University of St Andrews

After the Classicism of the long 18th century and the poets’ adoration of closed and self-contained bodies, the Romantics not only invented new concepts of corporeality, but also re-discovered the leaky body which shed a profusion of tears. In the wake of Richardson’s Pamela and Mackenzie’s Harley, a multitude of men and women of feeling incorporate the ideal of sentimental porosity which, however, was not uncontested among the Romantic poets themselves. In Wordsworth’s early poetry, men shamefully repress their tears and what is considered to be their feminine side, and when, in his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron refers to the epitome of porosity and bodily leakiness, Niobe, he deprives her of her essential attribute: her tears. Byron’s scepticism of the female Niobean body takes on gigantic dimensions in his last large-scale poem, Don Juan. The scandal the poem caused cannot be attributed so much to the fact that Byron divests his protagonist of his metaphysical rebelliousness as to the fact that his picaresque life is conceived of as a voyage around the genital regions of gargantuaesque women. A close reading of exemplary passages of this poem will thus reveal that Byron’s poem is the missing link between Swift’s misogynistic satires and Joyce’s rediscovery of the carnivalesque in Ulysses.