The Byronic Hero Analysis

With the rise of the technological age, sublimation seizes to exist as more people confirm to societal norms that have ‘liquidated’ the divide between the two dimensions of society and high culture. Higher culture is represented by art and philosophy that establish the utopian dimension, in the two-dimensional split. In art, the desire for an idealistic society is sublimated by a representation of that desire. Art creates an acknowledgement of the divide between the two dimensions; these sublimated representations may be positive or negative, or simply different; the common feature however is that they create a metacognitive alertness between the way things actually are and the way they ought to be. In the literature of the past, the eighteenth

Not only is this character found in Byron’s work, but is also modeled in many of his contemporaries and predecessors from Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein to Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights besides many more. This character has become a guideline for the formation of many leading mysterious protagonists. In The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Peter Thorslev describes the Byronic hero as one of the most prominent literary character types of the Romantic

However, the different heroes in Byron’s tales are not interchangeable; they may possess many of the qualities Thorslev attributes, but they are not limited to them. Thorslev also rejects the influence of Byron’s personal life and experiences on the formation of the Byronic hero, believing that ‘Byron did not project life into literature nearly as much as he projected literature into life’ (Thorslev 12). However, even though Byron was certainly influenced by the literature of the time, his personal experiences had a lot to do with the iconic persona he developed. J.D Jump exposes the uncertainties in Thorslev’s generalized description of the Byronic hero. The very phrase the Byronic hero implies that there exists a single character-type to which it can refer. But the hero of the first two cantos of Chile Harold’s Pilgrimage, Jump notes, is distinct from the hero of the Turkish Tales, who is quite unlike the hero of the last two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, who in his turn differs appreciably from the hero of the dramas. (Jump 101) The Byronic hero changes with the change of cultures, which is related to the change in Byron’s nature. As his work and his characters represent a desire for utopia, his actions represent a breach between the two dimensions. As Byron reflects on the need for revolution in the first two Cantos of Childe Harold, he revolts in the Turkish Tales ( ooor The