Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 95
4.6 Conclusion
To argue that East Lynne is intended as an example for women to demonstrate the
necessity to suppress their sexual desires as their acting out would only end in
disaster is to disregard Wood’s obviously sympathetic treatment of Isabel’s dilemma.
Although Isabel’s passions are the reasons for the destruction of her family,
the text implies that the shortcomings of Carlyle, embodiment of the ideal of
bourgeois masculinity, are responsible for Isabel’s fall. Even though readers
should reject Isabel for her actions, both the description of her marital misery and
the detailed depiction of her repentance lead to a questioning of the restricting
social convention. Her fading away within the symbolic left her no choice than to
break out, as it would have led to her certain death.
The representation of masculinity in East Lynne is reduced to only two models.
Firstly, the good but morally overwhelming father, up to which standards Isabel
cannot live. Secondly, the villainous lover, who ruins her. The Byronic hero, although
the trigger and catalyst of her sexual desire, is here stripped of every Romantic
notion and presented as a shallow, evil seducer, whose villainy knows no
end. In the second part of the novel, Levison’s villainy is emphasised. He is portrayed
as an experienced seducer and eventually revealed as a murderer. Thus,
Isabel is more and more perceived as a victim. Wood’s portrait of Isabel’s character
and the description of her marital relationship lead to sympathy and pity, not
to a condemnation of the heroine.
The dialogism of the text, meaning the subversive sub-text that arises from the
circumstance that Wood wants the reader to think two contradictory things at
once, to condemn and to identify with Lady Isabel, is clearly intended as a critique
on the patriarchal system. This points to Wood’s intentions, both to criticise the
strict social conventions for women and the shortcomings of masculinity. In this
way, East Lynne challenges the very norms it seems to support and pictures the
contradictions of the ideal woman.
5. Conclusion
Through their novels, Lady Caroline Lamb, Charlotte Brontë and Ellen Wood,
three female writers, partake in the chief debate of their age, the debate between
rights and duties. By means of characters and plot, these women writers express
their view in the debate. They criticise and condemn ideals and values of a society
dominated by the ideology of patriarchy and its oppressive stance towards
women. All three demonstrate, in similar ways, the severe consequences of an
ideology that demands the repression of female desire and total female submissiveness.
Where Lamb and Wood reveal by the examples of Calantha and Isabel
how under the surface a torrent of repressed and denied desire is only barely re-