Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Colin Carman
Colorado Mountain College

Desire, by definition, is mediated, imitative, and mimetic. At the core of identity and indeed of being itself lie the dual demands to be recognized and to be imitated. These are just some of the premises of Eric Gans and René Girard, and the insightful literary study these two thinkers have inspired, Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Byron is a provocative choice: while the “Byronic hero” is usually typified by defiant autonomy, even solipsistic self-adulation, Ian Dennis reveals just how important the roles of mediation, interplay, and the desires of—and for—others are in Byron’s oeuvre.

Since Gans and Girard form the book’s conceptual apparatus, a heavily theoretical introduction to the book’s eight chapters helps to adumbrate the pair’s contributions to the history of desire. That history emerges from certain “imitative processes,” in which “models” act and “subjects” perceive (14). Other key terms include “external mediation,” used to denote the influence of models that exist apart from interpersonal rivalry and, by contrast, “internal mediation,” whereby a more accessible influence can be imitated, even rivaled to the point of violence (17).

From there, Dennis plunges into works as diverse as the closet tragedy Cain and Don Juan, perhaps Byron’s most personal work, begun in 1818. If the first canto of Don Juan concludes with an appeal to the public in the form of an advertisement, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, argues Dennis, are even earlier efforts to promote the reader’s dependence on an authorial model. As Jerome McGann has noted, the geographical place being described in Byron’s travelogue pales in comparison to how the poem’s speaker experiences that locale for himself. What the two cantos gave to the marketplace at the time of their publication in 1812 was more than the suffering and melancholia characteristic of the Byronic hero. Instead, Dennis asserts that the cantos are a “remarkable innovation in internal mediation,” as they market Byron’s unique impression of those far-off places, places where no English traveler had gone before (48). From this internality, Chapter 2 turns to the externality of Byron’s reverence for nature. Because Nature cannot be rivaled, the best a Byronic ego can do is model himself upon nature through partnership. In the parlance of Girard, Nature remains an external mediator because it is indifferent to human desire.

“Partnership” shades into darker dependency in Chapter 3, where Dennis argues that Byron’s popular Eastern tales are powered by the author’s fantasies of victimization. In The Giaour, Dennis finds that desire “takes a beating,” as the poem’s hero suffers the loss of his Leila and dies pathetically in a monastery (65). The Corsair, meanwhile, dramatizes an equally destructive love triangle in which heroes pursue women already taken, and wind up massacred as a result. In brief, lovers need rivals—though Dennis stops short of deploying Sedgwickian triangulation as another theoretical tool. He does, however, pay close attention to characters like Alp in The Siege of Corinth, and Hugo in Parisina, forced as they are into symmetrical relations leading to self-immolation. Moreover, these men implicate their audience in the spectacle of their sufferings. Such appeals to readerly desire also hold Dennis’ critical eye in the brief Chapter 4, which couples Byron’s “Prometheus” with “The Prisoner of Chillon” (both composed in 1816). Again, Dennis pursues the rhetoric of victimhood in these works, specifically the way in which Byron subjects his readers to his own projections. Prometheus, that familiar Romantic symbol, is portrayed by Byron as God’s enviable rival who, alongside the Prisoner, models sublime forms of altruism.
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Reviewed by
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Texas A&M University

Daniel P. Watkins’s study of works by three major Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—examines the place of sexual roles and gendered struggles for power within a social and political landscape marked by profound economic change. Specifically, Watkins investigates the shift from an aristocratic, feudal economy to an emerging capitalism, and he points to gendered subjectivity as the primary experiential space through which anxieties over that shift were mediated. Posing the model of “sadeian logic” as the template for making sense of both social and interpersonal relations, Watkins reads a number of well-known Romantic works through the lenses of gender, class, and power finally to conclude that while the idealistic tendency of Romanticism remains compromised by the masculinist biases of its day, a feminist materialist investigation of the history and historicity of that dilemma—the very sort of project in which Watkins’ study participates—offers Romanticism its only way out of the convoluted patriarchalism that structured social, economic, and interpersonal relationships in the early nineteenth century.

Throughout his book, Watkins argues that “during the romantic period there are close relations between visionary idealism, patriarchy, and sadism” (60), and he demonstrates how “[the] three admittedly nonparallel categories of society, philosophy, and sexuality seem . . . to be crucial in the attempt to locate and explain, in historical terms, the romantic imagination and romantic textuality” (xvi). Anticipating skepticism about his subject and approach in the brief “Introduction” that opens the book, Watkins remarks that a central “problem” of Romanticism—in particular, how that movement’s ” . . . entanglement in the turbulent conditions of both feudalism and capitalism [and] its involvement with the declining energy of the Enlightenment project . . . [shapes] the romantic understanding and portrayal of gender” (xv)—”can be considered most usefully when gender is cast in its strongest possible form and then set in relation to other prominent, or constitutive, features of romanticism” (xvi). Indeed, for Watkins, the hallmarks of Romanticism—”[f]ragmentation, alienation, and reification”—are never overcome but, instead, are “pushed further down into the inner recesses of social life until they are almost hidden away in one of the most basic relations of human existence-sexuality” (120). Watkins offers the strongest support for his subject and methodology near the end of his chapter on Keats where he justifies the turn to sadeian logic by underscoring a phenomenological link between the almost simultaneous and, Watkins suggests, the contingent emergence of the works of Sade and the development of the Romantic attitude. Of the particular gender bias for which Romanticism has long been attacked, Watkins writes that “[i]t is important to call the logic of this masculinist poetic strategy sadeian because the word both suggests the severity of the poem’s portrayal of gender and helps to link various social and cultural energies of the age within a single historical and cultural framework” (123). Watkins concludes his study by pointing to the three ways in which such a project—which, he maintains, might seem to invalidate any reading of Romantic poetry as anything other than oppressive, particularly at the level of gender—remains useful to larger questions about Romanticism and its cultural moment. Specifically, Watkins argues that “feminism must explain the enabling logic and shaping conditions of violence if it is to be defused and its energies positively redirected”; that his project “calls attention to the historical field where oppression takes place and, therefore, where goal-oriented materialist feminism must always begin”; and that “feminist intervention . . . enables romanticism to be brought forward as history rather than as ideology or nostalgia, serving not only as a poetic expression of hope but also as a historical register of the real conditions of that hope” (129).

This reviewer’s lengthy focus on Watkins’ subject and methodology underscores the anxiety the author himself voices throughout Sexual Power and British Romantic Poetry; indeed, Watkins admits that his decision to focus on exclusively a few well-known works by canonical writers results from the fact that while he believes his model to hold true for the larger Romantic movement, these familiar and easily accessible texts function as test cases in which his theory may be satisfactorily investigated. Watkins begins with Wordsworth, whose own attitude about political revolution and whose plan for poetic revolution mark him as an important figure to consider in terms of the shifting climates that shaped the early portion of the Romantic age. Focusing on “Tintern Abbey,” “Nutting,” and the “stolen boat episode” from The Prelude, Watkins argues that Wordsworth’s meditations on the self and its place both in the narrow register of individual imagination and in the larger scheme of social relations demonstrate an obsession with emerging subjectivity, which Watkins ties to a cultural and economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. As a member of a developing capitalist society, Watkins argues, Wordsworth struggles to find a place for himself in an increasingly self-made world.
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