Byronic Heroes- Frankenstein & Manfred

Byronic Hero

A grand, charismatic, yet ambiguous male, the Byronic hero, is a child of the Renaissance love of adventure. The quasi-satanic type dates back to the Greek Prometheus, a suffering god, and to the wandering Jew, and became a pervasive outsider in world art, dance, drama, opera, sculpture, film, and fiction. In mystic literature, the Byronic hero suffers alienation as his occluded spirit searches for some divine truth or link to a deity or Supreme Being. Ann Radcliffe created a forerunner of the stereotype in Schedoni, a sinister, glum-faced monk in The Italian (1797) who is both soulless predator and doomed victim (Hoagwood, p.157).

As a lover, the Byronic hero intertwines love and hate to shape a destructive, all-consuming passion, the impetus to tragedy in the love affair of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847). Whether a heartbreaker, sexual predator, bon vivant, or reckless rogue, the stereotype accommodates extremes of behavior, often for unconscionable reasons, as is the case with Charlotte Bronte's Edward Rochester, the guilt-wracked charmer in Jane Eyre (1847) who woos Jane while immuring his insane wife in an upper story of Thornfield. Similarly, ambiguous in behavior and outlook are the main characters in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (ca. 1588), Byron's Manfred (1817), Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1831), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1790-1832), and Algernon Swinburne's "A Ballad of François Villon" (1878). The character type emerged, in American gothic in the person of Ahab, the obsessive whaling captain in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, (1851).

For all its waywardness and sin, Byronism exudes glamour. As the literary critic, Peter Haining explained in his introduction to The Shilling Shockers, (1978), Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Horace Walpole emphasized villainy in an appealing form to boost reader interest. Likewise, Emily Bronte explored the elements of the ill-natured hero in Heathcliff, a proud, passionate suitor of an unattainable woman. Like the conventional heroic villain of gothic fiction, he conceals a guilty-sad past beneath lingering melancholy (Rutherford,

p.76). Clinging to his reputation are hints of dissipation in the past and of unspecified infractions against society that include the hanging of a pet dog. Moody and willful, he both repels and fascinates in the style of Napoleon and of Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost (1667), a touchstone of gothic villainy.

A lone wanderer usually endowed with an electric appeal somber good looks, and charm, the Byronic hero of modern English novels relies on intellect and self-sufficiency the coping devices of the suave, purposefully tight-lipped wife-slayer Maxim de Winter in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938). The unnamed female speaker, at the beginning of her relationship with Max, jumps to fearful speculation through surreptitious character study: "He had a face of one who walks in his sleep, and, for a wild moment, the idea came to me that perhaps he was not normal, not altogether sane." When Max speaks of himself at age 42 to his youthful bride-to-be, he blames bitter memories and a repressed secret (Kauvar & Sorensen, 98-99). True to ...