Introduction

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Vanessa Mangione
Lamb demonstrates in Glenarvon how passion and desire will find a way to
break free and take over the body and mind. She uses the literary persona of the
Byronic hero as a trigger and catalyst of female passion. Simultaneously, she transforms
him through her own personal experienced with Lord Byron, and presents
him as an inconsistent, fatal and cruel, but charismatic lover, who arouses female
desire to such an extent that it can neither be repressed nor ignored. She not only
started a new literary tradition by using the dangerous love for the first time in a
novel, her depiction of this persona would become one of the most popular Byronic
features in novels. Furthermore, other female writers would use the persona
to criticise gender roles.
Lamb sees the origin of the “female dilemma” in an insufficient education.
Avondale’s and Glenarvon’s attempt to reveal the “true” woman within from
artificial social and cultural restrictions such as education, law, and social class,
demonstrates how the idea of femininity has been forced upon women. Lamb
exposes the oppressive power of the patriarchal system and its capability to repress
women’s semiotic side. Thus, Lamb’s interest lies not in the punishment of
the heroines’ failure to resist the sexual temptation through remorse but in the
emotional understanding and experiences of the “female world” that is oppressed
by a patriarchal rule of social convention. The women in her novel had no other
chance than to fail, as their education and traditional conventions prohibited them
to learn reason, so that they acted on their desires only. Accordingly, Glenarvon is a
presentation of the inevitable interaction between the symbolic and semiotic, a
demonstration that neither order can stand alone. It is a depiction of the relationship
between conventional patriarchal social values, the private world of passionate
feeling and the consequences of being forced to comply with the symbolic
only.
3. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
3.1 Feminist Criticism
Since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has been considered to be a novel that
speaks particularly to women and about womanhood. In the twentieth century it
became an iconic text in feminist criticism, which reads it as a woman’s quest for
independence and equality. From childhood on, Jane Eyre struggles to recount her
own story, in order to defend and explain her life’s choices, which are far from
conventional, but also to let her voice be heard at a time when women were not
supposed to have a voice of their own. Jane, however, dares to talk back and thus
liberates herself from the repressing symbolic order. C.Kaplan states that feminist
criticism has read Jane Eyre as a “revolutionary manifesto” as Jane is able to “nar-