Exile

Byron rehearsed going into exile in 1809, when he was twenty-one years old. Before setting sail for Lisbon, he wrote, “I leave England without regret, I shall return to it without pleasure. – I am like Adam the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab and thus ends my first Chapter” (BLJ 1: 211). Byron’s sardonic perception of himself as a biblical exile foreshadowed the allusive character of his second longer-term exile at the age of twenty-eight, when his carefully staged exit required an audience (some of the same friends and servants), expensive props (a replica of Napoleon’s carriage) and a literary precursor. On his last evening in England, Byron visited the burial place of the satirist Charles Churchill, and lay down on his grave. It was a performance of immense weariness with life and solidarity with an embittered outcast.Postprin

The Lake Poets

“If Southey had not been comparatively good,” writes Herbert F. Tucker, “he would never have drawn out Byron’s best in those satirical volleys that were undertaken, at bottom, in order to reprehend not the want of talent but its wastage.” And if Wordsworth and Coleridge had not been dangerously talented, Byron might have spared them some of his stinging sallies. In Table Talk Coleridge proclaimed the conclusion of the “intellectual war” Byron threatened in Don Juan (XI. 62: 496), declaring Wordsworth the poet who “will wear the crown,” triumphing over Byron and his ilk for the poetic laurels of the Romantic period. But Byron was not simply an opponent of his contemporaries. His responses to the Lake poets, particularly to Wordsworth, ran the gamut from “reverence” (HVSV, 129) then “nausea” (Medwin, 237) to Don Juan’s comical though cutting disdain, in under a decade. Focusing on Byron’s relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, I will show how Byron’s poetry and drama reveal the range and complexity of his dialogue with his older peers, where, even at their most apparently divergent, the conversation between the poets reveals the depth of the engagement across their works

Defiant Odalisques: Exoticism, Resistance and the Female Body in Nineteenth Century Fiction

Most studies of European exoticism tend to emphasize its complicity with the hegemonic or imperialistic gaze. This dissertation takes a different approach--exploring the tensions/connections between exoticism and resistance within European culture, especially with regard to representations of the exoticized female body. Its interdisciplinary range spans the 19th century British novel, the work of French and British orientalist artists (particularly Gerome), discourses on ethnology, medicine and criminology, conduct books for women, and the operas of Puccini and Bizet. I argue that several artistic constructions of the exoticized woman (in both male and female authored texts) enact ambivalences which rupture and destabilize the ideological structures of domesticity and imperialism. Moreover, I theorize the figure of the Eastern odalisque (which has so far been analyzed as the passive, eroticized object of the European male gaze) as an equivocal, racially hybrid female body, aligning it with the European courtesan. I redefine the odalisque broadly, as including (and blurring) the categories of harem woman, public dancer, nomad, vampire, and courtesan. I argue that often, the hybridized odalisque not only returns a compelling gaze of her own, but also articulates a powerful, transgressive female presence, continually negotiating cultural anxieties about female self-display and miscegenation. The Introduction and Chapter One survey Puccini\u27s opera Turandot, paintings of seraglio interiors by orientalist artists, medical and ethnological texts by Acton, Ryan, Knox, Lombroso and Ferrero, and the positioning of the courtesan. I read Merimee\u27s gypsy Carmen, LeFanu\u27s vampire Carmilla, and Wilkie Collins\u27s detective Marian Halcombe as exoticized women who unravel the plots of Victorian ethnology. Chapter Two explores the possibilities and limitations of female visibility, power and appetite through a discussion of the haunted odalisques in Charlotte Bronte\u27s fiction. Chapter Three examines the dynamics of female adornment within orchestrations of imperial spectacle and regulated self-display in Collins\u27s The Moonstone and No Name, and Trollope\u27s The Eustace Diamonds. The final chapter investigates the links between the racialization of disease (in Victorian imperial medicine) and female insurgence in the fiction of colonial novelist Flora Steel, focusing particularly on the ethnology of the Indian courtesan