The Byronic hero origins and developments of the hero-type in Lord Byron’s travelogue, tales and tragedy

Abstract

This dissertation aims at exploring the origins and the developments of the Byronic hero in the early portion of Lord Byron’s works. It also seeks to clarify the common misconception that the Byronic hero is nothing but Byron’s persona transposed into art and though Byron’s persona did play a significant role in the moulding of this hero-type, it was not the only factor contributing to the creation of this hero. The Byronic Hero is in actuality a Byron writ-large, blending his persona and real-life experiences alongside a whole host of 18th century and Romantic hero types in such a way that it capitalized on the demands of the Romantic era as it was an age obsessed with heroism amongst many other things. This hero-type made a celebrity out of Byron and he knew that his audience read his heroes with his persona in mind, and that is why he also tampered with his Byronic Heroes in such a way as to make him appear as mysterious and dangerous as his own creations. He, like his readers, was heavily influenced by his art and the purpose of this dissertation aims also at investigating how the artist, in this case Byron, created himself through his own art. The first chapter focuses on Byron’s poetic travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage with particular reference to Cantos one and two which is where we trace the origins of the Byronic hero through Childe Harold who becomes Byron’s prototype for this new hero-type. Here, we shall be investigating how, even though the poem details Byron’s travels across the Mediterranean on his grand tour between 1809-1811, the poem, and especially its hero, are not strictly biographical. We shall be proving this through the juxtaposing voices which come to the fore in the poem, that of Harold which are marked by romantic descriptions and gloomy passages, and that of Byron, whose grand ego and facile rhetoric cannot help but to intrude in the poem. Here, we shall also be introducing the notion that the Byronic hero also emerges out of a strand of hero types, such as the Gothic Villain, the Noble Outlaw and the Child of Nature amongst others where Peter Thorslev’s study The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes becomes of paramount importance. The second chapter deals with the developments of the prototype from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to Byron’s four Turkish tales, namely, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and Lara which portray a radically different hero from Childe Harold. Here, we shall be seeing how Byron shapes the East and his heroes in that setting with what Mohammed Sharafuddin in his study Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient calls his ‘Oriental realism’ where Byron creates his Orient through a mixture of literature and experience. We shall be analysing the hero-types Byron chose to focus on for his heroes of the tales, and how he implemented these hero-types differently in each individual tale. Here, we shall also be seeing how through his portrayal of very heroic, masculine men, Byron wanted to project a new face to society, one which was daring and dangerous, which seemed to work very well for him as in his age and ours he is known as the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ celebrity-poet as described by one of his most passionate lovers, Caroline Lamb. Lastly, the final chapter shall focus on Byron’s lyrical drama, Manfred where Byron returns back to the formula of his prototype by presenting us with a Byronic hero who is contemplative and no longer a man of action like the heroes of the Tales. Manfred is, however, painted with such great philosophical and psychological depth that he manages to achieve a certain peak of maturity that his previous Byronic heroes never seemed to aspire to. We shall also be investigating the new hero-types that were used to craft Manfred, the shift of setting from the East to the Swiss Alps, and how Byron’s infamous scandal with his half sister Augusta Leigh influenced the work, where a tone of grief and remorse seems to cut through the entire text which finds its immediate counterpart in the way Byron was feeling after his self-assumed exile in 1816. We will conclude our study by seeing how, even though the Byronic hero is partly molded out of Byron’s persona, that part of his own persona which he assigned to his heroes was not his entire persona, or even the most prominent part of Byron’s personality. This goes to show how as human beings, we tend to take parts of something, especially parts of someone’s personality, which we then turn into a whole, which is the principle fallacy readers make when analysing Byronic heroes, which this study aimed at clarifying.