The Secret History of Romance Masculinity: The Byronic Hero and the Novel, 1814-1914

Though the Byronic is often casually invoked by writers and critics, this study interrogates what the Byronic means in terms of linguistic construction, literary inherence, and British masculinity. Within this trajectory, I uncover an important undercurrent of gender and genre resistance that I call romance masculinity: sexually transgressive, politically dangerous and anti-domestic. From Romantic and Victorian domestic novels to the "romance revival" that begins with the paperback publication of Stevenson's Treasure Island in 1883, I excavate "a secret history" of masculine representation that betrays deep contradictions in the monolithic facade of Romantic and Victorian values of home, family, and patriotic nationalism. Across the long nineteenth century, Byronic romance masculinity elucidates three generic enclosures: domestic, schizophrenic, and romance. For example, Austen's allusions to Byron's Corsair reveal that Wentworth, the male love interest in Persuasion (1818), functions essentially as a domestication of the Byronic hero---and is thus a prototype for other domesticated romance masculinities such as Charlotte Bronte's Rochester. The rejection of domestic realism and the reemergence of romance in the 1880s usher in not only the British adventure novel tradition, with its treasure islands and lost civilizations, but the sexual and social danger of romance masculinity inside the "respectable" world of fin de siecle Britain. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) split domestic respectability and transgressive romance desire into the same representation, one in which desire for sexual and class liberation meets the social necessity of respectability, creating a schizophrenic enclosure which inevitably ends in tragedy. The history of the Byronic, or romance, hero across the long nineteenth century becomes a vehicle for understanding the drastic changes in the representation of British masculinity and its historical consequences.