-character performs through his use of masks and disguises. Unlike The Giaour, The Corsair rejects defining identity according to racial and religious binaries, and according to the binaries which The Bride proposes when favoring a self-chosen identity over a socially-imposed one. By focusing on the multiple selves an individual may assume, this poem defines identity in its relationship to appearance. The external changes the title-character undergoes do not change his inner self, even though his guises confuse his observers. However, his identity as shape-changer is challenged with the appearance of Gulnare, the Eastern beauty, whose unfeminine-like agency questions the role of appearance in defining female identity. Unlike Conrad, Gulnare’s identity changes with the gaze of the male self. Although Mel Campbell argues that the “poem’s perspective shifts between modes of representation that . . . were gendered ‘male’ and ‘female’” (16), I demonstrate that the subject, whether male or female, can generate observers’ perspectives by controlling appearance/behaviour.

* * *

The Corsair revolves around the existing animosity between Conrad, the supposed pirate of the tale, and Seyd, Conrad’s arch-enemy, who plots to raid the “Pirate’s isle” (1.43). To defend his homeland, Conrad parts from his beloved Medora, who is heart-broken that he is leaving her again to pursue his enterprises. Conrad attacks Seyd’s region, Coron’s bay, reminding his crew that “Man is [their] foe, and such ’tis [theirs] to slay,” but warns them that they “must spare the weaker prey [women]” (1.811-12) to prevent Heaven’s “Vengeance” against their own wives (809-10). After pillaging the town and burning the buildings, he orders

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them to save the women who were trapped in the burning towers. However, his chivalric behaviour upon saving Seyd’s favorite concubine not only leads to his capture, but also increases

Seyd’s wrath against him. Conrad’s behaviour also triggers Gulnare’s gratitude which Seyd misreads as disloyalty, causing him to consider executing both. So, Gulnare saves herself and

Conrad by stabbing the sleeping Seyd despite Conrad’s repulsion at such an unfeminine action.

He is further shocked upon arriving at his isle to discover that Medora had died of grief during his absence. He thus abandons Gulnare despite her sacrifices, and disappears.

Like the Dedication, the tale discusses the ethnic identities of Ottoman and Greek and the identities of pirates, slaves and authority figures. In fact, the identities of slaves and pirates were fiercely negotiated both in parliament, which was debating banning the slave trade and granting rights to slaves, and in current writings, where biographies of pirates who raided the Caribbean and the Mediterranean were popular.93 Byron also engaged with the poor conditions of workers and discussed slavery in his parliamentary speeches of 1812. In the tale, Byron engages again with these topical issues by blurring existing definitions of the marginalized groups—outlaws and slaves—by representing them as transgressing their limited status and behaving like those belonging to the prestigious and educated classes. To the shock of his readers, Byron’s introductory lines eulogize the freedom and licentiousness of piracy and contrast it to the bondage and oppression of slavery. In the second canto, he also defines the class of authority figures as he did in his 17 November 1813 entry, depicting them through the Turkish despot,

Seyd, as corrupt and inefficient rulers (BLJ 3: 244). When representing his concubine, Gulnare,

93 In the eighth edition of The Corsair (Jan 1815), Byron adds a long extract in the final note to the tale, relating the adventures of popular pirates who used to raid the South American shores in the seventeenth century. For more on the early nineteenth-century interest in biographies of pirates, see Grace Moore’s introduction to Pirates and Mutineers, and Mel Campbell’s “Pirate Chic” (12-13). 135

he represents her as acting against her social and political limitations, too, by seeking love and freedom.

The tale offers contrary sketches of Conrad: although the introductory lines represent him as a ruthless pirate, he acts in a chivalric manner throughout the narrative, as when he defends his hometown and his people from foreign aggression, and defends women in need. But the narrative also hints at Conrad’s ability to slip between the identities he embodies at will.

He had the skill, when Cunning’s gaze would seek

To probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,

At once the observer’s purpose to espy,

And on himself roll back his scrutiny. (1.217-20)

These lines emphasize Conrad’s ability to control the perception of his observers by manipulating his appearance, and controlling their gaze. His keen eyes (64) force his observers to gaze back on their own selves and evaluate their flaws rather than judge his. Conrad then chooses the mask that best reflects the identity he seeks on each occasion, which, however, challenges his supposed reputation as a ruthless pirate, or the corsair. Whether it is his pirate comrades, Medora, Seyd or Gulnare, Conrad appears to each in such other roles, which he projects as different identities, as that of an ungrateful lover, a Dervise, a devil, and/or a figure of romance and chivalry. Unlike Byron’s contrasting his perception of his self with those of his contemporaries in the Dedication, the different portraits of Conrad remain open to scrutiny, as I will demonstrate, because his own perception of his self remains mysterious with his code of silence and his sudden disappearance.

Byron represents Conrad initially through a distant observer who relies on the circulating rumors about Conrad and on existing views of physiognomy rather than on real knowledge or

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acquaintance with him. This method of narration resembles not only the way Byron represents the title-character in The Giaour, but also the way Byron represents his own fellow spectators at playhouses, opera houses and dinner parties in his Journal (BLJ 3: 240). Acting like an omniscient narrator, Byron defines his acquaintances by claiming to read their masks to expose their supposed illicit behaviour. However, Byron’s playful though exaggerated tone questions those representations like his representations of Conrad in this romance. Conrad revolts against the identity his surroundings had originally imposed, as he claims, by assuming the identity of a pirate like Selim in The Bride. But unlike Selim, Conrad’s behaviour is inconsistent with his claimed identity of pirate because he acts more nobly than the named and unnamed authority figures in the romance. In the next sections, I will trace the way Conrad’s multiple identities, whether claimed or rejected ones, shape and/or challenge his acquaintances’ perceptions, and especially his initial representation as a corsair of the Mediterranean.

The poem directly questions identity with the choice of the title, The Corsair. Byron misapplies a Western term, as he does in The Giaour. In his first tale, Byron uses a specifically

Turkish and Arabic term to describe a Venetian youth, who is an infidel from the viewpoint of the Muslims rather than Byron’s European audience. According to the OED, the term “corsair” originated from Latin and was popular in European languages to refer to privateer. However, in

Mediterranean dialects, the term specified the pirates originating from Barbary, northern Africa, who assailed Christian shores and ships with the sanction of local Turkish and Muslim authorities. However, not only is Conrad a self-exile, who has settled in the pirates’ isle due to the ill-treatment he claims to have suffered, but also Seyd and Gulnare are the only ones who call him a corsair. Also, Conrad’s piracy does not result from his religious or political alliances, nor is he seen raiding any European shores or ships in the tale, nor are his actions sanctioned by any

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authorities, Muslim or Christian. In fact, the local ruler of a neighboring Turkish isle, Seyd, seeks to slay Conrad.

Although Conrad disrupts the definition of the corsair, the introductory lines establish that reputation by using existing conventions of representation as based on appearance. The narrator thus supposes that Conrad’s appearance conceals his real, evil self even though all attempts of performing a physiognomic analysis of Conrad’s features are thwarted by his bold and defiant glances according to the previous lines, and his ordinary looks of the following ones.

But who that Chief? his name on every shore

Is famed and feared—they ask and know no more

With these [pirates] he mingles not but to command;

Few are his words, but keen his eye and hand.

Ne’er seasons he with mirth their jovial mess,

But they forgive his silence for success.

Ne’er for his lip the purpling cup they fill,

That goblet passes him untasted still—

And for his fare—the rudest of his crew

Would that, in turn, have passed untasted too;

Earth’s coarsest bread, the garden’s homeliest roots,

And scarce the summer luxury of fruits,

His short repast in humbleness supply

With all a hermit’s board would scarce deny. (1.60-74)

These lines raise interest in Conrad by rhetorically asking about the identity of the unnamed

“Chief.” The narrator then provides a sketch of his character rather than his appearance. Despite

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his reputation as a ruthless pirate in the surrounding shores, he acts unlike pirates throughout the narrative. He neither socializes with his supposed crew with his code of silence nor participates in their sensual indulgences in alcohol and luxurious food. With his strict code of behaviour, he also shuns their plunders. In fact, Conrad’s acquaintances accept his abstinence as a self-made choice apart from any social or religious maxims. When Conrad refuses to drink the wine

Medora prepares before his departure, she also accepts his abstinence with the comfort that

“What others deem a penance is [his] choice” (1.432).

In another instance, the narrator manages to scrutinize select features of Conrad’s physique, and encourages the observing “stranger” (1.243) to analyze his features to prove his supposed identity as a pirate.

In Conrad’s form seems little to admire,

Though his dark eyebrow shades a glance of fire;

Robust but not Herculean—to the sight

No giant frame sets forth his common height;

Yet, in the whole, who paused to look again,

Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men;

......

Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale

The sable curls in wild profusion veil;

And oft perforce his rising lip reveals

The haughtier thought it curbs, but scarce conceals.

Though smooth his voice, and calm his general mien,

Still seems there something he would not have seen. (1.195-200, 203-08)

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These lines, however, fail to match Conrad’s features with popular connotations of evil. The narrator realizes that Conrad appears ordinary: he is neither of unusual height nor has super powers which would identify him as a villain.94 In this instance, his average physique, smooth voice and insignificant-looking physique, eyebrows, cheeks, lips, and the scattered curls which veil his forehead, all also fail to identify him as a head of pirates. The same elements, however, would gain different meaning in the next scenes when Conrad acts as a shape-changer, misleading his observers into perceiving him in other identities than his own.

Before tracing Conrad’s multiple identities, the narrative comments on the prevalent interest in physiognomy by emphasizing that one’s “governed aspect” (232) may mask one’s real self. Because “slight are the outward signs of evil thought, / Within—within—’twas there the spirit wrought” (227-28), Byron interrupts the narrative, and perhaps the unreliable narrator, to criticize the popular concern with physiognomic analysis because they may be unable to point to one’s inner traits, or because a person like Conrad may control them at his will. This quote also reminds readers that Conrad, like Byron, both observes his observers, and manipulates their perceptions. Conrad thus masks his real identity to serve such ends as defying public scrutiny, revolting against social limitations, and subduing his rivals. Byron thus reminds readers to pay attention to those moments when the narrative provides clues about the mystery surrounding the title-character and his actions, as in the scene when his wife reveals personal information about him which hints at his former life.

94 Despite Byron’s claims of the non-biographical basis of his protagonists in the Dedication, I believe that he bases Conrad’s portrait on his own portrait as a child which his Journal provides in the 26 Nov1813 entry: “I differed not at all from other children, being neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, of my age, but rather lively—except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a Devil” (BLJ 3: 258). Byron claims that his apparently ordinary appearance conceals his real violent traits which only his swift mood changes revealed. 140

In the farewell scene, Conrad’s and Medora’s conversation reveals various personal facts which not only defy Conrad’s image as corsair, but also point to his real self. Using Byron’s assertion in his Journal that self-representation is less authentic than the representation of others because a person misrepresents the self to the self (BLJ 3: 233), I read Conrad’s self- representation as a pirate as similarly flawed, and read the multiple selves he assumes as subordinate selves, masking his real one, which, however, remains mysterious. When his beloved pleads for a peaceful life and begs him to enjoy the pleasures of her domestic circle,

Conrad rather favors piracy by reminding her of his wrongful condemnation which his undisclosed past virtue had caused. That virtue might have been misplaced allegiance with the unnamed authorities who had supported his privateer interests, and hence generated his title of corsair. But because, as Grace Moore asserts, the political changes in the early nineteenth century caused governments to abandon their national privateers, many became pirates (2).

Moreover, although Conrad justifies his piracy as fulfilling his vengeance against all mankind, his so-called piracy rather causes him to resist foreign/Ottoman aggressions and defend his domestic sphere. He acts as a “medieval outlaw” or the “archetypical Robin Hood” figure according to Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud (685-86), who reads the poem as representing the nineteenth-century controversy over property rights. I thus propose that Conrad’s real self, which he masks from his observers when claiming to be an outlaw, is partly that of saviour and protector of his domestic sphere. He guards his home-island from a “watch-tower,” which overlooks the bay (1.123); he ruthlessly raids the surrounding shores to eradicate any future threat; and he embarks on a hazardous enterprise to overthrow the neighboring despot who plots to exterminate his island.

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Although scholars like Naji B. Oueijan rely on Conrad’s initial portrait to identify him as a Muslim “Albanian pirate,” because of his Albanian-like appearance, and his asceticism which

Oueijan believes points to his being a Muslim (101-103), I believe that Conrad is a Greek, who is covertly revolting against Turkish tyranny and occupation of the Greek isles.95 His being Greek justifies the existing animosity between him and the rulers of the surrounding shores, and, like

Medora’s conversation, explains the perpetual state of war in which he and his people live.96

From the introductory lines, the narrative emphasizes Conrad’s self-control whether in the instances when he willingly shuns alcohol and sensual luxuries, and lives like a hermit in his lonely tower; or when he willingly controls his appearance, as I will demonstrate when discussing the representations of his observers. Moreover, the narrative warns that “while he shuns the grosser joys of sense, / His mind seems nourished by that abstinence” (1.75-76).

Conrad’s self-made choice of leading a hermit-like life strengthens him physically and mentally, turning him into the powerful protector of the weak and oppressed, a role which he, however, retains not by being a Muslim, but by being the ruthless pirate and plunderer his rivals fear.

The reason I emphasize Conrad’s being Greek is because the narrative is filled with hints which support this conclusion. The second canto, for example, directly identifies Conrad and his crew as “the Greek[s]” (2.17) whom Seyd expects to defeat stealthily the next morning. The introductory lines of the third canto then pay “homage” to “Fair Athens” and lament its fall from

95 Mel Campbell offers another reading of this asceticism by suggesting that it separates Conrad’s exterior life from his interior one (33). However, I believe that he masks his interior by assuming temporary masks, or his exterior self. He then uses this exterior to serve his interests in the different circumstances he encounters, especially those in the worldly sphere of action. 96 Cochran, however, believes that Conrad is not a “revolutionary against Ottoman imperialism” because he attacks Seyd to “pillage” his town rather than for “replacing” his regime (52-53). My discussion asserts that although Conrad resists the aggressions of the Turks against his followers, his raid does, though unintentionally, overthrow Seyd’s regime when Gulnare, the Harem queen, murders Seyd and elopes with him. 142

classical glory, which recalls the plight of modern Greece in the present context of her occupation by the Ottomans, like Seyd (3.1-65). Moreover, the narrative locates Seyd in

“Coron’s bay” (2.1), which Byron notes to be on the “western shores of the Gulf of Kalamata, or

Coron, or Messenia” (CPW 3: 447n1). This place is located in southern Greece and is also associated with Homer. These geographical facts and mythological allusions not only point to

Conrad’s Greek origins, but also justify his animosity towards Seyd. Such hostile relationship suggests Conrad’s belonging to the Greek resistance, especially with his reputation of raiding the shores, and his self-seclusion from the mainland, which appears to be under Turkish rule.

Despite his reading Conrad as both a Muslim and a Christian Albanian, Oueijan reads

Medora as a Greek based on the origin of her name and based on her appearance which coincides with that of the Greek women Hobhouse idealizes in his Journals (113-14). However, I argue that both are Greek based on the narrative which represents Conrad and Medora as sharing the same cultural origins as Byron’s audience. The tale constructs Conrad as a literary representative of European, and hence British identity,97 and Medora according to Western definitions of femininity, which associate her with the domestic and the sensual, and foreground her European- like “deep-blue eye[s]” (1.468) and “long fair hair” (470). Their speech also points to their being familiar with classical allusions and myths and with Western medieval texts. When dissuading him from embarking on his next enterprise, for example, Medora tempts Conrad with various sensual pleasures including telling “the tale, by Ariosto told, / Of fair Olympia [who was] loved and left of old” 98 (1.439-40). She also predicts her destiny of desertion by meditating on

97 Traditionally, the British claimed to have inherited Greek culture. I have examined this relationship and the significance of European identities in general when examining CHP 1 and 2 in Chap. 1 (see 15-17). 98 Ariosto was a medieval Italian romance epic poet who was popular for his stories of crusade wars. 143

“Ariadne’s Isle” (1.444). Medora’s alluding to Ovid’s Metamorphoses foreshadows her own destiny. Such allusions represent Conrad in the tradition of classical and medieval mythology as an ungrateful lover with his unstable and violent life. Medora perceives Conrad as repaying her sacrifices to which the narrative alludes by abandoning her to a lonely life for the sake of his futile intrigues, but Conrad perceives his enterprises as fulfilling noble ends.

Conrad’s and Medora’s argument not only reveals the tensions between his masculine sphere and her domestic one, but also reveals more aspects of his real self than his identity as a

Greek. Medora is inconsiderate of Conrad’s patriarchal-like responsibilities, objecting to his outward aggressiveness by wondering “How strange that heart, to me so tender still, / Should war with Nature and its better will!” But Conrad defends his enterprises, claiming that the unnamed authorities have wronged him. Thus, his “heart hath long been changed” because

“Worm-like ’twas trampled—adder-like avenged— / Without one hope on earth beyond [her] love, / And scarce a glimpse of mercy from above” (1.396-401). He claims to have suffered from social and political injustices, which cause him to revolt against mankind. Although Conrad favors a life which rejects submission to authorities whether religious or secular, rather embracing republican-like ideals which support his own personal choices and his love for

Medora, Conrad’s behaviour is not as evil as the title of the tale and the introductory lines assume. Conrad might be deluded by his hatred for Seyd and by his own choices, but unlike

Seyd, Conrad shuns sensual indulgences, embraces strict codes of behaviour, and is compassionate towards the weak.

Although Conrad appears to abruptly end his farewell with Medora, the narrative notes that Conrad had “learned to curb the crowd, / By arts that veil” (539-40). Conrad actually masks his emotional frustration by assuming the identity of the ruthless and silent chief of pirates.

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His [Conrad’s] eyes of pride to young Gonsalvo turn—

Why doth he start, and inly seem to mourn?

Alas! those eyes beheld his rocky tower,

And live a moment o’er the parting hour;

......

Again he mans himself and turns away. (1.577-80, 584)

In this instance, Conrad’s eyes, which the narrator described as defying the scrutiny of his observers and as evil, struggle to conceal his turbulent emotions. He is distraught at parting from his beloved and causing her pain. Fearing that submission to emotions would unman him,

Conrad “mans” himself against Medora’s domestic values by securing the domestic sphere from outside threats. The scenes with Medora as well as those with his crew blur the binaries of the domestic and the worldly by representing them as mutually dependant. Although Conrad rejects the sensual basis of the domestic sphere by embracing his worldly enterprises, his enterprises protect that very sphere, which Medora occupies. However, when he is sailing with Gonsalvo to his pirate ship, his memories of the domestic threaten to consume him emotionally by interrupting his identity of pirate.

When arriving at Coron’s bay in the third canto, the tale introduces Conrad as his observers perceive him: as a “captive Dervise” who has escaped from the pirates (2.49). Conrad enters the court disguised to distract Seyd and his associates from the impending raid.

His arms were folded on his dark-green vest,

His step was feeble, and his look deprest;

Yet worn he seemed of hardship more than years,

And pale his cheek with penance, not from fears.

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Vowed to his God—his sable locks he wore,

And these his lofty cap rose proudly o’er:

Around his form his loose long robe was thrown,

And wrapt a breast bestowed on heaven alone;

Submissive, yet with self-possession manned,

He calmly met the curious eyes that scanned. (2.53-62)

These lines trace the way Conrad uses his facial features, clothing and physique to assume the identity of a Muslim holy man. In the introductory scenes (1.203-20), Conrad’s sun-burnt face and sable locks had signified his belonging to the vulgar ranks, which were associated with poor education, manual labor and poverty. Also, his eyes had appeared to defy close observation, causing the observer to perceive him as exceeding his class in villainy. However, that poverty- stricken appearance takes on a different meaning when Seyd and his attendees perceive Conrad as a Dervise in this scene. Conrad’s pale cheeks and scattered “sable locks,” which he covers now with a lofty cap, signify his admirable self-deprivation and religious devotion. Similarly,

Conrad’s pale cheeks and weakened physique signify his abstinence from worldly pleasures; his humble clothes and untidiness signify his lack of interest in his appearance, and hence worldly pleasures; and his feeble steps, folded arms and lowered eyes signify meekness and respect, and thus humility towards mankind.

By “manning” himself against scrutiny, Conrad successfully deceives his observers in this scene, too. By wearing the mask of the inconsiderate chief of pirates, he had manned himself against the emotional disruption of Medora’s domestic ideals. To enter the court in this scene, he mans himself again by assuming a religious-like perseverance and humility which masks his

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hatred for Seyd. But Conrad swiftly thwarts this identity by appearing as a spy, and then a devil before finally revealing himself as the famous chief of pirates, or the corsair.

Up rose the Dervise with that burst of light,

Nor less his change of form appalled the sight:

Up rose that Dervise—not in saintly garb,

But like a warrior bounding on his barb,

Dashed his high cap, and tore his robe away—

Shone his mailed breast, and flashed his sabre’s ray!

His close but glittering casque, and sable plume,

More glittering eye, and black brow’s sabler gloom,

Glared on the Moslems’ eyes some Afrit Sprite,

Whose demon death-blow left no hope for fight. (2.142-51)

Although Conrad’s portrait in this instance foregrounds the detailed transformation he undergoes, it emphasizes only two physiognomic elements which overshadow the rest: his

“glittering eyes” and “black brow[s].” Also, the elements of his disguise which had defined him as a pirate and then a Dervise take on a different meaning. Seyd and his comrades read Conrad’s

“loose long robe,” which they had interpreted as stemming from religious humility and his particular order of Dervise, as hiding his artillery and military disguise. Conrad’s high cap, which he had worn over his scattered hair, rather hides his well-known “glittering eyes” and his well-known complexion. And Conrad’s eyes, which had appeared pious and humble with their downcast appearance, now gain a supernatural-like power and seek vengeance. Seyd and his attendees also realize that Conrad discards his former “dark green vest” for a “mailed breast,” marking his readiness for battle and violence. In fact, Byron explains in a footnote in The Giaour

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that green was “the privileged color” associated with the prophet’s “pretended” descendants. In the notes to that romance, Byron associates this supposed privilege with religious hypocrisy and corruption because he accuses those descendants of ignoring “the necessity of [doing] good works” (CPW 3: 418n357). Byron criticizes this Eastern privilege in the same manner he treats birthrights in European culture in his Journal. Byron thus expects readers of The Corsair to realize the sham of Conrad’s identity when seeing him in the green costume.

After scrutinizing the significance of Conrad’s changing appearance to his observers, the narrative questions definitions of identity as based on social class by comparing Conrad’s and

Seyd’s responses at times of danger. Although the narrator and Conrad’s observers condemn

Conrad as a pirate, he acts more nobly than the ruler of the Turkish isle, Seyd. While Conrad takes responsibility for his people and shuns sensual pleasures with his continuous alertness to possible foreign aggressions and his dwelling in a watch-tower rather than with his beloved,

Seyd invites that attack by not only plotting to raid the supposed pirates’ isle, but also indulging in sensual pleasures, which prevent him from recognizing Conrad’s ambush. Rather than confronting his enemy and defending his people, Seyd flees, returning only when his accomplices capture the injured Conrad.

Despite his jeopardizing his own safety to save Seyd’s women, Seyd conceives an extremely painful execution for Conrad. He plans to hang him for the vultures to devour him but have his wounds continuously treated. This punishment resembles that of Prometheus, who had defied the Olympian gods by giving the gift of fire to mankind. Both Prometheus and Conrad are condemned by irrational and cruel despots: Zeus had Prometheus endlessly devoured by vultures; and Seyd plans to have Conrad suffer in a similar manner despite Seyd’s

Turkish/Muslim origins and his supposed ignorance of the Greek heritage, as Byron had asserted

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in CHP 1 when noting the Ottoman’s ignorance of classical Greece. Regardless of the authenticity of Byron’s construction of Seyd in this case, I read the parallels in both punishments as transforming Conrad into a hero of Greek mythology, and as hinting further at his Greek origins. According to the multiple identities Byron discusses in this tale and its Dedication, I suggest reading Seyd as not only representing Turkish tyranny, but also representing both

Turkish tyranny against classical Greece, and the tyranny of British and European monarchies against Napoleon—the double symbol of classical and current liberty and freedom—as Byron and his contemporaries thought, and the tyranny of those monarchies against their own people, as

Byron’s supplementary “Lines” to The Corsair asserts.

After the contrary portraits of Conrad, which Seyd and his comrades construct when perceiving Conrad as a Dervise and then a demon, a further portrait evolves.

Much did she [Gulnare] marvel o’er the courtesy

That smoothed his accents, softened in his eye—

’Twas strange—that robber thus with gore bedewed,

Seemed gentler then than Seyd in fondest mood. (2.261-64)

Unlike the threatening effect of his bold eyes on his observers in Seyd’s court, both his eyes and voice soothe Gulnare’s turbulent emotions during her entrapment in the fire. Gulnare perceives

Conrad as the saviour of the weak because he saves the desperate women, whom he and his crew, however, had nearly killed. Although Conrad claims that his saving her had stemmed from his strict codes of behaviour, Gulnare questions not only his supposed identity of corsair, but also

Seyd’s identity as lover.

Gulnare’s observing Conrad causes her to observe her own self, and her lover. Conrad can be held responsible for the changes in her behaviour because as the introductory lines had

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warned the readers, Conrad had the special ability of not only defying the gaze of his observers, but also reversing their scrutiny upon themselves. She is thus resentful of Seyd, her patriarch and supposed lover, who had abandoned her to certain death, lamenting that he was never interested in her, merely being interested in her body (2.500-12). She then defies his ruling against her rescuer by leading a rebellion against her master. As I will examine in the next section, Gulnare’s identity changes from the passive female slave—or Eastern enchantress—to Conrad’s saviour, but her resulting agency questions the role of appearance in defining female identity.

* * *

Besides Conrad, Gulnare is the other character whom the tale closely observes though only through the perspectives of her two lovers: Seyd and Conrad. Both define Gulnare according to their Eastern or Western perspectives towards femininity, foregrounding her appearance, and disregarding female agency, or her self-chosen identity which The Bride had promoted. Unlike Conrad, who controls his observers’ perceptions with the masks he assumes, she unintentionally controls her observers with her appearance and her supposed subservience.

Her lovers thus define her in binaries: she is the epitome of Eastern femininity as long as she is passive, but she is the fallen woman once she exercises her agency.

Seyd, her master and patriarch, appoints her head of his Harem slaves and his favorite for her extreme beauty. But when Conrad saves her from the fire, Seyd condemns his action as desecrating his personal property, which also destroys her value.

...... [E]ach word

Of thine [Gulnare] stamps truth on all Suspicion heard.

Borne in his arms through fire from yon Serai—

Say, wert thou lingering there with him to fly?

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Thou need’st not answer—thy confession speaks,

Already reddening on thy guilty cheeks:

Then—lovely Dame—bethink thee! and beware. (3.178-84)

Interpreting her gratitude for Conrad as violating her supposed passion for him—her master/patriarch—and as opposing his hatred for Conrad, Seyd re-defines Gulnare from the favorite to the condemned. He then accuses her of lingering in the burning building to escape with the pirates. Denying her the ability to defend herself, Seyd reads her reddening face as proof of his accusations. Although Gulnare’s gratitude to Conrad is supposed to be a commendable response to his rescuing her, Seyd reads it as infidelity, which he plans to punish with death.

Like Seyd, Conrad is enchanted by Gulnare’s beauty although he is the slave/prisoner of her master. Despite his captivity, Conrad influences her behavior, though unintentionally, besides observing her as his own observers had.

That form, with eye so dark, and cheek so fair,

And auburn waves of gemmed and braided hair;

With shape of fairy lightness—naked foot,

That shines like snow, and falls on earth as mute. (2.402-05)

Gulnare’s physique initially reminds Conrad of Medora’s, especially in their similar white skin and dark brows. He thus represents Gulnare according to conventions of romance, emphasizing her beautiful appearance and her harmony with her surroundings, as when she walks silently on the white marble floor. Intrigued by her, Conrad initially overlooks the deviance in her behaviour when she visits him—the condemned prisoner/slave of her master—stealthily at night. However, he responds to her claims of gratitude by citing his personal duty towards the weak; and he rejects her emotional intrigue with him not only because he is engaged to another, but also

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because she is already sexually possessed. However, their nightly meetings continue, and she realizes the injustices of her situation, and eventually realizes her difference from Medora.

Claiming to be more loyal to her beloved, Conrad, than her rival, Medora, Gulnare leads a rebellion to rescue him and liberate herself. She thus claims to act according to Conrad’s code of honor which compels her to repay him for saving her.

However, instead of thanking her, he is greatly horrified at Gulnare’s agency, and condemns what he perceives as her unfeminine-like behaviour. Although Conrad uses the same violent means as Gulnare when defending his pirate isle from Seyd’s aggressions, he perceives his actions as more honorable than hers.

No poignard in that hand, nor sign of ill—

‘Thanks to that softening heart—she could not kill!’

Again he looked, the wildness of her eye

Starts from the day abrupt and fearfully.

She stopped—threw back her dark far-floating hair,

That nearly veiled her face and bosom fair:

......

They meet—upon her brow—unknown—forgot—

Her hurrying hand had left—’twas but a spot—

Its hue was all he saw, and scarce withstood—

Oh! slight but certain pledge of crime—’tis blood! (3.406-11, 414-17)

When observing the changes in Gulnare’s appearance, Conrad judges her again in the manner of sentimental narratives: according to her “heart,” or her supposed emotional and physical susceptibility. But he soon realizes that she has committed the murder, which causes him to

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believe that her behaviour had ruined her appearance. He then traces the changes in the elements that he had used in the previous scenes to manipulate his own appearance. He perceives

Gulnare’s eyes as losing their dark beauty by gaining a wild and threatening look, and perceives her previously gemmed and braided hair as dishevelled, like the hair of the vulgar ranks with whom Conrad was classified in the introductory lines. In fact, he perceives her previous fair face and bosom, which enchanted him and suggested her resemblance to Medora, as having masked her now wild hair.

Although Gulnare does not carry a weapon, her blood-stained brows point at what

Conrad believes is her deviant self, compelling him to read her saving his life as murder.

That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak,

Had banished all the beauty from her cheek!

Blood he had viewed—could view unmoved—but then

It flowed in combat, or was shed by men! (3.426-29)

Because Conrad associates bloodshed with the worldly sphere of combat and violence, Gulnare’s blood-stained brows change her status by assigning her to that sphere rather than the domestic.

Before Gulnare’s transformation into what he perceives as a plotting rebel, Conrad had associated her with the sensual and the domestic like Medora. In the scene of his farewell, he had justified his piracy enterprises not only as avenging him against mankind, but also as securing the domestic—Medora—from foreign aggressions, like that of Seyd. But Gulnare’s murder separates her from Medora for her ability to defend herself and those around her through violent action, which Conrad perceives as unfeminine.

Gulnare’s participation in masculine feats turns her into what Watkins describes as an activist who “enters the public world of action and physical violence, fighting to defend the man

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she loves” (84). However, I read her as a domestic rebel whose only way to escape her oppressed, domestic life is by using violent means associated with the worldly sphere of action.

She does not enter into the public world, but borrows instruments of violence to use within her domestic circle. Despite her lover’s warnings against violence, she takes action against her oppressive surroundings by murdering her abusive master, risking changing from female enchantress to social and gender transgressor. She thus blurs the binaries between the worldly and the domestic by murdering her patriarch within the supposedly safe domestic sphere, which is, however, the space that Conrad’s enterprise sought to both protect and ruin.

Conrad’s representation of Gulnare is as limited as his own representation by his observers, both of which only rely on appearance. Seyd had committed the same mistake when accusing her of treachery and discounting her ability to be both a sensual and complicit being, and/or a rebel if forced into action. The narrator thus notes that “little deemed he [Seyd] what thy heart, Gulnare! / When soft could feel—and when incensed could dare!” (3.198-99). Similarly,

Conrad fails to consider that her inner self, or what he calls her heart in the murder scene, can behave in contrary ways: she can be a sensual, loving being, which are properties linked with the feminine and domestic, but she can also act as a man by being harsh to her abusers. However, this agency, or masculine behaviour, dissociates Gulnare from Medora for whom Conrad longs at this moment: “He thought on her afar, his lonely bride: / He turned and saw—Gulnare, the homicide!” (3.462-63). Such lines reveal the traumatic effect Gulnare’s appearance now makes on Conrad. He finally realizes, and probably accepts, Medora’s inability to perceive the separation between the domestic and the worldly when she had tempted him with sensual pleasures before his departure. Also, Conrad finally realizes that the domestic sphere is susceptible to outside intrusions, which may ruin it, as he had done when raiding Seyd’s town;

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and such intrusions may change the identities of its inhabitants, as he had also done when associating with Gulnare and causing her rebellion, or masculine act of murder.

Gulnare persists in justifying her so-called transgression as a necessary and rather noble action which saves her and Conrad from her master’s wrath. But Conrad accepts his own persecution on the grounds that he was captured in the battlefield, and condemns Gulnare for her unfeminine action which she commits during her aggressor’s sleep.

I am not what I seem—this fearful night

My brain bewildered—do not madden quite!

If I had never loved—though less my guilt,

Thou hadst not lived to—hate me—if thou wilt. (3.472-75)

Rejecting the repulsive change that Conrad sees in her now, Gulnare fails to understand the horrific, moral implications of her murder in the same manner Conrad fails to understand its emotional implications for her. While the early portrait marked her change into a so-called murderess by identifying her supposed hardening heart, this instance reveals that her softening heart for Conrad was actually the motive behind her murder. She is thus resentful of him, and persists in believing that she is unchanged from her former self, who is still in love with him. The next stanza, however, records Conrad’s secret response to her accusations of ingratitude.

She wrongs his thoughts, they more himself upbraid

Than her, though undesigned, the wretch he made;

But speechless all, deep, dark, and unexprest,

They bleed within that silent cell—his breast. (3.476-79)

Hinting at his ability to transform his observers’ gaze back on themselves, Conrad holds himself responsible for the changes she has undergone, which have led up to her murder. Although he

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did not intend her to change, as he claims, nor did he approve of it, he masks his emotional turmoil again, or his self-reproach, by assuming his former identity of pirate chief, appearing silent and aloof during their trip back to his pirate-island.

Gulnare, on the other hand, stands meekly beside Conrad with her folded arms (3.517-

18). She displays such traits as humility and quietness, which besides her pale-looking face, are aspects associated with heroines of sensibility. This mask keeps Conrad’s pirates ignorant of her identity, or what Conrad had perceived as her transgressive behaviour, murder. Like them,

Conrad also reads her mask as accepting his judgment against her.

And now he turned him to that dark-eyed slave

Whose brow was bowed beneath the glance he gave,

Who now seemed changed and humbled:—faint and meek,

But varying oft the colour of her cheek. (3.531-34)

Upon their arrival, Gulnare mirrors Conrad when he had entered Seyd’s court as a Dervise. She masks her face with a real veil like Conrad when he had masked his identity as Seyd’s enemy by assuming the guise of a holy man. Her image thus suggests that she, the outsider, may threaten the domestic sphere of his nation with her assumed meekness in the same manner Conrad did when he stealthily raided her town, ruining, though unintentionally, her domestic sphere, too. In fact, his domestic sphere is soon going to be shattered like hers. After their parting kiss on the ship, which he justifies as not carrying any sexual intentions and believes that even Medora would approve, Conrad rushes to meet his beloved only to discover that she has died during his absence. He thus disappears without a trace, merely leaving his name as corsair.

This end triggers more questions than answers about the title-character and about identity as Byron had asked in the Journal and then the Dedication. Byron leaves the question of

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Conrad’s identity as corsair open to interpretation. Although the term in the title refers to a pirate with loyalties to Eastern Mediterranean, Muslim authorities, this name seems to be inaccurate because it masks his other selves, including that of saviour and protector of his domestic sphere which dominates the action in this tale. Throughout the tale, he assumes different masks which not only elude his observers but also control their perception. Unlike Conrad, Gulnare’s agency disrupts her feminine appearance, and hence her identity. Her acting like a man, when revolting against her master and leading an insurrection to save Conrad, blurs the binaries between the domestic and the worldly by her performing actions associated with the worldly, murder, within the domestic sphere, and then embracing her violent action as stemming from her emotions, which are associated with the domestic. However, the tale ends with their mutual silence and disappearance behind Conrad’s reputation as corsair, which the tale has repeatedly questioned through his role as shape-changer. Leaving this tale open to interpretation, Byron ponders the relationship between appearance and identity again in Lara by experimenting with the role of speech/silence in shaping identity. He constructs a protagonist whose appearance is so elusive to his acquaintances because of the lack of narrative about him that his observers, including the readers, need to find clues to construct the tale and hence answer Byron’s questions about identity.

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CHAPTER 6

THE (UN)TOLD STORY OF LARA: IDENTITY THROUGH SPEECH/SILENCE

Although he had declared on 1 February 1814 in the Dedication to The Corsair that it was his last work to “trespass on public patience” (CPW 3: 148), Byron not only wrote another tale on the Orient four months later, but also published Lara anonymously with Samuel Rogers’ pastoral poem, Jacqueline, on 6 August 1814. I read this tale as questioning identity on multiple levels: Byron conceals his identity as writer in the same manner he conceals the title-character’s identity. Unlike the linear narrative of The Bride and The Corsair, and the circular one of The

Giaour, where the multiple portraits about the characters illuminate the tale, Lara does not provide the proper narrative background to understand the ensuing events nor does it provide portraits of the characters. The visual only collapses because of the lack of the verbal, or the silences. Despite the negative reviews this tale has received, I believe that the complexities in the narration are intentional: Byron challenges the readers to answer the questions about identity he had raised in his previous works, which I have discussed, and refrains from offering any answers.

To understand the plot, readers need to reconstruct Lara’s identity by piecing together the clues

Byron provides within and outside the text.

Despite Byron’s public dissociation from the tale, his Advertisement to the first edition introduces Lara in relationship to his previous romance, The Corsair.

The Reader . . . may probably regard it [Lara] as a sequel to the Corsair;—the coloring is

of a similar cast, and although the situations of the characters are changed, the stories are

in some measure connected. The countenance is nearly the same—but with a different

expression. (WLB 3: 323n1)

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Although Byron drops the Advertisement when publishing the tale independently from Rogers’ in December, Byron foreshadows his new perception about identity through the different issues these lines raise.99 This earlier version of the Advertisement explicitly makes a distinction between the “countenance”(form) of the two poems, and their “expression” (content), a distinction which I have explained in Chapter 1 when discussing the separation between the outside (the form of the text), and the inside (the content) (23-24).100 Byron warns his readers indirectly that although both poems use the same metric form—rhyming heroic couplets, as I have discussed in the previous chapter (130-31)—and offer poetic completion to each other, The

Corsair and Lara convey different perceptions of identity through their different narrative structures. This metaphor of the separation between the tales’ form and content, whether literary or aesthetic, reverberates with Byron’s view of the separation between appearance and the inner self, as I have discussed in the previous chapters.

Against the implication of this Advertisement, Jonathon Shears opposes reading Lara as a sequel to The Corsair. Shears asserts that “the uncertain narrative context of Lara becomes over-determined when resolved in relation to The Corsair, obscuring the unfocused nature of the later tale” (4-5). Although I agree with Shears that Lara is not a sequel to The Corsair, I believe that it provides a sequel to Byron’s evolving views about identity. As I have discussed in the previous chapters, CHP 1 and 2, question the binary of the European self, and specifically the

British one, in relationship to its ethnic, religious and political others. The Giaour then blurs the self with its supposed other(s) by rejecting religious and ethnic differences to define identity. The

99 Despite Byron’s hesitance, Murray separated Lara from Jacqueline in the fourth edition of 12 Dec. 1814. 100 EHC and Turhan (72) use this version from the first edition of Lara unlike other scholars, including McGann (CPW 3: 453), who use Byron’s revised version which drops this direct reference to form and content. 159

Bride rather focuses on the conflict between the self as defined by others, and the self as defined by the self. Constructing a republican-like society, The Corsair examines the multiple guises that one—whether male or female—assumes intentionally or unintentionally to support, re-define or mask the real self from public scrutiny, including public threats. Lara, on the other hand, re- evaluates Byron’s literary and political views in the post-Napoleonic context by locating them in a medieval, feudal-like society. While these tales use appearance to define identity, Lara foregrounds the aural, and disrupts the binaries of identity not by examining or domesticating the other as the previous tales do, but by questioning the identity of the self and hence treating it as the other.

Byron locates Lara in the feudal past to scrutinize the return of monarchy in France through the ordeals of his returned exile, Lara. Despite the festive atmosphere of the opening lines, the long-awaited chief disappoints his townspeople by his solitary arrival with a foreign- looking page. Despite the increasing mystery about him because of his refusal to disclose his past whereabouts and his non-conforming and strange behaviour, the text narrates only the circulating rumours about him. While the serfs associate his actions with the supernatural and witchcraft, his feudal neighbors associate them with the disruption of the existing social structure. The serfs, for example, report that Lara communicates with the spirits of his ancestors when visiting the portrait gallery at night, and loses consciousness on one occasion. The narrative then reaches a climax when his rival, Sir Ezzelin, disappears mysteriously after threatening to expose him as a perpetuator of a horrific deed. The feudal lords thus condemn Lara for murder and for disrupting the socio-political hierarchy. Soon, an insurrection rises by those defending personal rights—the serfs under the leadership of Lara—against those defending feudal rights, or the old-world order—Lara’s peers. However, Lara dies in the battle and is mourned only by his page, Kaled,

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whose masked identity as a woman is finally unveiled. But she is so delirious for his loss that she dies without disclosing anything about Lara. Rather than offering poetic closure, the tale ends by raising additional questions about identity.

Consolidating Byron’s past with his present, this tale loosely uses various elements from his previous tales. At first look, Lara recalls such divisions among traditional categories of identity as the social separation between the private and public spheres, the class separation between serfs and feudal rulers, and the gender separation which Lara’s page transgresses with the intentional or unintentional support of Lara. But Byron dissociates this tale from conventions of writing about the Orient, too, by providing a fragmentary, and perhaps incomplete, narrative which refrains from telling fantastic tales about the “wondrous wilds, and deserts vast” which

Lara is assumed to have visited (1.86). Instead of boasting the narrator’s, or the protagonist’s, knowledge of the Orient, as Byron does especially in The Giaour, Lara invites the readers to focus on the changes those experiences cause to Lara’s identity. His multiple observers repeatedly raise such questions as “What had he been? what was he, thus unknown, / Who walked their world, his lineage only known?” (1.295-96).

In this chapter, I will refer to various extra-textual texts to understand this romance, especially Lara’s identity. McGann asserts that the early drafts of Lara indicate that Byron had originally intended to accompany this romance with the short poem, “Opening Lines to Lara”

(CPW 3: 452).101 Using Byron’s favorite metaphor of the separation between the inner and the outer, “Lines” provides insight into Byron’s evolving views about identity in Lara.

Whose [the beloved’s] name too dearly cherished to impart

101 McGann notes that the “Opening Lines” did not appear in print till Jan. 1887 in Murray’s Magazine. 161

Dies on the lip but trembles in the heart—

Whose sudden mention can almost convulse

And lightens through the ungovernable pulse—

Till the heart leaps so keenly to the word

We fear that throb can hardly beat unheard. (1.3-8)

While McGann dismisses this poem as addressed to Byron’s half sister, Augusta Leigh (CPW 3:

459n232) and EHC as addressed to Lady Webster (WLB 3: 319), I believe that, regardless of the addressee, the poem foreshadows Byron’s new interest in speech rather than appearance when defining identity. The speaker fears that the mask he assumes would collapse by hearing or uttering the beloved’s “name.” Her “name” causes his “ungovernable pulse” and throbbing heart to expose his secret, perhaps illegitimate, emotions. But by controlling all sounds his body produces, especially by suppressing her “name,” the speaker is able to assume a mask of disregard for his beloved. In this instance, speech besides facial appearance masks or unmasks a person’s inner self. This instance also foreshadows the importance of the “name” in the romance by showing its significance in interpreting one’s identity.

“Lines” foreshadows the complexity that the unspoken facts about Lara would produce when the text separates his inner self from his past self and his present self. Understanding the past—whether Byron’s or Lara’s—is essential to decode the romance. In the same manner I have used Byron’s “Journal: November 14, 1813—April 19, 1814” in Chapter 5 to understand the political and personal background of The Corsair, I will use the final entries to understand the

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background of Lara.102 While Byron starts this Journal by pondering identity, he abruptly ends it five months later with the initial exile of Napoleon to Elba, which had occurred a month before

Byron started Lara. In his 9 April 1814 entry, Byron signaled the day of the abdication by exclaiming “I mark this day!” (BLJ 3: 259).103 From this day to the publication of Lara, Byron struggled with multiple personal, political and financial pressures. His ex-lover, Caroline Lamb, for example, pursued him again. His confidante, Lady Melbourne, denounced his relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, especially upon her giving birth to Medora on 15 April, whom Melbourne and others suspected Byron had fathered.104 And on 25 April the Milbankes finally approved Byron’s courting Annabelle, whom he married in December regardless of his undecided feelings and his rising debts.

Despite the urgency of these struggles, Byron refers to them only fleetingly in the entries following the 9 April one. Byron was rather occupied by the repercussions of Napoleon’s fall, thus protesting at the end of his Journal that “the Bourbons are restored!!!” (BLJ 3: 257). As I have discussed in the previous chapter, Byron and his acquaintances associated the Bourbons with conservatism, corruption and oppression. This justifies Byron’s announcing that “I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before—‘O fool! I shall go mad.’” Despite his threatening Byron’s home-nation, Napoleon’s fall marked the defeat of republicanism with its promise of progress. The tale represents Byron’s view of the loss of republican ideals, as caused by the interests of their leaders—Lara in this case—which causes the

102 In the previous chapter, I have discussed Byron’s Journal in relationship to The Corsair and the seventh edition of CHP 1 and 2. 103 See Chapter 2 for more on Napoleon’s abdication of 6 Apr. 1814 (45n27). 104 Augusta named her newborn Medora, who was the beloved of the title-character in The Corsair, the tale which Byron composed while they lived together in 1813-1814. 163

return of the old-world order—Sir Otho and his feudal peers—and their disregarding the thousands who perish under the slogans of freedom and equality—the serfs.

Underestimating the significance of Byron’s personal struggles, McGann and Watkins offer a political reading of the tale like their reading of The Corsair, a reading which interprets both tales according to Byron’s own readings about European politics. While McGann emphasizes the role of such political writers as Sismondi with his views of the Italian revolution in forming Lara (CPW 3: 452-53), Watkins emphasizes the role of Napoleon’s 1814 abdication with the resulting return to “powerful conservatism” as forming the social relations in Lara (89).

However, I interpret the tale as Byron’s aesthetic response to his present—personal and political—which visualizes his fear of the loss of republican ideals. Because Byron associated conservatism—or political and social oppression—with the medieval past, he locates Lara in a feudal society. Besides exposing the values of the old-world order, Byron’s representations of serfdom reverberate with current discourses about workers as slaves. Lara’s employing the serfs for his personal ends, for example, recalls Byron’s criticizing the financial and social bondage of the working classes in his parliamentary speeches of 1812, as I have notes in the previous chapters.

* * *

The tale starts by announcing the unexpected arrival of the person they believe is “the

Chief of Lara” (11).

His hall scarce echoes with his wonted name,

His portrait darkens in its fading frame,

Another chief consoled his destined bride,

The young forgot him, and the old had died. (1.33-36)

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Unlike the introductory lines of The Corsair, which base the tale on Conrad’s “name” as a reputed pirate, Lara starts by establishing a tension between the protagonist’s “name” and his

“portrait”—an aural and a visual aspect of identity—and establishes a tension between the protagonist’s “name” and real self—the outside and the inside. Conrad’s “name” prevails despite his final disappearance, but Lara’s initial absence eradicates all trace of his identity including its visual aspects through memory, and its aural aspects through stories or gossip. Because those who knew him had either died or were too young to remember him, Lara’s appearance becomes an unreliable way of recognizing him, turning him into a stranger. Therefore, his portrait loses value because his absence and silence about his past whereabouts cause a narrative discontinuity about his identity, which questions his being the person in the portrait. Although the identity of the protagonist is the center of scrutiny here, as in the previous tales, Lara’s inner self in this tale remains a mystery even to the narrator.

In the same manner Byron conceals his identity as the writer of Lara through its anonymous publication but reveals it through his tell-tale Advertisement, his title-character conceals his identity but reveals it through what his acquaintances perceive as his disruptive behaviour. Byron uses the concept of “name” as synonymous with identity in this tale. As I have discussed earlier, the “name” represents the two competing social structures which both The

Corsair and Lara use when allegorizing Byron’s frustration at the fall of Napoleon. The Corsair constructs a republican, classless society where traditional values, including those of family, are absent. But Lara emphasizes those values by constructing a medieval, feudal society that is based on preserving traditions and ancestry. Acting on his reputation as a chief of pirates, Conrad favors his worldly enterprises, which ensure the safety of his pirates’ isle. However, he is doomed when he permits such traditional values as chivalry—aiding oppressed women—to

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interfere with his adventures. Despite the misfortune this so-called weakness causes, his name as the formidable chief of pirates prevails unlike Lara’s darkening name at the beginning of this romance (1.34).

The narrative starts by juxtaposing Lara prior to his absence with the person whom his people believe to be Lara, thus questioning the identity of the present person. His observers gradually other him because his continued silence disrupts his identity from the being whose

“soul in youth was haughty, but his sins / No more than pleasure from the stripling wins” (1.61-

62) to a being whose behaviour is different not only from that of his acquaintances, but also from his own supposed past self. Lara’s experiences change him to the extent that he resists his social and political roles of “uphold[ing] his patrimonial fame” (1.59-60). Lara is thus condemned for discarding the roles his feudal society prescribes: he abandons his feudal estates, mismanages his serfs, and ignores his ancestral lineage by not producing an heir. While the serfs support Lara because he sympathizes with their ordeals unlike his fellow-feudal rulers, Lara’s peers oppose his disrupting the existing power relationships within the feudal society. To the double misfortune of his “name,” Lara dies in the insurrection, and is buried in an unmarked grave.

Although Byron calls Lara a “tale” in its sub-title, Lara disrupts conventions of story- telling by not only loosely borrowing narrative elements from sensibility and gothic romances, but also by providing incomplete information about the characters and events, both of which disrupt readers’ expectations about the narrative. This romance not only discards descriptions of appearance and provides little narration, but also constructs an all-male community where violence occurs in both the domestic and the public spheres, and where the object of conflict is not a female but the attainment of masculine honor. The only heroine is the character who appears and behaves as a male but, as the final scene reveals, is actually a masked female. On the

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other hand, this romance constructs what Leonard S. Goldberg calls “Gothic moments” (661) through the haunted appearance of Lara’s ancestral mansion with its supernatural beings which, according to the servants, torment their master. But the narrative soon discards these moments as mere hallucinations, directing attention to the insurrection. Such complexities in the construction of Lara generate not only a protagonist different from those of the previous tales, but also a protagonist whom scholars believe to epitomize the Byronic hero. While this concept is relevant to the protagonists of the earlier tales, I introduce it here because the Byronic hero, Lara, is more developed and prominent here than in Byron’s earlier tales.

According to Alexis Spiceland Lee, stanzas 17, 18 and 19 not only describe the mysterious traits in Lord Lara but also illustrate the traits that such scholars as Jerome McGann

(24-27) and Peter Thorslev (159-61) cite when defining the Byronic hero (9-12). In his well- known study, Thorslev defines the Byronic hero as simultaneously borrowing traits from existing heroic types. For example, he borrows from the “Man of feeling” his “tender sensibilities and . . . his undying fidelity to the woman he loves” and from the “Gothic Villain” his “looks, his mysterious past, and his secret sins” (163). Thorslev concludes that the Byronic hero is a

“Romantic rebel” who is also “courteous towards women,” has a “sense of honor,” but suffers a

“deep sense of guilt” (8). While Thorslev and Lee perceive the Byronic hero in terms of “‘total’ rebellion” whether on political, religious, and philosophical levels (197), I perceive him as one whose agency intentionally or unintentionally disrupts existing conventions, causing those around him to condemn his lack of conformity. I also read the defining traits of the Byronic hero, which scholars point out, as fulfilling double, perhaps contrary, ends.

I believe that Byron consciously constructs his protagonist in Lara to make the question of identity the focus of this poem. Thorslev notes that Byron had later added stanzas 18 and 19

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(1.313-82) to represent the character of Lara as a Byronic hero (160).105 Lee also reads these lines as representing a “multi-gendered protagonist” whose behaviour and appearance, like the protagonists of the previous tales, destabilize popular constructs of male and female (21).

However, he undermines the disruption of identity these characters perform. I thus read these lines as signaling the importance of the doubleness in Lara’s character, which both Lara’s observers and Lara’s readers fail to consolidate.

With all that chilling mystery of mien,

And seeming gladness to remain unseen,

He had (if ’twere not nature’s boon) an art

Of fixing memory on another’s heart:

It was not love perchance—nor hate—nor aught

That words can image to express the thought;

But they who saw him did not see in vain,

And once beheld, would ask of him again:

And those to whom he spake remembered well,

And on the words, however light, would dwell:

None knew, nor how, nor why, but he entwined

Himself perforce around the hearer’s mind;

......

You could not penetrate his soul, but found,

105 Thorslev is referring to what McGann describes as MS. L, dated 15 May 1814, with which McGann finds a group of “MS. Leaves (MS. LA)” containing various corrections and insertions Byron had made for the poem before its initial publication (451-52). 168

Despite your wonder, to your own he wound;

His presence haunted still; and from the breast

He forced an all unwilling interest:

Vain was the struggle in that mental net—

His spirit seemed to dare you to forget! (1.361-72, 377-82)

Discarding Lara’s appearance, these lines delineate the trait which sets Lara apart from his acquaintances. Like Conrad’s ability to influence the inner thoughts of his observers while concealing his own, Lara is able to penetrate the thoughts of his observers while mesmerizing them with his mysterious identity. Although scholars highlight this trait as significant in the construction of the Byronic hero, I add that upon close inspection this trait actually serves double purposes of good and bad. Although as McGann asserts, “all Byronic heroes are almost hypnotically fascinating” (24-25), this trait of Lara’s unforgettable and intriguing presence causes an acquaintance from the past, Sir Ezzelin, to recognize him and threaten to expose his supposed dark past, as I will examine in the next section.

By the end of this portrait, the narrator changes the narrative viewpoint from the third person to the second with his “You,” which directly challenges the readers to decode the multiple, single-sided perspectives Lara reveals. While Shears discards this challenge by reading these portraits as lack of characterization, or Lara’s “moral ambiguity,” attributing them to a

“lack of stable moral purpose to the story itself” (3), I believe that the complexity in Lara results from the elusiveness of identity which Byron perceives. In other words, this complexity results from Byron’s making up stories about a stranger to the community—the other—who is supposed to be the self by providing incomplete information based on the rumors of those who claim to know the protagonist. Byron’s view of identity is thus not a homogenous, stable construct, as

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Roderick Beaton also argues (33). But unlike Beaton’s view of identity as “willed by the protagonists,” the instability in identity that Byron represents in 1812-1815 is caused by the changing political and social circumstances in the early nineteenth century which tormented

Byron, as his Journal also reveals.

Lara struggles to consolidate his two pasts—the period before his trip and the period during his trip—with his present. As the youthful Lara had escaped from his lavish but unfulfilling life to the lands of the Orient, the mature Lara escapes again from the past, though for undisclosed reasons, by returning to the present. The resulting doubleness in his character not only supports the previous definition of the Byronic hero as having a memorable persona, but also supports my definition of the Byronic hero as submitting to a special code of behaviour and speech, which unintentionally disrupts prevalent codes.

That brow in furrow’d lines had fix’d at last,

And spake of passions, but of passion past;

The pride, but not the fire, of early days,

Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise;

A high demeanour, and a glance that took

Their thoughts from others by a single look;

And that sarcastic levity of tongue,

The stinging of a heart the world hath stung,

That darts in seeming playfulness around,

And makes those feel that will not own the wound;

All these seemed his, and something more beneath

Than glance could well reveal, or accent breathe. (1.67-78)

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While these lines mark again Lara’s ability to perceive others’ hidden thoughts, this portrait slightly traces the facial changes that his experiences had generated. He not only develops deep lines between his darkly knit brows, and thus appears different from his past portrait, but his present behaviour also differs from his youthful one by his being cold and rude towards others, and being verbally aggressive to those surrounding him. He also reciprocates the curiosity of his townspeople by pondering, and perhaps judging, his observers.

Although Lara attempts to consolidate his differences whether in the public sphere with his townspeople, or in the private sphere with the portraits of his ancestors, the narrative warns that Lara remains different from his acquaintances. He is a silent observer among his peers, the

“magnates of his land” (1.98), with whom he “only saw, and did not share, / The common pleasure or the general care” (1.101-02). However, the narrator notes that Lara’s wavering between an extrovert personality and an introvert one actually masks the inner anguish he suffers: “With eye more curious he appeared to scan [Man]” / And oft in sudden mood, for many a day, / From all communion he would start away” (1.132-34). I interpret this part by reference to “Lines to Lara.” Like the speaker of that poem, Lara controls his observers’ perception by the mask he assumes. Although he appears to be interested in his present surroundings, only observing his people while shunning their pursuits, his inner self interrupts that disguise by his sudden anguish and nostalgia for his past. He thus masks his inner self by his persistent silence, especially about his travels.

While I agree with Thorslev’s definition of the Byronic hero as neither good nor evil, I disagree with Elizabeth A. Fay’s view that the opposites in this hero “mirror the social tensions and projected fears of a culture in flux” (195). My discussion will reveal that the Byronic hero exposes the conflicts in the existing system by embodying contradictory aspects of behaviour.

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The experiences this hero undergoes compel him to choose his own lifestyle, form his own alliances, and submit to his own codes of behaviour and perhaps language, which, however, his observers condemn. Accordingly, Lara’s so-called peculiarities turn him into a dominant topic of gossip.

Opinion varying o’er his hidden lot,

In praise or railing ne’er his name forgot:

His silence formed a theme for others’ prate—

They guess’d—they gazed—they fain would know his fate. (1.290-93)

Lara’s townspeople believe that his experiences have changed him to the extent that they interpret his conversation, too, as foreign. His different manner of speech causes his servants and fellow feudal rulers to suspect his past whereabouts and his identity. His servants thus publicize his communicating in the language “not of his native tongue” (1.230) with his ancestral portraits, spirits and even his foreign-looking page. His speech not only marks his serfs’, and later his acquaintances’, fear of the unknown, but also their fear of his disrupting the social and political order when sharing traits with those who are foreign to his people, especially his feudal peers.

Although the reaction of his country-men addresses again the issue of others gazing back at the self, as in The Giaour, otherness here is established through the difference of speech, which not only leaves the listeners, or eavesdroppers, ignorant of Lara’s self, but also alienates them from the knowledge he shares with his supposed foreign addressee, Kaled.

I will consider the previous portrait of Lara as a Byronic hero alongside his other portraits in the tale because they delineate the complexities in Lara’s identity. In the next section, I will focus on two key scenes which precede and follow the popular portrait of the Byronic hero:

Lara’s scream of terror in the portrait gallery and Lara’s encounter with Sir Ezzelin. Both are

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significant because they allegorize the tension between the past and the present. Despite his supposed “name,” both scenes cause Lara’s acquaintances to gradually perceive him as a stranger, which he enhances with his silence about his personal history, and by behaving unconventionally. Both scenes also recall Byron’s denouncing class privileges in his Journal, as I have explained in the previous chapter (128-29), by exposing the inability of the ancestral

“name,” or the old-world order, to generate one’s identity.

* * *

Lara’s disturbing encounter with his ancestors’ portraits occurs in the portrait gallery of his ancestral mansion. He stares at the portraits, which directly “frown / In rude but antique portraiture” at him through a frontal pose (1.137). This positioning hints at the various binaries which Lara had disrupted when consolidating the past with the present. Interpreting this scene in terms of public and private binaries, Leonard S. Goldberg, for example, reads it as representing the “impassable borders” between the self and the outside which Lara had unfortunately transgressed with his long, mysterious trip. This transgression entraps him in the center—the self—and alienates him from his outer surroundings, causing him to lapse into a “private language,” which his acquaintances cannot comprehend, each time he fails to cross these borders

(663-64). However, I read these binaries as signifying the way Lara performs his subjectivity in his feudal surroundings. The ancestral portraits—public icons—become a part of his private history, which, like his travels, he conceals from the public, though for different reasons. By being exhibited in an isolated hall, of which the servants/observers are afraid, the portraits lose their end of boasting his supposed ancestral glory and are eventually forgotten by the townspeople (1.34). Lara further diminishes the supposed value of these portraits by rejecting his

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feudal role and hence separating himself from his ancestors by leading an insurrection against his feudal neighbors which causes his death.

This scene also recalls the binaries of life and death by representing Lara in a spectre-like appearance which foreshadows his death in the final scene. While reciprocating the gaze of his ancestors, his appearance others him from not only his acquaintances but also his ancestors. He takes on an appearance that coincides with the gothic-like atmosphere of the “dark gallery” with its portraits (1.138). This scene actually offers one of the few visual descriptions of Lara when pondering his “bristling locks of sable,” his “brow of gloom” and “the wide waving of his shaken plume,” enhancing his ominous and untidy appearance (1.197-99). Lara’s gazing at the portraits not only compels a comparison between his own diminishing portrait of the introductory lines and his present self after his return, but also compels a comparison between his ancestral portraits, a representation, and the present Lara, a real subject.

There [the portraits] were the painted forms of other times,

’Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes,

Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults

That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults;

And half a column of the pompous page,

That speeds the specious tale from age to age. (1.183-88)

These lines treat the portraits as texts which can convey identity by their ability to narrate, or reflect, tales visually, albeit fabricated ones. Although the narrator describes the portraits in terms of tradition and familial honor—aspects of the old-world order—Lara rejects this reading of his supposed ancestors. Lara ponders the portraits only to realize that because of their temporal distance, the identities of his supposed ancestors are questionable like his own identity

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in the previous instances. He also realizes that observers read identity—whether verbal or visual—subjectively because these portraits, besides the biographical records of his ancestors, are mere “painted forms,” which an artist—painter or writer—produced. His realizing that these records prevail over such material and immaterial relics as one’s real vices and virtues, customs and bodily remains greatly alarms Lara, and causes his lapse into unconsciousness. In fact, these suspicions regarding the historical and cultural authenticity of portraits reverberate with the manipulations Byron had committed when Phillips was drawing him the year before, as I have discussed in Chapter 2 (58-65). In this tale, the past also turns into an imaginary construct like the culturally constructed other.

Moreover, this scene destabilizes the conventional binaries of self and other by representing Lara—the supposed self—as mirroring his ancestors, whose identity as the self is, however, questionable. His eccentric behaviour and persistent silence turn him into a stranger to his own class of rulers and to the residents of his domestic circle. The early lines of this poem separate the returned Lara from the past one, whom his townspeople and serfs remember vaguely, causing them to perceive him as a different self, or an other. Although his townspeople have used portraits as a reference for the identity and lineage of Lara’s family, the scene in the portrait gallery establishes doubts about that very identity by hinting at the fictitious nature of what the portraits narrate. The portraits can also be read as the other in relationship to the observing Lara because they represent dead people, who are distanced through time and context, and thus can be merely perceived through material means of art, paintings and biographies. On the other hand, the increasing doubts about the returned exile being the Lara in question separate him further from the ancestors in the portraits, and question his identity as the real Lara or an impersonator.

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However, Lara’s observers—servants—perceive him differently in this scene. They read

Lara’s pondering the remains of his supposed ancestors and his solitary wanderings as caused by supernatural-like powers. They circulate rumors about their master’s private life, claiming to hear mysterious noises from the gallery hall every night. They thus rush with curiosity into the gallery when they hear his frightened scream, believing the spirits of the portraits to have scared him.106 Fortunately, his unconsciousness permits them to gaze at him in their attempts to understand his mysterious inner self in the same manner he had gazed at his ancestors’ portraits to understand theirs.

His eye was almost seal’d, but not forsook,

Even in its trance, the gladiator’s look,

That oft awake his aspect could disclose,

......

The swarthy blush recolours in his cheeks,

His lip resumes its red, his eye, though dim,

Rolls wide and wild, each slowly quivering limb

Recalls its function, but his words are strung

In terms that seem not of his native tongue. (1.221-23, 226-30)

Despite the vulnerability his unconsciousness seems to generate, he looks “firm” and defiant with his “gathered brow” and wild-looking lips which convey his readiness for battle (1.215-17).

His closed eyes also reveal what his observers perceive as a “gladiator’s look” (1.222). The narrator, however, warns the observers that this look “oft” (1.223) surfaces during his conscious

106 This incident recalls Byron’s own fear of his ancestral portraits, which Byron’s biographers note had scared the youthful Byron when reclaiming his ancestral mansion, Newstead Abbey. 176

state, especially when he will lead the insurrection. Lara’s appearance soon changes with his regaining consciousness: his cheeks blush, his lips redden, and his limbs and eyes quiver. This double appearance as like and unlike heroes of sensibility is questioned when the dimness of his eyes and what they perceive as his jumbled and perhaps foreign speech point to his still being unconscious of his surroundings. I read the different personalities that appear in this scene as unmasking different selves, which he conceals from public scrutiny like the speaker of the

“Lines.” As a result, his servants are greatly disappointed when Lara behaves as usual the next day and neglects to explain the incident in the gallery, or to offer his perspective on the event.

The different selves that this scene unmasks confuse, and perhaps alarm, his servants because those mysterious identities, which they fail to comprehend, violate their perceptions about his identity as a feudal lord. From this point onwards, Lara challenges prevalent codes of behaviour more explicitly than before the realization he achieves in the gallery, as the scene with Ezzelin demonstrates.

I interpret Lara’s identity in the portrait gallery scene as based simultaneously on the political frustration Byron was suffering because of the return of the old-world order, and on the reviews Byron was receiving from Phillips’ portraits in the Royal Academy exhibition, which had opened a few weeks before he had started composing this tale.107 The construction of Lara and his ancestral portraits mirrors Byron’s views about the interrelationship between verbal and visual representation, especially the objectivity of portraits, the role of the artist in producing art, and the role of the audience in interpreting the work. At first look, Byron’s emphasizing the

107 As I have discussed in Chapter 1, Byron sat to Thomas Phillips for two portraits in June and July 1813. These were exhibited in the annual Royal Academy Exhibition from 2 May to 9 July 1814. McGann asserts that Byron started composing Lara on 15 May 1814 (CPW 3: 451). 177

ability of the artist to control or manipulate forms of art points to their being a subjective medium, or a construct which simultaneously loses and gains significance according to the observer, and the temporal and spatial aspects related to the work, as I have noted in Chapter 1.

However, the multiple perspectives in which Lara appears to his observers recall the multiple perspectives one may have on a portrait in a gallery, a fact which Byron must have considered when exhibiting his own portraits on different walls in the exhibition hall (59-60). Reading Lara in the portrait gallery from a political perspective, I also believe that Byron uses the interrelatedness of the visual with the verbal to point to the error of constructing a single dimensional society, like the feudal one of Lara and the hierarchical ones of The Giaour and The

Bride, where the represented subjects lack voice and their identities thus risk misinterpretation.

The tale reaches a climax during a dinner party at Lord Otho’s, a fellow feudal ruler. This scene is highly complex and essential to the narrative because it promises Lara’s acquaintances, and perhaps readers, that the mystery surrounding Lara’s identity will be solved. A Sir Ezzelin, who claims to have been Lara’s acquaintance during his travels, transgresses Lara’s personal space visually and verbally by his gaze and his interrogation.

. . . ’tis a face unknown,

But seems as searching his [Lara’s], and his alone;

Prying and dark, a stranger’s by his mien,

Who still till now had gazed on him unseen:

At length encountering meets the mutual gaze

Of keen enquiry, and of mute amaze. (1.405-10)

Ezzelin gazes at Lara as intently as Lara had gazed at his ancestral portraits and as intently as his servants had gazed at his unconscious body. Lara soon counters Ezzelin’s gaze by gazing at him,

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and both seek to disclose each other’s inner thoughts and perhaps identity. But at his failure to intimidate Lara visually, Ezzelin disrupts their “mutual gaze” by crying publicly “’Tis he!”

(1.415). He then alerts all the guests about his shock at meeting this particular person, whom he interestingly does not name, in that particular place and occasion, and triggers their curiosity to hear his story by asking further “how came he thence?—what doth he here?” (1.426). After all,

Lara has kept his acquaintances ignorant about his past whereabouts and has remained withdrawn since his return.

However, Lara disappoints his observers/listeners again by not only refusing to respond to Ezzelin’s questions, but also by questioning Ezzelin’s own identity. Despite the assertions of their host about his being a neighboring landowner whose lands are located between Lara’s and

Otho’s, Lara accuses Ezzelin of being an intruder, or a foreign other. Lara then identifies himself as a feudal member of the local community.

“My name is Lara—when thine own [Ezzelin] is known,

Doubt not my fitting answer to requite

The unlooked for courtesy of such a knight.

’Tis Lara!—further wouldst thou mark or ask?

I shun no question, and I wear no mask.” (1.432-36)

This is a central scene about identity in this romance. Although this conversation is based on the ideals of the medieval courtly culture and hence reinforces the crusade background, as I will demonstrate, this scene raises the issues that Byron’s previous tales have been treating: the separation between the outside and the inside through the protagonist’s struggle to separate his private life from public scrutiny. Acting against his former violations against his feudal origins and against his future ones when he leads the insurrection, Lara embraces his ancestral name of

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“Lara” and his feudal status. This move distances him from the questions of his observers by virtue of his class and status, and thus counters the circulating suspicions about his real identity.

This move also recalls Byron’s and his acquaintances’ belief in the corruption of authority figures, especially of the old-world order, when they escape judgment by virtue of their political status.

Lara ends Ezzelin’s interrogation abruptly by reinstating Ezzelin’s initial remark of “’Tis he!” into “’Tis Lara.” He uses this remark to declare that his identity is his personal business and not a subject for public scrutiny. By declaring in an affirmative tone that he is wearing his real self without a mask, Lara dissuades his interrogators further from asking about his identity again.

He also accuses Ezzelin, and perhaps the readers, of failing to read his appearance and condemns their persistent curiosity in his supposed real identity. This remark actually turns his acquaintances’ curiosity about him on themselves by representing them as wearing masks, which possibly hinders them from understanding him. Contrary to these claims of transparency, Lara persists in denying knowing Ezzelin by claims that he “must not trifle too” (2.694). However, the second canto will support his opponent’s claims of their former comradeship by suggesting their fighting together in battles in distant lands, perhaps the crusade wars. His acquaintances will suspect Lara’s assertions in this scene when he later reveals superior combat skills, as when he forces Otho to fulfill Ezzelin’s knightly pledge, and fights in the insurrection. After his death, the narrative will again suggest his participating in a past war with Ezzelin, noting that “on his

[Lara’s] breast, / . . . / They found the scatter’d dints of many a scar, / Which were not planted there in recent war” (2.540, 542-43). Lara’s declaring his openness to interrogation in the previous instance despite his persistent silence about Ezzelin’s accusations justifies in hindsight

Ezzelin’s rage.

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In the party scene, Lara’s acquaintance is not only shocked at Lara’s denying their past but is also enraged at his questioning his identity. Ezzelin thus mimics Lara’s assertion of honesty in disbelief before pleading to his conscience regarding a woman whom he claims both had known.

Thou shun’st no question! Ponder—is there none

Thy heart must answer, though thine ear would shun?

And deem’st thou me unknown too? Gaze again!

At least thy memory was not given in vain.

Oh! never canst thou cancel half her debt. (1.437-41)

This is all the readers learn about Lara’s past, his previous sexual life, and the possible anguish he suffers. A precursor to the unspeakable and unspoken pain of the title-character of Manfred

(1816), who suffers for losing his forbidden lover, the title-character of Lara is haunted by a similar lover with whom he not only had an illegitimate relationship, but also wronged, possibly causing her death. But because this narrative abstains from providing the story from Lara’s point of view, as the Giaour provides his story through his confession, the identity of this woman and her relationship to Lara remain mysterious. Accordingly, when Ezzelin reminds Lara of his supposed transgression—whether it is his relationship to the deceased woman, or his role in her death—Lara deals with his accusations in the same manner he had dealt with his past in the portrait gallery: he avoids visual and verbal confrontation by keeping his inner self, and his past, masked. But Ezzelin perseveres in penetrating Lara’s mask of indifference by pleading to Lara’s inner self—his emotions and memory—and asks him again to engage his senses—ears, eyes and speech—rather than shutting them against his inquiries.

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Rather than responding to Ezzelin’s questions, Lara thwarts him again by reinstating his own social status, or “name,” against Ezzelin’s. He thus demands reverence from his accuser and the bystanders by recalling his status as a feudal lord and thus someone supposedly above persecution.

“Art thou not he? whose deeds——”

“Whate’er I be,

Words wild as these, accusers like to thee

I list no further; those with whom they weigh

May hear the rest, nor venture to gainsay

The wondrous tale no doubt thy tongue can tell,

Which thus begins so courteously and well. . . . ” (1.455-60)

Ezzelin exhausts all means to delve into Lara’s inner self: the gaze, interrogation, recalling their shared past, threats of exposal, and appeals to Lara’s conscience. Lara concludes the scene abruptly by interpreting Ezzelin’s need for a confirmation as need for gossip, which he condemns as disrespectful to his reputation, or his “name.” Lara then escapes further scrutiny by the immunity that their host offers when postponing their confrontation to the next day, and having each pledge to produce evidence to justify each one’s claims. To the misfortune of their audience, and the readers, Ezzelin disappears mysteriously the same night and the promised interrogation turns into a sword fight between Lara and Otho. This fight then develops into a war between both feudal heads under the guise of an insurrection by their oppressed serfs.

Because of the lack of factual background in this scene, I interpret the mysteries it raises through an entry from Byron’s Journal which comments on the writings he was reading before writing this romance. Although Byron’s letters to Murray and to Hobhouse had denied national

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associations, especially those to medieval Spain in Lara (CPW 3: 453n1), Byron’s using the name of Ezzelin for this particular scene indirectly supports the tale’s background of the crusade wars, as I have noted when discussing the hints that Ezzelin had made in their first encounter and when interpreting Lara’s combat skills and the wounds on his body (180). In fact, when discussing the political writings he had been reading in a 20 March 1814 entry in his Journal,

Byron notes his fascination with a “fine engraving in Lavater, from a picture by Fuseli, of that

Ezzelin, over the body of Meduna, punished by him for a hitch in her constancy during his absence in the Crusades” (BLJ 3: 253-54). This quote not only proves Byron’s direct familiarity with Lavater’s manual of physiognomic analysis, which I have discussed in Chapter 2,108 but also reveals the source of Ezzelin’s character which his readers would associate with the crusades.

I use this anecdote to interpret the unspoken relationship between Ezzelin and Lara, and the aesthetic relationship between the original Ezzelin and Lara. Unlike Byron’s setting the previous tales explicitly in the present East, Lara lacks a definite setting. But this anecdote locates Lara’s travels in the Levant during the time of the crusade wars, and locates Lara’s feudal community in medieval Europe. Ironically, Sir Ezzelin, the only person who directly interacts with Lara, besides his host Otho, originates from a portrait. Although such use reflects the interrelationship between the visual and the verbal—as I have discussed in the section on the portrait gallery—and between both art forms in this period—as I have explained in Chapter 2—

Lara’s encounter with Ezzelin is based on reversals of art forms: Ezzelin reverses place with

108 For more on Lavater, see 49n30; and on the way views of physiognomy were integrated into Byron’s portraits, see 52-53. 183

Lara’s ancestral portraits by haunting Lara publicly in human form while his ancestors haunt him domestically in portrait form.

Besides revealing Byron’s loose use of his source texts, Byron’s displacement of the character of Ezzelin suggests a motivation for the enmity between Ezzelin and Lara. Their supposedly participating in the same war suggests a motive for their mysterious animosity, which their rivalry on the same woman had rather increased. Although Ezzelin accuses Lara in his fragmentary account to have caused her death, the text neither identifies that woman nor the nature of her infliction, and nor Lara’s role in her ordeal. Ezzelin may be hinting at Lara’s committing an unspeakable sin, or breach of knightly codes, which had intentionally or unintentionally caused the death of the aforementioned woman. Like the speaker of “Lines” and

Conrad in The Corsair, Lara only disguises his distress at her loss, and probably his guilt for causing her death, by assuming a mask of haughtiness and indifference.

Because the romance does not provide any insight about the woman’s identity and hence relationship to either knight, I disagree with the idea of her being Ezzelin’s adulterous wife according to Byron’s source text. I rather believe that Byron uses his sources loosely, as in his appropriating Ezzelin in this tale from a subject in a portrait to the antagonist of his tale. I thus propose re-reading the response of the only woman of the tale—the masked Kaled—to Ezzelin’s accusations in light of Byron’s entry about the source of Ezzelin’s name.

The colour of young Kaled went and came,

The lip of ashes, and the cheek of flame;

And o’er his brow the dampening heart-drops threw

The sickening iciness of that cold dew

That rises as the busy bosom sinks

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With heavy thoughts from which reflection shrinks. (1.598-603)

The facial changes that Kaled undergoes in these lines recall the changes in Lara’s facial features when he loses consciousness in the portrait gallery. While he appeared doubly as a man of sensibility and a gladiator, Kaled appears to be on the verge of death. Lara’s previous red lips and cheeks contrast with her burning cheeks and ashy lips. While his body gradually regains animation, hers appears to lose it by the dying-like appearance of her sinking bosom and perspiring forehead. Lacking the skill of Lara in disguising his inner self and anguish, Kaled’s perturbed appearance mirrors her horrified, inner self, as the narrative also describes. In fact, the fright she displays upon seeing Ezzelin interrogating Lara not only suggests her, and perhaps his familiarity with him, but also suggests Ezzelin’s being a threat to both.

Despite the interest of Lara’s observers, and the readers, in constructing Lara’s identity, the tale is silent about the identity of the young Kaled. Their acquaintances disregard her uncommonly close relationship to her master, and overlook her nonconforming behaviour in relationship to her supposed status as a page. The romance ends by merely stating that “she lies by him she loved; / Her tale untold—her truth too dearly proved” (2.626-27). The poem merely devotes the concluding lines to notify the readers that her story remains untold like her lover’s, because of the general lack of interest in her identity. Like her supposed master, she had no acquaintances because she shunned verbal contact with others, including those of her supposed class, her fellow-pages. Using the same entry in Byron’s Journal, I believe that it clarifies why

Kaled was terrified about recognizing Ezzelin. Kaled was afraid that if Ezzelin exposed Lara’s misconduct against the mysterious woman, he would expose Kaled’s own masked identity, thus either exposing her own role in that incident, or exposing her disguised self as the woman who is the subject of their rivalry. Disguised as a page, Kaled may be read as having eloped with her

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accomplice, or beloved—Lara—with or without his knowledge. Whatever may be Kaled’s real identity, or her story, her disturbed expression upon seeing Ezzelin provides the motive to her murdering him as a protection for both herself and Lara.

Emphasizing Lara’s identity, this tale ends by classifying his identity according to the opposite selves that he reveals in both cantos.

Stern, unambitious, silent, he had been

Henceforth a calm spectator of Life’s scene;

But dragg’d again upon the arena, stood

A leader not unequal to the feud;

In voice—mien—gesture—savage nature spoke,

And from his eye the gladiator broke. (2.258-63)

These lines juxtapose the extremes of Lara’s identity: Lara, the silent observer of the first canto; and Lara, the gladiator-like fighter of the second. Although these are not mutually exclusive because they have frequently appeared simultaneously in various instances—as I have shown in the portrait gallery scene—the narrator accuses his acquaintances of having caused Lara’s violent self to erupt, asserting that Lara was actually uninterested in the battle into which his serfs and his aristocratic rivals drew him. The second canto also questions the identities which the first canto provides by representing Lara as blurring binaries other than those of gender. After appearing as both the ruthless murderer of Ezzelin and the liberator of the serfs, Lara appears as a gladiator when leading the insurrection. But this gladiator-like character is thwarted when he is wounded. Lara then appears as a man of sensibility, lying on Kaled’s lap, and conversing with her gently in their language till he dies. The tale remains unresolved about whether or not Lara’s violent self had co-existed with his peaceful one and may have erupted at other occasions,

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whether or not this peaceful personality was shaped by or influenced by the one he had masked, and whether or not other identities co-existed with these selves but lacked the stimuli to surface.

From this tale and the previous ones, the question of identity remains unresolved. The self, or the Byronic hero as I have discussed in this chapter, may be recognized and unrecognized because his identity is endlessly shaped by external changes as well as personal ones. Tom Mole argues that Byron had adjusted views about physiognomy by showing that “the discerning spectator could read the secret and uniquely private history of a troubled and fascinatingly deep subject” (Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 75-76). However, Byron’s tales, especially Lara, lack closure because both his narrators and the readers fail to access that private history, or the

“untold” story, by visual scrutiny alone. This failure points to Byron’s belief that the inner self is an individualized subjectivity which is inaccessible to the public. I thus refer to the last line in my previous quote from Lara to resolve the mysteries in this romance: “All these seemed his, and something more beneath / Than glance could well reveal, or accent breathe” (1.77-78).

Lara’s appearance conceals his inner self because Byron requires the observers to construct the tale without Lara, or the narrator, providing any input. I believe that the goal of this romance is to foreground the subjective aspect of identity by challenging the readers to construct their own endless versions of the story. In other words, the untold remains untold in Lara, and to a larger extent than in the previous tales, because Byron leaves gaps in the narrative which hinder readers from perceiving the tale in a traditional sense, directing their attention to the open-ended historical/political questions he raises, like the question of national and personal identity in the early nineteenth century, and the old-world order replacing republican ideals.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS: LARA

I started this project by tracing the way Byron perceives and represents the ethnic and cultural other in select personal and public writings of 1812-1815. These writings display a gradual change in his perspectives about those he had encountered and observed in his Grand

Tour, whether in Western Europe or in the lands under Ottoman rule. When Byron had arrived in the lands under Ottoman rule, he realized the inadequacy of defining the people residing there as the other because, first, he realized that the Greek, who were under Ottoman rule, belonged to both the Western and the Eastern selves for their historical, political and cultural parallels with both cultures; and second, because he realized that the people in the so-called Orient shared various traits with those whom Byron and his acquaintances called Europeans. By tracing the ethnic, religious and social differences and similarities between the British self and those residing in the regions outside the borders of his home nation, Byron questioned existing definitions of personal and national identity in the works of this period and beyond it.

Modern scholarship has focused on the authenticity and truthfulness of Byron’s representations in terms of the modern binaries of self and other. However, I have read his portraits alongside his tales to argue that Byron’s works, which I have discussed, do not fall into such simple binaries because he experiments with different systems to define identity, revealing the limitations in each. Although Byron had written each text in close proximity to the others, and was at times working simultaneously on the revisions of a published text while composing another, he continued to explore identity progressively in different contexts and from different perspectives in each work. In CHP 1 and 2, Byron categorizes identity according to political, religious and ethnic systems which he discards in The Giaour. Using popular views related to physiognomy in The Bride, Byron proposes defining identity according to the tensions which a

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socially-imposed identity generates in relationship to a self-chosen one. But he soon discards this binary, too, by acknowledging the ability of a person, male or female, to adopt any number of identities through masks, which enables the person to assume multiple other selves even if they risk becoming social outcasts. In Lara, Byron emphasizes the role of speech, whether through rumors or narration, in defining identity besides appearance. However, this tale reveals that both are equally unreliable to define identity because both are susceptible to a person’s point of view.

Critics like Carla Pomare read Lara as marking Byron’s rising interest in what she calls the nineteenth-century interest in the “historical discourse” (12). I, however, interpret Byron’s references to European history and politics in his tales as masking his non-conforming views.

His references legitimize his complex frame narratives by basing the tales on real political and personal events, as he does in The Giaour, and by aligning his verse with contemporary settings and events which his audience recognizes. However, Byron takes poetic license when adjusting the discourse of history by referring simultaneously to past history—scholarly and classical— and present history—Napoleonic France and the Ottoman rule. Byron also uses the discourse of

Orientalism and conventions of romance loosely in his tales by referring to such topical debates as sending missionaries to the East, the conflicts of the working classes, and the issue of personal and political rights within the old-world order versus a republican one.

Byron’s verse narratives about the East have generated endless controversy about their relationship to the nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism, and Lara has especially generated endless criticism for being, according to various critics, a poorly constructed tale about the Orient. Despite Byron’s assertion that he had perceived Lara in relationship to his previous narratives, many modern critics overlook Lara in favor of Byron’s later The Siege of Corinth

(1816), treating it as a Turkish tale in the same manner as its predecessors: The Giaour, The

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Bride and The Corsair. Based on the Ottoman conquest of the Morea, Byron imaginatively narrates the final resistance of the Venetians through the ordeals of Alp, a Venetian renegade who is condemned for a mysterious crime and then rejected by his beloved, Francesca. Turning against his own people and religion, Alp joins the Turkish army despite the pleas of Francesca, who unbeknown to him has already died and thus appears in spectre form. However, he ignores her pleas and mocks her promises of pardoning him for his deviations, dying the next day as a traitor.

While Naji B. Oueijan omits Lara in his discussion of Byron’s tales about the Orient, including The Siege instead (Compendium 59-63), Cochrane suggests treating The Corsair and

Lara as one tale; and like Oueijan, he treats The Siege as a Turkish tale (“Byron’s Orientalism”

52-56). Although this tale also explores the moral, political and religious implications of choosing one’s own identity, I believe that The Siege belongs to a different period in Byron’s writings, and is hence distanced from the other four tales. Although, as McGann argues, Byron had started and abandoned The Siege early in 1812, before starting The Giaour (CPW 3: 479-80), he finished composing The Siege, which was published on 13 February 1816, over a year after he had finished composing Lara (14 June 1814). I thus argue that The Siege is different from the preceding tales for additional reasons: Byron had kept The Siege incomplete and did not acknowledge its existence either publicly or personally; this tale’s content and subject matter are different from those of its predecessors; and while the earlier tales are semi-biographical, documenting parts of his own trip to the lands under Ottoman rule and thus following conventions of travelogues loosely, The Siege is a semi-historical poem, as Byron’s letters and

Advertisement to that tale assert.

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Despite the negative reviews Lara has received, I read this tale as demonstrating Byron’s narrative skill in constructing a tale without a plot, and thus transforming it into a guessing challenge for his readers. To understand his texts, especially Lara, I believe that a reader must be familiar with his previous works and his personal writings. In fact, Byron expresses this view in a 2 September 1814 letter to John Murray, which he wrote a few months after the end of the

1814 Royal Academy Exhibition, discussed in Chapter 2. Forbidding Murray from publishing

Lara separately, Byron asks him to publish the four romances on the Orient with the two cantos of CHP together as a series. My choice of texts and my organization of the chapters thus accord with Byron’s own view about his verse narratives of 1812 to 1815.

It [Lara] is of no great promise separately but as connected with the other tales—it will

do very well for the vols you mean to publish—I would recommend this arrangement—

Childe H[arold]—the smaller poems—Giaour—Bride—Corsair—Lara—the last

completes the series—and it’s very likeness renders it necessary to the others.” (BLJ

4:165)

While Jonathan Shears interprets this letter by asserting that “What appears to have bothered

Byron was the possibility that his narrative [Lara] might be considered incomplete—insufficient on its own” (5), I read this letter as Byron’s asserting the importance of reading these texts in this sequence. This letter establishes various facts about the way Byron had perceived his narratives: that these tales, especially Lara, would lose their value if any was published alone, that these tales convey a collective message when they are read in this particular sequence, and that Byron was engaged closely with the publication and public reception of these works, as I have demonstrated when discussing some of his revisions.

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By acknowledging the existence of a “likeness” between Lara and its predecessors in the previous letter, Byron may be comparing the contents and the forms of the tales, besides the similarities between the protagonists in terms of his metaphor of the separation between the outer and the inner, as I have discussed in the previous chapters. He may also be comparing the tales according to their exploring—though differently—the same question: identity. I have focused on this question as it progresses from tale to tale. Using intra-textual and extra-textual clues, and correlating them with Byron’s personal and public writings, I have argued that Byron challenges the readers to construct the identity of his protagonists by his complex constructions, which blur the supposed differences between the self and other. His tales compel readers to scrutinize existing definitions of identity besides the ones he proposes. I have thus suggested using the term

“other selves” when describing the people Byron represents, as I have defined it in Chapter 2.

Each work shows that identity may be modified or manipulated whether by the masks the subjects may assume, or the endless ways observers perceive identity. The confused and mixed information his narrators offer impede the ability of the observers, and perhaps readers, of the tale to define the protagonists whose deaths or mysterious disappearance only raise additional questions about their perceived selves.

Starting this work with the goal of understanding Byron’s view of identity, especially of the cultural other, in the early nineteenth century, I end this project by restating my view that

Byron treats the self and other as variations of other selves. These selves choose the identity, which fits their personal and public/political circumstances, changing their appearance according to the changes in their circumstances. Moreover, I read the lack of poetic closure in his tales as warning the readers about reading identity according to appearance—or the popular concepts of physiognomy—and speech. Both are equally unstable and highly subjective constructs which

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cannot reveal one’s inner self because they rely on the changes not only in time and place, but also in the observers’ perspectives. The inconclusiveness of the question of identity in these works demonstrates that although identity can be subject to personal manipulation and change, social definitions compel a person to adopt multiple other selves, as Byron’s characters in his later tales do.

Although the works I have discussed belong to a different personal and historical period than their more popular successors—before the scandalous break-down of Byron’s short marriage, his self-exile on the Continent, and the post Napoleonic era—and have received less critical attention than such works as Don Juan and CHP 3, I provide a context to read these later works. CHP 1 and 2 provide the starting point for Byron’s scrutinizing existing perceptions of identity, and Lara marks Byron’s gradual internalizing of the “I” from the third person of the previous Turkish tales. Lara not only completes the cycle of Byron’s exiles of the former tales, but also can be read as prefiguring the exiles of Byron’s later tales, like Manfred and the much discussed Don Juan, both of which construct complex protagonists who act against their socially defined identities, but whose identities remain mysterious to their observers and readers.

I believe that the later texts continue to negotiate the question of identity though indirectly. The protagonist of Don Juan, for example, takes on different identities throughout the different episodes of socializing, one of which takes place in the Greek Cyclades in the Aegean

Sea, which was under Ottoman rule in the early nineteenth century (canto 2, stanzas 127-28).

Because Byron continued adding episodes to this poem and died before he could complete it, the poem can be still read as pointing to the elusiveness of identity, which may change according to changes in time and circumstances and according to personal will. As a result, the elusiveness of identity can be used to manipulate the observers, as the title-characters in the four tales I have

193

discussed attempt. It would be an interesting project to attempt a similar study of Byron’s popular works by correlating them with what is available of Byron’s personal and public writings to understand the lack of closure in his later narratives, too, and explore the implications of this lack on his future perspectives on identity after he had moved to the Continent in 1816.

194

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