Eric Eisner Nineteenth Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity

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(1.28)
The representation of Donna Inez casts Lady Byron as the curious
reader par excellence, but also allows her to stand for the thereby
feminized, and aggressive, curiosity of the entire reading public,
a curiosity about the truth of Byron the poet both deplores and
incites.
In Don Juan, Byron ruminates on his own life and his experience
of celebrity, on the relationship between himself and his readers, and
on the culture he inhabits. These topics endlessly intertwine because
it is the poem s argument that they are inseparable, and because they
form the actual situation of the poet writing and of his first readers
reading. The poem abandons the lyric intimacy between reader and
writer Fare Thee Well! aimed for (and at), but takes for granted
a bond between reader and writer constructed not through the
exchange of passionate feeling but through a shared location within
print culture, a mutually mediated existence. As Manning notes,
the manifestly oral presence conjured by the narrator s conversa-
tional facility (Don Juan 15.20) creates a sense of intimacy with the
reader that depends on Byron and his reader meeting in the print
40 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
marketplace, on their being immersed in the common things and
commonplaces of a shared print culture (Don Juan 14.7), and on
their sharing the history of Byron s career.58 In the final pages of this
chapter, I follow the dynamics of the separation scandal into Don
Juan, tracing the connections between Byronic performance, Byron s
scandalized readers, and the performative women who populate the
poem.
The attack on Lady Byron (and her defenders) through the por-
trayal of Donna Inez ensured that the rhetoric of the separation
would carry over into the critical response to Don Juan. Though
Blackwood s writers, as we ve seen, would later take a much more
sympathetic view of the poet s role in the separation, the magazine at
first reacted with possibly feigned hysteria to the poem s mockery
of Lady Byron:
To offend the love of such a woman was wrong but it might be
forgiven; to desert her was unmanly but he might have returned
and wiped for ever from her eyes the tears of her desertion; but
to injure, and to desert, and then to turn back and wound her
widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold-blooded mock-
ery was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean.59
The reviewer not only takes Lady Byron s side but casts Byron s read-
ers, the reviewer included, as Lady Byrons themselves, as the poet s
jilted and deceived lovers:
We look back with a mixture of wrath and scorn to the delight
with which we suffered ourselves to be filled by one who, all the
while he was furnishing us with delight, must, we cannot doubt
it, have been mocking us with a cruel mockery [& ]. The con-
sciousness of the insulting deceit which has been practised upon
us, mingles with the nobler pain arising from the contemplation
of perverted and degraded genius to make us wish that no such
being as Byron ever had existed.60
Such commentary confirms the terms in which Don Juan itself frames
readerly seduction, in which an always unstable analogy is implicit
between, on the one hand, the poet s relationships to individual
female readers and, on the other hand, the poet s relationship to his
Systems of Literary Lionism 41
readership at large, the readers for whom Blackwood s presumes to
speak.
Passionate attachment to Byron was the province of multitudes of
readers both male and female, of course, but, like Don Juan, cultural
representations of such attachment often figured it as particularly
feminine or feminizing. The author of John Bull s Letter to Lord
Byron (probably John Gibson Lockhart) described love for Byron
as an adolescent girl s crush, contending that in spite of all your
pranks (Beppo, &c. Don Juan included,) every boarding school in
the empire still contains many devout believers in the amazing mis-
ery of the black-haired, high-browed, blue-eyed, bare-throated Lord
Byron. 61 Claiming to debunk the humbug of Byron s performative
identity Byron is not really so melancholy, but thought it would
be an interesting pose to adopt the writer demonstrates the
effect of such performance through an extraordinary mock-blazon
of Byron s commodified body, ventriloquized through the voices of
Jane Austen s characters:
How melancholy you look in the prints! Oh! yes, this is the true
cast of face. Now, tell me, Mrs. Goddard, now tell me, Miss Price,
now tell me, dear Harriet Smith, and dear, dear, Mrs. Elton, do tell
me, is not this just the very look, that one would have fancied
for Childe Harold? Oh what eyes and eyebrows! Oh! what a
chin! well, after all, who knows what may have happened. One
can never know the truth of such stories. Perhaps her Ladyship was
in the wrong after all. I am sure if I had married such a man, I
would have borne with all his little eccentricities a man so evi-
dently unhappy.62
The joke depends on the way the erotic appeal of Byron s image,
and the fascination with such a dangerously sexual figure, supplants
any direct response to his poetry.63 But the joke is also on John Bull
himself, since the letter just displaces onto the girl readers who
supposedly wish themselves into Lady Byron s abandoned place
the eagerness of both male and female readers, the Letter s author
included, to insist they know the real Byron. Like the girl readers he
conjures through Austen s novel, John Bull proves in any case an
attentive reader of Byron s body as it is commodified and purveyed
in the prints.
42 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
Don Juan is Byron s reply to the dual charges widely made by cul-
tural commentators and picked up in this passage from the Letter:
that Byron s popularity depends in large part on his erotic appeal
to female readers, and that Byron s own behavior as a husband and
father, if uncensured, threatened to corrupt public virtue. Linking
the poem with the image of Byron as libertine that emerged from the
separation scandal, Caroline Franklin argues that as Byron himself
was already being excoriated by the Tory reviewers as the corrupter of
female morals in his poetry, and the epic poem which he now writes
should be seen as his considered and devastating attack on not
women themselves but the notion of reforming society through
propagating an ideal of chaste femininity. 64 As Franklin observes,
the poem focuses less on Juan himself as anti-hero than on a gallery
of female characters, in a variety of nations. 65 Don Juan explores the
links between the seductive power the poem assigns to women and
Byron s own literary and personal powers of seduction, between the
forms of public and private authority performative women obtain in
the poem and the cultural authority of Byronic performance. If Don
Juan seems, on the one hand, to play up the popular link between the
power of Byron s poetry over the reading public and the poet s own
magnetism, then, on the other hand, the power the poem repeatedly
ascribes to women complicates this scenario of seduction.66
At the end of Canto I, Byron famously jokes that the end of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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