Political seductions: the show of war in Byron's Sardanapalus - Lord Byron

Criticism, Wntr, 2002 by Daniela Garofalo

In The Theaters of War: Performance, Publics and Society, 1793-1815, Gillian Russell claims that the interest in war during the Napoleonic years called for a theatrical technology that was increasingly more realistic. Russell argues that theater and war did not become connected for the first time during the wars with France, but that connection reached a new level of intensity, which, as a result, changed the nature of both war and theater. Russell stresses the differences between the army's self-presentation in the eighteenth century and the changes that followed from the war with France in the nineteenth century. The construction of the soldier as a kind of sportsman was particularly important in the eighteenth century when warfare was represented "in terms which stressed its aristocratic, even festive elan" (26). War was a "gentleman's game" (27) in which the gentleman assumed a role he could also shed; he was capable of moving from the military camp to an elegant dinner party by merely changing his clothes. As I argue later, this aristocrat who approaches war as if it were a game or a performance in a play evokes the Assyrian king's own appearance in battle. But the aristocrat's deliberate theatricality is no longer acceptable at a time when war has become a serious occupation, not the pastime of the idle nobleman.

The challenge to the patently artificial theatricality of this kind of warfare came in large part as a response to the French Revolution and the war with France. "During the period 1793-1815 there was an increasing dissociation of the military from civilian society" so that the army began to be associated not with the camp but with the barracks, an exclusively male space removed from society. The extended war turned the aristocratic play into a much "more serious affair" in which all classes needed to feel involved and represented (49). In becoming a serious affair, war required soldiers who "had to be rather than act the soldier." The French wars "divest the army as a whole of its amateurism by creating a professional fighting force attached not to a local community or to civilian rank, but to king and country, and, above all, to one's fellow soldiers" (51). What became necessary, then, was a fighting force whose performance was so perfect that it seemed natural. The spectacle of war became increasingly popular but its tone changed to reflect the manliness of the soldier and his deadly seriousness.

The new emphasis in war, then, was not on the officer's ability to move seamlessly between the camp and the salon, but on the soldier's performance of his true, immutable warrior nature. That the soldier lived separately from the rest of society in the barracks, that his codes of dress, behavior, and speech differed radically from those of civilian society marked him as having become the role he had previously only assumed. The professional replaced the amateur; the actor became the role and remained the same, unchanging in all theaters. The costume made the man so that costume became the charged metonymic signifier of an interiority, a self, that was only produced in the first place by a uniform and the required props. (13)