Love in the First Degree: Manfred, Byron, and Incest

1.        Manfred has incest and guilt at its core. Manfred has committed incest, and he is obsessively guilty. Two hundred years' worth of critics and scholars have considered the significance and inter-relationship of these two, and most agree that Manfred expresses guilt for having committed incest with his sister, Astarte. Moreover, many acknowledge that Manfred's incest is a mirror of Byron’s incestuous relationship with his sister, Augusta Leigh, and suggest that Manfred's guilt is an expression of Byron’s own. [1]  Without question, incest is a central concern in Manfred, and a central concern to the Byron who wrote Manfred. I would argue, however, that Manfred the text and Manfred the character show not Byron's guilt over his incest with Augusta Leigh, but rather his lack of guilt. Furthermore, this is a lack that Byron continues to display in various ways in his later work, and one for which he has larger intellectual reasons.

2.        Byron plants the seeds of Manfred's lack of guilt in the character's opening monologue. Here Manfred proclaims: "Good or evil, life, / Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, / Have been to me as rain unto the sands, / Since that all-nameless hour" (I.i.21-4). This is a time-honored dramatic maneuver, a proleptic announcement that keeps the audience in suspense until a text reveals all at a later time. In Manfred, however, that time never comes. In the course of the play, "that hour" remains literally "all-nameless": no one ever explains when or what it was. The closest anyone comes is in the exchange between Manfred and the Witch of the Alps in the second scene of the second act:

Once unpicked, this deeply unclear clarification reveals the source of Manfred's guilt to be not incest but Astarte's death and his role in causing it. A rough paraphrase of these lines would be, Although the play does not make explicit a connection between "that all-nameless hour" and "that hour" (and note that in the second case, too, "that" is a floating referent, referring back to nothing), in this passage "that hour" appears to link back to the moment when Astarte's "blood was shed— / I saw—and could not staunch it," not to the moment when Manfred and Astarte had sexual relations.

3.        The text goes on to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Manfred has committed incest, and it persistently establishes that he is tormented, but it never actually connects the two. In fact, the construction of Manfred's revelation to the Witch figures his motive for incest not as lust or as a desire to do evil, but as love: "I loved her, and destroy'd her!" His soliloquy after she departs reiterates this:

Even when he confronts the Phantom of Astarte, he seeks not expiation for incest but reassurance that she does not hate him and is not suffering: "Say that thou loath'st me not—that I do bear / This punishment for both" (II.iv.125-6). Manfred makes no reference to a sense of guilt here, only to an imposed punishment and an overwhelming love.

4.        But Manfred does not limit itself to repeated evidence that Manfred does not regret his sexual relationship with Astarte. It also emphasizes Byron's lack of compunction about his incest. It achieves this in part by Manfred's declarations of love for Astarte, in part by the strength of his lack of regret, and in part by the play's obsessive avoidance of naming the act of incest. If this last sounds counterintuitive, that is because it is. It needs to be. As D.L. MacDonald has pointed out, Byron could scarcely announce his love affair with his sister to the public, but Manfred nonetheless refers to it "obsessively, but by aposiopesis," as well as by persistent lacunae and allusions that draw attention to the act rather than disguising it (37). Manfred tells the Chamois Hunter that they loved each other as they "should not love" (II.i.27); he later informs the Witch that his beloved "was like me in lineaments" (II.ii.105); the servant Manuel is significantly interrupted just at the right moment in his description of Astarte,

Just in case there should be any doubt, Manfred reminds the Phantom of Astarte that "it were / The deadliest sin to love as we have loved" (II.iv.123-4): not many kinds of love fit that bill. In fact, the play's very existence is a demonstration of Byron's absence of remorse. According to a statement drawn up by Lady Byron in 1816, rumors of Byron's sexual connection to Leigh had "become current in the World" before his departure from England (qtd. in Marchand 589), and when a man suspected of incest publishes a verse drama about a man who seems to have committed incest, pangs of conscience do not appear to have played a role in either the incest or the publication.

5.        Reviewers certainly understood precisely what was not being named. Francis Jeffrey deplored the "painful and offensive nature of the circumstance" on which the play's "distress was ultimately founded" (140). In the British Review, William Roberts wrote that Manfred's love "appears to have been of the sort that lies under a natural interdict" (86), while the Day and New Times put it more plainly, explaining that Manfred "committed incest!" In fact, the Day and New Times, at least, knew what had occurred outside the text as well as in: its announcement of Manfred's incest was followed by the assertion, "Lord Byron has coloured Manfred into his own personal features" (130).

6.        It is not unreasonable to suggest that an author who wants to keep a secret should be more secretive, nor to suggest that an author who is not terribly secretive might not want to keep his secret. Byron was fully aware of the public horror and censure that would attend upon any clear revelation that his hero and his hero's sister, or he and his own half-sister, had committed incest. It is significant that Manfred takes care to clarify that he alone is responsible for what transpired with Astarte: "What is she now?—a sufferer for my sins" (II.ii.96-7). In an 1814 letter Byron exhorted Lady Melbourne, his confidant in the matter, not to reproach Leigh for having sex with him: "it was not her fault—but my own folly" (BLJ IV:27, Byron’s emphasis). [2]  But his awareness of risk did not stop him from publishing a work that he knew would be widely read as confessional, featuring as its main character a version of himself who demonstrated no regret for what he had done. All this suggests that, while he may have been concerned about public reaction, he, like Manfred, did not regret the act itself.

7.        In fact, Byron's justification for his actions also mirrors Manfred's, except that while Manfred cries his love, Byron confided it. He wrote to Lady Melbourne that Leigh was "twined round my heart in every possible manner—dearest & deepest in my hope & my memory" (BLJ IV:69). Still, for both creator and created, this love is rendered legitimate by reason of its uniqueness and the great gap it fills. "I have wandered o'er the earth, / And never found thy likeness" (II.iv.144-5) Manfred tells Astarte, while Byron wrote to Leigh, "we—at least—I—am by a crowd of circumstances removed from the only being who could ever have loved me, or whom I can unmixedly feel attached to" (BLJ V:95).

8.        In light of this quotation, it seems significant that Byron was as reluctant as his hero to stop referring to his forbidden relationship. Even before Manfred, he inserted a reference in Childe Harold III, where the waters of Lake Leman "sound sweet as if a Sister's voice reproved" (95). More interesting, however, is a very carefully encoded reference in Don Juan two years later, in the passage in which Donna Julia is excusing her way toward adultery:

As Byron points out, Don Juan contains "much which could not be appreciated / In any manner by the uninitiated,” and in this stanza the reference to his personal experience may go unnoticed by those not on the look-out (XIV.22). But for those aware of the facts of Byron's personal life, it is difficult to read the seemingly innocuous last line of this passage without finding it considerably less than innocuous. Byron, after all, knew how some women act toward their brothers. What's more, in a passage that pulls the rug out from under each of Julia's virtuous stratagems, revealing them as merely excuses to edge toward sin, such sly acknowledgement that the fraternal can turn—indeed, in one particularly relevant case has turned—into something more makes perfect sense. Julia, Don Juan is telling its initiated readers, is fooling herself about the asexuality of brothers.

9.        Jerome McGann has written that the job of Juan's reader is not so much to "decipher the text" as to "describe and retrace" Byron's "acts of encipherment,” and Gary Dyer has built on this to suggest that one might fruitfully focus on both the encipherment and its context and meanings (207; 573). Indeed, what is most fascinating about this moment in which incest is enciphered is the meaning of its existence in its context: the fact that, given contemporaneous notions of morality, Byron chose to include it in a published work at all. Literature is not thick with joking references to incest, because incest is not something authors or audiences usually take lightly. But Byron does. Now, it is true that the Byron of Don Juan takes pretty much everything lightly. That aspect, however, was precisely what most repulsed reviewers: William Hazlitt complained of the poem that "Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is . . . turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it . . . It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate and sometimes moral; but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him" (162). Hazlitt and others objected to this facet of Don Juan because to joke about morals is to suggest their insignificance, to announce that they are foolish enough to be the subject of jokes. By inserting his sly joke—that a woman may feel a preference for men "who are pleasanter than others, / But then they only seem so many brothers"—Byron suggests that the idea that brothers are, naturally, sexually off-limits is laughable, that sibling incest (not least his own, which is the basis for the joke in the first place) is something harmless enough to be the root of a joke. The meaning of this moment, then, is Byron's own casual relationship with incest and its prohibition.

10.        Admittedly, this revelation is only accessible to the initiated: those readers who know Byron's past and make the connection. By the time he writes Cain in 1821, however, Byron has decided to declare his feelings more openly than he did in either Juan or Manfred. As Heather Stansbury has recently pointed out, this final Byronic portrayal of incest represents it not as something to be condemned, "but, rather, entirely natural" (25). Astounded by Lucifer's revelation that brother-sister love will one day be a sin "in your children" (I.ii.361), Cain's wife and sister, Adah, asks rhetorically,

Incest here is not merely natural but logical.

11.        In addition, Cain portrays the incestuous love of a sister as the prop that outlasts all others. Exiled from the Garden of Eden, separated from his family and the life he has known, Cain goes forth hand in hand with Adah, who will join him both in sorrow and in peopling the world: "Now, Cain! I will divide thy burden with thee . . . Lead! thou shalt be my God, and may our God / Be thine! Now let us carry forth our children" (III.i.551-5). Stansbury writes that Byron "describes the product of incest," Adah and Cain's son Enoch, "as a means of strengthening the family bond," but Byron also shows sibling incest itself as a means of strengthening that bond (25). Cain's mother, Eve, calls down "the eternal Serpent's curse" on him for killing Abel (III.i.403); his father banishes him (III.i.444-5). Only the sister who is also his wife cleaves to him. Byron even goes so far as to transfer into Adah’s mouth the plea for mercy that Cain makes in the Bible. The Bible passage, "And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me" (King James Bible , Gen. 4.13-14), becomes in Byron’s play:

Allowing one character to ventriloquize another is perhaps the clearest endorsement of their relationship that an author can offer.

12.        The deeper question raised by all this discreet and indiscreet support for incest is “Why?” Why produce works that extol incest as love and that extol that love as the greatest support in life? Why hint at, make jokes about, and eventually openly approve sibling incest, when it would be much easier, safer, and more generous to the sister you say you love to keep quiet about having participated in that act?

13.        The answer is both simple and complex, grounded in both Byron's psyche and his ethic. First, Byron liked being seen to be bad. He wanted and expected Manfred to cause some sort of scandal. In a surely unique combination of (hopefully) unconscious appropriateness and irony, he wrote to Augusta Leigh in March of 1818 asking if the publication of the drama had caused "a pucker" (CPW IV:466) Hints of incest more than ensured that pucker.

14.        Second, there is the effect of distance. Just as his time in Europe had made Byron less aware of the habits and mores of English society, it may be that it had made the society and people he knew there less real to him. [3]  In 1819 he wrote ruefully to Leigh, "Three years absence—& the total change of scene and habit make such a difference—that we have now nothing in common but our affections & our relationship" (BLJ VI:129). The loss of immediacy brought by distance would explain why he was not held back by the potential harm his revelations might cause to Leigh. [4] 

15.        Finally, he may simply never have considered what harm he might do, or he simply might not have cared. Daniel McVeigh argues that Byron's "hints about their incest would have been unconscionable had he perceived a real threat against" Leigh (611). But Byron did perceive a threat, as evidenced by his remarks to Lady Melbourne, about "my . . . folly" and, later, of his "misery . . . on her account" (BLJ IV:69, Byron’s emphasis). Perhaps the potential damage to Leigh did not outweigh his own wishes. Empathy for individuals was never Byron's strong suit.

16.        It would do a disservice to Byron, however, to suggest that these were his only reasons for choosing to write what he did. He also had strong philosophical reasons for doing so. As Evan Gottlieb observes, Byron was highly rational, and predominantly interested in society, particularly in the structures and masks society imposed (99-100). Byron's personal experience would have given him empirical evidence that the incest prohibition was one of these imposed structures, not least because he began his liaison with his sister with a certain sense that what he was doing was wrong, but that sense quickly vanished. On August 11, 1813, when the affair was still in its early stages, he commented to Lady Melbourne that "I should have been glad of your advice how to untie two or three 'Gordion knots' tied round me . . . some are rather closely twisted round my heart" (BLJ III:87-88, Byron’s emphasis), and on August 22, he wrote to Thomas Moore, "I am, at this moment, in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape than any of the last twelve months—and that is saying a good deal” (BLJ III: 96).  [5]  Yet he quickly sloughed off these worries. When Lady Melbourne wrote to him on April 25, 1814, "I could talk & reason with you for two Hours, so many objections to urge, and after all, for what—for the sake of Augusta—is it worth while!" [6]  Byron responded firmly.

This response is an ambivalent promise of reformation if ever there were one—note that dismissive "& all that." But it is also an unambiguous endorsement of the behavior—consider that outburst, "Oh, but it is worth while!"

17.        Nor does Byron seem to have changed his mind over time. In April 1817, he wrote to Leigh from Switzerland, "I shall never find any one like you—nor you (vain as it may seem) like me. We are just formed to pass our lives together" (BLJ V:96); three years later, after four years away from her, he wrote: "I always loved you better than any earthly existence, and I always shall unless I go mad" (BLJ VII:159). Manfred's moving pleas to the Phantom of Astarte,

find echo in Byron's writing to Leigh: In fact, Byron's connection to Leigh seems to have brought him the deepest, most frank, and longest-lasting love of his life (although what exactly "love" meant for Byron is difficult to say).

18.        When one considers Byron’s own experience, then, as well as his more general philosophical stance that any certainty and knowledge beyond the most basic are subjective, his skepticism about the incest prohibition seems more understandable. In response to Adah's astonishment that incest might be deemed a sin, Cain's Lucifer responds that it "cannot be a sin in you—whate'er / It may seem in those who may replace ye in / Mortality" (I.ii.375-7), yet later on he declares to Cain, "Evil and Good are things in their own essence" (II.ii.657). If both of these are true—and Cain endorses both, and it appears to offer Byron's own opinions—then it stands to reason that the incest prohibition is not good "in its own essence," but rather is a taboo imposed for certain reasons. Thus, for Byron, it is open to question. Byron's relationship with Leigh, like Manfred's with Astarte, is a sexual connection between people of equal age, non-coercive, and apparently without issue. [8]  In and of itself, free from social constructs and impositions, it would cause no wider damage. Adah's lines to Lucifer, pre-dating socialization, support this: what can be wrong with a love that springs from and only produces more love?

19.        Such reasoning is understandably difficult for audiences, since Byron's vision assumes a sexual world free of coercion and of what one might argue is an instinctive repulsion. Yet Byron's deduction is based on a standard empirical model. Like any good Enlightenment scientist, he has done the experiment then drawn the conclusion based on concrete experience (his own), rather than on the abstraction and assumption that is conventional morality. [9]  The flaw in his conclusion, however, is that he reasons inductively, from particulars (himself) to generalities (the majority of people), assuming that his general readership feels, or could feel, as he does. On the other hand, Cain shows that part of what underlies Byron's view on incest is a belief that the generality labor under morals that have been impressed on them. This, too, has validity: both the Romantics and contemporary scholars wrestle with the question of the degree to which morals are innate and the degree to which they are imposed. Byron's thinking here, then, engages with that of his contemporaries, and with our own questioning.

20.        It takes a deeply unusual man to put empiricism before morality—most people do the reverse. But Byron was, and remains, deeply unusual. Moreover, the gift of his uniqueness is that it offers scholars many layers of thought to unfold. Nowhere does this complexity seem more true than in the case of his thinking about incest. The topic features even more frequently in Byron's writing than it does in Romantic texts generally, [10]  and, in virtually every work in which it appears, it is portrayed positively, or at least not negatively: The Bride of Abydos, Parisina, Epistle to Augusta, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III, Manfred, Cain. Both this repetition and this portrayal suggest that for Byron incest is the expression of something central to his understanding of how the world should be. It is up to us to discover what that something is. Some twenty years ago, D. L. MacDonald suggested that examination of Byron's incest and its use in his works might yield fruitful results (37). That fruit remains ripe for the plucking.