Touching Byron: Masculinity and the Celebrity Body in the Romantic Period

Abstract

If Byron’s contemporaries were entranced by his poetry and personal myth, many of those who met him for the first time also invariably recorded their impressions of his body. ‘That beautiful pale face is my fate,’ said Lady Caroline Lamb. Contemporary accounts often contained depictions of Byron’s physique, which sought to capture the peculiarities of his face, eyes, voice and gait. As these features stimulated the inquisitive gaze of onlookers and admirers, Byron became a body to observe and scrutinize; a spectacular body inspiring curiosity and fascination. However, Byron’s was also a body that repeatedly eluded decodification and exceeded cultural norms at a time when conservative gender codes were increasingly linking masculinity to notions of productivity, domesticity, reserve and probity, an image promoted by such powerful advocates of Evangelical values as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. In contrast with this prescriptive discourse, Byron’s body functions in Romantic culture as the opposite of, and an antidote to, this conventionally regulated male body and masculine identity. Specifically, the desire for the irregular, excessive body of Byron (and, indeed, that of his fictional heroes) emerges powerfully in a number of accounts which hint at the possibility of breaking verbal, visual and social barriers in order to touch Byron. Inviting scrutiny and attracting physical contact, Byron-as-body is a flagrantly non-normative object, a magnetic physique that, moreover, does not lose its cultural power after the poet’s death in 1824. In fact, its persistent relevance may be gauged through its influence on the silver-fork and dandy novelists of the 1820s and 1830s, a generation of writers who looked back to Regency society as the moment of origination of dandyism and a time when aristocratic codes of behavior were still relatively unchallenged. Yet, for the silver-fork novelists the Byronic body proves too much. Their narratives, in particular Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham and Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, ultimately deflect its subversive potential, just as they neutralize the eccentricity of the dandy code and realign their dandy heroes with established conventions. If, in the earlier period, touching Byron’s body implied a brush with disturbing celebrity, touching it in the silver-fork implies an initial recovery of its subversive value and the eventual neutralization of its disturbing potential. These narratives effect a move from the Byronic to the normative body which enables the dandy hero to be reintegrated as a fully-fledged and active member of society. Nonetheless, although the silver-fork novels reduce its eccentric and excessive import within their normalizing conclusions, the Byronic body remains tantalizingly enigmatic and unavailable to the desire to touch it, a differential mode of masculinity that stands its ground as an alternative to the influential conservative models emerging in the Romantic period.

… when we think of Byron, the first thing that comes before our eyes is a physical presence, a profile. (Praz 147)