Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative

by Deborah Lutz

The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.

The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Gothic, Research

136 pages, Hardcover

First published August 22, 2006

About the author

Deborah Lutz is the Thruston B. Morton Endowed Chair of English at the University of Louisville. She has published four books, most recently The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects and Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. She is the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Jane Eyre and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Reviews

[Alexis Hall]

Well, this pretty interesting although I'd be intrigued to know what someone more tied into romance and romance-academia thought of it. Since this moves in an occasionally rather woolly fashion from the 19th century seduction narrative back to the Restoration rake and forward to the mass market. Impossible not draw these links, I think, but it's a very slim volume and to my mind some of the connections she draws, especially with regard to modern-day romances, felt a bit generalised and unsubstantiated.

She's interested in the type of romantic heroes she characterises as the ‘dangerous’ or ‘demon’ lover who “stretches his pained existence back to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and forward to the mass-market romance and to, well, all points in between.” Lutz believes that “attraction to the dangerous lover mirror basic ontological structures”, in which the relationship between lovers may be seen as a microcosm for wider relationships both with the “work-world” and with “authentic being,” Heidegger’s Dasein.

Lutz’s focus is explicitly philosophical – “to discover what romance has to say about the mystery of existence” (which is kind of big ask in 200 pages, amirite?) – and consequently her reading of the dangerous lover is necessarily abstract. She locates his seductiveness in the “power of impossibility” loving him represents and the “aestheticisation of failure” that allows the heroine to wrest a happy ending from seemingly insurmountable despair.

However what this accomplishes is a systematic intellectualization of the erotic and a gradual movement away from the indicated trajectory into the aesthetic of female desire.

In my experience, for example (though, admittedly, I am not a woman so possibly it's different) desire rarely includes Heidegger.

[Rachael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting study, though its first few chapters were more convincing and well-structured than its later ones (which become rather scattershot and unfocused). Well worth reading if you're interested in the trope of the Byronic hero-lover, and discovering new models of that character archetype.

[Susanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

You've got to love a book with a chapter entitled:
The Erotics of Ontology: The Mass-Market Erotic Historical Romance and Heideggerian Failed Presence (1921-2003)

[Abigail Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh the author absolutely ate writing this. The analysis of the edgy dark romance ml, antihero archetype was beautifully written. This book really spells out why this archetype has it's appeal and how its displayed in work in past time periods. Absolutely gorgeous writing.

[Geof Sage · Rating 3 out of 5]

The middle of this book went off on a tangent that it never quite recovered from. A stronger edit or an additional peer review would have helped.