Introduction

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Vanessa Mangione
transgression into a lavish story about female suffering that seems to exceed any
moral or didactic requirement that the heroine be punished for her sins” (98-99).
Cvetkovich joins the group of critics who perceive Wood’s excessive punishment
for Isabel as a means to demonstrate her adultery and abandonment of her family
as unpardonable. Wynne also argues that the “enjoyment for readers [lies] more in
Barbara’s triumph over Isabel rather than its capacity to generate tears” (67). Here
she disagrees with Langbauer who perceives it to be a “weepy melodramatic”
novel and comments that “all female characters cry hysterically throughout it”
(227). All these feminist critics lay their focus on either Isabel’s excessive maternal
feelings, the appeal of the novel to female readers because of its melodramatic
mood and the ability to ‘generate tears’ or on Isabel’s excessive suffering as a
warning for the female population to stay within their assigned sphere. What they
fail to mention is what Showalter points to: that Wood “expressed female anger,
frustration, and sexual energy more directly than had been done previously”
(1999, 158).
Moreover, a closer reading of Wood’s works suggests that her novels and East
Lynne in particular, are concerned with the exposure (supposedly unconsciously, as
has been argued) of the difficulties, economic and ideological, women had to endure.
While excessive women are always severely punished in her works (usually
through imprisonment or death) this is done in a way “which some critics have
suggested smack ”of rebellion against constraints of the respectable plot” (Introduction:
Ellen Wood, Writer 151).
To read Wood’s East Lynne as a pure condemnation of the fallen Isabel and
thus a propagating of middle-class values is too simplistic a reading, as the novel is
more complex than that. It is also possible to read the text as both a critique on
the emotional restrictions imposed on women in the nineteenth century and the
shortcomings of bourgeois masculinity. The Byronic hero, here stripped of any
positive quality and presented as a pure seductive villain, acts again as a catalyst of
desire that induces the heroine to flee the restrictions of the passionless, symbolic
sphere.
4.2 Lady Isabel: Propriety vs. Desire
East Lynne differs in its structure from Glenarvon and Jane Eyre. Where in the latter
two novels the heroines meet the Byronic hero and are confronted with the temptation
to give in to the semiotic only after their lives within the symbolic has been
presented, Lady Isabel encounters the Byronic hero right from the start. Thus, she
is immediately torn between sexual desire and decorum, as she meets Sir Francis
Levison only shortly after her very first meeting with Archibald Carlyle, a fact on
which the narrator comments: