THE BYRONIC HERO

Byron embodied Romantic spirit and gave it a recognizable shape. He left behind him the enduring image of the Byronic hero: a gloomy unsatisfied social outcast, a fighter against social injustice, who in his quest for self-realization refuses to accept social codes and conventions. The Byronic hero is, in some way, the portrait of Byron himself or rather of what Byron would have liked to appear and tried to seem before the people he knew.

This hero first emerges in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and later occurs in different guises throughout Byron’s work.

There are two fundamental distinctive characteristics of this hero: noble origins and a mysterious and troubled past. He is man of few words who never smiles and does not hesitate to kill or to love and help whenever the circumstances require that. Courage and passion move him and, behind his hardened heart, a tender soul and charming manners emerge.

The Byronic Hero generally has these characteristics:

Ø rebels against convention or society

Ø has a low tolerance for societal norms and social institutions

Ø is isolated or has chosen isolation from society

Ø is not impressed with rank and/or privilege

Ø has larger-than-life abilities and larger-than-life pride

Ø suspected of committing a crime or has been cursed

Ø suffers from grandiose passions

Ø has a tendency to be self-destructive

The fully-fledged Byronic hero is more isolated, darker, more complex in his history and inner conflict, and therefore more frightening and more compelling to the reader. Such is the hero of Byron's poetic drama Manfred, "an alien, mysterious, and gloomy spirit, superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity, whom he regards with disdain". He in his isolation absolutely self-reliant, inflexibly pursuing his own ends according to his self-generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural.

The attraction of this flawed character seemed compelling, and the fifure of the arch-rebel was imitated in life as well as in art. It helped to shape the cultural and intellectual history of the later 19^th century. The literary descendants of the Byronic hero include Heathcliff in The Wuthering Heights, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, James Steerforth from Chrales Dickens’s David Copperfield and others. Scholars have also drawn parallels between the Byronic Hero and the solipsist heroes of Russian literature. Pushkin’s Onegin and many others.

Bertrand Russel, in his History of Western Philosophy, gives a chapter to Byron, because Byronism, the attitude of “titanic cosmic self-assertion”, eventually helped to form Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the hero who stands outside the jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil.

The Byronic hero is also featured in many contemporary novels, and it is clear that Lord Byron's work continues to influence modern literature as the precursor of a commonly encountered type of anti-hero.

WORKS

Byron experimented with different literary forms, including narrative verse, lyrical poetry and drama.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a poem in four cantos written between 1812 and 1819. It tells the story of a young disillusioned nobleman who travels to the placed that Byron himself had visited on his Grand Tour. In his Preface, Byron insisted the narrator Childe Harold was a fictitious character, merely “the child of imagination”. The world, however, insisted on identifying the character as well as the travels of the protagonist with those of the author. In the fourth canto Byron, abandoning the third person dramatis persona, spoke out frankly in the first person. The style of Childe Harold with its abrupt changes in subject, apostrophes, imperatives, exclamations, hyperbole is without close parallel in English. Goethe applied to it the terms: daring, dash and grandiosity. The result is like seeing Europe by flashes of lightning, for everything is presented, not as it is in itself, but as it affects the violent sensibility of that new cultural phenomenon, The Romantic Man of Feeling.

Oriental Tales include The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, The Bride of Abydos, The Siege of Corinth. Together with Childe Harold, this is Byron’s most celebrated poetry. In these poems, the Byronic hero, in various embodiments, flaunts his misanthropy and undergoes a variety of violent romantic adventures that current gossip attributed to the author himself. Unlike the traditional epic poems, Byron’s narrative poems are comparatively short; they do not depict socially important events or celebrated the exploits of a celebrated hero. Instead, they are centered on the flawed and rebellious protagonist, and concentrate on the inner workings of his mind and soul.

Drama The drama Manfred is inspired by the frustration induced by the reflection that man is ‘half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar’. The protagonist is again a typical Romantic hero: magnetic, tormented, passionate, melancholic, emotional, solitary. Torn between noble aspiration and sin, and unable to solve the dualism, he commits suicide. The drama Cain is Byron’s apology of the notorious biblical sinner. In Byron, Cain rebels against the authority of God and hates his brother Abel for obedience and humility. The tragedy Marino Faliero, Dodge of Venice dramatizes an episode in Venetian history, when the dodge formed an alliance with the people to overthrow the state. The main interest, like in Byron’s other theatrical works, lies in its political content.

Don Juan The unfinished poem Don Juan, which many critics consider his masterpiece, is a picaresque verse satire with several autobiographical references. The poem is also a satire against conventional restraint, society and the Romantic poets who had turned to political conservatism.

Even though unfinished, Don Juan is the longest satirical poem, and indeed one of the longest poems of any kind, in English. It is a mistake to look to Don Juan primarily for the story. The controlling element is not the narrative but the narrator, and his temperament gives the work its unity. The poem is really an incessant monologue, in the course of which the story manages to be told. Don Juan’s misadventures are used to confide to us the speaker’s thoughts and devastating judgments upon the major institutions, activities and values of the Western society. The narrator is a new type of literary character created by Byron. It is quite different from the gloomy and misanthropic Byronic hero and is one of the great, and one of the most complex comic inventions in literature.

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