Imagine that there is an intriguing man standing in the darkest corner of the room all alone, and while he seems to be quiet and depressed, all the women in the room are looking right at him. This is a perfect example of a Byronic hero. One common characteristic of many works in the Romantic Era is the presence of a Byronic hero. A Byronic hero is classified as a depressed and rebellious young man who is very attractive to women because of his dark and mysterious past. First created by Lord Byron, the concept of a Byronic hero has transformed the way in which some characters are described. Modern literature, with a Byronic hero as exemplified by Jay Gatsby and cinematography, with its Byronic hero as seen in Batman, would not be the same without this type of character.
The first example of a Byronic hero appeared, appropriately enough, in Lord Byron’s work “The Corsair.” In “The Corsair,” Byron’s tale written in 1814, the pirate hero, Conrad, is described as this kind of hero because Byron portrays him as “a man of loneliness and mystery,” who never smiled or spoke (Byron). In addition, he does not have many friends, he is attractive to women, and he embodies all the traits that have since become associated with a Byronic hero. Also in “The Corsair,” Byron describes his pirate hero as a man who considers himself a villain because of his mysterious past. “He knew himself a villain—but he deem’d/The rest no better than the thing he seem’d,”(Byron). In this quotation from “The Corsair,” Conrad, the pirate, also describes himself as a villain, but for what reason? The darkness behind Conrad’s character contributes to the component of mystery in a Byronic hero’s past.
After Byron introduced his version of a hero, many other authors b...
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...ears. This displays his desire to live in the shadows and stay away from civilization. Also, we know that he grew up without his parents and that his butler, Alfred, raised him as his own, but with a large trust fund readily accessible. Despite his mysterious past and sheltered life, Batman is appealing to women. Enter Cat woman!
A Byronic hero is a character who possesses traits that lead him to seem mysterious yet appealing. Byronic heroes such as the Pirate, Mr. Darcy, Jay Gatsby, and Batman are the types of characters who make stories interesting to read or watch because the reader yearns to know more about the person and his history. This desire to know more about the hero, or his past, helps to maintain reader or viewer interest. Useful and entertaining characters in any work definitely give a reader or viewer something to think about and someone to root for.
Everyone has their own perception on what defines a hero; some may argue that they exhibit characteristics such as honesty or courage, while others may think that heroes have special power. Our society may have changed the values in which we associate heroes with, but one thing seems to have never changed: the main character of the book turns out as the hero. In my analyst, Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, is put on trial as we see through our own eyes how Caulfield can not be considered a hero in modern society. In modern society, we would consider a hero as a role model, and someone who we would want to emulate.
As in the case of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde, it is the social attitudes of the time at which the works are written, rather than the author’s personal viewpoints on gender and representation, that shape the female forms of the works. Both Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde had experiences that shaped how they viewed the gender, sexuality, and the popular social response to these subjects; however, neither Frankenstein’s or The Importance of Being Earnest’s female characters reflect the personal beliefs of the authors in terms of gender and sexuality. The relationship between perceived gender stereotypes and the age in which a work is written is something that can never be severed as literature is inherently the product of the cultural attitudes of the time that it was produced. As different the author’s personal viewpoints are, there is always the pushback of the ‘traditional social attitudes’ against personal beliefs. Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde were not exempt from the prejudices of their time periods, the Romanticism Era and the Victorian Age respectively, and had to alter their viewpoints in order to be accepted as
“Lord Byron.” Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2009: 269-272. Student Resources in Context. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
The Byronic hero in literature is named after Lord Byron and his main protagonist in his poem Childe Harold. The Byronic hero was established during the Romantic period in art and literature as an anti-hero; he is supposed to represent the antithesis of the ideal, chivalrous hero of the time. This hero is dark, mysterious, and brooding. He often harbors the torturing memory of an enormous, nameless guilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom. He holds himself detached and sees himself as superior in his passions and powers compared to society and humanity, whom he regards with disdain. He stubbornly pursues his own ends according to his self-generated moral code, against all opposition. He also gains an attraction from the other characters because it involves their confusion at his obliviousness to ordinary human concerns. Byronic heroes in literature often have the following characteristics: passionate, unrepentant, wandering, isolated, attractive, and self-reliant.
One of the most prominent character archetypes in literature is that of the tragic hero. This trope has appeared in many literary works, especially plays. Many of the greatest plays with this archetype were written by William Shakespeare, an English playwright who profoundly shaped this trope. The best example of his work with a tragic hero archetype is his play Macbeth. The archetype Macbeth perfectly depicts the character arc of a tragic hero in literature and teaches that excessive ambition and pride bring ultimate ruin.
Masculine identity has been constructed and represented in numerous ways in literature throughout the Western literary canon. The representations change based on a plethora of reasons, such as when the text has been written, the audience, or the message the author is trying to convey. Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein differ in many ways, such as narrator frame, tone and writing style. However, they are both narrated from the perspective of men with grand ambitions. In this essay, I will be comparing the construction and representation of masculine identity by analysing the narration, tone and the use of plain direct language vs. figurative language of the texts in reference to the narrators Victor Frankenstein and Benjamin Franklin.
As I have already mentioned, Inigo is one of these characters. Another would be Fezzik. When we first meet him, he seems to be nothing more than a giant who works for an evil man. Though this is somewhat true, our opinion is greatly altered when we learn his backstory. After suffering bullying and a rough childhood of his parents forcing him to fight, Fezzik becomes someone the reader feels a strong compassion for. His love of rhymes makes him much gentler, and his desire to do the right thing and help his friends is quite endearing. All in all, he becomes a character who instead of being a villain, is most definitely a hero.
. “Emerging from these conditions was an assertion of the value of the individual self, an intense concern with the inner workings of the perceiving mind, and an affirmation of emotion and instinct” (Robinson 1). Robinson defined romanticism as the value of the individual self and working with the mind which is what we see with our two male main characters. Nonetheless Poe and Hawthorne were involved with the Dark Romanticism. It has been said that Hawthorne is about morality within his dark romanticism whereas Poe focuses on the psychological aspect of it. “Melville exemplifies the turn in Romanticism that inverts the hero and disavows the quest for unity and understanding, replacing it with a growing recognition of chaos and darkness”
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
The idea for the novel of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came to her one night when she was staying in the company of what has been called ‘her male coterie’, including Lord Byron and her husband, Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley’s whole life seems to have been heavily influenced by men. She idolised her father, William Godwyn, and appears to have spent a good part of her life trying very hard to impress both him and her husband. There seems to have been a distinct lack of female influence, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having died weeks after her birth, being replaced by a neglectful step-mother. These aspects of her life are perhaps evident in her novel. The characters and plot of Frankenstein were perhaps influenced by Shelley’s conflicting feelings about the predominately masculine circle which surrounded her, and perhaps the many masculine traits that we see in novel were based upon those of the male figures in Shelley’s own life. In this essay I will attempt to show some of these traits.
Shelley’s writing was heavily influenced by the artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century in England. One of her most popular novels, Frankenstein, features one of the key aspects of romanticism: the romantic hero. In the excerpt from this novel in Fiero’s The Humanistic Tradition Dr. Frankenstein is shown to possess the qualities of said hero. The plot of Shelly’s Frankenstein highlights the unmanageable quest of Dr. Frankenstein’s attempt to overcome the decaying effect of death. His aspirations and ultimate “failure” are what brand his character the romantic hero of the novel.
In literature, there are two types of heroes, epic and tragic. An epic hero reflects their society’s values, immortalized in the eyes of their people, and shows courage in the face of adverse situations. Achilles is an epic hero because he embodied the honor that was so highly regarded in Greek society, chose to die early in battle and be remembered gloriously rather than living a long anonymous life in his homeland of Pthia, and avenged Patroclus’s death.
Otis Wheeler describes how the surge in sentimental dramas was a direct reaction to the coarse comedies of the Restoration wherein man was depicted as ridiculous and nonsensical. In contrast “the drama of sensibility” was a display of the infinite promise of man. In this way the beginnings of the Cult of Sensibility is inextricably linked to the birth of Romanticism, yet where Romanticism preferred the superfluous and exaggerated the Cult of Sensibility preferred the delicate, softer emotions that would bring people together in harmony. As such it is fair to say that although these two styles were borne of a similar distaste for the neoclassical, they developed into very different types of drama. Romanticism created antagonistic protagonists, such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1962. Print.
For a time, the main characters in a story, poem, or narrative were easily classified as either being a hero or a villain. A hero would be easy to identify by the traits he'd possess, such as bravery, honesty, selflessness, trustworthiness, courage, leadership, and more. The villain would be easy to identify as well, possessing traits such as maliciousness, deceitfulness, immorality, dark, wishing harm upon others, and more. But what if the character lacked the natural heroic qualities but wasn't a villain either? What if the person displayed personality flaws that would traditionally be associated with a villain, but has heroic intentions? These questions were finally answered with the emergence of the anti-hero in literature.