Introduction

78
Vanessa Mangione
4.1.1 The Byronic Hero’s Transformation
In the Victorian age, a new concept of Byronism was invented, as the Victorians
applied their moral code to him. As a result, several interpretations of this hero
and different emphasis on topics regarding the Byronic hero evolved. Accordingly,
Carlyle used the concept in his work to focus on class issues, Brontë to focus on
gender roles, Tennyson to discuss popularity and Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and
Wild to focus on sexuality (Elfenbein 10). Elfenbein notes that in the 1840s the
romantic had to give way to the realistic novel, as Byron and his literary persona
were connected to Romanticism, the rise of realism simultaneously entailed a rejection
of the Byronic hero (146). Thus, a dualism of the Byronic perception
evolved; although he did not lose his appeal to the reading audience, novelists (like
Eliot and Wood) dealt with him more critically. His overtly sexual attractiveness
becomes a reason of rejection, as morality and proper behaviour develop into
conventions that were to be followed strictly. Accordingly, Wood presents the
Byronic hero in form of Sir Francis Levison as an Iago-like character. He is a
heartless, evil seducer; a vilified dandy, whose force of meaningless malevolence
destroys lives. He is stripped of all “attractive” Byronic attributes, like mysteriousness,
broodiness and obvious remorse; instead, he embodies negative, aristocratic
characteristics, such as arrogance, indifference and extravagance.
4.1.2 Differences of Opinion in Wood Scholarship
Wood as a writer of sensation novels is perceived to be one of the most conservative
and domestic writers. It has been argued that the narrator, who is strongly
associated with Wood herself, favours the new middle-class family and thus serves
the symbolic as she supports with patriarchal ideas through her harsh critique of
female sexual desire and passion. 37 A. Kaplan argues that “she [the narrator] can
vividly appreciate the attractions of desire, but self-righteously sets itself against it
in “lectures” to the reader” (46). She adds that “like Wood herself, the narrator
cannot think outside of the discourse available within the fictive world and thus
cannot conceive a world in which female desire would not destabilize the entire
system” (46). Wynne comments that East Lynne is a “product of a conservative,
rather old fashioned magazine” and that it “promoted views which blended comfortably
with the magazine’s house style” (64). However, she also points out that
the only source of Wood’s life is “her dutiful son’s unsatisfactory biography” that
“obscures and mythologizes one of the most prolific writers of the Victorian Period”
(65). The picture of Wood, which is presented by her son Charles in his
Memorial of Mrs Henry Wood (1894), is that of a “conservative, passive, nervous and
domestic” woman. The contrasting picture of Wood however, that emerges more
37 For such an interpretation of Wood’s intention see A. Kaplan.