Written on the Brow: Character, Narrative, and the Face in Byron and Austen

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes My focus on narrative does not, however, imply Bakhtin's claim that nineteenth-century poetry, as evidenced especially in Byron's Don Juan, has been “transposed to the novelistic zone of contact” (33). For an overview, see Wootton. For a brief discussion of character's subjection to plot in various critical approaches, see Chatman (107-116). Phelan explains that his Reading People, Reading Plots was conceived as a remedy to this feature of narrative theory but ultimately came to focus on character's embeddedness in plot (ix). Butler and Leask identify connections between the poem's Eastern setting and British concerns. The following discussion favors the Levinasian ethics of the face-to-face rather than the “faciality” of Deleuze and Guattari, whose two-dimensional model of the face's “white wall” and “black hole” offers a very different schemata than that which Byron and Austen's faces invoke. “The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse” (Totality 66). Meyer reads the Giaour's assumption of Hassan's racial features as an instance of the other's sublimation into the self and its fundamental annihilation; his alteration and misquotation of “his that bled” as “‘[him] who bled’” forces such a reading (678). Leask, Levinson, and Gleckner all comment on the Giaour's potentially identical response to Leila's hypothetical infidelity. Leask additionally observes that Byron here denounces western moral superiority and that “the power relations of gender transcend cultural difference” (29). On Persuasion and Romantic poetry, see Thomas; on the Byronic presence in Persuasion, see Knox-Shaw. See Felluga for Austen's self-canonizing expurgation in Persuasion of the various threats Byron posed to the nineteenth-century novel (133). While it is not clear that Austen read The Giaour, her comment on Byron's later orientalist poem indicates the familiarity of ironic disdain: “I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do” (Letters 268). See Ireland for a view of this “fusion of time-planes” as a result of narrative omniscience. Her sarcastic explanation that her affections for him begin when she sees Pemberley has often been taken seriously; Jane's response with an “intreaty that she would be serious” (286) indicates it is not. His reputation, appearance, and personality—all meanings of “character”—coalesce in a public assessment that begins by deeming him “much handsomer than Bingley,” but this sentence ends by pitting the estate against the face in a way that predicts Elizabeth's experience of the portrait when it is decided that “not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance” (6). See Cunningham and Hollander. Auerbach asserts that Elizabeth admires “the awesomely institutionalized power of a man” (15). By contrast, Rovee argues that she “reduces the impact of his image to the memory of a smile, the echo of a recent conversation” (2). Galperin argues that both Elizabeth and Darcy are in a similar way “taken” in this scene: Elizabeth positions herself as an object of Darcy's gaze, and Darcy's image is “taken” in accordance with his father's wishes (130). Darcy himself further restricts the range of this charitable act when he tells Elizabeth that he “thought only of you” (280). Of the competing meanings of “regard” in this passage, Lacour has argued that Elizabeth would take it to signify Darcy's proposal rather than his face. For this argument, see Poovey 198-202.