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Mortal Intimacy: Desire, Death & the Subject in British Romantic Literature /

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Mortal Intimacy: Desire, Death & the Subject in British Romantic Literature // Madison Chapman.
Author:	Chapman, Madison,
Description:	1 electronic resource (186 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-02, Section: B.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-02B.
Subject:	English literature. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=30568314
ISBN:	9798380140850

Mortal Intimacy: Desire, Death & the Subject in British Romantic Literature /
Chapman, Madison,

Mortal Intimacy: Desire, Death & the Subject in British Romantic Literature /Madison Chapman. - 1 electronic resource (186 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-02, Section: B.

This dissertation looks at the works of Lord Byron, John Keats and Mary Shelley in order to understand how and why narratives of romantic desire get articulated through the vocabulary of death in British Romantic literature. In today's popular culture, we can take for granted the degree to which mortality gets invoked in common axioms related to romantic love and intimacy (both physical and emotional). But what exactly is the logic behind sayings like "till death do us part," "I would die without you," or "I'm dying to be with you?" To answer these questions, I look to select poetry and fiction from the latter part of the British Romantic period (1807-1820) by three of the most significant figures of the time. Each of these writers offers important individual contributions to the period's formulations of gender and subjectivity in relation to love and death. While they make different formal choices and have contrasting affective postures towards desire, these three share a preoccupation with the sheer force of desire. These authors write stories about the unsettling sense that desire is not only continuous with one's sense of self, but continuing beyond life into death. What makes these Romantics repeatedly voice this idea that desire feels so powerful that the subject themselves must be outlived by the enduring force of their own desires? To explain what I mean by the force of desire, I repeatedly turn to the psychoanalytically-inflected work of Lauren Berlant, along with that of other queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I also contextualize these abstract questions about desire and death through the scholarship of Romanticists engaged with the history of sexuality, gender and subjectivity, including Nancy Yousef, Joel Faflak, Tilottama Rajan and Clara Tuite.My dissertation asks contemporary critics and readers of Byron, Keats and Shelley to appreciate the way these authors theorized the desiring subject as binding mortality to the beloved and vice versa. Regardless of whether the actual stakes are true danger or entirely ordinary risks, the Romantics understood that falling in love more often than not feels like a matter or life or death. Anxieties about the reciprocity of desire, the cohesion of one's sense of self, and the social legibility of romantic relations all get articulated through desirous language permeated by the vocabulary of death and dying. But this recursion to death is not just about repressed fears and fractured subjectivity. We see in each of my chapters how the question of death compels Byron, Keats and Shelley to inhabit open-ended inquiries about unexpected ways of feeling alive and experiencing loving intimacy.In my first chapter, "'Death was heavenly in his friend's embrace' : Queer Intimacy & the Veil of Death in Lord Byron," I argue that the poet stages elaborate, tragic death scenes in order to smuggle queer love into plain sight. His manipulation of reader expectations regarding gender roles and classical literature of battlefield warriors emboldens him to write explicitly about men loving other men in "Nisus and Euryalus" and Lara. Turning to classical translation and allusion, Byron uses heavy themes of masculine bravery and fraternal love as tools of plausible deniability when he writes narratives of queer love and intimacy. I argue that Byron's playfulness with form complicates the tendency in queer theory to formulate non-normative sexuality as operating in a mode of active, antisocial resistance. I also read Byron's male lover characters as stopping short of engaging in the kind of alternative, utopic world-making practices that more optimistic strains of queer theory have posited. Byron may be conscious of forms as tools of discretion, but he understands discretion around desire as having multiple functions. On the one hand, the legibility of queer desire must always come with risks in a romantic setting. But, on the other hand, any effort to make desire legible and visible, as such, opens up the subject to vulnerable questions of reciprocity, social endorsement, and the compatibility of desires in relation to a full sense of self.My second chapter, "'Real are the dreams of gods' : Fantastical Intimacy & Violation in John Keats's Romance Poems," focuses on the necessities and the pitfalls of fantasies for young lovers. I read the first three named poems from the last volume of poetry published in Keats's lifetime, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, as both cautionary tales and a set of texts which illuminate a generalized Keatsian ethos of desire. In each poem, he presents a set of lovers pursuing close adherence to the scripts of their fantasies of romantic "happily ever after." Because they each draw on heavy Gothic tropes and antiquarian allusions, the poems have consequences of hasty, clouded decision-making that are disastrous and often fatal. Keats's characters rashly but always knowingly embrace mortal risks in the pursuit of their fantasies, even eroticizing their own proximity to death and refusal to accept the finality of death. Much as Byron does with classical tragedy, Keats's antiquarian choices enable a hyperbolic articulation of the mortal stakes of romantic love. Genres like Gothic romance and phases of life like young love are necessarily indulgent and fanciful, but both this literary mode and this stage of falling in love are grounded in an understanding of romance as having necessarily mortal stakes. I argue for a dual reading of Keats's romance poems: young love risks mutual destruction when one or both people selfishly fixate on making fantasies come true. However, true romance can be measured by a degree of indulgence in such fantasies that reckon with the way love binds up the subject's fate with that of the beloved. The wholesale commitment of one's life to another is not fantastical in and of itself. My final chapter, "'Death is too terrible an object for the living' : The Desire for Death & Ambivalent Life in Mary Shelley's Matilda" looks at the surprisingly elastic figurations of "death" in Shelley's incest plot novella. Within Shelley's own oeuvre and within the archive of this dissertation, Matilda is by far the least explicitly romantic text, but it deals with the inherent paradoxes of desire and death that populate all of my primary materials. We witness how "death" operates as a stand-in for various other objects in this novella: as a place, a mode of purification, a descriptor of the past, a sense of destined future, and as a romantic object of desire in the present. In relation to desire, death often becomes a way for Matilda (and Shelley) to rethink relationality in the present such that living feels more bearable, the self feels less fractured and the future feels less impossible. This reading of "death" in Matilda importantly differs from a straightforward interpretation of her desire to die as the suicidal wish for nonexistence. Through Matilda's own voice, the reader experiences Matilda's desire for "death" as a narrative magnet which organizes a way of living, a mode of epistolary storytelling and tenuous but necessary self-making for this young woman. Once again, we see how "death" becomes a tool for articulating another Romantic theory of desire: Shelley shows how the force of desire, putting us in relation to the ongoingness of the world even when we do not want it, is an ambivalent condition of being human. Desire can shred the seams of sociality and shatter a subject into a fragile state of unbearability, but, as long as it is present, desire guarantees this minimal yet powerful attachment to the continuity of existence.

English

ISBN: 9798380140850Subjects--Topical Terms:

516356
English literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Death

Mortal Intimacy: Desire, Death & the Subject in British Romantic Literature /
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520 $a This dissertation looks at the works of Lord Byron, John Keats and Mary Shelley in order to understand how and why narratives of romantic desire get articulated through the vocabulary of death in British Romantic literature. In today's popular culture, we can take for granted the degree to which mortality gets invoked in common axioms related to romantic love and intimacy (both physical and emotional). But what exactly is the logic behind sayings like "till death do us part," "I would die without you," or "I'm dying to be with you?" To answer these questions, I look to select poetry and fiction from the latter part of the British Romantic period (1807-1820) by three of the most significant figures of the time. Each of these writers offers important individual contributions to the period's formulations of gender and subjectivity in relation to love and death. While they make different formal choices and have contrasting affective postures towards desire, these three share a preoccupation with the sheer force of desire. These authors write stories about the unsettling sense that desire is not only continuous with one's sense of self, but continuing beyond life into death. What makes these Romantics repeatedly voice this idea that desire feels so powerful that the subject themselves must be outlived by the enduring force of their own desires? To explain what I mean by the force of desire, I repeatedly turn to the psychoanalytically-inflected work of Lauren Berlant, along with that of other queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I also contextualize these abstract questions about desire and death through the scholarship of Romanticists engaged with the history of sexuality, gender and subjectivity, including Nancy Yousef, Joel Faflak, Tilottama Rajan and Clara Tuite.My dissertation asks contemporary critics and readers of Byron, Keats and Shelley to appreciate the way these authors theorized the desiring subject as binding mortality to the beloved and vice versa. Regardless of whether the actual stakes are true danger or entirely ordinary risks, the Romantics understood that falling in love more often than not feels like a matter or life or death. Anxieties about the reciprocity of desire, the cohesion of one's sense of self, and the social legibility of romantic relations all get articulated through desirous language permeated by the vocabulary of death and dying. But this recursion to death is not just about repressed fears and fractured subjectivity. We see in each of my chapters how the question of death compels Byron, Keats and Shelley to inhabit open-ended inquiries about unexpected ways of feeling alive and experiencing loving intimacy.In my first chapter, "'Death was heavenly in his friend's embrace' : Queer Intimacy & the Veil of Death in Lord Byron," I argue that the poet stages elaborate, tragic death scenes in order to smuggle queer love into plain sight. His manipulation of reader expectations regarding gender roles and classical literature of battlefield warriors emboldens him to write explicitly about men loving other men in "Nisus and Euryalus" and Lara. Turning to classical translation and allusion, Byron uses heavy themes of masculine bravery and fraternal love as tools of plausible deniability when he writes narratives of queer love and intimacy. I argue that Byron's playfulness with form complicates the tendency in queer theory to formulate non-normative sexuality as operating in a mode of active, antisocial resistance. I also read Byron's male lover characters as stopping short of engaging in the kind of alternative, utopic world-making practices that more optimistic strains of queer theory have posited. Byron may be conscious of forms as tools of discretion, but he understands discretion around desire as having multiple functions. On the one hand, the legibility of queer desire must always come with risks in a romantic setting. But, on the other hand, any effort to make desire legible and visible, as such, opens up the subject to vulnerable questions of reciprocity, social endorsement, and the compatibility of desires in relation to a full sense of self.My second chapter, "'Real are the dreams of gods' : Fantastical Intimacy & Violation in John Keats's Romance Poems," focuses on the necessities and the pitfalls of fantasies for young lovers. I read the first three named poems from the last volume of poetry published in Keats's lifetime, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, as both cautionary tales and a set of texts which illuminate a generalized Keatsian ethos of desire. In each poem, he presents a set of lovers pursuing close adherence to the scripts of their fantasies of romantic "happily ever after." Because they each draw on heavy Gothic tropes and antiquarian allusions, the poems have consequences of hasty, clouded decision-making that are disastrous and often fatal. Keats's characters rashly but always knowingly embrace mortal risks in the pursuit of their fantasies, even eroticizing their own proximity to death and refusal to accept the finality of death. Much as Byron does with classical tragedy, Keats's antiquarian choices enable a hyperbolic articulation of the mortal stakes of romantic love. Genres like Gothic romance and phases of life like young love are necessarily indulgent and fanciful, but both this literary mode and this stage of falling in love are grounded in an understanding of romance as having necessarily mortal stakes. I argue for a dual reading of Keats's romance poems: young love risks mutual destruction when one or both people selfishly fixate on making fantasies come true. However, true romance can be measured by a degree of indulgence in such fantasies that reckon with the way love binds up the subject's fate with that of the beloved. The wholesale commitment of one's life to another is not fantastical in and of itself. My final chapter, "'Death is too terrible an object for the living' : The Desire for Death & Ambivalent Life in Mary Shelley's Matilda" looks at the surprisingly elastic figurations of "death" in Shelley's incest plot novella. Within Shelley's own oeuvre and within the archive of this dissertation, Matilda is by far the least explicitly romantic text, but it deals with the inherent paradoxes of desire and death that populate all of my primary materials. We witness how "death" operates as a stand-in for various other objects in this novella: as a place, a mode of purification, a descriptor of the past, a sense of destined future, and as a romantic object of desire in the present. In relation to desire, death often becomes a way for Matilda (and Shelley) to rethink relationality in the present such that living feels more bearable, the self feels less fractured and the future feels less impossible. This reading of "death" in Matilda importantly differs from a straightforward interpretation of her desire to die as the suicidal wish for nonexistence. Through Matilda's own voice, the reader experiences Matilda's desire for "death" as a narrative magnet which organizes a way of living, a mode of epistolary storytelling and tenuous but necessary self-making for this young woman. Once again, we see how "death" becomes a tool for articulating another Romantic theory of desire: Shelley shows how the force of desire, putting us in relation to the ongoingness of the world even when we do not want it, is an ambivalent condition of being human. Desire can shred the seams of sociality and shatter a subject into a fragile state of unbearability, but, as long as it is present, desire guarantees this minimal yet powerful attachment to the continuity of existence.
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650 4 $a Gender studies. $3 2122708
650 4 $a Sexuality. $3 816197
650 4 $a British & Irish literature. $3 3284317
650 4 $a Romance literature. $3 2144781
653 $a Death
653 $a Desire
653 $a Love
653 $a Queer theory
653 $a Romanticism
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690 $a 0733
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710 2 $a The University of Chicago. $b English Language and Literature. $e degree granting institution. $3 3759115
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