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Byron's sense of the bower continues to be refined after this first suggestion within the "Elegy," but it remains associated with images of rocky enclosures as in poems like "The Prisoner of Chillon," Canto 2 of Don Juan, and "The Island." The importance of these bowers is not the opportunity to discover a prelapsarian purity and happiness, as in the Bower of Bliss; instead, Byron focuses on their relationship to a postlapsarian world, creating bowers that resemble "postlapsarian wombs." They do not suggest a return to an Edenic utopianism, but an enclosure where the fallen man can escape society to explore his definition of self and his relationship with others. Byron predicates an escape from the physical world within the bower on an established fissure between reality and imaginative possibility. That fissure is what I will call virtual space.
One of the first significant uses of the term "virtual space" is found in Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form, where she discusses the use of space within artistic works. Her focus is on the creation of space within painting, sculpture, and architecture through the artist's manipulation of the viewer's senses. While this application to art is not particularly germane, Langer's focus on the potentiality inherent within the space of any work of art and the relationship of this space to sensory manipulation does apply to the Byronic bower. The virtual space of the bower becomes creative for Byron through its propagation of this sensory manipulation and its reinterpretation of social space.
The application of the term virtual space to these bower images results from their suggestion of a domain free from social forces, creating an indeterminacy to allow intense, but brief, explorations of identity and social relations. This indeterminacy suggested by Michael Heim in his discussions of virtual reality has two components: on a personal level, sensory perceptions of self and surroundings, such as seeing, touching, and hearing are reconfigured in virtual space; and on a social level, perceptions of community are manipulated through a symbiotic relationship with others within the virtual space. Heim's suggestion that virtual activities must have the "capacity to evoke in us alternate thoughts and alternate feelings" (33), while also bearing some relationship to an understandable reality is equally important; what Byron creates within his bower is not a space that evades all comprehensibility, but an opportunity to re-explore normal perceptions in new combinations, and, most importantly, removed from the undermining tendencies of social forces.
All three poems also mediate the power of the bower through a paradigm of re-creation. In this sense, the bower image resembles a womb and the unique social position of the female that the male cannot "conceive," as examined by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's focus on the semiotic as opposed to the thetic which she defines as a "realm of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions" (98) also emphasizes the initial indeterminacy of identity so important to the virtual experience. The concept of re-creation within the bower is dependent on a symbiotic relationship between two seemingly disparate elements, male and female, that can be best expressed as a return to this pre-signified semiotic phase.
"The Prisoner of Chillon" presents a unique, and early, formulation of the bower, since it is a prison, the characters are there against their will, and all of the characters are male. A sense of womb-like enclosure is magnified by the recurrent use of surrounding water: "We heard it ripple night and day; / Sounding o'er our heads it knock'd; And I have felt the winter's spray / Wash through the bars when winds were high " (117-120). This use of water recurs in Don Juan and "The Island." The prison contains three brothers who reside here because of the sin of their father, suggesting a postlapsarian setting, as well as aligning the poem with Byron's "Cain." Bonnivard relates the idea of suffering for the faults of a father, as in "Cain": "But this was for my father's faith / I suffer'd chains and courted death... And for the same [his father's tenets] his lineal race / In darkness found a dwelling place" (11-12, 15-16).
This bower also contains a reconfiguration of gender through the characters of the narrator and the youngest brother. The youngest brother becomes the physical embodiment of the mother: "The youngest, whom my father loved, / Because our mother's brow was given / To him..." (73-75) and "His mother image in fair face" (166). While the first brother to die was "form'd to combat with his kind; / Strong in his frame and of a mood " (93-94), the youngest brother dies "so calm and meek, / So softly worn, so sweetly weak, / So tearless, yet so tender kind" (186-88). Not only do these references suggest the youngest brother taking a maternal designation in this poem, but Bonnivard's narration as "eldest of the three" (69) suggests his role as father-figure.
The virtual space components of this prison scene are highlighted by these incongruities in gender and roles. The three brothers first suggest a homosocial triangulation, as suggested by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men and Marjorie Garber's more recent work in Vice Versa on bisexual erotic triangulation. Garber's ideas on bisexual triangulation are heavily invested in the gender manipulation that leads to the underlying erotic suggestions when the youngest brother dies later in the poem. As Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, gender definitions and distinctions are "performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence." (24) The virtual space of the prison allows for the gender slippage that results in the youngest brother taking the maternal role, as well as the hypermasculine protectiveness of the narrating brother. This gender mutability is an essential element to all of Byron's virtual spaces, suggesting an escape from the performative aspects of gender demanded of individuals within the social world.
Equally important in this and other poems is Byron's manipulation of the senses to intensify the virtualness of the bower experience. In "Chillon," he begins by removing sight in favor of other senses. The brothers are each chained to a separate column-- "we were three--yet, each alone; / We could not move a single pace, / We could not see each others face." (49-51) This visual separation is increased by the darkness of the dungeon. To compensate, the brothers "harken to each other's speech, / And each turn comforter to each" (58-9) as a way of retaining their affiliation. This darkness and lack of sight creates an atmosphere which Byron will use often when developing these bower images. The virtual experience leading to the re-creative potential becomes heavily invested in this manipulation of the usually dominate sense, sight, in favor of other sense that reconfigure normal experience and normal strategies of affiliation.
These unique ideas of affiliation are emphasized in Byron's linking of this poem to Wordsworth's "We Are Seven," to suggest an evasion of normal designations of community. While Bonnivard's use of past tense "We were seven--who now are one" (17) is distinct from the girl's use the present tense "Seven boys and girls are we; / Two of use in the church-yard lie" (30-31), the prison does reinforce an abnormal sensory denotation of family in both poems. Her comment "Their graves are green, they may be seen" (37) is repeated in Bonnivard's "There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, / In Chillon's dungeons deep and old" (27), suggesting that the family is always virtually present within the dungeon walls. In both cases, a sense of community, specifically family, is altered by a projection of family upon inanimate objects.
The moments following the death of the youngest brother, when Bonnivard finally exerts himself physically, display the power of the virtual experience. Whereas earlier, upon the death of the first brother, he "strove, but strove in vain, / To rend and gnash [his] bonds in twain" (147-8), when the youngest brother dies he "burst [his] chain with one strong bound, / And rush'd to him" (210-11). Such action suggests the highly charged eroticism embodied in this virtual manipulation of gender and familial roles. It also brings into play the qualification of experience by the addition of two new senses as he can finally see and feel the "hand which lay so still" (221).
In this state of loneliness, he turns to a moment of psychotic melancholy that freezes his physical being, suggesting what Andrew Rutherford, in Byron: A Critical Study calls "another form of death in life." (71) It is similar to death, since "First came the loss of light and air, / And then of darkness to: / I had no though, no feeling--none-- / Among the stones I stood a stone" (233-36). After an extended period of sensory denial, this sudden use of two new senses, within a virtual world which has dominated his earlier experience, creates a moment where the concept of self is radically altered. Ernest Lovell's paradigm explaining Byron's poetic relationship to nature states that "with nature the poet mingles or merges himself; and in doing so he loses his awareness of self." (124-5) In losing all sensation, this moment suggests his precarious existence between real and virtual experience and the tenuousness of the virtual space.
The carol of a bird, returns him "back to feel and think" (278), while also stressing the sense of hearing. The bird is temporarily aligned with his newly deceased brother, but much of the virtual qualification of experience is lost when, Rutherford states, the bird creates "an impulse to look once again on the landscape which he used to know." (72) The bird stresses this duality of feeling; it allows him to regain his senses, but also creates a moment of recognition that leads to the loss of the potentialities within virtual space. Robert Gleckner, in Byron and the Ruins of Paradise reminds us that this intrusion of the outside world undermines this scene, changing the experience from one of virtual potentiality into images of "microcosmic imprisonment [and] macrocosmic imprisonment" (199).
What "Chillon" represents, as Byron's first significant use of virtual space enclosed within a bower image, is the fleeting potential for personal and social exploration and re-creation. That this image is couched in the gloomy spectacle of a prison does not undermine its careful articulation of the issues of sensory perception and identity generally reinforced by more positive images in his later poetry. That in the end, Bonnivard "regain'd [his] freedom with a sigh" (392) suggests his inability to fully understand the virtual experience he has undergone, and his desire to look only backwards and attempt to relive past experience, like the narrator in "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," rather than looking towards the possibilities of the future. We can also recognize this dilemma in the later cantos of Don Juan when Juan, in England and free, is never able to find the pure love of "his lost Haidee." (XV.58.2)
In Don Juan, many of the incidents leading up to Juan's discovery of Haidee's cave have a strong affiliation with earlier incidents in "Chillon." Like Bonnivard and his family, Juan is driven from his home for transgressing established social norms. Donna Inez sends him to "travel through / All European climes by land or sea, / To mend his formal morals..." (I.191.2-4). His mother's total control of his upbringing upon his father's death, and her dominating spirit, suggests a lack of the symbiotic experience. Juan's only hope for survival is to leave this hostile and self-interested society. His boarding of a ship at Cadiz suggests his departure from this self-interested and maternally-dominating world.
The lines devoted to Juan's experiences on the raft, reinforce a cruel and self-interested society. This theme recurs in all three poems and Gleckner reminds us that this formulation of a self-interested and despotic society provides "a constant reminder of man's loss of his essential humanity" (333) and a stark contrast to the virtual space experience. While on the raft, the image of the survivors quickly degenerates as they "fell ravenously on their provision, / Instead of hoarding it with due precision" (II.68.7-8). The carefully circumscribed enclosure of the raft suggests a bower-like image, but the pervasive self-interest bears a stronger corollary to the image of the Bounty we will see in "The Island." By refusing to eat his beloved tutor, instead "Chewing a piece of bamboo and some lead" (II.82.6) Byron suggests that Juan, like Bonnivard and Torquil, is an outsider in a civilized world based on pain.
As Juan swims towards the island, the only survivor of the shipwreck, he undergoes much the same sensory regression we see in Bonnivard: "..for the earth was gone for him, / And time had nothing more of night nor day / For his congealing blood and sense dim" (II.111.2-4). In an enticing use of the womb image, Juan lies naked, wet, and barely sentient at the mouth of the cave. The juxtaposition of Haidee, the strong female image, with the helpless and near-dead Juan suggests a moment of maternal salvation as she and her attendant "lift[ed] him with care into the cave." (II.115.1) More importantly, we begin to distinguish the role variation that defines the virtual space of the Byronic bower, as Juan "like an infant... sweetly slept" (II.143.3) and Haidee "watched him like a mother" (II.158.2). These lines reinforce a mother-child paradigm suggestive of the cave as womb. Attaining these roles allows them to escape an enlightened and reasoning society and allows the virtual possibilities of the bower to be realized: "as the new flames gave / Light to the rocks that roofed them, which the sun / Had never seen." (II.115.5-7)
This association of the cave with the female character pervades both Don Juan and "The Island." This sense of female empowerment again suggests its womb function, but also a gender reversal that allows the female character to offer protection to the male. Haidee will collect food and offer protection, common male roles, while also nursing him as a female. Juan is weak and helpless, popular notions of femininity, but also virile and masculine. This contradiction in established gender roles alludes to the gender-shifting seen in "Chillon" and the performative aspects of gender discussed by Butler. These virtual domains suggest an arena that allows the "parodic" break from socially-assigned gender roles. As such, Don Juan continues to resituate the feasibility of polyvalent, virtual selves and communities within the Byronic bower.
The use of three characters within the bower setting, like "Chillon," also suggests the possibility of an erotic triangulation. Haidee's maid plays a much more significant role than the middle brother in "Chillon" and she is invested with the care and nurturing of Juan, just like Haidee. In some ways the third character within the bower opens the opportunity for a wide array of possible relationships. But, just like Bonnivard's disenchantment upon realizing his freedom, the baby that Haidee takes within her womb to the grave, suggests a similarly unproductive experience from this triangulation. Whether we view Bonnivard's narration of "Chillon" as the product of his experience within the bower, like the dead baby, any by-product of the bower's virtual potentialities in these first two poems becomes malformed or dies when it re-enters the world.
Notice also the carefully drawn parallel experiences between Juan's "dreamless" sleep and Bonnivard's catatonic state. Bonnivard enters this state upon seeing and feeling the hand of his dead brother, and only returns to the world by hearing the carol of the bird, initially related as his brother. Juan enters this state upon seeing and feeling the hand of Haidee, and only returns to the world by hearing the song of Haidee's "good modern Greek" (II.150.6). Unlike Bonnivard, for whom this regression is a precursor to his removal from the experience of the virtual space, for Juan, this experience is a rebirth not into the social world, but out of it. Both instances mark important delineations of experience between social reality and virtual potentiality. That they occur at opposing end of the virtual experience is not as important as their being situated within the designated space of the bower and their involvement in the manipulation of self and society.
The mutual passion shared by Juan and Haidee emphasizes the symbiotic elements made available to the bower inhabitants. As Rutherford also suggests, this virtual space allows an opportunity to realize "passionate love...not an illusion based on social or literary conventions..." (155); the type of love that, for Bonnivard, breaks the shackles of social oppression. For Haidee, "She loved and was beloved, she adored / And she was worshipped after nature's fashion, / Their intense souls into each other poured." (II.191.1-3) But, as "Chillon" makes evident, such re-creations of self and community through these virtual experience are only interludes through which Gleckner suggests Byron "re-create[s] paradise, indeed is paradise regained, but,...that re-creation is only momentary" (340). The virtual possibilities of the bower are numerous and the polyvalent experience within it suggests unrealized potentialities, but as Juan regains physical strength, social propriety and obligation override open-ended potentiality. When they enter into the social world of Lambro's house, they change the boundaries that define their experience. For Juan and Haidee, the return of the father creates a paternal panopticism or a social "law of the father" that suggests a social regulation that can only be evaded briefly within the cave. The island society, here represented as malevolent and pirating, takes control of Juan, selling him as a slave and sending him on a journey that will never make this opportunity available to him again.
"The Island," Byron's last complete poem, is perhaps the most fully developed in terms of its treatment of the bower, or, what Gleckner recognizes as "`Neuha's Cave' that womb-like miracle" (125). In terms of charting this development of the bower, Robert Hume's statement in "`The Island' and the Evolution of Byron's `Tales'" that "The Island" is "not a `throwback' or a `return' to an earlier style, but rather a new departure based on the synthesis of earlier endeavors" (177), proves significant. Byron's addition of Bligh and Christian invokes competing social concepts of civilized honor versus revolutionary independence, both undermined within virtual space. This double narrative--Bligh and Christian, Neuha and Torquil--allows Byron to fully display the impressive scale with which he could argue for the bower's effectiveness as a true virtual space, fully concealed from the competing social interests of his English characters.
The first Canto sets up an antithetical characterization between the mutineers, led by Christian, and Bligh and his supporters. While Bligh is a "gallant chief" (1.17) and his followers the "faithful few" (1.125), the mutineers are "wilder hands" (1.26) and "half uncivilised" (1.31). The mutineers reject their civilized precepts in favor of an easy life, without suffering. This desire for the painless life is not a characteristic of the virtual space, since both Bonnivard and Juan undergo significant anguish before the potential for re-creation is realized. Both mutineers and Bligh's supporters represent competing social interests, and, as such, must be excluded from any participation in the final bower. The Bounty leads directly to the image of Toobonai, whose native inhabitants juxtapose nicely with the sailors, having vices which are "only the barbarian's--[the sailors] have both; / The sordor of civilisation, mix'd / With all the savage" (2.68-70).
Like Juan and Haidee in Don Juan, Neuha and Torquil spend their time in a cave along the shore described as both a "grotto of the wave-worn shore" (2.346) and a "rocky bower" (2.399). The repetition of this strategy is important, since both poems create an initial cave image far removed from society even as it is situated upon land and, therefore, always controlled by social forces, such as pirates, mutineers, or despotic rulers. The cave attains the same beauty as the rest of the island, but the island as "utopia" for Christian and his men is, as Hume notes, "far from being an ideal" (172). Instead, this final virtual space must be removed from land, stressing in the broadest possible terms the complete absence of all social convention or reality.
Byron's use of the senses continues in the suggestion of a noise that leads the characters to a recognition of impending danger. On Toobonai, it is first "a voice! / Not such as would have been a lover's choice" (2.416-7) and then "a loud, long, and naval whistle, shrill" (2.428). The warning of an approaching English ship is reminiscent of the bird's song in "Chillon;" both sounds force the characters to remember the outside world far removed from their darkened cave, and the powerful forces at work in that civilized world. In this poem, however, the land-based cave is not represented as the virtual bower. Like Don Juan, this use of sound suggests the beginning departure into the virtual space and the manipulation of the senses to connect and disconnect the characters from the physical world.
With the approach of the English ship seeking retribution for a dishonored nation, the island paradise is threatened by the same images of the inescapable power of external social forces as seen in the other two poems. In Don Juan, Juan's usurpation of Lambro's house must lead to the dissolution of the symbiotic union first realized in virtual space, since it cannot be maintained within the island society. In "Chillon" Bonnivard's notice of the bird reasserts physical reality upon him. Byron's application, once again, of the "Cain" motif asserts Christian's desire to return to the Edenic paradise denied him by Bligh, the representation of English rule. But these early representations of an Old Testament struggle with original sin are left to the English characters; by focusing the later cantos on Neuha and Torquil, Byron actively evades the social and historical in favor of his presentation of the virtual possibilities.
The narrator also goes to considerable lengths to ensure that the reader recognizes that Neuha is innocent and free of these historical forces as " the South Sea girl... / With no distracting world to call her off / From love (2.333-5), as well as Torquil, "A blooming boy, a truant mutineer.../ free as ocean's spray" (2.209-10). By establishing their difference from Bligh and Christian, the narrative voice reinforces Neuha's and Torquil's asocial and uncivilized nature in a postlapsarian world. Hume suggests that Byron intensifies his "radical division... between civilization and nature" when he uses two boats in the escape scene. (175) Only Neuha and Torquil can enter the cave since the water, not land, is their natural domain. Neuha's "Track beneath the native sea / Was as a native's of the element" (4.106-7), while Torquil, "the nursling of the northern seas, / Pursued her liquid steps with heart and ease" (4.112-3). Most importantly, this bower remains totally concealed from the eyes of the vengeful English, as well as the mutineers. If his other uses of virtual space suggest at the end of each poem an unsatisfying or unfulfilling experience, here Byron creates a scene of opportunity, and growth through the virtual experience.
Within this bower, Byron conflates several common elements of his previous bowers. The cave, previously discovered by "a young [male] chief" (4.195) in which he "shelter'd there a daughter of the clime" (4.200), is now used by Neuha to hide a male. She also supplies the cave with all the elements (food, water, light) necessary for survival. She is actively involved in the distillation of gender from social forces recognized in the previous two poems. Similarly, the swim to the entrance of the cave involves the sensory deprivation and manipulation that one finds while submerged in water, just like Juan's experiences prior to entering Haidee's bower. So, as Byron carefully changes those elements of the earlier poems that suggested their ultimate failure in establishing a fully-realized virtual experience, he is also careful to retain those elements of indeterminacy essential to any virtual space.
Below water and naturally dark, the cave conceals its inhabitants from society, suggesting, in Jerome McGann's comments from Fiery Dust, "that the lovers have pushed beyond the barriers of ordinary space and time, " (193) perhaps one of the strongest acknowledgments of their experience as virtual. Unlike the previous poems where the third brother in "Chillon," and Haidee's maid in Don Juan suggests interference and an ultimately unproductive experience, this cave is the den of only two. There is also a recognition that this cave is not a new home, but a "refuge" for re-creation, from which they must take the symbiotic love which is revealed in this enclosed space and return to the outside world. Only in "The Island," do we recognize the social world, after the experience in the bower, to be "No more polluted with a hostile hue" (4.402). This underwater cave is distinct, as Carl Woodring points out: "Far more secret and awesome than the cave where Haidee nursed Juan, this cathedral of nature, [is a]womb of all beginnings..." (225). The cavernous bower of the previous two poems is ultimately undermined by surrounding civilization; in "The Island" Byron articulates a reformulation of the previous poems' unsuccessful elements to display a fully realized virtual space.
Instead of suggesting strange and fantastical worlds that evade all sense of the real, Byron's subtle reconfigurations of sensory perception and identity lead to an enlivened experience of self and community. Most importantly, instead of focusing on past experience and either attempting to recreate it or to seek revenge for it, the fully-realized virtual experience looks forward towards possibility. In each poem we see the moment of divorce from the social community as an opportunity for discovery, with a recognition that the virtual bower extends the realm of possibility only through symbiotic activity that invokes a humanism at the expense of a personal investment in social strictures. Through Byron's evolution of these bowers, we see his recognition of the influence of social forces and his creation of a space to escape them; a space he had recognized as a young man in Newstead Abbey.
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