Literature Focus IV. The Byronic Hero

George Gordon, Lord Byron was only thirty-six when he died. His brief life was marked by bold adventure, lascivious scandal, and artistic accomplishment. His work and lifestyle profoundly influenced the culture of his time.

W hen Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, he became famous overnight. The speaker of this long poem is an unconventional outsider, a moody, passionate, mysterious wanderer. In short, he is a Byronic hero—an antihero, alienated and rebellious. Byron himself embodied many of these traits, and the archetype that he created has become ingrained in literature and popular culture.

Characteristics of the Byronic Hero

Literary critics have defined the Byronic hero in various ways, but most agree on the archetype’s essential characteristics.

Rebellion The Byronic hero is a rebel, an individualist who questions and rejects society’s laws, conventions, and morality. As the model, Byron might have looked to figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, the mysterious commoner who became emperor of France and whose genius was to transform it into a great European power.

Alienation The Byronic hero disdains society and social conventions. He rejects the assumption that people of wealth, rank, and privilege deserve advantages in life solely because of their ancestry. He is often an outcast or outlaw who supports the democratic ideals of a meritocracy.

G loom The Byronic hero is darkly handsome, melancholy, moody, and mysterious. He can never be happy, even when good things happen. He is difficult to portray because the reader must sympathize with him, yet he must be somewhat sinister. One of Byron’s characters, Manfred, carries an air of melancholy that grows out of a mysterious, “half-maddening sin.” Byronic heroes often have unexplained pasts that intensify their air of mystery and hint at great sorrow.

Boldness The Byronic hero is arrogant and defiant. Byron’s heroes are effective, almost superhuman leaders who overcome obstacles and formidable, even supernatural, opponents. This confidence helps endear the Byronic hero to the reader.

Danger The Byronic hero is ultimately self-destructive and, unlike traditional heroes, unlikely to live happily ever after. That is his charm and his tragedy. Appealing as he may be to the various women who cross his path, he cannot be faithful to them. He is either incapable of such fidelity, or his wandering destiny keeps him from lasting attachments.

The Legacy of the Byronic Hero

Besides the dark, brooding characters that he created, Byron himself left a lasting impact on European culture. His style and persona mirrored the tastes of the day—his portrait in Albanian dress shows the era’s fascination with the exotic. The famed Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, an enthusiastic admirer of Byron, had himself painted in a similarly exotic costume. As if they were making a pilgrimage, artists followed in Byron’s footsteps, traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and painting exotic street scenes and portraits of Arab chieftains and commoners.

Composers have immortalized several Byronic heroes as well. Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy grew out of Byron’s first major work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Inspired by the Byronic hero Manfred, Robert Schumann wrote a Manfred Overture, and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky wrote a Manfred Symphony.

S till, the most significant effect of the Byronic hero has been in literature. Many 19^th-century novels feature brooding, mysterious characters, such as Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

In modern times, the Byronic hero has been a regular feature of romance novels, comic books, and detective stories. He has also found his way to the big screen. In spaghetti westerns, Clint Eastwood famously portrayed nameless, roving gunslingers who embodied the archetype of the Byronic hero. Perhaps the best-known pop-culture example, though, is James Dean’s lead role in Rebel Without a Cause.

UNIT 6. LITERATURE OF THE

VICTORIAN PERIOD

Literature Focus I. Literature of the Time

KEY IDEA Victorian literature shifted gradually from romanticism to realism, with the change led by novelists, who enjoyed a golden age. Late Victorian writing moved into naturalism and escapist fiction.

The Influence of Romanticism

B y the 1830s, romanticism was certainly past its height. Shelley, Keats, and Byron were dead, and Wordsworth was no longer a youthful revolutionary but a stuffy, elderly member of the establishment. Still, young up-and-coming poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been raised on the romantics. Of course, they had their likes and dislikes: Tennyson said that Wordsworth at his best was “on the whole the greatest English poet since Milton,” while Browning, who idolized Byron and Shelley, told fellow poet and future wife Elizabeth Barrett that he would travel to a distant city just to see a lock of Byron’s hair but “could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder.”

Overall, though, the Romantic movement had an enormous influence on early Victorian poets—not so much on their style of writing, which was often brilliantly original, but on their ideas of what poetry should be. On the streets, they saw factories belching smoke and ragged, hungry children begging pennies. In their writing, though, they ignored this grim reality, focusing instead on more “poetic” subjects: ancient legends, exotic foreign lands, Romantic love, and the awe-inspiring beauty of nature. Matthew Arnold argued that the poet could have no higher goal than “to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.” Perhaps this approach was pure escapism, perhaps optimism; or perhaps—just as attitudes inherited from an earlier generation hindered social reform—literary ideals inherited from the Romantics kept the first Victorian poets from redefining poetry for their own time.

Readers seemed to share this sense of dislocation. On the one hand, the Victorians revered their poets, seeing them as a higher order of human being—sensitive, intuitive, inspired—an image first popularized by the Romantics, particularly Byron. On the other hand, many readers, especially among the middle class, increasingly viewed poetry as irrelevant to their own lives. While poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti passionately insisted on “art for art’s sake,” the growing reading public turned to other forms of literature, particularly the novel.