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Introduction Chapter 1 Notes Introduction 1. Further explanation of the January–May theme in Chaucer can be found in Chapter 1. I am aware that other combinations of months can describe these intergenerational marriages—December–May is the most common alternative—but variations of months often work to suggest smaller differences in age. For example, Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) uses November–June in the following pas- sage: “‘Ho-ho-ho—Miss Hoity-toity!’ said Lord Mountclere, trotting up and down. But, remembering it was her June against his November, this did not last long” (310). Since I see Chaucer as vital to the theme’s presence in British literature, I have chosen his “January–May” as the most appropriate designation. 2. Sinclair investigates the etymology of the word “cuckold” (30–49). See also Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Cuckold.” 3. The traditional Anglican marriage ceremony includes the verse, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Mark 10:7–8). 4. Gates reverses the logic of Audre Lorde to make his point. I differ from Gates in that I see this method as one means of subversion—not the only one. Chapter 1 1. Ryder details specific examples of this type of behavior. 2. The cycles at York, Chester, and Wakefield present Joseph as being too old to procreate with his young wife, Mary. George discusses this aspect of the play at length. 3. Before age sixty, Capellanus sees little problem with age differences in sexual relationships. The first dialogue in the book responds to a wom- an’s complaint that “I am rather young, and I shudder at the thought of receiving solaces from old men.” The man replies, “Old age is cer- tainly not a thing to disapprove of” (39), and he lists his many accom- plishments as evidence of his superiority to young men. 214 Notes 4. Matthews, Tavormina, Hartung, and Boothman make various connec- tions between these works. 5. Morse provides a detailed explanation of those who brought Chaucer to his nineteenth-century audience. 6. There are a number of European works of art from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries depicting older men and younger women such as Phyllis and Aristotle by Hans Baldung-Grien at the Louvre. 7. The Sack-full of Newes was reprinted in 1861 by J. O. Halliwell from a copy dated 1673, printed by Andrew Clark, and sold by Thomas Pas- senger at the bookseller The Three Bibles on London Bridge. Halliwell believes this is the same text referred to by Robert Laneham in a letter written in 1575. 8. Perhaps due to critical attention to racial issues, there are few scholarly treatments of the play’s attention to age. Nordlund briefly addresses the important of Othello’s age. 9. Here again, the January–May theme proves important across national borders. Moliere’s L’École des femmes influenced the plot of The Coun- try Wife, where the middle-aged husband foolishly believes he is ensur- ing his wife’s fidelity (and his masculinity) by marrying a young country girl. 10. The January–May marriage theme is also central to Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and is one way Behn connects African and British cultures. Behn describes how Oroonoko’s grandfather, the king of an African tribe, marries Imoinda, his grandson’s true love. Because the elderly king is impotent, Imoinda is spared sexual relations with him, but her affair with Oroonoko inspires the king’s wrath and their subsequent slavery and deaths. 11. Dawn Lewcock notes that Behn never allows Sir Patient to speak directly to the audience, while Lady Fancy addresses the audience per- sonally on numerous occasions. Lewcock concludes that “by building such relationships through direct asides or comments to the audience by some characters and not by others Behn is able to sway the audi- ence’s sympathies to or from any particular character” (77). 12. Wilputte offers a good discussion of economics in this marriage. 13. I should note, however, that Fanny Hill also contains another inter- generational relationship that conveys the aging lover favorably and deserves more attention than I can give it in this introduction. Toward the end of Fanny’s narrative, she describes her romance with a sixty- year-old man when she is nineteen. In this case, she sees age as a social construction; her lover appears more like “five and forty” than sixty, and she finds him a wonderful sexual partner: “as age had not subdued his tenderness for our sex, neither had it robbed him of the power of pleasing, since whatever he wanted in the bewitching charms of youth, he atoned for, or supplemented, with the advantages of experience, the sweetness of his manners, and above all, his flattering address in Notes 215 touching the heart, by an application to the understanding” (206). Fanny is happily devoted to her older partner, and when he dies, leaving her his immense fortune, she grieves his loss. Another unconventional example from the period is Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717), which celebrates the love of the twelfth-century tutor and his young student. 14. In this sense, perhaps The School for Scandal has more in common with “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in which the erring knight is given what he wants only when he acknowledges a woman’s prerogative to choose for herself. 15. Likely because their age difference is not that large, many critics have ignored how age contributes to power within the novel. Several critics refer to Dorriforth as “the young Catholic priest.” Though Dorriforth is hardly elderly at thirty, designating him as “young” fails to clarify his age in relation to the age of his much-younger wife. One excep- tion is Haggerty, who finds that “by eroticizing the ‘father,’ Inchbald unapologetically cuts through the tenets of sensibility, which paint the father as a superior being endowed with saintly grace, and proposes a domestic scene that is neither simple nor in any conventional sense ‘happy’” (657). 16. For more on the novel’s play with incest, see Ford. 17. Dismissing the age difference between Miss Milner and Dorriforth, Mortensen reads Sandford as the oppressive father figure from whom Miss Milner is saved by her young lover Dorriforth, arguing that Dor- riforth does not become the oppressive father figure until the second half of the novel. 18. Curran explains this trend. 19. An evolving group of intellectual women who met in each other’s homes, the Bluestockings included Elisabeth Vesey, Frances Burney, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Montagu and flourished in the years between 1770 and 1785. 20. Sterling connects important historical-scientific constructions of sex to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a “crisis of gender” that corresponds with social and economic forces as well as developing sci- entific knowledge. 21. The following argument on Tonna and Engels originally appeared as part of my article “Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride,” reprinted with permission from SEL: Studies in English Literature1500–1900 45, no. 4 (Autumn 2005). 22. Seltzer and Ward provide more background on the shift from agrarian to industrial economies. 23. Shanley details the Infant Custody Act of 1839, the 1857 Divorce Act, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act. 24. Despite the sympathy expressed in The Princess for the rights of women, Tennyson’s fears of gendered reversals of power are manifest throughout 216 Notes his poetry, including “Lucretius,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and “Maud.” 25. Strickland continues to be a useful source of information regarding the women in Byron’s life, and Crane offers a more recent study of the struggles Byron faced with women. Recent biographies by Grosskurth, Eisler, and MacCarthy detail Byron’s early years. 26. In his chapter, “‘One Half What I Should Say’: Byron’s Gay Narrator in Don Juan,” Gross criticizes what he sees as a scholarly focus on het- erosexual aspects of the plot of Don Juan. Citing Butler, Gross asserts that “treating homoeroticism as ‘private’ perpetuates the notion that only heterosexuality is culturally intelligible” (132). Though I agree with Gross’s point in theory, I maintain that homoeroticism is not lim- ited to the confines of “male” with “male” bodies. In focusing on the January–May marriage, the essay deconstructs what appears to be a socially sanctioned heterosexual union, yet the gender dynamics are much more complex. 27. Don Juan’s biographical connection to Byron’s life (particularly Cantos I and II) has a long-established tradition in scholarship. Steffan and Marchand both give ample evidence to suggest that Byron’s life largely influenced Canto I. Steffan holds that Byron’s work on his Memoirs led to the poet’s direct infusion of immediate personal matters into Don Juan. This biographical interest continues into current scholar- ship; Gross, for example, probes Byron’s own homosexual experiences to support his claim regarding the sexual orientation of the poem’s narrator. 28. Beppo, written in the autumn of 1817, and Mazeppa, written between April 1817 and the autumn of 1818, explore the dynamics of age, sex- ual power, and adultery. Beppo relates the tale of a cavaliere servente, a middle-aged married woman, and her seafaring husband. Mazeppa describes the relationship between a young lover and a young wife who is unhappy with her older husband: “His wife was not of his opinion— / His junior she by thirty years— / Grew daily tired of his dominion” (167–69). 29. Though Eisler follows the biographical claim that Byron “hardly noticed” Teresa in 1818, his own words describing her position in rela- tion to other men and his inability to get close to her in 1818 suggest otherwise.
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