This is a fairly rough draft of some plans I had for an essay recently that I thought I would put out regardless – essentially most of it is here, though I would have liked to have explored Godwin’s memoirs more and the critical response following Memoirs, but that will be for another day.
Transgressing the Law of Gender.
Byron’s Don Juan and Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. She argues for a “REVOLUTION in female manners”. She argues that women, lacking the education and liberty to exercise their personhood have become “slavish” and “infantile” in their “gilded cages”. These women, consigned to gendered stereotypes throughout their lives have become “infantile subjects” — “the denial of their education was tantamount to a denial of their personhood”. Rather than essentialist differences of gender of man and woman, Wollstonecraft saw the “greater spirit of liberty, which allowed men to see more of life”. This ennobling of masculinity, associated with liberty and reason, over femininity, which encouraged the “infantile subject”, opened the way for women to take on “masculine” characteristics — “masculine women”. Wollstonecraft notes that “any woman who displays a higher than normal ‘energy’ is called masculine”. Wollstonecraft saw the appropriation of masculinity as a method of gaining greater freedom for women: she “put a female claim on the manly spirit of independence” (Wolfson). This masculine tone pervades the text, with what the Whig Monthly Review heralded as a “great performance” — rhetoric and reason which was hitherto the assigned as the province of men is employed by Wollstonecraft to assert her argument. If women can be deemed criminally and morally accountable for their crimes, then they have souls capable of thinking correctly. If they are capable of rationality, then they should be guided to improve their actions. Therefore, this rational facility should be developed to its greatest ability. This argument, including its rhetoric, displays what Hays noted as a “strong masculine tone”. Wollstonecraft crosses the line of demarcation between the strict couplings of male-masculinity and female-femininity in order to improve the lot of her sex, discarding the “weapons of the weak” (Lynch) of femininity for a striving for the masculine-woman and all it entails — reason, independence, strength and liberty and so on.
Byron’s Don Juan engages with the strong heroin throughout, with these women often exhibiting something akin to Wollstonecraft’s “masculine woman”. If one were to answer the cry of “masculine women — where are they?” one need only look at Cantos II to see the heroin Haidee. She has a “voice that bespoke command” and a “form of the highest female mould”, exhibiting characteristics that are contrary to femininity; instead she portrays traits typically ascribed to masculinity: a dominant tone and a tall frame. Upon finding Juan, unconscious, washed up on the shore she tends to him — hiding him from the patriarch, her father Lambro, in a cave that is reminiscent of a prelapsarian paradise, shielding from culture — Haidee “cast an atmosphere of life about the place”. But from the outset, the exotic Haidee subverts both patriarchal and colonial norms, discovering Juan: she is the discoverer, not the discovered, compounding the dominance of this heroin. “She is an active pursuer” (Chen). She actively engages with Juan, exploring his body, tending to him and initiating encounters with him. “She is an unconventional figure who challenges patriarchal conceptions of women” (Reed). This unconventionality, and an emphasis of masculine-womanhood, is most pronounced when Lambro discovers Juan. She “threw herself her boy before”. “A minute past she had been all tears”, but now faced with the threat of Lambro, becomes one who “stands as stern as her sire”, with a “fix’d eye” gazed upon him. “They are alike…but in years and sex”. Haidee and Lambro are more alike in their characteristics (both exhibiting masculinity) than “the boy” Juan, who, in the passive role, takes a feminine subjectivity. Haider captures the “manly spirit of independence” (VRW). Juan, the emasculated subject can be further emphasised when Haidee and Zoe cover the bed in “her sables”, and gave a “petticoat a piece” to cover Juan. Signifiers of womanhood are used to cover Juan, pacifying him — Byron’s emasculated “Juan faces the threat of other men […] but [Byron] also masculinises women in the process” (Wolfson). The cave is reminiscent of Plato’s, albeit inverted — in the cave the strict demarcations of gender are unfixed, whereas outside in culture (as shall be elaborated on later) the demarcation is re-fixed. Wollstonecraft argues that women have never had the chance to prove their against their subjugation to men, and it is within this cave that these new subjectivities of the masculine-woman and emasculated Juan can be explored, unconstrained by patriarchal rule, represented by the absent Lambro. This natural paradisiacal land with which Haidee cast “an atmosphere of life” again conforms for the opportunity of unconventional gender norms: nature, in contrary to Rousseau’s nature in which he argues that women essentially provoke men, act infantile, love dolls and so on, allows a free expression of the self.
Evidently, Byron empowers Haidee, attributing to her masculine characteristics (as well as his other heroines in Don Juan). Husika sees this as evidence that Byron was one who sought to allow women to “shape their own destinies” (Husika). However, this misses the full story. Byron “senses fatal consequences when the laws of gender are transgressed” (Wolfson). Haidee is associated with images of death throughout — within her dream her “black eyes gazed upon the dead”, with waves rising and rising, threatening her life. “Juan nearly died” from his encounter with Lambro and his love for Haidee. Haider, as well as inviting, displays threats of death, too: she is called a “lioness” and is “also one who could avenge”; a clear threat of death to Lambro the father and the patriarch. Wolfson notes that Byron invokes Deuteronomy which stated that any man or woman who transgressed their gender conventions were “an abomination unto the LORD”. Similar “fatal consequences” of gender norms can be seen after the death of Wollstonecraft. Godwin, well intentioned and adhering to his discipline of strict reason and truth, issued his Memoirs that revealed the unsavoury (to contemporary audiences) life of his lover: companionships with women, suicide attempts, fits of “sensibility” that defied her masculine woman status, and the account of her agonising death in child birth. The Rev. Polwhele in The Unsex’d Female saw women of her type as a “female band that despis’d NATURE’s law”. The Memoir, as well as those like Polwhele saw to it that Wollstonecraft’s transgressions were corrected in society, with fellow female writers such as Edgeworth and Hays (who tended to her as she died) using Wollstonecraft as a template for contemptuous characters in their novels, as a “moral lesson” to their readership. Polwhele suggests that it is the hand of God which issued the correction of the “abomination unto the LORD” (Deuteronomy). Wollstonecraft is re-written: the masculine woman is corrected by divine will for her transgressions of gender conventions. “She died a death that strongly mark’d the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny and diseases which they are liable”. In deviating, Haidee also feels the correcting hand, but of the author, who “issues plots of correction and restoration to contain threats to male privilege” (Wolfson). Though lacking scholarly intellect, Haidee employed rhetoric and argument against her father, “dominating the speech of the episode” (Reed). Lambro, eventually, seizes her, and after the perceived death of Juan at Lambro’s order, she falls in to coma and dies a passive death. The threat to male privilege is corrected and restored.
Bibliography
Byron, George G. B. Don Juan. Raleigh, N.C: Alex Catalogue, 1990. Print.
Godwin, William, Pamela Clemit, and Gina L. Walker. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001. Print.
Husika, Esma. “Genre and Gender as Byronic Subversions in Don Juan”. 1st International Conference on Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (FLTAL’11), 5-7 May 2011, Sarajevo. Web. 28 Aug. 2015.
Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism & Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Reed, Toni. The Foreign Woman In British Literature. N. p., 2015. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.
Polwhele, Richard. Mary A. Radcliffe. The Unsex’d Females: A Poem. New York: Garland Pub, 1974. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.
Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the secrets of the Political Novel” Studies in Romanticism 27.2, 1988: 221-51. Web. 23. Aug. 2015.
Wolfson, Susan. “Their She Condition: Cross-Dressing And The Politics Of Gender In Don Juan”. ELH Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 585-617 2015. JSTOR. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston, Thomas and Andrews, Faust’s statue, no. 45, 1792. Print
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