Introduction

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Vanessa Mangione
Avondale, and found, as social experience is, to be merely a relative thing,
not extra-social, not absolute, and certainly not timeless. (14)
Glenarvon, as a Byronic hero, is the embodiment of this extra-social love, or in
other words, he belongs to the realm of the semiotic. Repressed passions and
desires, some of which women were never even aware of, are awakened through
his presence. Kelly proceeds with an explanation of his interpretation of Kristeva’s
symbolic and semiotic, in his words, the social and extra-social. He argues that the
plot evolving around Calantha belongs to the private, extra-social world of passion,
whereas she is surrounded by “a crowded, complex, confusing, and deceptive
social world” (16).
With the appearance of Glenarvon, the plot of the novel is reduced to affairs
of passion, be it relationships between men and women, or revolutionary acts.
Passion, love and desire function as a bridge between male and female worlds of
experiences; they reduce the plot to the interaction between men and women. In
the novel the individual as well as everything belonging to the semiotic like passion,
or a woman’s world of experience, has to surrender and be repressed in order
to comply with the symbolic structure of public, social and traditional patriarchal
values. This is depicted in the love-triangle between Calantha, Avondale and
Glenarvon, and through a clash of institutional love with passionate love. The
symbolic and semiotic are treated in society as two separate orders, which are not
supposed to collide. However, as Kristeva argues, the one cannot exist without
the other; subordination to a dominant patriarchal system of social convention
through neglect and repression of the “female world” of emotional experience is
doomed to fail. Accordingly, under the calm surface, the heroines in Glenarvon are
emotional time-bombs that are waiting to explode.
2.4 The Byronic Hero: Catalyst of Repressed Desires
Lamb uses the Byronic hero as the activator of the explosion of repressed female
desire he is used as a form of criticism of institutionalised love and of the emotional
oppression of women. Glenarvon is portrayed as a fatal seducer, a betrayer
of the weak and oppressed, of women, and Irish rebels. He combines in equal
measures Satanism and sexuality, which are both destructive for women, as the
real Byron was. Braudy comments on Byron’s power to activate the semiotic in
women:
Byron is … celebrated … for the literary display of ‘himself’ – a swirling
whirlpool of almost sexual allure in which his audience might glimpse an
image not of their public selves so much as those desires and aspirations
that had seemed socially unfit or irrelevant, now writ large and grand. In
letters that poured in to him … spoke the voices of private loneliness and