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Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Art)or, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 UMI* UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEXTUALIZING BYRON’S HOMOGRAPHIC SIGNATURE; EXPLORATIONS OF HIS OTHER SELF AND VOICE A dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By ABIGAIL F. KEEGAN Norman, Oklahoma 2001 UMI Number: 3001311 Copyright 2001 by Keegan, Abigail F. All rights reserved. UMI UMI Microform 3001311 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 c Copyright by ABIGAIL F. KEEGAN 2001 i^l Rights Reserved CONTEXTUALIZING BYRON’S HOMOGRAPHIC SIGNATURE; EXPLORATIONS OF HIS OTHER SELF AND VOICE A Dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Acknowledgements Joanna Rapf, with her inspired teaching, first led me into Romantic studies. I hope that throughout my career I can bring to my students the dedication, enthusiasm, and innovative inquiry that Joanna always brought to the classroom. Her own wit and complex understanding of Byron’s performative poetics gave me my appreciation of Byron. Joanna’s continued support, readings and direction of this work and throughout my graduate studies have been invaluable to my development as a scholar. My studies with Daniel Cottom increased and broadened my interest in literary theory and helped me to conceptualize the direction of my own investigations of Romanticism. I will always remain grateful for his interest in and appreciative reading of my work and for the insightful and clarifying questions he raised for me. Finally, his own daring writing and scholarship has provided me with fresh insights and a real excitement about the possibilities of literary criticism. Robert Lauer’s perceptive questions and revision suggestions during my writing offered me a number of crucial insights. The interest and “joy” he communicated about my work were a life-line during this writing and his poetic e- mail communications were witty and beautiful. I both admire and am very grateful for his complete sense of commitment to this project, even while he was away on sabbatical. David Gross’s intellectual enthusiasm first introduced me to critical theory and to this profession. His political commitments, his respect for the dignity of his students, and his love of ideas made me believe I had found the place I could work. For his enthusiastic and thoughtful reading of my dissertation, I offer him my thanks. Richard Barney’s reading of my dissertation and excellent suggestions for its future life as a book I highly value. As well, I appreciate his very favorable response to the writing. Lawrence Frank provided a careful reading of the early drafts of this manuscript and many useful suggestions for its improvement. I am forever in debt to my friend Barbara Hillyer. Her scholarly interests in literature, women’s studies and human relations enriched our conversations about and her reading of this work. Her generous emotional and intellectual support through these years of writing and research have kept me going. To have such a friend is my great good fortune. Thanks to my colleagues at Oklahoma City University who have listened to me and supported me through a heavy teaching load during these last few years, especially Elaine Smokewood, Perry Dillon, and Marsha Keller. Thanks to the iv people who have continued to believe in me, Eliska Been, Chris Rice, and Jane Temerlin. Table of Contents Introduction: Everything Begins with E. Méthodiste and Melancholy 1 Chapter One: Abject Figures and Subversion 24 Chapter Two: Byron’s Poetics: Permutations of Silence Sodomy, Rhetoric, and Pre-texts to Childe Harold 59 Chapter Three: The Sexual Outlaw: The Giaour 111 Chapter Four: Disturbing Gender: The Bride of Abvdos 142 Chapter Five: The Corsair: A Pirate and a Homicidal Woman Disturbing Sexual Difference 170 Chapter Six: Coming to Terms: Lara, the Effeminate Page, and Queer Reading 194 Conclusion: 218 Works Cited: 222 VI Abstract The redefinition of the sodomite in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality produced a new sexual subjectivity in England. The sodomite became a more visible figure in the eighteenth century, but in Regency England, this new subject was increasingly represented as the abject other to what Foucault has called the Malthusian couple. By considering these new representations of the sodomite and George Gordon, Lord Byron’s own writings on and experiences of same sex desire, this study contextualizes the influence of homosexuality on Byron’s emergence as a public writer and on his development of the Byronic hero in a series of poems he suggested be read together; Childe Harold I and II. The Giaour. The Bride of Abvdos. The Corsair, and Lara. Byron’s movement into public writing is a critical juncture that forces a displacement of the homoerotic into his poetics and his stylization of the persona of the Byronic hero. His self-dramatizations within these poems reveal a homographie inscription, which my deconstructive and queer reading gives both psychological and social significance. I argue that the creation of the Byronic persona and the Byronic hero are deeply indebted to Byron’s relationship to conflicted homosexual meanings within his age and that reading these conflicts exposes the ways discursive constructions of (homo)sexual, gendered, and national identity are imbricated in the emerging heterosexual imperatives of Byron’s age. Vll Introduction Every Thing Begins and Ends With E; Méthodiste and Melancholy As I consider reading George Gordon, Lord Byron’s, Oriental Tales. I am aware that theories of sexuality are (and will probably always be) in process. I do not want to read Byron as a homosexual, pure and simple. Virginia Woolf wrote that it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple (108); likewise being a homosexual simply, and especially purely, is fatal because no such possibility of inscription exists. In order to contribute to a liberationist politics of producing a legible homosexual difference to counter what has been a long history of unremarked, invisible or imperceptible representations of the homosexual, I read Byron’s work to develop a sense of what influence homosexual practice and desire had on his writing. My intellectual debt implicit throughout this writing is to the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Louis Crompton, and numbers of gay, lesbian, feminist and queer scholars whose studies of sexualities may one day make possible what Jacques Derrida calls a “sexual otherwise’’ where, as he describes it, “there would be no more sexes, there would be one sex for each time. One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift” (199). Or, as Monique Witlig writes, there might be “as many sexes as there are individuals” (119). We have punished sexuality for centuries, made it our whipping boy, our streetwalker, our burning fag. In order to come to new understandings of sexuality, and certainly sexualities less inflected with such extreme divisions as the terms heterosexual and homosexual have implied, explorations of how sexuality has been produced within discourse can help us understand the functions of sexuality. My study of the possibility of reading homosexual meaning in Byron’s writing, therefore, locates his writing within the discourses on sodomy that developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through this reading, I seek to explore the varied meanings of sexuality in Byron’s work with an understanding that his representations of sexuality are imbricated within other discourses of his day. Byron’s representations of sexuality, and hence homosexuality, are placed and displaced in relation to other categories that produce the identity of a speaking subject, categories which include gender, class, nationality and race. My readings of the production of the sodomitic subject and the influence of such discourses on Byron attempt to realize that sexual meaning is never pure and simple but always constituted within discursive frames and structures of power. I. Homosexuality and Sodomy As Alan Bray has written of the British homosexual subject, “the socially diffused homosexuality of the early seventeenth century” emerged in the eighteenth century as a “homosexuality [which] could be expressed and therefore recognized; clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and particular public places—all could be identified as having specific homosexual connotations” (92). With this transition, homosexuality became constituted in ways that have the power to signify; the homosexual “comes to figure and be figured” (Edelman Homographies 6).