Porous Boundaries: Space, Shorelines, and Sexuality in Byron’s “Turkish Tales”
Porous Boundaries: Space, Shorelines, and Sexuality in Byron’s “Turkish Tales”

Summary/Abstract: This article considers the crossings and transgressions in Byron’s “Turkish Tales” alongside the shores on which they take place, arguing that the instability of the shoreline reveals the instability of certain gendered and sexual binaries, thus creating queer possibilities. The settings of the two poems discussed here, The Giaour (1813) and The Corsair (1814), overlap multiple boundaries and their narratives contain many kinds of transgressions. Mainly set among the coastal edges of the Ottoman Empire, they take place in the spaces between land and sea and East and West, with characters constantly moving between these supposed binary opposites. By focusing on the physical properties of shorelines, this article shows that such binary opposites are not always clearly demarcated, indeed their supposed defining lines are often porous and unstable. Moreover, crossing these unstable boundaries often has significant consequences for how gender and sexuality are presented in the poems, precipitating slippages between masculinity and femininity and straight and queer, which belie the surface narratives of heterosexual romance. Thus, I argue that the shoreline acts as a locus for Romantic fears about the instability of gender and sexuality, a fear which is realised in the crossings of the “Tales.”

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