Contextualizing Byron's homographic signature: Explorations of his other self and voice.

Abstract

The redefinition of the sodomite in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality produced a new sexual subjectivity in England. The sodomite became a more visible figure in the eighteenth century, but in Regency England, this new subject was increasingly represented as the abject other to what Foucault has called the Malthusian couple. By considering these new representations of the sodomite and George Gordon, Lord Byron's own writings on and experiences of same sex desire, this study contextualizes the influence of homosexuality on Byron's emergence as a public writer and on his development of the Byronic hero in a series of poems he suggested be read together: Childe Harold I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara.

Byron's movement into public writing is a critical juncture that forces a displacement of the homoerotic into his poetics and his stylization of the persona of the Byronic hero. His self-dramatizations within these poems reveal a homographic inscription, which my deconstructive and queer reading gives both psychological and social significance. I argue that the creation of the Byronic persona and the Byronic hero are deeply indebted to Byron's relationship to conflicted homosexual meanings within his age and that reading these conflicts exposes the ways discursive constructions of (homo)sexual, gendered, and national identity are imbricated in the emerging heterosexual imperatives of Byron's age.