George Gordon, Lord Byron“Mad, bad, and Dangerous to

Know”

George Gordon, Lord Byron“Mad, bad, and Dangerous to

Know”

George Gordon, Lord Byron:“Mad, bad, and Dangerous

to Know”

• Byron had a reputation for wickedness and free thought.• He was a strong individual with little regard for social conventions or expectations.• He was proud, rebellious, passionate—all characteristics that marked the Romantic spirit.

Byron embodied in his life and writings the figure subsequently known as

the Byronic hero:•passionate, restless, and moody individualist• self-exiled from society after exhausting all possibilities of excitement• tormented by remorse over some mysterious sin(s) committed in the past•His proud, defiant individualism refuses to be limited by conventional moral and societal boundaries•He is an outsider whose daring life both isolates him and makes him attractive.

Byron was a true paradox.

He was:• a fiery rebel AND a

conventional aristocrat

• an idealist AND a cynic

• a scandalous playboy to his countrymen AND a hero to the Greeks for helping them win their independence from Turkish rule

• Ironically, Byron’s romanticism is grounded in a strong admiration for the more conservative neoclassical writers of the previous century (18th), especially Alexander Pope. Why Pope?•  He was a close friend with

the Shelleys, with whom he spent much time in Europe.• Many of his poems are an

intriguing blend of romantic melancholy and satiric irony.

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After Percy Shelley’s death and the breakup of their small circle of artist friends, Byron grew restless (again). Always an ardent spokesman for political freedom, he saw Greece, the ancient home of democracy, struggling to win its independence from Turkey. He invested a great deal of money and energy in organizing an expedition, which he himself led, to help the Greek cause.

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While training troops in the squalid, marshy town of Missolonghi, he was stricken with a severe fever and died, shortly after his thirty-sixth birthday. Although his practical contribution to the Greek army was insignificant, his presence and tragic death produced a vital spark of inspiration for the eventual liberation of the country. He is still regarded in Greece as a “national” hero.

What to Remember about Byron’s Don

Juan• published in installments

from 1818 until his death in 1824• Byron extemporized the

poem from episode to episode: “I have no plan…I had no plan; but I had or have materials.”• composed with remarkable

speed (the 888 lines of Canto XIII, for example, were accomplished within a week)

What to Remember about Byron’s Don

Juan

• meant to be read rapidly, at a conversational pace• even in its unfinished state,

it is the longest satire—and one of the longest of all poems—written in English (about 2000 stanzas!)• Byron’s epic narrative is based on an old Spanish legend (Find out what you can about the original story).

What to Remember about Byron’s Don Juan

• The poem’s hero had in the original legend been superhuman in his sexual energy and wickedness. • Throughout Byron’s version

the unspoken but persistent joke is that this violent and archetypal homme fatale of European legend is in fact more acted upon than active: Unfailingly amiable and well-intentioned, Don Juan is guilty largely of youth, charm, and a courteous and compliant spirit (The ladies do all the rest).

What to Remember about Byron’s Don Juan

• Byron’s most trusted literary advisers thought the poem disgracefully immoral—however, in our own day, the most common complaint is not that Don Juan is immoral, but that it is morally nihilistic (Find out what this means).

• Byron insisted that Don Juan is “a satire on abuses of the present state of society,” and “the most moral of poems.”

What to Remember about Byron’s Don Juan• Don’t look to Don Juan primarily for the story: the controlling element is not the narrative but the narrator…his temperament gives the work its unity. It’s really an incessant monologue, in the course of which a story manages to be told.

•In Don Juan, Byron was able to take a standard stanza form—Otava Rima, an eight line stanza with rhyme scheme of abababcc—and make it sound like relaxed, colloquial speech.

The Byronic Hero

Characteristics of the Byronic HeroThe Byronic hero--so named because it evolved primarily due to Lord Byron’s writing in the nineteenth century—is, according to Peter Thorslev, one of the most prominent literary character types of the Romantic period:

The Byronic Hero

Romantic heroes represent an important tradition in our literature . . . In England we have a reinterpreted Paradise Lost, a number of Gothic novels and dramas . . . The heroic romances of the younger [Sir Walter] Scott, some of the poetry of [Percy] Shelley, and the works of Byron. In all of these works the Byronic Hero is the one protagonist who in stature and in temperament best represents the [heroic] tradition in England (Thorslev 189) .

The Byronic Hero• A Byronic hero exhibits several

characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities.

• With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and hypersensitivity, the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also his status as [a traditional] hero."

The Byronic Hero• He is usually isolated from society

as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some external force or is self-imposed.

• Byron's Manfred, a poetry character who wandered desolate mountaintops, was physically isolated from society, whereas his Childe Harold character chose to "exile" himself and wander throughout Europe. Although Harold remained physically present in society and among people, he was not by any means "social."

• Often the Byronic hero is moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue.

• He also has emotional and intellectual capacities, which are superior to the average man.

• These heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, and extremely conscious of himself. Sometimes, this is to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion against life itself.

• In one form or another, he rejects the values and moral codes of society and because of this he is often unrepentant by society's standards. • Often the Byronic hero is

characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed sexual crime. Due to these characteristics, the Byronic hero is often a figure of repulsion, as well as fascination.

Byron’s Influence

• Scholar-critic Harold Bloom notes that “between them, [the Brontë sisters] can be said to have invented a relatively new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron's poetry and by his myth and personality, but going back also . . . to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama" (Bloom).

Byron’s Influence

• When Byron died at the age of thirty-six in 1824, Emily Brontë was but eight years old. Brontë 's youthful age, however, did not preclude Byron and his works from having a profound effect on her and her writing; indeed, the "cult" of Lord Byron flourished shortly after his death "dominating [the Brontë s'] girlhood and their young womanhood" (Bloom).

Byron’s Influence

• Of the Bronte sisters' background, Tom Winnifrith comments that a "study of the Brontes' juvenilia provides confirmatory evidence of the sisters' preoccupation with the aristocracy, their emancipation from Victorian prudery, and the attraction of the Byronic hero, beautiful but damned.”

REVIEW—The Byronic hero typically exhibits

several of the following traits:

• a strong sense of arrogance

• high level of intelligence and perception

• cunning and able to adapt• suffering from an

unnamed crime• a troubled past• sophisticated and

educated

The Byronic hero typically exhibits several of the

following traits:

• self-critical and introspective

• mysterious, magnetic and charismatic

• struggling with integrity• power of seduction and

sexual attraction• social and sexual dominance• emotional conflicts, bipolar

tendencies, or moodiness

The Byronic hero typically exhibits several of the

following traits:

• a distaste for social institutions and norms

• being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw

• disrespect of rank and privilege

• jaded, world-weary• cynical• self-destructive behavior

Assignment:

1) Research two film or literary characters who are characteristic of a Byronic Hero (also known as an anti-hero). Provide character names, descriptions, titles of films or novels.

2) Analyze and discuss the characters’ roles by applying Byronic Hero traits and specifying descriptions and events. Prove that the characters you’ve chosen are, in fact, Byronic/Anti- Heroes (rather than typical or traditional heroes).