Examine Byron’s response to at least two of the places visited by Childe Harold: Greece, Rome, Portugal, Venice & co.

‘I have always had great contempt for women; and formed this opinion of them not hastily, but from my own fatal experience. My writings, indeed tend to exalt the sex; and my imagination has always delighted in giving them a beau ideal likeness, but I only drew them as a painter or sanctuary would do, -- as they should be.’[1] (Medwin, Nov 1821- Mar 1822 (Cf. Ideality of Art)) p. 195

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was Lord George Gordon Byron’s first composition which he begun in 1809 and finally completed in 1818. The structure of the poem follows a young promising knight through his journey around Europe. The poem is autobiographical: Byron uses Childe Harold as a fictional figure to respond to, and comment on, life and experiences around Europe whilst Byron was undertaking his own ‘Tour’. The Grand Tour ‘became the fashionable way for young male aristocrats to complete an education whose foundation was classical Greek and Roman history, rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry.’[2] As a Romantic poet, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron uses the depiction of nature as a way to express his opinions of place. Childe Harold is full of images and motifs which takes its reader on a journey, or a pilgrimage, of self-discovery and through foreign lands in the truly beautiful Byronic style. Politics have dominated the critical analysis of Childe Harold in the past, centred on the response of the Battle of Waterloo in Canto III and IV. Nonetheless, Byron’s presentation of the women in the text offers the reader a fresh understanding of the different countries visited by Childe Harold of which I shall concentrate on Spain, Greece and the City of Rome.

Spain is described in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a ‘splendid sight to see/ (For one who hath no friend, no brother there)’ (Canto I. XL. 1-2) as nature, as always in Romanticism, prevails. However, Byron suggests a tension in Spain where even ‘free’ ‘Savilla… son shall Conquest’s fiery foot intrude.’[3] (Canto I. XLV.4) Byron’s admiration of Spain is heavily tainted with his portrayal of poor condition of the native lives who suffer ‘vineyard desolate’ (Canto I. XLVII.3) and their ‘unconscious of the coming doom,’ (Canto I. XLVI1) The latter part of Canto I, by the response of Spanish women, could explain the unease of the country in Byron’s interpretation. ‘Their doom’, according to Byron, reflects the behaviour of the Spanish women:

It is for this the Spanish maid, aroused, Hangs on the willow her unstrung guitar, And, all unsexed.. …whom once the semblance of a scar Appalled (Canto I.LIV. 1-5)

The woman’s behaviour is a reflection of the state of affairs in Spain, as the women are no longer ‘appalled’ by the scar. In this incident the ‘scar’ is the symbol of war and unrest, and an ever present violence. The audience can only assume that this is because the Spanish maids are familiar with the ‘scar’, and are exposed to violence which should usually be hidden from maidens’ eyes that they become ‘all unsexed’. It is the unsexing of the woman which forms the impression which the Byron/Harold narrator communicates to his audience:

Her lover sinks- she shed no ill-timid tear; Her chief is slain- she fills his fatal post; Her fellows flee- she checks their base career; The foe retires- she heads the sallying host: (canto I. LVI.1-4)
The woman ‘fills his fatal post’ and takes on the masculine role. Byron shows the woman as replacing the male role only when her male authority ‘sinks’, ‘flee’, ‘retires’ or is ‘slain’. The Spanish maid is masculinised, and adopts a male persona, as a necessity in the exception of the current disaster of the country. Byron’s audience would identify the Spanish maids behaviour with that of Lady Macbeth who asks the spirits to ‘unsex me here,/ And fill me from the crown to the toe topful/ Of direst cruelty!’[4] (Act 1, scene 5, 41–43) Lady Macbeth, like the Spanish maids, needs to be unsexed before she is able to carry out the masculinised task of murder. However Byron sees the wrong in the masculine female, commenting that ‘Spain’s maids no race of Amazons’, and uses oxymoron’s like ‘tender fierceness of the dove’ to highlight the unnaturalness of the situation. Byron later jokes the Virgin in stanza LXXI is ‘the only virgin there’, and therefore depicts the Spanish women as harlots unchaste. Additionally the bullfight towards the end of the canto epitomises the true state of the Spanish maids. The Byron/Harold narrator finds the violence of the bullfight a ‘sweet sight for vulgar eyes-‘(Canto I. LXXIX.7) and is disapproving of the ‘ungentle sport that oft invited/ The Spanish maid, and cheers the Spanish swain.’ (Canto I. LXXX.1-2) This implies that the ‘Spanish maid’ has ‘vulgar eyes’, and that the Spanish treatment of violence is romanticised between the maid and the ‘swain’, or suitor. The audience becomes aware of Byron’s judgemental attitudes towards Spain as the status quo of the nation is disrupted by war and violence which affects the femininity of women, causing them to act grotesquely in reflection of a vulgar community.

Contrasting to Spain, Byron transports his reader in Canto II to Ali Pacha’s court in Greece. Omar Abdullah Bagabas interprets that:

‘…in his descriptive passage on the orient court, he relies once more on a direct visual experience which gives him the power to portray such an oriental setting. The lively description of the court particularly which the approach of night in Ramadan and its bustling activities add to the glamorous atmosphere Byron creates of an eastern court with all its opulence, magnificence and revelry.’[5] (p. 175)

Byron paints the image of the Greek court as busy, fascinating, loud with celebration and the stereotype of the eastern ‘orient’ with all its lively colours. However, the Harold/ Byron narrator’s response to women in canto II is more telling of the true state of affairs amongst the busyness of patriarchal court lifestyle:

‘Here woman’s voice is never heard: apart,/ And scarce permitted, guarded, veiled, to move,/ She yields to one her person and her heart,/ Tamed to her cage, nor feels a wish to rove:…’ (Canto I. LXI. 1-4)

Byron presents the Grecian woman as the opposite of the women of Spain. The women of the Greek court are ‘never heard’, ‘scarce’ and ‘veiled’. Byron contrasts the women in the court with the boisterous attitudes of the men, which suggest an imbalance in the natural order of men, women and nature. The imbalance of Greece hints at the mysteriousness of the oriental court and a distrust in the male authorities. ‘Along that aged venerable face,/ The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace.’ (Canto II. LXII. 8-9) I would suggest that these ‘deeds that lurk’ are in reference to Ali Pacha’s own ‘deeds’ which in English culture would ‘disgrace’. Omar Abdullah Bagabas explains ‘The cruelty of Ali excited terror in civilized Europe. In his court, he used to boast of acts of direst cruelty followed by his demonical laugh when he hung one man, impaled another and tortured a third.’[6] (p. 177) Arguably it is the ‘tamed’ woman in the previous stanza that allows the ‘aged venerable face’ to be ‘stain with disgrace.’ Byron gives us a nation run predominantly by men and as a result the audience is left with a sense of anticipation and lack of Nature’s character. When in Greece Byron is reminded of Greek myths and stories. He speaks of Calypso who’s ‘reign is past, her gentle glories gone:’ (Canto II. XXX.1) and the ‘Haram’s silent tower,’ (Canto II. LVI. 1) As a result these hush and delicate descriptions creates a sense of lost character in the Greek culture and nation. It is the absence of Calypso which is seemingly the greatest let down for Byron’s Childe Harold who is ‘weary’ (canto II.XXIX.3) of the sea guardian’s dangers. Byron’s reminiscence of the Ancient Greek myth of Calypso, without the life which Byron applies to his later ancient scenes of Rome suggests a sense of disappointment. This is emphasised a few cantos on when the poet declares that ‘Dear Nature is the kindest mother still… and [I] loved her best in wrath.’ (Canto II. XXXVII. 1.9) Byron praises nature most when ‘she’ is angered, and thus the stillness of the long expected Calypso shows a loyalty to the beauties of the personified nature but a sense of disappointment in the reality of modern Greece. The Greece that Byron encounters is feminised throughout the second canto. David Roessel reviews;

…the someone who was to arise and unchain the female Greece was not and ancient Greek male but a European man. Byron reacted to such thinking when he told the Greeks: Heredity bondsmen! Know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? (Canto II. 76. 720-21)

It is Byron’s sincere attempt to advise the Greeks to take back their own country which stimulates the audience to sympathise even more with both the disappointment that Harold experiences, and the situation of the lost ancient life.

In Canto VI, set in Italy (but for all purposes of this argument, Italy’s Rome), Byron recalls Valerius Maximus’ story of Caritas Romana, or “Roman Charity”. The scene is, on first appearance, thrown into the literary references that fill the last Canto of Childe Harold, and is almost hidden among the politics centred on the battle of Waterloo in Cantos III and IV. However, in her essay, Fiona Wilson suggests that the ‘half-alienated use of the scene allows for volatile interpretations beyond those normally attached to the legend.’[7] (p. 99) Byron introduces the Caritas Romana scene by asking ‘What do I gaze on? Nothing: Look again!’ (Canto IV. CXLVIII. ii) This poetic transition allows Byron to implicate that the scene he is about to describe is imagined by his intellectually stimulated mind. Between stanzas CXLVIII and CLII Byron outlines the legend;

But here the youth offers to old age the food,/ The Milk of his own gift: - it is her sire/ To who she renders back the debt of blood/ Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire (Canto IV. CL. 1-4)

The ‘youth’ which Byron refers to is Pero, whom secretly breastfeeds her father, Cimon (referred to as ‘old age’ in Byron’s passage), so he will not die in the ‘dungeon’ where he is imprisoned. In the legend Pero is discovered by the guards, who release Cimon because of Pero’s selfless act of nursing her father. Byron uses this vibrant image of Pero and Cimon when Childe Harold travels in Rome for various affects. Valerius believed that “to love parents [is] nature’s first law.”[8] (p. 503) Byron demonstrates this as the scene shows the extreme loyalty that Pero has for Cimon as the taboo of the father/ daughter relationship has been broken. However, Byron is far from judgemental in his portrayal of the scene. He describes the girl as having a body of ‘warm and lovely veins’ and the act having a ‘holy feeling’. (Canto. IV. CL. 6) In Homer’s Odyssey[9] the gods eat Ambrosia and drink Nectar, and so when Byron tells his reader that Pero’s ‘blood is nectar’ it implies that the humanness of her kind spirit is worthy of the gods. This Godlike association is again enforced near the end of the “Roman Charity” passage where Byron exclaims ‘Oh, Holiest nurse!’ (Canto IV. CLI. 9) The altruism is prominent in our first reading of the passage but we must question Byron’s real motives of including this reference in his description of Rome. As we have previously seen Byron uses the image of the woman as a response to place. Women and nature are undoubtedly linked in some way throughout Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. However, it is only in Rome that the woman is able to embrace nature to the full extent necessary in the patriarchal world. Franklin surmises that “Feminine” values of [love and nurture] are appropriate to endorse patriarchal rule’[10] (p. 173) Therefore, it seems that Byron uses the image of Pero and Cimon to emphasise that women are needed to fulfil their purpose in nature for the sufficient workings of the patriarchal society: it is Cimon, after all, that historically is the political figure who needs to be saved to resume his political role. Therefore Byron romanticises the woman who is merited on her willingness to connect fully with nature: Pero breaks down the incestuous taboos for the greater good. The woman’s breast in this image has become the medium in which nature is able to flow through. Mario Praz understands ‘The function of the flame which attracts and burns is exercised, in the first half of the century by the Fatal Man (the Byronic hero)… the moth destined for sacrifice is… the woman’[11](p. 206) Byron’s hegemonic world consists of the woman as life-provider, a sacrifice to the masculine figure and connected with death as though somehow the feminine figure completes the cycle of nature. By breaking the conventional taboos for the sake of saving the ‘patriarchal world’ as Franklin suggest, the woman is glorified and the balance between man and nature is mysteriously restored in the Rome which Byron describes. It is perhaps for this reason that it is Byron’s voice exclaiming ‘Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!/ The orphans of the heart must turn to thee’(LXXXVIII.1-2) Byron implies that Rome is the central ‘soul’ of Europe, and the epitome of feeling and compassion. The concept of the ‘orphans’ looking to Rome for nurture prepares the audience for a nurturing display of Rome, and a place of community and impressionable kindness which is reflected through the Canitas Romana scene.

It is not only in Spain, Greece and Rome that Byron uses the representations of women to reflect cultures, or is women only used in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to communicate the response to a place. The feminine figure is also a comfort of hope and sympathy to create an emotional response in order to underline a political purpose. In her essay on “Virt’ous Fraud”, Fiona Wilson discusses:

‘Hope…is linked to appeals to a benign female imaginary that implicitly nurtures and affirms the “natural” desire for freedom. On the shores of the Rhine, the boundless generosity of “Maternal Nature” soothes the memory of Napoleon’s sublime failure (III. 46. 408). In the Alps, the story of a young girl, whose heart broke after her father was imprisoned by a tyrant, underlines the “blasphemy of laws/ Making kings’ rights divine” (III. 64. 627)’[12] (g. 105)

Through the women in the poem Byron offers his audience a journey which is made complete in the Italian city of Rome. In Canto I the Spanish maids are shown as ‘unsexed’ and ‘vulgar’ which reflects the chaos of the country. Spain is imbalanced, and thus infects the gentleness of the country’s women and weakens the male authority. Although Byron sympathises with Greece, and wishes the renewal of the countries greatness, Greece also is shown imbalanced, however the roles of men and women are subverted. The male is complete dominator, and the woman appears meek and ‘tamed’. Byron connects nature with the presence of the woman, and therefore the feminine character of the Greek woman causes a feminised Greece, who, like the woman, is quiet and thus less amazing. It is only when the protagonist finds ancient expectation (by imaging events of myths and legends as thought they were real) that Childe Harold and the reader finds the completion of their journey. In Rome the woman takes up role as mother nurture, and accepts her place in natures will, and thus the language is of perfect rhetoric and poetic ideal.

Bibliography

Bagabas. O. A, Chapter Five: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I & II Ali Pacha’s Court in Byron’s Representation of the Orient in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan and the Oriental Tales. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Essex in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Literature June 1993

Byron. G. G, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Edited by Francis A. Niccolls & co. (Boston: C. H. Simonds Company, 1990)

Dekker. G. G, Introduction in The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott and Mary Shelley (Stanford University Press, 2005)

Franklin. C, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)

Homer The Odyssey, Trans. Richard lattimore (Perenial Classics: Harper & Row, 1967)

Maximus. V, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, trans. D Wardle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998)

Medwin. T, Medwin’s conversations of Lord Byron, ed. E.J. Lovell, Jr., 1929 in “Romantic Reassessment,” ed. Dr. James Hogg Byron: The Critical Voice Volume 1, Introduction &General Criticism by Bruce Wallis, 1973

Praz. M, La Belle Dame Sans Merci in ‘The Romantic Agony’ Trans. from the Italian by Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press Humphrey Milford 1933)

Shakespeare. W, Macbeth (Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992)

Wilson. F ‘“Virt’ous Fraud” The Perverse Politics of Caritas Romana Scene’ in Childe Harold in Keats-Shelley Journal Volume LIV 2005 (New York: The Keats-Shelley Association of America, 2005)

-----------------------
[1] Thomas Medwin, Medwin’s conversations of Lord Byron, ed. E.J. Lovell, Jr., 1929 in “Romantic Reassessment,” ed. Dr. James Hogg Byron: The Critical Voice Volume 1, Introduction &General Criticism by Bruce Wallis, 1973
[2] George G. Dekker Introduction in The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott and Mary Shelley (Stanford University Press, 2005)
[3] Lord George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Edited by Francis A. Niccolls & co. (Boston: C. H. Simonds Company, 1990)
[4] William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992)
[5] Chapter Five: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I & II Ali Pacha’s Court in Byron’s Representation of the Orient in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan and the Oriental Tales. By Omar Abdullah Bagabas. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Essex in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Literature June 1993
[6] Omar Abdullah Bagabas
[7] Fiona Wilson, “Virt’ous Fraud” The Perverse Politics of Caritas Romana Scene in Childe Harold in Keats-Shelley Journal Volume LIV 2005 (New York: The Keats-Shelley Association of America, 2005)
[8] Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, trans. D Wardle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998)
[9] The Odyssey of Homer, Trans. Richard lattimore (Perenial Classics: Harper & Row, 1967)
[10] Corline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)
[11] Mario Praz La Belle Dame Sans Merci in ‘The Romantic Agony’ Trans. from the Italian by Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press Humphrey Milford 1933)
[12] Fiona Wilson, “Virt’ous Fraud” The Perverse Politics of Caritas Romana Scene in Childe Harold in Keats-Shelley