The Byronic Hero

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“. . beautiful, but damned.”

The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both Byron’s life and writings have been considered in different ways to exemplify the type.

The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), and was described by the historian and critic Lord Macaulay as “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection”.

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" (Thorslev 187).

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 character who wandered desolate mountaintops, was physically isolated from society, whereas Childe Harold 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 (Thorslev 197). 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.

Harold Bloom notes that "[b]etween them, the Brontes 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" (1). When Byron died at the age of thirty-six in 1824, Bronte was but eight years old. Bronte'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 Brontes'] girlhood and their young womanhood" (Bloom 2). 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" (4). 2778159_orig.jpg

Source: www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACT

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The Byronic Hero

The early influences of Byronic Heroes can be found in stories like Paradise Lost and even Hamlet. But it wasn’t until Lord Byron’s epic poems that the archetype really found its place in the literary world. The Byronic Hero was named after Lord Byron due to a mixture of his writing as well as his personal life. He was “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” yet his appeal was undeniable. The popularity of this character type continued to grow, becoming immortalized and even more deeply romanticized with characters like Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre or Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. The popularity of this dark, romantic figure hasn’t died since.

Byronic Traits:   Know them, look for them, be wary of them!

A character does not have to possess all of the traits below to be considered a Byronic hero, nor is every character with some of these traits necessarily a Byronic hero. This list gives an overview of the character traits and attitudes typically associated with the Byronic hero.  

DIRECTIONS: For how many of these traits can you find specific examples in Mr. Rochester?  Highlight the traits you’ve noticed. Jot down examples from the text next to these traits you’ve seen in Mr. Rochester. (FYI: Some examples from the text may fit for more than one trait.)

Traits of the Byronic Hero:

  1. A distaste for social institutions and norms  

  1. An exile, an outcast, or an outlaw  

  1. Arrogant  

 

  1. Dedicated to pursuing matters of justice over matters of legality

  1. Emotionally conflicted or moodiness  

  1. High level of intelligence and perception  

  1. Mysterious past, unspecified sin, and suffering

  1. Magnetic, and charismatic

  1. Manipulative: self-serving

  1. Masterful: able to command  

  1. Self-critical and introspective: self-aware

  1. Self-destructive behavior  

  1. Seductive and sexually-appealing (Power of seduction and attraction)

  1. Sophisticated and well-educated  

  1. Struggles with integrity