Byronic Hero

This paper focuses on the interplay of romantic and Gothic elements in the two
most famous novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontё: Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights. Special attention is paid to the metamorphoses of the Byronic hero in
those novels as well as to the presence of supernatural and Gothic elements in
them. At the beginning, the paper discusses the Byronic heroes in the two novels
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and their characteristic features as Byronic heroes.
I likewise identify other types of Byronic heroes in Jane Eyre. The following
chapters are concerned with the supernatural and gothic elements in Wuthering
Heights and Jane Eyre starting with an introduction of Gothicism, its appearance
and development. I further consider the question of whether Wuthering Heights is
Gothic or realist. Having in mind the sub types of Gothicism, I place Jane Eyre in
the group of new Gothic romances which is confirmed by many critics.
Key words: Byronic hero, Gothicism, supernatural, realism, mysticism

This paper attempts to draw parallels and propose points of comparison between Byron's and Nietzsche's responses to social progress in their resorting to the modern cult of the individual—especially in the idealized form of the Übermensch, or the great human being who is beyond good and evil. Of particular interest are the contradictions and inconsistencies which both writers display in attempting to combat modernity with its own weapons, as it were. Thus, it will be argued, Byron and Nietzsche resist the erosion of ancien regime values by positing in their work a neo-classical ideal of heroic rebellion and aristocratic anarchism which is itself a by-product of the very Enlightenment project they appear to critique.

Composition history and Byron's intentions, characteristics and nature of the Byronic hero (with examples from 19th century literature and 20th century pop culture, as well as pre-Byron predecessors), and the parallels and differences between Manfred and Nietzsche's superman.

George Gordon Byron
Life
• George Gordon Byron is an unconventional aristocrat and to many of his contemporaries, Byron’s poetry and life embodied the romantic spirit.
• Though rich and handsome, he had a handicap that consisted in a deformed foot and because of this he lacked a happy childhood. However, as a student at Cambridge University, he not only drank, gambled and made brilliant conversations but he forces himself to become skilled at physical sports.
• In 1807 he published Hours of Idleness, a small volume of lyric poems which was attacked in the pages of the Edinburgh Review; Byron replied with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, where he showed his taste for satire.
• In 1809 he set out on his Grand Tour, visiting Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East, where he gathered the experiences that inspired the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he published after his return to England in 1812. The cantos were so successful that he became a literary and social celebrity, even because of his extravagant, fascinating, dissolute, unconventional, nonconformist, brilliant and original personality. He had a great reputation because of his works dealing with exotic settings and foreign customs.
• In 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke but it lasted one year due to Byron’s incestuous relationship given that he believed in free love.
• Because of this public scandal and because of his debts he decided to self-exile, even because he saw England as a limitation. He then travelled among Europe and strongly believed in nationalistic changes and supported nations for their independence. He first moved to Geneva, where he became close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. He then moved to Venice, where he produced the tragedy Manfred, the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold, the heroic poem Beppo and his epic masterpiece Don Juan. In 1819 he moved to Milan where he participated to patriotic plots against Austrian rule; eventually he moved to Pisa to join Shelley. After Shelley’s death he decided to commit himself to Greek struggle of independence from Turkey. He organised and expedition and devoted himself to training troops in Missolonghi, where he died in 1824 due to a severe fever.
•  Byron firmly believed in individual liberty and wanted to be himself anywhere and at any time; he also wished all men to be free and so went to fight against tyrants. The general foreground of his works is an isolated man whose feelings are reflected by and identified with exotic and wild natural landscapes.
• Byron criticised both Wordsworth and Coleridge because they were narrow-minded and ignored the progress being made during that period in Europe. Though Byron deals with Romantic themes, he makes use of neoclassical style such as archaisms, cantos, conventional rhyme scheme and so on.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
• The poem is structured in four independent parts called cantos. Unity is given by the protagonist who is Harold, called Childe (medieval term) because he is a nobleman awaiting knighthood who travels. Harold’s boredom and disillusionment with life lead him leave England.
• The first two cantos evoke a glorious past, the famous monuments and landscape of Spain, Portugal, Albania and Greece.
• In the third canto Byron experiments his own ability to become completely absorbed in imaginative creativity and the attraction to the nature world, which both provide a new vitality. Structurally the canto follows Byron’s journey, after he left England in 1816.
• In the fourth canto, which is set in Italy, contains several descriptions of nature, especially of the sea, depicted as the image of the sublime and eternity. Thus, nature reflects the poet’s mood and feelings.
• Childe Harold can be identified with the Byronic hero because of his mysteriousness, that men cannot understand for he is isolated and is at ease among wild nature.
Harold’s Journey
Harold’s Journey is a part of the third canto. In the second stanza there is a first person narrator because Byron wants to talk directly to his readers about the moment he left England and his daughter. He is excited for what is new and wonderful about to come. Harold’s journey is described as a pilgrimage because he does not know where he is going, he doesn’t have a set destination.
In the other stanza here it appears again the third person narration. Harold is pictured as an outcast and, though in youth he tried to hide his original and quirky nature, he then ignores the others’ opinion and becomes proud to be special despite being isolated.
In the thirteenth stanza Byron uses several personifications to implicitly say that nature is a living being and that it speaks a mutual language with him and the protagonist, and this language is clearer than his mother tongue.
In the fifteenth stanza Byron describes Harold’s suffering when he is among people and civilisation; he introduces the condition of the poet. Harold has to be in contact with other human beings in order to survive, but when this happens he feels as if he is just a little thing, he is bored and annoyed. He feels like a bird in cage, and as so Harold fights and struggles to do what he wants but finds an obstacle and thus harms himself (such as the bird bleeds on his plumage) and suffers in his soul. In this paragraph the poet’s message is that his ideas, his personality and his values are suppressed by society.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Life
• Percy Bisshe Shelley was born in 1792 and he was the eldest son of a wealthy and conservative family. He rebelled early against his conventional background and in 1811 he was expelled from Oxford University because he wrote a pamphlet against their religion set and in which he denied the existence of God.
• At the age of 19 Percy married a 16 year-old girl and then travelled with her and their two children so that he could express his ideas and make a propaganda against the British government, especially in Ireland.
• In that period there was a nationalistic wave in almost all European countries. Shelley, therefore, lived in a time of conservatism which was hostile to any radical ideas and to political moderation. He rebelled against existing religions, laws and customs. He became a Republican, a vegetarian and a supporter of peace, freedom and free love; for this reason he had many relationships with both women and men outside marriage. His complaint for traditional forms of religion was identified by an interest of his in the occult sciences, scientific experiments and alchemy.
• Once he came back to England he separated from his wife and married Mary Godwin who was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin; the couple eloped in Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Though their love at first sight, he was cruel to her and had a lot of affairs but despite this she kept being faithful to him.
• In 1818 the couple went to live in Italy, in voluntary exile, during which much of Percy’s best work was composed, including the Ode to the West wind, written in 1819, and the Defence of Poetry (1821), which is an uncompleted essay concerning the importance of poetry. Italy was the right place to rebel against the government and there were secret rebellious groups, but also beautiful landscapes.
• In 1822 the poet drowned during a storm while sailing near Livorno. Shelley’s grave is in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

Throughout history, a lot of literature has been written concerning the relationship between the sweet and innocent heroine and the dangerous, stereotypical bad boy-hero. We see this phenomenon reoccurring over and over again, in novels from hundreds of years ago, but also in novels written in modern times as well. Why is the Byronic Hero so fascinating?
In this thesis I will research the Byronic Hero, and take a look at who he is as a character. Moreover, I will investigate some of the typical characteristics of the Byronic Hero, and explore his obsession with possession and control. Correspondingly, I will study how he dominates and seduces. Lastly, I want to see how revealing his mysterious secrets will show us who he really is. Furthermore, as examples of these characteristics I will throughout this thesis use the characters of two modern Byronic Heroes; Edward Cullen from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Christian Grey from E. L. James’ trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, as well as one contemporary Byronic Hero that is crucial in this context; Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian novel Jane Eyre.

The Romantic poet Lord Byron was known for his epic verse such as 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' and 'Don Juan', but he was equally famous for his scandalous lifestyle and his revolutionary activities in Italy and Greece. Byron became a member of the Carbonari while in Italy and referred to Freemasonry in 'Don Juan', the poet perhaps being familiar with his great-uncle's Masonic activities and that of his friends John William Polidori and Col. Thomas Wildman. This paper will examine Byron's links to Freemasonry and the Carbonari and discuss how the poet may have been influenced by the themes and the ethos of these secret societies.

In Canto 3 of his long poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron critiques Napoleon for not being able to control his pettiest passion. Yet in the section beginning at stanza 42, it is equally obvious that he sympathises with men of passion who are fated for extreme action which raises them above others only to be detested by "those below" (CHP 3.45). Byron himself is one such. Since he does not say this, how do we know it is so? This paper sets out some very preliminary answers to this tricky question.
[Published in The Romantics, ed. Shobhana Bhattacharji (New Delhi: Doaba, 2010), pp.398-414]

Bram Stoker, famous for his Gothic novel Dracula, was also a Freemason, and this paper will argue how the themes of secrecy and mystery, key elements of the Byronic Hero, a characterisation of which Dracula has been associated with, may not only have been inspired from Stoker’s brush with Freemasonry, but also from the fellow Freemasons that were part of his life, such as Sir Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Byronic Hero was a characterisation that can be found in nineteenth century literature with characters such as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and the character of Eugene Onegin by Russian Freemason and writer Alexander Pushkin. These characters have elements of mystery and secrecy, and indeed, as we shall see, there is evidence of some Masonic influences with these works. Byron, whose own life, along with the fictional characters within his poetry, significantly inspired the Byronic Hero characterisation, was also a member of the Carbonari and there is evidence that he was aware of Freemasonry, his Great Uncle being Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. Indeed, the Romantic essence of these literary Byronic Heroes will be explored, along with the darker traits that characters such as Dracula portrayed.

The works of poet Lord Byron were a tour de force over the course of the nineteenth century—from the serial release of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), ever-famous poetry like Don Juan (1819), and his dramatic stage works, such as Manfred (1817), Byron can be noted as one of the most highly influential authors and artists of his time. Though Byronic style and traits were adopted by a variety of authors and poets throughout Europe, Byron’s influence stretched beyond the literary. Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and other nineteenth-century composers also adopted Byronic plots or narrative elements and incorporated them into musical works. Aside from the polemical writing style and sensational authorial persona that mark his work as distinct, Byron also introduced a unique character type, the “Byronic hero.” This novel hero manipulated standard behaviors and plot outcomes associated with earlier conceptions of the “hero” archetype, creating an entirely new standard character that
revolutionized literature and art.

It is a familiar figure: the brooding but sensitive man whose quiet, if not taciturn, demeanor covers over a deeply troubled soul. Another familiar figure is the extraordinary woman who breaks through his inscrutability and draws out the secret man of the heart. Beauty and the Beast, The Phantom of the Opera, even the inexplicably popular Twilight books follow this pattern. This dark and mysterious male character, known often as a Byronic hero after the character in the narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, has become wildly popular amongst female readers. In Victorian times, two of the most recognizable and enduring Byronic heroes are Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. So what is it about these characters that enthrall readers and have enthralled readers for years? Why were women in Victorian times drawn to these characters? The answer is complex and reveals much about the inner workings of the female reader. The appeal of the Byronic hero lies in a woman's own insecure sense of worth (created by a stifling repressive patriarchy), especially during Victorian times, and provides a sublimated outlet for " unacceptable " passion. The Byronic Hero is " a venerable literary model " and " embraces protagonists who possess extraordinary masculine traits that include dominance but also multiple personal flaws. " They are often " inscrutable, assertive, and controlling " and generally "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (Gross), though some do renounce these traits and reform. The personalities of these characters can lead many to wonder why the female heroines are drawn at all to them. Drawn to them they are, though, and these tales have often endured and ended up being regarded as the most romantic stories of all time. The reasons for this phenomenon are vast and varied and hotly debated.

A study of Ivan Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons,' focusing on the nihilistic character Bazarov. The essay attempts to trace the character's roots to European Byronism and the Byronic hero. Written to fulfill the requirements of English 414: Special Topics in Romantic Literature-Byron and the Byronic Hero.

This article attempts to read Juliusz Słowacki's Arab from the comparative perspective of John Milton's Paradise Lost. The protagonist of Słowacki's oriental tale, who is a variation on the Byronic hero, also shows similarities with Milton's Satan: unceasing motion, obsession of revenge, loneliness, axiological preference of evil. The analysis of those similarities creates a new interpretative context for Arab, which was hitherto regarded as a superficial study of the pathological psyche or a caricature of the Byronic model.

The autobiographical memoirs of Lord Byron, shredded and burned in John Murray’s parlour on May 17, 1824, retain their reputation today as the most infamous biography never read. As the subject of unprecedented celebrity both at home and abroad, Lord Byron was a self-fashioned public figure whose persona was founded on a paradox of “well-known secrets” reflected in his work. Even today, these public secrets have made literary critics out of Byron’s most shameless gossips, and made gossips out of even the most dedicated literary critics.
         
This paper, then, begins with the facts that are known about Byron’s lost memoir, and charts some of the efforts by which Byron’s critics have sought, in a sense, a spiritual reconstruction of this lost document, even as a literal reconstruction is forever lost to them. The hard facts of Byron’s life are interpreted perpetually through a soft speculation on his character, as represented through a web of anecdotes, letters, gossip, and of course by his poetry itself. The network of Byron’s biography is a wide-ranging tapestry of texts, and this paper draws out from this tapestry the collective narrative they tell about an emblematic figure of life-writing whose ultimate will toward autobiography was stopped in its tracks by a catastrophic destruction of writing which has become, in its way, just another chapter of his story.

The original version of this talk was delivered as an oral, somewhat conversational lecture; the paper has been adapted from this, and I've left it conversational and informal in tone.

This paper analyses the internal fissures within the narrative of 'The Giaour: A Turkish Tale'. Even though the poem has been claimed to be a propagation of Eurocentric ideology, this paper argues that there are contradictions within the poem that underlie the apparent unity of the narrative. This is an attempt to offer an alternative reading of Byron's poem.

Open Graves, Open Minds presents:

‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny

A symposium for the bicentenary of The Vampyre
6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead

John Polidori published his tale The Vampyre in 1819. It is well known that his vampire emerged out of the same storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that gave birth to that other archetype of the Gothic heritage, Frankenstein’s monster. Present at this gathering were Polidori (who was Byron’s physician), Mary Godwin, Frankenstein’s author; Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, and (crucially) Lord Byron.

Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man characterised by ‘a curious disquiet’. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society. The Vampyre was something of a sensation and spawned stage versions and imitations that were hugely popular.

Sir Christopher Frayling declares The Vampyre to be ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’. Polidori gave the creature the form that largely persists through subsequent vampire narratives, transforming it from the animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry to something that can haunt the drawing rooms of Western society, undetected. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, modelled on Lord Byron via Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous Glenarvon (1818), is aristocratic and sexualised and, though something of a blank canvas, even potentially sympathetic, providing a template for the ‘Byronic hero’ that features in Gothic romance down to the paranormal romances of the present day.

This symposium will trace Polidori’s bloodsucking progeny and his heritage of ‘curious disquiet’ in literature and other media. Guest speakers have been invited to share their research into the many variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s seminal textual reincarnation of Byronic glamour. The delegates have been selected for their expertise in the Byronic, the Gothic, and the vampiric. The speakers are: Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. Catherine Spooner, Prof. William Hughes, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sue Chaplin, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Prof. Nick Groom, Prof. Gina Wisker, Dr Sam George, Dr Bill Hughes, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, writer Marcus Sedgwick, and OGOM ECRs and doctoral students Dr Kaja Franck, Daisy Butcher, and Dr Jillian Wingfield.

The Symposium is being held at the beautiful Keats House, Hampstead, home of the poet. The event will include a tour of Keats House (who hold a first edition of The Vampyre) and a trip to Highgate Cemetery, home of the Highgate Vampire (a sensation of the 1970s), and where Karl Marx (who made good use of the vampire metaphor) and others lie.

More details here:
http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/

Fees:
£70/day waged; £40/day postgraduate and unwaged
Fee includes all the talks, bespoke catering, including lunch and vampyre cup cakes, tour of Keats House and excursion to Highgate Cemetery.

You can book here:
https://store.herts.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic/humanities/some-curious-disquiet-polidori-the-byronic-vampire-and-its-progeny

We are very grateful for the cooperation of Keats House and for generous grants towards the Symposium from the British Association for Romantic Studies, the International Gothic Association, and the University of Hertfordshire.

En esta contribución nos proponemos confrontar la visión sobre el héroe byroniano de dos
autores: Emilio Castelar y Benito Pérez Galdós. Castelar publicó en 1873 su Vida de Lord Byron; Galdós,
el episodio nacional Cádiz en 1874. En primer lugar ofreceremos los datos pertinentes acerca de
las relaciones entre estos dos autores, a continuación presentaremos un análisis de la biografía del poeta
inglés por Castelar y de su recepción y estudiaremos la presencia del héroe byroniano en Cádiz. Este
análisis comparativo nos permitirá contestar a la pregunta de saber si se puede leer el episodio nacional
como una réplica al libro de Castelar.

In order to expand upon the legacy of Lord Byron’s verse-drama Sardanapalus (1821) as a problem play in terms of genre and gender, this chapter explores the equally complex ways in which ecology and sexuality operate and are ultimately interwoven. In the early 2010s, ecocritics began to incorporate theories of gender and sexuality into their ways of thinking about nature, and that unique interpretive hybrid, known as queer ecology, helps to reveal the radicalism of Byron’s play on sex and nature.  I argue that this lesser-known historical drama runs counter to certain persistent homophobic understandings of heterosexuality as the only “natural” orientation, for it enshrines the flower, particularly the garland crown atop King Sardanapalus’s head, as the analogue of a queer ecology. In ways that are jointly botanical and erotic, I argue that Sardanapalus depicts a new form of political sovereignty in which gender variance is celebrated as natural, empowering, and tied to a particular place in ancient Mesopotamia. Byron territorializes his hero’s florid effeminacy, which is to say he roots the king’s sexual difference in the flowers and rivers that flow around his palace, which he inhabits alongside his lover and slave Myrrha (no less transgressive in terms of gender roles).  Finally, I show how Byron’s drama depicts a royal model that, far from being ancient history, illumines a greener, pinker and more eco-conscious future for humans and the earth they inhabit.

Evil in the novel titled “Przeznaczenie” by Łucja Rautenstrauchowa

In the article I analyze literary presentations of evil in Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's novel “Przeznaczenie”. I consider this aspect of the work in the context of the features characteristic of two very popular prose trends of the 18th and 19th centuries: the sentimental novel and the Gothic novel. I raise issues such as: the theme of impossible love, the construction of the main characters or the (gothic) thread of the monastery. I also wonder about the image of the Gypsies in the analyzed text, in the context of 18th and 19th century Polish literature.

Źródło / Source:
Dorota Vincůrková, Zło w powieści „Przeznaczenie” Łucji Rautenstrauchowej, in: Ciemna strona człowieka w literaturze XIX wieku, ed. Danuta Dąbrowska, Marta Zofia Bukała, Dominika Gruntkowska, Szczecin 2017, p. 119-136.

In this essay, I think about transgression as the bite before the chew, about how it takes desire for change as evidence for the change.  I build upon Freud, Foucault, Lacan, Bersani, Edelman, and Byron to show how transgression becomes a theory of agency that exceeds empirical evidence.  I turn to Byron and Don Juan to work through how surprise becomes the embodied form of transgression par excellence.

Lord Byron was a prominent figure in English Romanticism and his influence extended beyond his poetic works to include his political actions and persona as one of the nineteenth century's greatest "artist-heroes." However great Byron's influence was at home, his influence on the Continent during his lifetime and after his death was considerably greater. Byron's popularity stemmed partially from the public's fascination with his semi-autobiographical fictional characters who exposed the more sensational details of his lifestyle. Out of this conflation of Byron's personal experiences and his poetic works an aesthetic movement called Byronism emerged in which the Byronic hero plays an important part. The Byronic hero penetrated the consciousness of Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Giuseppe Verdi, all of whom were active composers during the mid-nineteenth century and each presents a different facet of the Byronic hero. Berlioz's Harold en Italie portrays the Byronic hero as meditative wanderer suffering from the Romantic malady of Weltschmerz . Schumann's Manfred psychologically portrays the Byronic hero in exile, suffering from a past secret sin that causes an overwhelming sense of anguish and guilt. Finally, Verdi's Il Corsaro presents the Byronic hero as an amalgam of the Noble Outlaw and the Hero of Sensibility.