byron's hero

7/29/2019 Byron's Hero

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17/03/13 he Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Age: Topic 1: Explorations

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Not until the age of the American and FrenchRevolutions, more than a century after Milton wroteParadise Lost, did readers begin to sympathize withSatan in the war between Heaven and Hell, admiringhim as the archrebel who had taken on no less an

antagonist than Omnipotence itself, and evendeclaring him the true hero ofthe poem. In his ironicMarriage of Heaven and Hell(NAEL 8, 2.11120),Blake claimed that Milton had unconsciously, but

justly, sided with the Devil (representing rebelliousenergy) against Jehovah (representing oppressivelimitation). Lecturing in 1818 on the history of Englishpoetry, Hazlitt named Satan as the most heroicsubject that ever was chosen for a poem andimplied that the rebel angels Heaven-defyingresistance was the mirror image of Miltons ownrebellion against political tyranny. A year later, Percy Shelley maintained that Satan isthe moral superior to Miltons tyrannical God, but he admitted that Satans greatnessof character is flawed by vengefulness and pride.

It was precisely this aspect of flawed grandeur,however, that made Satan so attractive a model forShelleys friend Byron in his projects of personalmyth-making. The more immediate precedents of theByronic heroa figure that Byron uses for purposesboth of self-revelation and of self-concealmentwere the protagonists of some of the Gothic novelsof the later eighteenth century. Examples areManfred, the ominous hero-villain of HoraceWalpoles The Castle of Otranto (1764) (NAEL 8,2.57982) and the brooding, guilt-haunted monkSchedoni of Ann Radcliffes The Italian (1797), whoeach embody traits of Miltons Satan. Byron identifiedanother alter ego in the towering historical figure ofNapoleon Bonaparte, who to the contemporary

imagination combined, in Satans manner, moral culpability with awe-inspiring powerand grandeur. Between 1795, when Napoleon took command of the armies ofFrance, and 1815, when defeat at Waterloo banished him from Europe to his finalexile, patriotic supporters of Britains war effort represented Napoleon as an infernal,blood-thirsty monster. These demonizing representations frequently alluded to theexample of Miltons enemy of mankind, as William Wordsworth did in an 1809sonnet, Look now on that Adventurer, and George Cruikshank did in an 1815cartoon depicting the colossus in exile on the tiny island of St. Helena. SatanizingNapoleon made for effective wartime propaganda because it invoked an alreadyestablished plot, a narrative of inevitable downfall. Yet Byrons complex response to
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the man, worked out over the entire body of his work, yields a contrasting account ofhistoryand also, and in particular in the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte he wrotefollowing Napoleons abdication, a contrasting account of Miltons fallen angel. ToByron, Napoleon represents both a figure of heroic aspiration and someone who hasbeen shamefully mastered by his own passionsboth a conqueror and, afterWaterloo, a captive: Napoleon thus becomes as much the occasion for psychologicalanalysis as for moral condemnation. There was more than a touch of self-projection inthis account. (At a tongue-in-cheek moment in canto 11 ofDon Juan, Byron dubshimself the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.) The characteristic doublenessof the Byronic hero is dramatized in the story of Napoleons venturesome rise and

inglorious fall.

Byron first sketched out this hero with his Satanic-Gothic-Napoleonic lineage in 1812, in the openingstanzas ofChilde Harolds Pilgrimage, canto 1(NAEL 8, 2.61719). At this stage, he is rathercrudely depicted as a young man, prematurely satedby sin, who wanders about in an attempt to escapesociety and his own memories. Conrad, the hero ofThe Corsair(1814), has become more isolated,darker, more complex in his history and innerconflict, and therefore more frightening and morecompelling to the reader. The hero ofLara (also1814) is a finished product; he reappears two years

later, with variations in canto 3 of Childe Harold (seeNAEL 8, 2.61922, stanzas 216, and 2.62728,stanzas 5255 ) and again the following year as thehero of Byrons poetic drama Manfred(NAEL 8, 2.63669).

Early on, Coleridge recognized the disquietingelements in the appeal of this hero of dark mystery,and in the Statesman's Manual(1816) warnedagainst it, but in vain. Immediately affecting the life,art, and even philosophy of the nineteenth century,the Byronic hero took on a life of his own. Hebecame the model for the behavior of avant-gardeyoung men and gave focus to the yearnings ofemancipated young women. And Byron was fated todiscover that the literary alter egos he had created

could in turn exert power over him: his socialdisgrace following the breakup of his marriage in1816 was declared by Walter Scott to be aconsequence of how the poet had Childe Haroldedhimself, and outlawed himself, into too great aresemblance with the pictures of his imagination.Literary history demonstrates, similarly, that Byron

could at best participate in but not control the myth-making processes of Byronism.Upstaging him, many others were determined to have a hand in the myth-making.Byron had borrowed from late-eighteenth-century Gothic novels to create his personabut, in the nineteenth century, the Byronic hero would be absorbed back into theGothic tradition. The process began in 1816 with Glenarvon, a roman clef whoseauthor, Lady Caroline Lamb, mischievously recycled elements of Byrons own poemsin particularThe Giaourto tell the story of her failed love affair with the poet and

to portray him as a monstrous, supernaturally powerful seducer. It continued threeyears later with a novella published by the poets physician and traveling companionJohn Polidori that would clinch the association of Byron and the evil undead. Theseworks and the novels, plays, and even operas they spawned granted Byron an eerieafterlife, as the Gothic traditions vampire in chief.

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