The Byronic Hero
AP English Literature
Review
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Characteristics of the Byronic hero
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Moody
Passionate
Cruelty
Guilt from past crime
Isolated/alienated
Self-destructive
Arrogant
Intelligent
Cynical
Emotionally conflicted (bipolar disorder)
Heroically defiant
Humanistic opposer of tyranny
A symbol of struggle and hope
What had happened was. . .
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John Milton writes Paradise
Lost, attempting to explain the
way of God to man.
William Blake accuses Milton of
unknowingly belonging to the
devil based on his presentation
of Satan in Paradise Lost.
Milton was concerned that his
“inspiration” would be mistook
for pride; Byron’s inspiration
was both glorious and sinful,
and his creation glorifies
human aspiration
A new and exhilarating fascination
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The Romantics were terribly concerned with the
subject matter of Milton’s poem. They were also
consumed with the myth of Prometheus.
– Bryon writes a poem about Prometheus largely
inspired by Percy Shelley’s poem Prometheus
Unbound.
– Mary Shelley uses the Promethean figure for the
subtitle of her novel.
– The French Revolution, particularly the person of
Napoleon, serves as an inspiration for the Byronic
hero (a sort of Promethean figure himself)
Prometheus Rising
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Romantics such as Byron and Shelley found
Prometheus’s story to be their own.
They equated the Satan in Milton’s vision as a type of
the Promethean figure. . .defiant, angry, and willing to
take on God (or Zeus)
Percy Shelley wrote, of Prometheus, that he was a more
“poetical” character than Satan, and, “as it were, the
type of highest perfection of moral and intellectual
nature.”
– Still, Percy was very much intrigued by Milton’s Satan and
declared him the hero of the story, the moral superior to Milton’s
tyrannical God (though flawed by vengefulness and pride)
– Note: Percy is frequently identified with Victor: “irresponsible,
obsessive, and destructive”—”A Multiplicity of Marys”--Botting
So, what about Lord Byron?
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A beautiful, tortured soul
Born with a physical
deformity of the foot;
some speculated it was a
“cloven” foot.
Byron classified Satan as
a hero, and modeled
many of his characters
after him
– He was equally fascinated
with the story of Cain (who
inspired a poem)
– Many critics believe the
legends of which he wrote
describe him equally well
Satan’s School: The
headmasters
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“The Christians have turned this Serpent into their Devil,
and accommodated the whole story into their new
scheme of sin propitiation.”—Shelley, On the Devil, and
the Devils
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In removing the Devil from the story of man’s fall,
Shelley and Byron remain consistent with actual text of
Genesis, and suggests that man himself, not a demon, is
to blame for his expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
From “Representations of the Devil” Nineteenth-Century
Literature Criticism; Vol 100.
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Byron and Shelley reject Milton’s insistence that the
serpent is the Devil.
Byron’s Cain
if he gives you good—so call him if/
Evil springs from him, do not name it mine./
Till ye know better its true fount; and judge/
Not by words, though of spirits, but the fruits/
Of your existence, such as it must be,/
One good gift has the fatal apple given--/
Your reason;--let it not be over-sway’d”
--Lucifer speaking to Cain
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Byron: “There is little reason to suppose that any
considerable multitude of planets were tenanted
by beings capable of resisting the temptations of
the Devil than ours. But is the Devil, like God,
omnipresent? If so, he interpenetrates God, and
they both exist together.”
Byron’s Lucifer professes himself ready to struggle
against Jehovah throughout the universe over
which they both reign.
Shelley and Byron were infamous
The idea that God and the devil work in
some sort of partnership, God creating
man to be burned by the devil in hell-fire,
is found in both Shelley’s essay On the
Devil, and Devils, and Byron’s Vision of
Judgment, as well as in Cain.
 Their works reveal the desire to subvert
and even poke fun at the orthodox
Christian belief in the archfiend.
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Still. . .
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Neither poet was blinded by Satan’s heroic
nature (in Milton’s poem)
– Shelley wrote: Satan has the “taints of ambition,
envy, revenge, and a desire for personal
aggrandisement” (preface to Prometheus Unbound)
– Byron’s Lucifer professes himself to be unable to love,
and possesses many of the same flaws Shelley
criticizes
– BUT, in refusing to accept man’s blame for the fall,
and arguing against the idea of an omnipotent and
benevolent Jehovah, they express incredibly
irreverent notions, basically letting Satan off the
hook.
So what does this have to do with
Frankenstein?
 The novel comes to represent
Mary’s view of the danger of the
Romantic idealism her hero and
Shelley’s (Satan, Prometheus, and
perhaps himself) fall prey to—
Botting.
A Closing Thought. . .
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From “Frankenstein’s Fallen Angels” by Joyce
Carol Oates
– While Paradise Lost is to Frankenstein’s demon. . .the
picture of an “omnipotent God warring with his
creatures,” Frankenstein is the picture of a finite and
flawed god at war with, and eventually overcome by,
his creation. It is a parable of our time, an enduring
prophecy, a remarkably acute diagnosis of the lethal
nature of denial; denial of responsibility for one’s own
actions, denial of shadow-self locked within
consciousness.
– The Creature says it best: “My form is a filthy type of
yours.”
So. . .
Based on your understanding of Paradise
Lost, which character best represents the
Byronic hero?
 Refusal of subjugation was seen as an
heroic act in itself, and many Romantics
considered Satan to be the hero of
Milton’s epic.
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What would Byron and Shelley think about
man’s fall as the result of his own free
will?
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If one considers Mary Shelley’s literary heritage (her
feminist mother primarily), one cannot overlook that the
inclusion of PL does offer something of a misogynistic
view of women (which may certainly be a comment on
the weaknesses of Milton’s poem)
But Victor brings forth Death on his own, without the
implication of female weaknesses and “guile”
Notice how the women of the novel are relatively “Evelike,” except for they do not contribute to Victor’s
aspirations , and they are all relatively minor characters.
Thus, Shelley allows for a refutation of Milton’s affiliation
of the feminine and the Fall.