The project of this book is to gaze, steadily and attentively, at the deep pool of emotions that converge on one point: longing. When we long, we encounter our own absence. Rilke imagines this aching state: my life without me. This flight from immediacy takes us swiftly elsewhere—to pure intensity, to abandon, to, irrevocably, the other. The gesture of desire, of yearning, is one of surrender; it grasps nothingness greedily. But it also makes nothingness its power; it says “here I am: empty.” Yearning lives the emptiness at the back of being: it points to the essential openness at the heart of existence.

Standing always under the sign of longing is the dangerous lover—the one whose eroticism lies in his dark past, his restless inquietude, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. His ubiquity marks him as always central to what we mean when we talk about existence and the modern self. And this is not despite the fact that he lives and moves and has his being today in popular historical romances and romantic cinema—female-coded genres—but rather because of this low-brow presence. Or, more essentially, because of his lasting and pervasive presence everywhere: he stretches his pained existence back to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and forward to the mass-market romance and to, well, all points in between. Why do we desire so readily, so uninterruptedly and incessantly, the demon lover? Why is it that the subject who lives imprisoned in the blighted landscape of his own mind, who is doomed only to repetition and a desire for death until his possible redemption by the utterly unique moment of love, becomes himself the true cipher of longing, the essence of the movement of desire?

Curiously, the romance with the dark, estranged antihero at its heart or, what I have named the dangerous lover romance—has not yet been recognized as a distinct genre; it has not been given a history, or shaped into a particular constellation of ideas. While numerous scholars such as Pamela Regis, Catherine Belsey, and Anne Humpherys have discussed specific literary villain/heroes as lovers and their place in particular narratives, there has not been a full-blown exploration of this two-hundred-year cultural phenomenon and its location in both canonized and popular culture. Why is this? Why does the enemy/lover stand on the margins of literary history, waiting to be fully seen? The dangerous lover’s obscured, nocturnal location in literary history and his heretofore secret circle of influence fits well with his character; he figures into history on the side of silence, obscurity, nonknowledge, and temporal interruption, rather than on continuity and teleology. But still one must wonder at the paucity of scholarship on a figure that represents a whole radiating nexus of vitally important historical and theoretical issues, including a substantial influence on modern understanding of subject formation. In these times, when Kafka’s characters sit and delay, interminably, the decision to be; when Hamlet restlessly falls to brooding while the world comes apart around him; when Eliot’s hollow men bonelessly look always away, never at; failure becomes a constitutive part of ontology. We fail, we are flawed, therefore we are. Now, “when in the restlessness of the interminable and the stagnation of endless error we have to dwell outside of ourselves, outside of the world, and, it would seem, even outside of death” (Space of Literature, 159), the dangerous lover steps in, just here, and makes the failure at the heart of our being erotic. Our hero tells us that the dangerousness of existence itself must be suffered. The forest is dark and in order to penetrate deeper, one must exile oneself, one must live the Kantian wound—the rupture between interiority and everything exterior. The dangerous lover—the Byronic hero—becomes an emblem of the hero who ventures out into the anguished world in order to find, paradoxically, the self. He moves through the stages of the Hegelian dialectic and, with him, it will often break down, floating him off to the disquietude of the transcendentally homeless.

The dangerous lover romance lends its voice to the buzz of existential questioning. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the forces at work in the attraction to the dangerous lover mirror basic ontological structures. Heidegger’s proximity theory particularly exposes the long-standing but secret dialogue between romance and philosophy and explains succinctly the enduring quality of dangerous lover narratives. Heidegger describes being as a process of misunderstanding the authentic self. Caught up in an everyday world of all that appears closest and most familiar to us, we believe that our existence can be explained by what we know well. But ontologically, our most authentic selves lie in what is most mysterious and strange—what appears to be furthest from us. Confronted with authentic Introduction

being, we feel a sense of terror in the face of the unknown. The dangerous lover narrative makes the same argument about ontology—that our “true” selves reside in what is most strange and enemy-like, in the dangerous other. Related closely to Heidegger’s proximity theory is our “being-toward-death”—that our lives can be understood only in relation to our end. The end of the romance transforms love into a possibility, into divine immediacy. Unfolding in the midst of stumbling error, unheard whispers, achingly misunderstood gestures, painful secrets bursting to be exposed, comes a day of grace. The romance story speaks always in relation to the full immanence of love which reaches its culmination at the end of the narrative.

The process of such a love has its uncanny qualities, and it is to the dangerous lover figure we must look in order to find a full embodiment of both Heidegger’s and Freud’s renderings of uncanniness. The romance heroine finds her most authentic self at the heart of what seems at first most foreign and outside her way of being—an arrogant, hateful other. Romance moves always toward discovery and approaching the impenetrable: what is uncovered is authentic existence in the uncanny other; at the very heart of what appears to be not ours comes what we must fully own as ours.

To be attentive to the dangerous lover is to see unfold a new literary history with genealogies of influence that have not yet been properly studied: such as the relationship of the Regency dandy to Victorian Gothic villain/heroes like Rochester, Heathcliff, and Dracula and of the way an amalgam of the gothic and the dandy can be found in various genres of twentieth-century romance. Once one is attuned to the dangerous lover formula, one begins to see it everywhere; the erotic outcast burns brightly through the history of ideas as well as through the history of “trash,” the “escapist,” the ephemeral. Perennially present, the dangerous lover narrative has become the conventional way to represent erotic desire and romantic love. Constructing this fresh literary history discloses contemporary romance’s active role as an important producer of cultural meaning, a doubly important recuperative act since female-coded genres are so rarely seen as having this power. The historical trajectory pursued in the following pages is always and everywhere a history of a women’s aesthetic—of what women desire, of what turns women on. Thus the following account begins by culling theories of dangerous love from the contemporary romance. With these theories in hand, this itinerary then travels backward to the Gothic, forward through Byron and the nineteenth century. This backwardness underscores the central agenda of this history as a discovery of mythical origins—of the origins of the antihero as he appears today in contemporary romance. Starting with the present and working always in light of this historical or historicist “ending” is a Heideggerian approach to history; he believes that to understand being, one must start from the death of this being and look back, rather than understanding ontology through origins, or beginnings. The strange chronology of the following account is also compelled by the convoluted temporality of the dangerous lover, whose story begins after the damning events of his past have already occurred; hence, in a certain way, his narrative occurs after it has ended.

Dangerous lovers flash out of the general fabric of history writing; by their very radiance they are always exemplary rather than representative. Thus the ollowing exploration treats only of the exemplary, not of the comprehensive, the general, the complete story of every subjectivity with dangerousness in his/her make-up. All history and genre-making is made to be undermined by pointing to subterranean, marginalized, “othered” histories. Seeking to articulate a particular type of longing, bounded largely by a women’s aesthetic, the following work is limited to male dangerous lovers. A lively history could and must be written on female dangerous lovers, which would take into account the female characters of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Victorian Sensation fiction, among many others.

An essential point of this work is in its stance—it approaches dangerous subjectivity from a traditional philosophical framework rather than a feminist one. Not carefully placing its subject texts within gendered paradigms and a whole host of situational and historical specifics, this study instead treats all the texts under discussion—including canonical, popular, philosophical, and theoretical texts—as equally legitimate and as existing on the same textual plane. By its very nature, philosophy declares that its ideas and experiences apply to everyone, no matter one’s situation in place or time, one’s positioning in light of gender or race. Why shouldn’t the headiness of this powerful dictation of all human experience inform scholarly readings of female-coded formula genres such as the popular romance? They seem never to do so. Does women’s desire speak to questions of desire itself—of what it means to devote one’s being to yearning? Of course. This is the following study’s work: not to read romance using ideas culled from philosophy, but rather to read romance in the same rarefied light as philosophy in order to discover what romance has to say about the mystery of existence.

Contents
Introduction
1. The Erotics of Ontology: The Mass-Market Erotic Historical Romance and Heideggerian Failed Presence (1921–2003)
2. The Spectral Other and Erotic Melancholy: The Gothic Demon Lover and the Early Seduction Narrative Rake (1532–1822)
3. Love as Homesickness: Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Brontës (1811–1847)
4. The Absurdity of the Sublime: The Regency Dandy and the Malevolent Seducer (1825–1897)
Conclusion
Appendix: Narrative Timeline
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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