#deborah lutz

[agoodhandwriting]

From The Dark Night: The Life of Emily Bronte by Deborah Lutz

I find it very interesting that Heathcliff is both a personification of the nature of Yorkshire and a racially ambiguous foreigner to the area found in Liverpool.

But then, Brontes themselves became synonymous with Yorkshire and their mother was Cornish and their father was Irish.

[yvain]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens with Gilbert Markham telling the story of his meeting Helen who has just moved into his neighborhood after leaving her husband. A fugitive from the law, she lives under an assumed name and tries to avoid the society of her immediate neighbors—Markham and his cohorts. Seen through the lens of Gilbert’s desire, Helen’s character emerges as the archetypal misanthropic stranger, inhabiting a wild and romantic Gothic mansion, her past replete with dark secrets. Brontë has done something astonishingly new: she has created a plausible female Byronic hero, coveted for her very “unfeminine” qualities: inquietude, difficulty, and distance. She is the “mysterious lady” who is so reserved that, “they tried all they could to find out who she was, and where she came from, and all about her, but [no one] ... could manage to elicit a single satisfactory answer ... or throw the faintest ray of light upon her history, circumstances, or connections. Moreover, she was barely civil to them .…” Anne revises Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights: it is not Rochester who rules this Thornfield Hall nor is it Heathcliff who lurks about Wuthering Heights seeing ghosts. This time, the woman takes the role of the stormy and seductive artist who charms and mesmerizes the man. Wildfell Hall is a dilapidated, storied mansion, like so many other homes of Gothic literature; it is “cold and gloomy... with its thick stone mullion and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-holes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation” surrounded by trees “half blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the hall itself” which “harmonized well with the ghostly legend and dark traditions our old nurse had told us respecting the haunted hall and its departed occupants.” Helen haunts these bleak rooms, and Gilbert longs to redeem her from her dark past and bring her back into the fold, just as Jane yearns to be Rochester’s salvation, his earthly paradise.

Deborah Lutz, introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

[pasdetrois]

Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative

[dwellordream]

“The figure of the vampire literalizes the undead state of the dangerous lover. The vampire’s near immortality links him to Cain, the Wandering Jew, and those ghastly characters in Byron who live eons of pain in a matter of days. In John Polidori’s introduction to his The Vampyre (1819), he points out that vampirism was often considered as a punishment after death for some dark crime committed when living, and the punishment encompassed not only the torment of a lonely and desolate immortality, but also the compulsion to visit the curse on those most loved by the man when alive. 

Byron’s Giaour is just such a cursed soul: But first on earth, as Vampyre sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent; Then ghastly haunt the native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corse. (755–62) The dangerous lover vampirizes those who love him, as with Manfred’s driving Astarte to take her own life; Glenarvon’s seduction of his victims, which leave them pale and lifeless; and the hero of the modern gothic romance and the erotic historical whose mysterious and terrifying eroticism fascinates the heroine into a helpless passivity. 

The Victorian seduction narrative often likens the seducer to a kind of vampire like Dorian Gray, or a frenzied animal like Carker who might attack with fangs. The vampire, like the dangerous lover, steps out of timeless myth. In both myths eroticism might bring about death, transformation, or a transcendence of time and place. Both trace their roots to the Gothic demon who rises out of a supernatural realm of superior strength, agility, and the ability to change shape and form. Those who were already marginalized figures in society were thought to return as vampires after death, Laurence Rickels explains. 

In medieval Eastern Europe alcoholics, thieves, excommunicated people, non-Christians (specifically Jews), those who died under a curse, and suicides were some of the excluded who might not stay dead. Dangerous lovers come down through myth with a similar constellation of vampiric symptoms; they are often alcoholics (Carton, Rhett Butler, and numerous erotic historical romance heroes), thieves (Conrad, the Corsair, and many other pirates); they are seen as unholy or cursed (Manfred, the Gaiour, Cain-like figures, Rochester, Heathcliff, and contemporary heroes linked with demonism, especially in gothic romances); they are effeminate or gay-coded (Rhett Butler, the dandy); and they desire death above all else (Manfred, Carton, Heathcliff, etc.). 

Vampires after Byron, Tom Holland argues, descend from the Byronic hero, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), surely the most influential version of the vampire story, was largely based on Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), a story Holland notes was originally told by Byron, which his sometime doctor heard, recorded, and embellished. Contemporary film versions of vampirism, as well as such popular narratives as those of Anne Rice, represent an even more eroticized, sophisticated, celebrity vampire haunting the fashionable world with dandified grace, full of Byronic decadence, satiated ennui, melancholy, and pallid beauty. 

An interesting and tenuous link can be traced between the vampire and the dandy, with Byronism as a background influence for both. Curiously, Lord Ruthven of The Vampyre appears to be something of a Regency dandy, and he has many of the characteristics that the Silver-Fork will later incorporate for its hero. The story opens in a familiar way: It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. . . . His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. (265) 

Lord Ruthven has “the reputation of a winning tongue,” and he loves to gamble, especially when it means he can ruin promising young men, Dorian Gray-like. He moves through the drawing rooms of London with a magnetic aloofness, “a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact” (267). He has, like so many dangerous lovers, “the possession of irresistible powers of seduction” (269). Lord Ruthven, like all vampires, is a dangerous lover of the melodramatic villainous type, and he eroticizes a sexual cannibalism, an act that involves violent, sadistic seduction. 

Because the vampire must always be invited in, he represents the paradoxical fascination and repulsion of sex that is desirable because it is dangerous, because it might lead to pain, expulsion, and/or death. This desire to be ravished, to be “taken,” to be greedily consumed, has a role in so many of the demon lover narratives discussed here. When Jonathan Harker first meets the vampire of Stoker’s Dracula, his charm and personable qualities relax Harker after his frightful journey.

 Although when Dracula is later encountered in England he is repeatedly described as a kind of crazed animal with a “hellish” look and flaming red eyes, here in the beginning his gently seductive and thoughtful manners draw Harker to him. Like the many melancholy heroes we have encountered he remarks, “I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may” (26). Dracula is another night brooder like Manfred or Eugene Aram who must do his work under cover of the darkness, when others are safe within their beds. 

Cast out of the everyday activities of the living and the permanent stasis of the dead, Dracula haunts the night caught in a liminal state between death and life. Like a melancholy insomniac—Romeo, for instance—he is unable to live in the light of day. Dracula mourns the many who have died during his very long lifetime, both by his hand and by other means. Rickels explains that Dracula represents, like Heathcliff after Catherine’s death or Manfred, unmitigated mourning. Dracula apologizes for his melancholia in one of his few speeches: “[M]y heart, through the weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth” (26). 

Dracula must die in order to open the possibility for a future that comes from Mina’s repurification after being “sullied” by Dracula and her engendering of a new narrative through her baby by Harker. That Mina can become a part of the heterosexual couple again and can escape the “outside” as represented by vampirism points to the future of many dangerous lover narratives. Thus we are brought full circle to the collection of dark, mysterious strangers in the twentieth century whose crimes do not need to be expiated by death, or by the punishments and inquietude that might happen after death, but instead their immanence comes on earth and in life, and their terrible self-exiled bitterness is absolved by love in the contemporary romance.”

- Deborah Lutz, “The Absurdity of the Sublime: The Regency Dandy and the Malevolent Seducer (1825–1897).” in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative

[fourthepigram]

Lately i feel exhausted from being filled with so much anger. I still don’t know what to do with it.

[marianhalcombes]

An active woman on a serious hike in the country might take along a staff, especially if she didn’t care much about fashion and was willing to be viewed as eccentric. Emily fit this profile. While Anne, with her violet eyes, was thought the prettiest by most who met them and was never sartorially criticized, Charlotte and Emily were described throughout their lives as awkward dressers. Charlotte experienced anxiety about her ‘plain—high-made, country garments,’ especially when she visited London as an adult, and she made adjustments to try to appear unremarkable. Yet when Emily was teased about her relish for puffy leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts that clung to her thin legs—styles that had fallen out of fashion decades before—she didn’t seem to care. Haworth townsfolk also noted heavy boots upon the three, a tomboyish eccentricity. Such mannish footwear would have gone well with walking sticks, and Emily did not shy from using accessories considered to be solely for men: Patrick taught her to fire his pistols, according to some sources, and she was a good shot. If a walking staff helped her to scale the heights up to the dear and remote Top Withins farmhouse, then Emily probably had one often in her hand

Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects

[aliteraryprincess]

March BFT Book Photo Challenge

Day 31: Wrap Up

I read 10 books this month, so I’m right on track!  And I’m actually 7 books ahead of schedule on my goal for the year since I read so much in January.  My favorite of the month was definitely Speak: The Graphic Novel.  I also had a great time reading The Immortals for my Series of the Month feature.  On to April! 

5 stars: Speak: The Graphic Novel

4 stars: The Brontë Cabinet; Let the Right One In; Wild Magic; Wolf-Speaker; Emperor Mage; The Realms of the Gods

3 stars: Mary Barton; Gondal’s Queen; Inferno

[cinematic-literature]

Jackie (2016) by Pablo Larrain

Book title: The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015) by Deborah Lutz