Byronic fandom: mutual consumption and the ambiguous politics of readerly desire
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2014
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Melbourne Authors
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School of Culture and Communication
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Masters Research thesis
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© 2015 Francesca Kate Kavanagh
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationships between Byronic heroes, fandom, and consumer culture through a detailed critical analysis of three female-authored Byronic texts. Taking Lady Caroline Lamb’s fictionalised account of her affair with Lord Byron as my starting point, I ask how desire for the Byronic hero has influenced our cultural understanding of fandom and gender. By reading the fan as an active authorial agent in Lamb’s 'Glenarvon' (1816), Emily Brontë’s 'Wuthering Heights' (1847), and Stephenie Meyer’s 'The Twilight Saga' (2008), I argue that Byronic heroes and their fans exist in a relationship of mutual consumption in which desire for the Byronic hero facilitates the literary productivity of fans.
Lamb, Brontë, and Meyer provide sites of departure from Byron’s poetry through their focus on the emotional lives of their heroines. Such a focus uncovers the patriarchal systems which are at work in Byron’s representation of his heroes and works to create a female space in which authors, characters and fans can return the Byronic hero’s famously fascinating gaze. This relationship is what I term mutual consumption.
The thesis moves chronologically from a selection of Lord Byron’s poetry and Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel 'Glenarvon', through the Victorian Gothic of Emily Brontë’s 'Wuthering Heights', to Stephenie Meyer’s 'The Twilight Saga'. These three texts form a trajectory of textual inheritance linking the Byronic hero to female desire and celebrity culture. In examining the relationships between the Byronic hero, fandom, and consumer culture, I seek to add to the critical literature working to rectify cultural assumptions of frivolity and worthlessness attached to women’s literature, the romance genre, and fan culture by demonstrating the cultural significance of these devalued forms.
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Lord Bryon, Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lamb, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, Bronte, The Twilight Saga, Twilight, Stephenie Meyer, Meyer, Celebrity, Romantic Celebrity, Fandom, Fan Fiction, Mutual Consumption, Literary Consumption, Byron, Byronic Hero