National Costumes and Political Masquerades: Byron’s “Mazeppa”

Zbigniew Bialas

“Society is founded upon cloth.” Thus argues Prof. Teufelsdroeckh in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. In other words: clothing represents and misrepresents the body, and further, clothes, articulating the body, make it culturally visible. Much critical attention has been devoted to these facts and in the nineteenth century - when political/national propaganda was rampant – “clothing” was often translated into “national costumes” especially in the then Southern and Eastern European national revival.

In one of the notorious attempts at naturalising Eastern Europe, as much as in a feat of self-promotion, Lord Byron had himself painted in Albanian national costume (1814). This could be a masquerade: the assumption of somebody else’s identity, and this could also be a misapplication of dress-codes, resulting in questioning and transgressing strict national and political boundaries. Or possibly both.

In view of the above I decided to concentrate on Byron’s own texts, specifically on “Mazeppa” (1819), a poem about manifestations of Eastern Europe’s apparent indeterminacy, strengthened by what might be called the “national propaganda of clothes and costumes” in the first decades of the 19^th century.

More specifically, in the course of my analysis I wish to address the following issues:

1. what was the regimental value of clothes especially if one chose to be encoded by a national costume

2. how depriving someone of the national costume could be interpreted as a propagandist imposition of non-identity

3. in what way being forcefully undressed could become a form of political and cultural punishment

[Byron’s text will be seen in the context of other 19^th century works devoted to the figure of Mazeppa (eg. Hugo, Pushkin, Slowacki)].