Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 53
every Byronic characteristic and theme, such as “love, jealousy, treachery, ambition,
courage, pride and daring”, as well as with “quality satanic ruthlessness and
demonic power” (2-3).
3.1.1 An “Unwomanly” Woman
The presentation of female desire in Brontë’s novel outraged many readers. The
novel addresses the stigmatization of female desire, as it does not depict Jane as a
mere passive being or as a sexual, demonic assailer. The novel raises the awareness
of the difficulties women had to communicate their desire. Female novelists challenged
and questioned the codes of female behaviour through their depiction of
fictional female characters. They tried to create a counter motion to advice literature
that tried to regulate female behaviour. Mitchell and Osland comment that
during the sixteenth century
women where regarded as inherently sexually voracious, driven by bodily
desires that their inferior rational powers struggled to control, advice literature
emphasized … prohibitions that would establish a system of behavioural
defences, chief amongst these being the scriptural case for obedience
which men saw as the basic resolution to women’s wiles and weaknesses.
(6)
They continue by pointing out that from the 1630s onwards, conduct books
changed their course from proclaiming that the dangers of female sexuality could
be avoided through submissiveness to men by focusing more on female “modesty”:
A modesty that in its broadest sense is no different form the moderation
earlier enjoined on women in subjugating themselves to masculine authority
as a ‘due master’ of their inferior status, but increasingly understood, or at
least increasingly discussed, more narrowly as a personal delicacy that
prompts a woman to shrink from notice or self-assertion. (6)
With the help of advice literature, critics could thus reconstruct the development
of the “image of woman as lustful, loquacious, and wilful to one that is naturally
rather than prescriptively chaste, silent and obedient” (6). The alteration from the
idea that women’s sexuality should be regulated through male authority to the
concept that all women are naturally delicate, sensitive and modest, and that they
instinctively shrink back from sexuality did not mean that one idea of femininity
replaced the other. Mitchell and Osland argue, “in the social construction of
womanhood, beliefs seem to have accumulated in layers” (7). This is why women
on the one hand could be condemned as demonic, voluptuous and wilful beings