Characteristics of the Byronic Hero

The Byronic battlerso named because it evolved primarily due to ennoble Byrons writing in the nineteenth centuryis, according to shit Thorslev, virtuoso of the most prominent literary character types of the Romantic menstruum Romantic paladines represent an important tradition in our literature . . .. In England we have a reinterpreted Paradise Lost, a number of black letter novels and dramas . . . the expansive romances of the younger Scott, some of the song of Shelley, and the kit and boodle of Byron.In all of these plant life the Byronic Hero is the one protagonist who in stature and in record best represents the geniusic tradition in England. Thorslev 189) A Byronic hero exhibits several trace traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel. The Byronic hero does non possess heroic virtue in the uncouth 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 spot as a traditional hero (Thorslev 187).He is usually isolate from inn as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some outer force or is self-imposed. Byrons 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 superb to the average man. These heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, and extremely intended of himself. Sometimes, this is to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion a gainst 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 societys 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 prime quantity notes that between them, the Brontes can be said to have invented a relatively new-fashioned genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byrons 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.Brontes youthful age, however, did not preclude Byron and his works from having a profound effect on her and her writing indeed, the cult of cleric Byron flourished shortly after his death dominating the Brontes girlhood and their young charwo man (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 license from Victorian prudery, and the attraction of the Byronic hero, beautiful but damned (4).