The Ladies Roles in Byrons The Corsair - Book Report/Review Example

The Ladies’ Roles in Byron’s “The Corsair” Most people in today’s world envision the Romantic Period asbeing a time full of hearts and flowers, men walking around spouting beautiful poetry about love and women hanging out of windows swooning with admiration. However, this was not necessarily the main thrust of this literary movement, which is recognized to have occurred roughly during the 1770s and continued until sometime in the mid-1800s, extending a little later in America where it took longer for new innovations to arrive (“Introduction”, 2001). Generally, the movement concentrated on idealizing the natural world with emphasis on supernatural phenomena. Nature was the ultimate creative element and considered the source of all true inspiration while the supernatural was believed to manifest itself through signs and symbols found in nature. Through this thought process, it was recognized that the viewer often created what they wanted to see in early recognition of the subjectivity of life. This began to be applied not only to supernatural issues, but also to social issues as it started to be recognized that conceptions of groups, such as the entire female gender or specific racial groups, may not be as inherent in the group as they were imposed upon them from external sources. At the same time, it was conjectured that changes in external definition might result in changes in internal behavior. One of the areas in which this type of change was initiated was in the social issues of gender rights. Up to this period in time, women were consistently represented as binary opposites from men, placing them in a negative, ‘lesser than’, misogynistic frame of reference. Poets like Lord Byron, while not immune to the attitudes and beliefs of his time, were more open to the concept that women might be different if they were provided with the opportunity to follow their own inclinations. In his poem “The Corsair”, Byron demonstrates both the misogynistic attitude of his time in the character of Medora as well as the possibility for something different in the figure of Gulnare. To understand Byron’s frame of reference, it is necessary to understand the important events of his time period. Leading into the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, society had been characterized by a strictly ordered society divided relatively neatly between the land-owning upper class, the incredibly poor peasantry and a small portion of a middle class in the form of shop owners and artisans (Hooker, 1996). Under this system, girls of good breeding were expected to remain in the house, the property of their fathers, brothers or some other male relative and, if educated at all, were typically educated within the home only in those subjects that would serve to make men’s lives more comfortable. “In addition to being able to sing, play an instrument and speak a little French or Italian, the qualities a young Victorian gentlewoman needed, were to be innocent, virtuous, biddable, dutiful and be ignorant of intellectual opinion” (Thomas, 2007). With the growth of the cities, though, there weren’t always enough men ready and willing to complete the work required within the factories, giving women, particularly lower class women, greater opportunities for work than ever before. As a result of this and increasing scientific and philosophic knowledge, attitudes toward women were gradually changing. Women themselves were proving that, given a little opportunity and a better education, they were capable of much more than the world had ever given them credit for. Romantic literature was primarily a reaction against the loss of the ‘venerable woman’ of a nostalgically idealized Golden Age of being, yet some authors, such as Byron, were willing to allow that perhaps this Golden Age wasn’t as pure as it was painted and that women, like men, were often products of an enforced exterior concept rather than a natural being. Byron’s “Corsair” tells a basic story of a pirate chief who goes to war with a sultan, is captured by this sultan and rescued by one of the sultan’s harem girls only to return home to find his beloved wife dead from grief over the loss of him. It is divided into three Cantos which are, in turn, divided into multiple numbers of verses of different lengths. However, the story is also written in heroic couplets, a poetic form that utilizes rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter and had been popular since Chaucer (Monroe, 1998). This poetic form is significant because it was most often used for works of solemnity and serious import, giving the poem, even for today’s readers, a sense of gravity it might not otherwise have gained. In making his point regarding how concepts of women were serving to define them, Byron uses this weighty poetic feature to call attention to his comparisons between the traditional English woman as represented by the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Medora, the masculine figure of Conrad the pirate, and the bold and beautiful foreign harem slave Gulnare. Medora is introduced at the beginning of the poem as Conrad’s beloved wife. She is the idealized treasured jewel of the house, the ultimate treasure, a being that exists solely for the entertainment and enjoyment of her man. She is so much a possession of the family, meaning Conrad, that she is physically and mentally separated from the rest of the pirates and their women (Conrad indicates later that many of his men are married), living alone on the top of a hill and always expected to be at home. The idea that she lives for Conrad’s sake alone is reflected in her explanation for the sad song she was singing upon his entrance to their home. “In Conrad’s absence wouldst thou have it glad? / Without thine ear to listen to my lay, / Still must my song my thoughts, my soul betray: / Still must each action to my bosom suit, / My heart unhush’d, although my lips were mute!” (I, 14: 26-30). When Conrad tells her he will be leaving again in about an hour, she is obviously heartsick, but behaves in a properly decorous manner, feeding him and providing him with entertainment until it is time to go. Her weakness is shown in his leaving when she collapses in his arms and in the pain in her eyes, but she doesn’t allow tears to spill in his presence, which is as close to a woman being brave as most men might allow. Her attempts to convince him to stay home revolve around the traditional activities of women in her time – music, dancing, singing – but remain insufficient to keep Conrad home. Medora drops out of the story at this point, only appearing much later as she frets over Conrad’s failure to return home or send a message indicating the reason for his delay. Convinced something terrible has happened to him and knowing above all that she has lost him, she is found pacing the shoreline when the few survivors of the battle with Seyd return and faints in the surf. When Conrad returns home, he finds her dead yet still beautifully young. Through this depiction, the English woman is seen as something incredibly weak. She is unable to master her emotions, she is unable to consider important political concepts (it is important to note that upon Conrad’s arrival at Seyd’s headquarters, Seyd was completing his preparations for a morning attack on the pirate) and she is physically incapable of surviving even the thought of losing her man. This is contrasted with the strong masculinity of Conrad himself. Although he is described in less than active terms, as a “man of loneliness and mystery / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh; / Whose name appals the fiercest of his crew, / And tints each swarthy cheek with sallower hue” (I, 8: 5-8), he is undoubtedly a fearsome character as viewed by those around him. In general, Conrad was conceived of by Byron’s public as a thinly veiled persona of the author, who encouraged this association by dressing up and playing the part whenever he could. “Byron created a ‘cult of personality’ based on the ‘Byronic hero’, defiant, melancholy, brooding upon some mysterious past” (Kinyon, 2003). This type of hero is significant because it presents a more feminized vision of man as a passive thinker rather than an active machine. While Conrad retains his masculine qualities in that he is capable of advanced thought, is active in determining to leave port immediately for a new attack and held in high esteem among his peers, this feminine attribute provides a small clue as to the true nature of women’s idle activities and paves the way for Conrad’s next comparison. Conrad’s dual nature, caught between masculinity and femininity, is demonstrated as he first sneaks into Seyd’s palace in disguise (feminine) and then springs to the attack when the signal outside is given (masculine). He fights ferociously, but halts the battle in order to compassionately and gallantly save the women in the harem, threatening his men in the process not to do the women any injustice. When he is captured as a result, he seems to enter into a kind of feminine sulk, refusing to do anything to improve his situation and eventually giving in, to a point, to Gulnare’s demands. Gulnare is the harem girl saved by Conrad in the second Canto. Having experienced a new way of being treated, she suddenly realizes the way she’s been living is completely unacceptable and desires a better life with greater respect. In the few moments that she was with him, Gulnare determines she is in love with him because he knew how to treat her like a person. “The Corsair vow’d protection, soothed affright / As if his homage were a woman’s right / ‘The wish is wrong – nay, worse for female – vain: / Yet much I long to view that chief again” (II, 7: 15-18). While the ideal treatment of women was the type of idolization expressed by Conrad, it was not necessarily the norm in England or elsewhere. Too often, women were considered only in terms of their financial dowry or political significance. Her person, her mind or her emotions were often not considered in the types of arranged marriages worked out between families (Thomas, 2007). It is this revelation Gulnare experiences in this scene. “Even though Gulnare is surrounded by splendor, she understands that she is only a slave and has no claims on the luxury by which she is surrounded. To outsiders it appears that she is very lucky, but Gulnare has paid for the borrowed splendor with her freedom and her youth” (Sevaried, 2005). Despite her protected status throughout her life, though, Gulnare proves herself capable of action and strength in the face of Conrad’s weakness and passivity. It is through her actions, rather than his, that the two characters are able to escape Seyd’s palace after Gulnare murders the ruler and only through her that Conrad is able to return to Medora at all, unfortunately too late to save her. Through these comparisons, Byron is able to explore concepts of masculine and feminine traits, illustrating how both genders have elements of each. While men are considered active and women passive, Byron illustrates how there are times when men are passive and women are active. Both men and women are seen to accede to the inclinations and desires of the other when it suits them, suggesting that women’s submissive behavior toward men is not necessarily a ‘natural’ condition, but is instead forced upon them by a set of inducements or punishments they are attempting to attain or avoid. Finally, it is illustrated that while men are normally considered to be thinking advanced thoughts in their moments of quiet, women are equally capable of conceiving advanced thoughts while acting. Through this illustration, Byron thus demonstrates he is well aware of his society’s conceptions of women, but is also aware that there may have always been the kind of independent difference in women just then being recognized as women began gaining access to education and opportunity. References Byron, George Gordon. (1814). The Corsair. Available 5 January 2008 from Hooker, Richard. (1998). “The European Enlightenment.” World Civilizations. Available 6 January 2008 from < http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/INDUSTRY.HTM> “Introduction to Romanticism.” (2001). A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature. New York: Brooklyn College. Available 5 January 2008 from Kinyon, Lezlie. (1 December 2003). “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know’: Le Vampyre, the Gothic Novel, and George Gordon, Lord Byron.” Strange Horizons. Available 5 January 2008 from Monroe, William. (1998). Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sevareid, Karen. (2005). “The CorsEyre: Lord Byron and ‘The Corsair’ in Jane Eyre.” Michigan: University of Michigan. Available 5 January 2008 from Thomas, Pauline Weston. (2007). “A Woman’s Place in C19th Victorian History.” Fashion Era. Available 6 January 2008 from < http://www.fashion-era.com/a_womans_place.htm> Read More