Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity, and the History of Sexualities

DURING MUCH OF HIS ADULT LIFE, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), a poet whose actions and writings exerted significant influence on British and European culture throughout the nineteenth century, grappled with issues of class and gender. Byron's struggle was a particularly intense one because in the age in which he lived, the venerated notions of "aristocracy" and "masculinity" were not only exposed to increased public scrutiny but were fiercely contested by those attempting to bring about a profound reorientation of social attitudes.

Jerome Christensen has done an excellent job of showing how Byron, as an aristocratic poet, employed "that imperative's residual strength in an age when the grounds of authority have been disclosed as being no more than nominal: authority derived from distinction, distinction the function of opinion, and opinion concocted by the powers that be." ¹ What has not been examined adequately, however, is how such a process was carried out in the areas of sex and gender. During the past two decades, some groundbreaking studies have appeared that consider Byron's homophilic side; ² however, for various, often valid, reasons, these have tended to approach the subject from what Stephen O. Murray characterizes as "the modern, northern European and American notion that everyone who repeatedly engages in homosexual behavior is 'a homosexual,' a distinct 'species' with unique features." ³ Although in a letter written to John Murray on December 10, 1822, Byron claimed that he had lived in "three or four" different worlds during his thirty-four years on earth, ⁴ as yet there has been very little close analysis of what he might have meant by such a statement, particularly in the context of the history and geographical distribution of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century sexualities. Consequently, this study will not discuss Byron as a "homosexual," "heterosexual," or "bisexual" but rather as a man who, in living what was unquestionably one of the most noteworthy lives of any generation, spent much of his time, in journeys eastward from England, attempting to defend and maintain public and private images of masculinity. If "Byron," as Christensen argues so convincingly, was a "collaborative invention of a gifted poet, a canny publisher, eager reviewers, and rapt readers," ⁵ that project was rendered much more difficult but immeasurably more interesting by increasingly bitter and often confusing conflicts between two competing paradigms of sexuality and gender. (These paradigms, with their profoundly different ideas of what it was to be a man, remain with us even today.) When key incidents in Byron's life are examined as different stages in an ongoing battle to preserve and protect his manhood, issues of homophilic cryptography, Orientalism, British nationalism, and self-expression acquire a previously unforeseen relevance, and certain important poetic works, such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (I and II), The Giaour, Lara, Beppo, Don Juan, and the Lukas poems, can be read in unexpected but nonetheless significant new ways.

"Enchanted Relationships":
Male Homophilia and Some Paradoxes of Misrecognition in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century England

One explanation for the sexual and gender ferment faced by Byron may be found in the reflexive sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, who sees "misrecognition" as central in the relationships between economic capital, symbolic capital, and domination in precapitalist and capitalist societies. Bourdieu argues that before a particular society develops the "conditions required for a mediated lasting appropriation of other agents' labour, services, or homage," those with power "are obliged to resort to the elementary forms of domination." Those forces constitute any "direct domination of one person by another" and range from a direct "appropriation of persons, i.e.[,] slavery," to "'winning' [others] personally, 'tying' them" by "gifts or debts." Consequently, in many "archaic" or precapitalist societies there exists an "institutionally organized and guaranteed misrecognition," a "sincere fiction of disinterested exchange" that "prevent[s...