Introduction

22
Vanessa Mangione
of the Other: “That which seduces us as a mystery is, in actuality, so very seductive
because it is our desire we encounter as that of the Other” (Byromania 13).
This conclusion is of great importance, as it challenges the former assumption that
only women react to the Byronic hero because of some hysteric notions – it even
challenges the assumption that only women are drawn to the mystery of the Byronic
hero. Regardless, the Byron ”fan”, whether an enthusiastic reader or writer
(who used Byron’s literary persona) and the ‘fan’s’ belief that there exists a hidden
truth within the subject, is still looked down upon. For instance, Phyllis
Grosskurth writes ironically:
The necessity to penetrate the hero’s façade, to reach the sensitive heart
that undeniably throbbed beneath the austere exterior became the determined
purpose of every young woman who copied passages into her commonplace
book. He might still be saved by a pure woman. (155)
She presents enthusiastic Byron readers as “screaming females” (159) who are
naïve enough to believe in the discovery of a hidden truth, while she herself declares
in the introduction to her Byron biography to be a “seeker after truth” (xiii).
Where then is the line which separates the critics’ and the fans’ search for the
truth? I suggest that the line is blurred, as already male contemporaries of Byron,
learned and famous men, felt the attraction of his work and heroes and tried to
identify the origin of his magnetism. In 1812, Jeffrey wrote that the secret of
Byron “excited a kind of curiosity” as the “flashes of emotion and suppressed
sensibility that occasionally burst through the gloom” would hit the reader like the
force of the discovered truth (2:837). Walter Scott also stated that one could
hardly resist the power of Byron’s work “not only by many noble qualities, but by
the interest of mysterious, undefined, and almost painful curiosity” that the reader
feels while being confronted with the ferocity of his passions (176). Consequently,
women writers who used the Byronic hero in their work were not hysterical, fanatic
fans who wanted to copy his mysteriousness for “silly” romantic plots. On
the contrary, female writers used the phenomenon of the Byronic hero to criticise
standing gender roles and the threatening rise of the separate spheres ideology.
1.2 The Separate Spheres Ideology
The concept of separate spheres is based on a strict division of spheres into the
domestic and the public, which developed in the late eighteenth century and
dominated the whole of the nineteenth century. This artificially created concept
coincides with the industrialisation and the rise of the middle class and had a huge
impact on women’s lives. The new invention of masculinity and femininity and
the finding of new gender definitions played an important role in the confinement
of the newly risen middle-class; it separated them from other classes. This separation
between the sexes and their confinement to distinct spheres existed at every