SOURCE: “Incest, Narcissism and Demonality in Byron's Manfred,” in Mosaic, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 25-38.

[In the following essay, Macdonald theorizes that Manfred is a powerful revision of Goethe's Faust and of the tradition behind it. Macdonald explains that the central act of the poem, the pact with the devil, can be traced to the psychodynamics of incest.]

In 1816, Byron left England forever, his reputation ruined by the collapse of his marriage and the rumors of his affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He went first to Switzerland, where he met the Shelleys and suggested that they all pass the time by writing ghost stories. The most famous fruit of this suggestion was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Byron himself began a story but soon gave it up; it was completed by his personal physician, J. W. Polidori, and eventually published, under Byron's name, as The Vampyre (1819). Byron did not, however, entirely abandon the ghost-story project: later in the summer, after a visit by the Gothic novelist M.G. Lewis, he wrote his “supernatural” tragedy Manfred (1817).

Critics have often been baffled by Manfred, but we cannot say that Byron failed to warn us. He first described it to his publisher as “a kind of poem in dialogue … but of a very wild—metaphysical—and inexplicable kind”: “Almost all the persons—but two or three—are Spirits … the hero [is] a kind of magician who is tormented by a species of remorse—the cause of which is left half unexplained—he wanders about invoking these spirits—which appear to him—& are of no use—he at last goes to the very abode of the Evil principle in propria persona—to evocate a ghost—which appears—& gives him an ambiguous & disagreeable answer …” (Letters 5: 170).

In trying to make sense of such a work, the critics have been surprisingly reluctant to discuss the two most remarkable things about it: its treatment of incest (which accounts for the hero's remorse) and its relation to the Faust tradition (which accounts for the spirits). In the first case, they may have been reluctant to bring in possibly impertinent biographical material, even though Byron was scarcely the only Romantic writer to deal with incest, and his use of the motif does not have to be discussed biographically. In the second case, they may have been put off by Byron's forthright disclaimers, such as: “The devil may take both the Faustus's, German and English—I have taken neither” (Letters 5: 270). He claimed never even to have read Marlowe (Letters 5: 268). Byron did, if only grudgingly, admit to a knowledge of Goethe: “His Faust I never read—for I don't know German—but Matthew Monk Lewis in 1816 … translated most of it to me viva voce—& I was naturally much struck with it” (Letters 7: 113). Byron was also gratified by the review of Manfred that Goethe himself wrote, though he was naturally irritated as well as amused by Goethe's belief that he had committed murder—a belief to which much of Goethe's curious review is devoted.

Despite its indulgence in biographical speculation, Goethe's review does provide an important analysis of Byron's drama as an adaptation of his own: “This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that not one of them remains the same” (qtd. in Butler 58; emphasis mine). In other words, Manfred (as Byron insisted) is not simply taken from Faust. It is a powerful and thorough revision of Goethe's work and of the tradition behind it (including, at whatever remove, Marlowe), just as it is a revision of Prometheus Bound and—as Charles E. Robinson has shown (41-59)—of P. B. Shelley's Alastor.

As a revision, Manfred is perhaps most remarkable in its transformation of the pact with the devil. I propose to follow this transformation inward, from the origins of the pact in cultural history to the “impelling principle” which characterizes Byron's revision of that history; specifically, I wish to argue that this principle, which Goethe called hypochondria and which today would be termed melancholia, is determined by the psychodynamics of incest.

.....

The diabolic pact was essential to the conception of witchcraft set out in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486): “it is necessary that there should be made a contract with the devil, by which contract the witch truly and actually binds herself … to the devil. … For this indeed is the end of all witchcraft; whether it be the casting of spells by a look or by a formula of words or by some other charm, it is all of the devil” (Krämer 7; qtd. in Quaife 22). This criterion ruled out earlier conceptions of magic, as the dismissive final words imply. It was disputed in its turn, for example by the Protestant physician Johann Weyer (1515-88), who argued (in a book that Freud considered one of the ten most important ever written [9: 245]) that such a pact could never be valid, since the Devil, being a spirit, could not ratify it by shaking hands (Quaife 56). The pact was generally accepted, however—by believers and skeptics, Catholics and Protestants—as the defining characteristic of witchcraft. As a pretext for persecution, it was of considerable historical importance. Manfred is not so far removed from this history of persecution as one might suppose: the last legal witch-burning took place in Switzerland in 1782 (Trevor-Roper 169).

Faust entered both popular and high culture in the era of the great witch-hunts, and the various versions of his story usually stress the pact. Marlowe's source, the English Faust-book of 1592, devotes five chapters to the negotiation, drafting, signing and copying of the pact (Palmer 138-45). Dr. Faustus devotes one scene to negotiation (1.3) and another to drafting, signing and reading (2.1), separating them with a comic scene in which Faustus's servant Wagner draws up a parodic pact with another clown (1.4), which helps to emphasize that the Faustian pact is already a blasphemous parody of the Christian covenant (Quaife 54-55). In the first part of Goethe's Faust (1808), Mephistopheles suggests a similar pact; Faust counters the suggestion with his famous wager, which corresponds directly to the wager which God and Mephistopheles have already made in the Prologue in Heaven, and which Mephistopheles accordingly accepts, shaking hands on it (despite the objections of Weyer) and insisting, like a demonic Derridean, that it be put in writing.

Despite all these formalities, the pacts are not binding. Marlowe's Faustus considers repenting immediately after signing his pact; his Good and Bad Angels debate the issue, and Mephostophiles eventually has to enter with Lucifer and Beelzebub to bully him into submission (2.2). Even in the last act, the Old Man urges him to repent, and he considers it so seriously that Mephostophiles not only bullies him again but also, to be on the safe side, distracts him with a vision of Helen of Troy (5.1). In the next scene, when the Scholars urge him to repent and offer to pray for him, he refuses their offer: “Faustus' offence can ne'er be pardoned: the serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus” (5.2.41-42). This refusal, not the pact, is the sin that finally damns him; it is the sin of despair, which, as usual, is linked to that of pride: he considers himself a greater sinner than even Lucifer. Goethe's Faust actually is redeemed in the conclusion to Part II of the drama. Though this section was not published until 1832, eight years after Byron's death, the redemption of Faust is foreshadowed by that of Gretchen in the conclusion to Part I.

Most of the Faustian pacts of English romanticism also contain escape clauses. In The Monk (1796)—by M.G. Lewis, who later translated Faust for Byron—Ambrosio tries to repent after signing his contract: “The Fiend read his intention and prevented it” (441), as if it might have been effective if it had not been prevented. In C. R. Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Melmoth can escape from his pact if he can persuade someone else to sign one. In The Deformed Transformed (1822), Byron's second Faustian drama (or, counting Cain [1821], his third), the hero, Arnold the hunchback, compacts with a diabolical Stranger for the body of Achilles. When Arnold asks if he will have to sign the pact in blood, the Stranger answers: “Not in your own”; when he inquires after the terms of the pact, the Stranger assures him: “You shall have no bond / But your own will, no contract save your deeds” (1.1.148-52; Works 5: 482-83).¹ It is impossible, however, to be sure of the precise significance of these concessions, since the play is unfinished.

The treatment of the pact in Manfred is even more radical than that in The Deformed Transformed. When the infernal Spirit shows up to collect him in the last scene, Manfred does not take advantage of an escape clause to have the pact canceled; he simply denies its existence:

                                                                                                                                            my past power
Was purchased by no compact with thy crew,
But by superior science—penance—daring—
And length of watching—strength of mind—and
                                                                                                                                                      skill
In knowledge of our fathers—when the earth
Saw men and spirits walking side by side,
And gave ye no supremacy. …

(3.4.113-19; cf. 2.2.83-90)

He is appealing, as his reference to the “knowledge of our fathers” implies, to an old conception of magic—the conception that the Malleus Maleficarum had set out to supersede—the conception of magic as a non-diabolic art that manipulated spirits without compacting with them. The medieval magicians who accepted this conception considered themselves good Christians and believed themselves specially hated and feared by devils because of their special powers (Cohn 169-71; Quaife 38). This conception is invoked in The Monk, by the sorceress Matilda: “I saw the Daemon obedient to my orders; I saw him trembling at my frown, and found, that instead of selling my soul to a Master, my courage had purchased for myself a Slave” (268).

The interchange of the roles of master and slave is actually characteristic of the pact Matilda uses it to deny. Goethe's Mephistopheles includes it in the terms of the agreement: “I pledge myself to your service here and will always be at your beck and call. If we meet over there, you can do the same for me” (25). Melmoth spends the whole of Maturin's novel trying to exchange roles—to tempt another as he once was tempted. In The Deformed Transformed, the Stranger apparently initiates a complicated process of interchange by taking possession of Arnold's discarded deformed body; George Steiner has speculated that in the completed play, the Stranger would have tempted Arnold into a second pact to get it back (212; cf. Works 5: 531-33).

Manfred denies such an interchange even more insistently than he does the pact itself. In the last scene, he refuses to acknowledge the infernal Spirit as his master on the grounds that he himself has “commanded / Things of an essence greater far” (3.4.84-85); moreover, he had already referred to the seven Spirits as his “Slaves” in the first scene (1.1.153). He refuses to swear obedience to the Witch of the Alps (who, confusingly, is another spirit, not a witch) for the same reasons, and in nearly the same words: “Obey! and whom? the spirits / Whose presence I command, and be the slave / Of those who served me—Never!” (2.2.158-60).

Manfred later refuses to kneel to Arimanes, the Zoroastrian “Evil principle”—not, in this case, because he has been a master, but because he is already a slave to his own evil. When the spirits threaten to teach him to kneel, he replies:

'Tis taught already;—many a night on the earth,
On the bare ground, have I bow'd down my face,
And strew'd my head with ashes; I have known
The fulness of humiliation, for
I sunk before my vain despair, and knelt
To my own desolation.

(2.4.37-42)

He suggests that he and Arimanes should kneel together to “the overruling Infinite” (2.4.47), but this suggestion that the Master of Evil should confess himself a slave appears to be mere sarcasm. Manfred has already refused the Chamois Hunter's offer to pray for him (2.1.89), as Marlowe's Faustus refused the offer of the Scholars. When the Abbot offers him a reconciliation with heaven, he refuses that too, in a speech of proud despair which, like that of Faustus, likens the speaker to Satan:

Old man! there is no power in holy men,
Nor charm in prayer—nor purifying form
Of penitence—nor outward look—nor fast—
Nor agony—nor, greater than all these,
The innate tortures of that deep despair,
Which is remorse without the fear of hell,
But all in all sufficient to itself
Would make a hell of heaven—can exorcise
From out the unbounded spirit, the quick sense
Of its own sins. …

(3.1.66-75)

Milton's Satan believes that the mind can make a heaven of hell as well as a hell of heaven (Paradise Lost 1.254-55); Manfred is a sounder and more melancholic theologian, but he is equally uncompromising.

Manfred's denial of a pact with the devil is a synecdoche for his refusal of any kind of exchange or interaction with anyone—even with the Chamois Hunter, who does not ask for his obedience, or for anything else. Manfred refuses the Hunter's wine (2.1.17-21), his prayers (89) and finally his guidance (92-94). He also informs the Hunter that he would not exchange roles with him (63-76); the Hunter, who is no fool, has already made it clear that he prefers his own role anyway (38-40).

Manfred has always been like this. As he tells the Witch of the Alps, he has always lacked “sympathy for breathing flesh” (2.2.57). He has always lived in a solitude broken only by his incestuous love for Astarte—if indeed such a love could be said to break his solitude:

She was like me in lineaments—her eyes,
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility—and that I never had.
Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—
I loved her, and destroy'd her!

(2.2.105-17)

The similarities and even the dissimilarities in this catalog suggest that Manfred's love for Astarte was an expression of what Peter L. Thorslev would call his “narcissistic sensibility” (50). Astarte was Manfred's ideal, and Freud has characterized idealizing love as essentially narcissistic: “the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own,” in this case, Astarte's feminine “gentler powers”; “We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism” (18: 112-13). Astarte is what Shelley calls an antitype, “a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness” (6: 202). Sibling incest, as Byron presents it, is a peculiarly convenient trope for this kind of narcissism because—compared to parent-child incest, to homosexuality as Byron understood it, or to conventional sexual relations—it minimizes the differences between the lovers.

Such a conception of incest has complex demonological implications. As Ernest Jones points out, the diabolic pact was often supposed to be ratified not just by shaking hands, but by demonality, sexual intercourse with the devil. Since the devil is a father figure, Jones argues, the pact represented an implicitly incestuous sexuality (199-202); incest was also supposed to be prominent among the activities at the witches' sabbath (Cohn 38, 41, 102, 106). In Manfred, conversely, the explicitly incestuous love of Manfred and Astarte represents an implicit diabolic pact—one between Manfred and himself, or a being all but indistinguishable from himself. Since Astarte helped him in his magical research, he does in a sense owe his powers to this pact. The love of Manfred and Astarte even has overtones of demonality, since the name of the goddess Astarte, travestied in Hebrew as “Ashtaroth,” became the name of a demon. A demon named Ashtaroth actually appears in the first version of Manfred (4: 468).

The conception of magic on which Manfred's triumph depends had been undercut by Aquinas, who argued that even supposedly non-diabolic magicians actually received their powers from an implicit diabolic pact, and that the devils only pretended to be enslaved in order to deceive and damn their supposed enslavers, so that the slaves turned out to be masters after all (Cohn 175; Quaife 39). Marlowe's Faustus stresses that magic is only an art (1.1.47-53, 117, 156), but the First Scholar refers to it as “that damned art” (1.2.29), and Mephostophiles is perfectly willing to reveal the basis of its efficacy:

Fau. Did not my conjuring
speeches raise thee? Speak.
Meph. That was the cause, but yet per accidens:
For when we hear one rack the name of God,
Abjure the scriptures and his saviour Christ,
We fly in hope to get his glorious soul;
Nor will we come unless he use such means
Whereby he is in danger to be damned.
Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring
Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity
And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.

(1.3.45-54)

The conception of magic as an art invoked in The Monk turns out to be equally specious: Matilda, who invokes it, turns out to be a devil in disguise, using it to tempt Ambrosio into an implicit diabolic pact and eventually into an explicit one.

In the first scene of Manfred, shortly before the Seventh Spirit assumes the form of Astarte, it lays claim to an implicit pact, telling Manfred that it has been “Forced [to appear] by a power (which is not thine, / And lent thee but to make thee mine)” (1.1.126-27). This differs from the revelation of Mephostophiles largely because the Seventh Spirit is already a sort of tutelary spirit for Manfred—it rules the star that rules his destiny (1.1.110-11)—so that its relations with him are as incestuous, or specular, as Astarte's. His mastery over it anticipates the mastery over himself that so impresses the evil spirits at the end of the second act (2.4.157-62), and its claim to mastery over Manfred anticipates Manfred's account of his kneeling to his own desolation and despair (2.4.40-42). Manfred's final self-affirmation is also a self-condemnation; it identifies him again with Milton's Satan:

The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time—its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou
couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.

(3.4.129-40)

This may be the most magnificently uncompromising declaration of independence in all of Byron, but it is also the consummation of the curse the Seventh Spirit has placed on Manfred, in the Incantation that closes the first scene: “I call upon thee! and compel / Thyself to be thy proper Hell!” (1.1.250-51).

The hell to which Manfred is condemned bears an uncanny resemblance to the condition Freud calls melancholia, as if to confirm William Patrick Day's hypothesis that the Gothic and the psychoanalytic are, respectively, imaginative and theoretical versions of the same material (179), or Freud's own contention that demonology is a precursor of psychoanalysis (17: 243). Skeptics like Weyer argued that those who confessed to witchcraft actually suffered from melancholy, a disorder which either created hallucinations of witchcraft or allowed demons to implant them in the sufferers (Trevor-Roper 123, 146, 149). According to Freud, the defining characteristics of melancholia are “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (14: 244). The Incantation, which has puzzled critics like Daniel McVeigh because so many of the reproaches it levels at Manfred are so obviously unfair (601-12), corresponds, as Peter J. Manning has pointed out, to the exaggerated self-reproaches typical of melancholia (Byron 78). Even the “Inexplicable stillness” which comes over Manfred an hour before sunset (3.1.7) corresponds to what Freud calls “the amelioration in the condition that takes place towards evening,” an amelioration “which cannot be explained psychogenically” (14: 253).

Freud distinguishes between melancholia and non-pathological mourning: in the former, which typically follows the loss of an ambivalent love, the ego turns on itself its repressed hatred for its lost love-object (14: 250-51). An element of ambivalence may be implied by the repeated antitheses in Manfred's account of Astarte to the Witch of the Alps (between his faults and her virtues, his loving and destroying her) and by his otherwise irrelevant allusion to the conjuration of Eros and Anteros, Love and Love's Contrary, in the same scene (2.2.92-93). Both expressions of Manfred's ambivalence, incest and (in some sense) sororicide, are equally introverted: the one is a turning-inward of Eros, the other of Thanatos. Turned in toward each other, they are like mirror images of each other.

Manfred's implicit pact with Astarte confirms his narcissistic inability to make a pact—or simply to come to terms—with anyone else. From the Lévi-Straussian perspective taken by Alan Richardson, incest excludes Manfred from society, since social life depends on the exchange of women necessitated by the prohibition of incest (751).

From a Lacanian perspective, incest confines Manfred in the Imaginary, the mental register dominated by mirror images of the self. Lacan follows Lévi-Strauss in seeing the realm of linguistic exchange, the Symbolic register, as governed by the prohibition of incest. This is the reason for the special literary status of incest as the unspeakable sin: in a sense, it precludes speech. Lacan refers to it as “the abomination of the Word (verbe) and the desolation of the sinner” (65-66). This formulation, like Manfred's account of kneeling to his own desolation, alludes to the abomination of desolation denounced by the prophet Daniel (11.31, 12.11; cf. Matthew 24.15, Mark 13.14). Daniel is referring to idolatry rather than incest; Byron and Lacan associate incest with idolatry because it confirms the domination of the Image. Byron reinforces the association by giving Astarte the name of an incestuous Canaanite goddess.

To emphasize the unspeakability of incest, Manfred refers to it obsessively, but by aposiopesis—that is, he mentions it by declining to mention it, so that, as Byron said, it is always “left half unexplained.” Manfred is under the equivalent of the “spell of silence” that allegedly prevented some witches from confessing, even under torture (Krämer 102, 227-29). He “cannot utter” what he wants the seven Spirits to help him forget (1.1.138). He breaks off his speech to the vision of Astarte at the end of the scene, and it vanishes (1.1.191). He breaks off his description of himself to the Chamois Hunter (2.1.72-73). He breaks off his account of Astarte to the Witch of the Alps: she was “one who—but of her anon” (2.2.59). He has considerable difficulty in getting to the point in his conversation with the Witch:

	with my knowledge grew
The thirst of knowledge, and the power and joy
Of this most bright intelligence, until—
Witch.	Proceed.
Man.	Oh! I but thus prolonged my words,
Boasting these idle attributes, because
As I approach the core of my heart's grief—
But to my task. I have not named to thee
Father or mother, mistress, friend, or being,
With whom I wore the chain of human ties;
If I had such, they seem'd not such to me—
Yet there was one—
Witch.	Spare not thyself—proceed.
	(2.2.94-104)

In this short exchange, Manfred interrupts himself four times, and his confession of his evasiveness is only a means of prolonging it; the Witch has to urge him on twice. Act 2, scene 4 is taken up largely with his attempts to talk to the phantom of Astarte; in his last long speech in this scene, he says “Hear me” twice (116) and “Speak to me” six times (117, 134, 141, 143, 144, 147). The conversation that follows is hardly an exchange: the phantom does not answer his questions or respond directly to his remarks; it makes an “ambiguous & disagreeable” prophecy which it declines to explain; and after only six lines, it disappears. The other characters also respect the unspeakability of incest. Manfred's servant Manuel refers at one point to “The lady Astarte, his—Hush! who comes here?” (3.3.47).

More conventional Faustian works, which make the pact (rather than the incest) explicit, still sometimes make it unspeakable. In Melmoth the Wanderer, for example, it is “that secret which [is] incommunicable, except in confessing to a priest,” the secrecy of the diabolical pact and of the Catholic confessional being complementary—and perhaps, in the view of the High Calvinist Maturin, not so different (354-55). Melmoth describes himself, much as Manfred and Manuel describe Astarte, in an aposiopesis, as “one who—what withholds me from disclosing all?” (424). The unspeakable also assumes a number of displaced forms in the novel's obsessive use of decayed or censored manuscripts, illegible letters, oaths of silence and speeches choked off by passion. Many of these have to do with the pact, and at least one of them has to do with its mirror image, an archetypal incest, “the impossible crime of violating the mother of God” (226n).

Manfred's relations with inhuman nature are also narcissistic, or Imaginary: he sees himself as “Grey-hair'd with anguish, like these blasted pines,” which is to say that he sees them as images of himself (1.2.66). Consequently, he feels as alienated from nature as he does from humanity:

                                                                                                                                                      My Mother Earth!
And thou fresh breaking Day, and you, ye Mountains,
Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.
And thou, the bright eye of the universe,
That openest over all, and unto all
Art a delight—thou shin'st not on my heart.

(1.2.7-12)

This is the “cessation of interest in the outside world,” the consummation of narcissism, which Freud sees as characteristic of melancholia.

Equally characteristic of melancholia, according to Freud, are Manfred's suicidal tendencies (14: 252); they also represent an introversion of Thanatos even more radical than his mysterious guilt for the death of his sister—which itself, in fact, appears to have been a suicide. Unlike Astarte, however, Manfred finds to his disappointment that “There is a power upon [him] which withholds / And makes it [his] fatality to live” (1.2.23-24; cf. 2.2.135-39). His inability to die is like Cain's; this similarity, along with Astarte's death, seems to be the point of the reference to his “brotherhood of Cain” in the Incantation (1.1.249).

The power which withholds Cain from death is represented by a mark; in the Bible, it is given to him as a favor, because he is afraid that he will be killed for having murdered Abel (Genesis 4.15), but in Byron's Cain, it is laid on him as a punishment, although like Manfred he longs for death (3.1.500; Works 5: 273). In The Monk, Lewis gives a mark like Cain's to the Wandering Jew. Coleridge gives one to Geraldine in “Christabel,” a poem which may have helped to inspire Manfred; it was frequently on Byron's mind in 1816-17, to judge from his repeated references to it (Letters 5: 15, 108, 150, 153, 177, 187, 193, 199, 208).

Such a mark was also supposed to be one of the telltale characteristics of a witch. It was a blasphemous parody of the stigmata of Christ, just as the witch's pact was a parody of the covenant. The witch's mark was often invisible (Geraldine's is only unspeakable; it is “A sight to dream of, not to tell!” [253]). Because it was also numb, however, it could be detected by pricking (Jones 211-12; Quaife 55). If a suspect failed to wince or cry out when pricked, the inquisitors assumed they had found her mark. Manfred's numbness or alienation or cessation of interest in the outside world is a displaced version of the witch's mark, just as the power which withholds him from death is a version of the mark of Cain and his incest is a version of the witch's pact.

Manfred's alienation is finally broken by the Abbot, who unlike the spirits (and unlike most of the historical representatives of his church in their dealings with suspected witches) neither threatens Manfred nor demands his obeisance. The timing of the Abbot's intervention is crucial: Manfred is finally ready for him. The ending of the play has been carefully prepared for—so carefully that without the play's invocation of the Faustian pact, it might seem merely obvious.

Manfred's earlier encounters are all Imaginary, all marked by aposiopesis and all more or less futile, but they are not all the same, as critics from Francis Jeffrey (qtd. in Rutherford 116) to Peter J. Manning (Byron 76) have tended to assume. In the first scene, Manfred is unable even to tell the Spirits what he wants to forget; in his conversation with the Chamois Hunter, he is able at least to mutter darkly about forbidden love and bloodshed (2.1. 24-30); in his conversation with the Witch of the Alps, he is able, with some prompting, to give a fairly coherent account of his love for Astarte; in the court of Arimanes, he is finally able to utter her name (2.4.83) and even to speak to her, however tentatively. At the beginning of the first Act, he is seeking forgetfulness; by the end of the second, he is seeking forgiveness (2.4.153), quite a different thing, as Manning concedes (Byron 81), and no longer a wordless thing. In the third Act, the servant Manuel resorts to aposiopesis (3.3.47); Manfred himself has no further need of it. He is moving out of the wordlessness of the Imaginary into the Symbolic world of communication and exchange.

The Symbolic, according to Lacan, is governed by the Law of the Father (217); by the last scene of the play, as Manning has suggested (Byron 74), Manfred has come to accept this law, the authority of “The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns” (3.4.40-41). It is appropriate that the father figures to whom Manfred does homage should be dead, for “the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, the dead Father” (Lacan 199). Since the lines come at the end of a long meditation on the ruins of the Coliseum, these fathers are not only dead but greatly distanced in time: they do not present a very pressing threat to Manfred's autonomy. Nevertheless, this passage, like his account of kneeling to his own evil (2.4.37-42), does qualify his alienated refusal to do homage to slaves, for these “sovereigns of the spirit” are, paradoxically, Roman gladiators, not Roman emperors: slaves, not masters.

Then the Abbot reappears, a living father figure. Dramatically, his presence at the final encounter between Manfred and the infernal Spirit makes it radically different from the earlier encounters, which have all, as Manning points out, involved only two parties (Byron 83). Even the encounter with the Phantom of Astarte, though embedded in the scene at the court of Arimanes, is not affected by the larger encounter: Manfred, Astarte and the spirits of Arimanes never form a triad. The father, according to Lacan, is the third party who intervenes in the dual, Imaginary relation between mother and child—what Manning calls the wordless dyad (“Don Juan” 211). The Abbot's paternal presence in the last scene confirms Manfred's passage from “the Imaginary dyad” to “the Symbolic triad” (Lacan 217).

It is the presence of an independent third party that enables Manfred to attain his own destiny, to articulate his own self-affirmation and condemnation. Byron thought that “the whole effect & moral of the poem” (Letters 5: 257) depended on Manfred's last line: “Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die” (3.4.151). Earlier in the play, however, death has been not only difficult but impossible. Manfred's last line has a condescending tone which emphasizes the differences between him and the Abbot, but it depends on his second-last, which is also addressed to the Abbot: “Give me thy hand” (3.4.149). He has broken the alienation sealed by the demonic handshake of incest to clasp the hand of another human being. At this point, the Spirit disappears, because, like the other spirits, it is an Imaginary reflection of Manfred's own ego; the power that withholds Manfred from death is withdrawn, because it is a manifestation of his confinement in the Imaginary. When the pact is annulled, the mark is erased.

.....

Manfred's triumph is ambiguous, both a self-affirmation and a self-condemnation, both an expression of human solidarity with the Abbot and an expression of contempt for him. Byron's triumph may be equally ambiguous. His tragedy treats incest with the most rigorous symbolic logic, developing its significance in historical, mythological and linguistic terms—but not in terms of the personal experience that provoked him to take up the theme in the first place. To Joanna E. Rapf, this is admirable: though the “roots” of Byron's treatment of incest “may be autobiographical, its trunk and branches reach towards a universal idea” (641). Jerome J. McGann has described the same process less admiringly: “The poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities” (1). Paradoxically, the bridge that Byron builds between the psychological and the historical, which is the most interesting and original thing about his play, may also be an escape route.

As long as critical studies continue “repudiating the reductive biographical approach”—as Alan Richardson applauds the tendency (738)—they may continue to be in thrall to the Romantic ideology that McGann criticizes. Moreover, psychoanalysis itself may be in thrall to the same ideology if Day is correct in seeing affinities between psychoanalytic theory and Gothic practice. Psychoanalysis has recently been accused of ignoring the “actual human issues” with which it should be concerned: the reality of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Psychoanalytic literary criticism may be vulnerable to the same accusation.

Of course, it would be absurd to argue that Byron should have treated his incestuous theme more frankly, or that he could have published his tragedy if he had. Moreover, my own discussion here has taken the form of ignoring the personal dimension. Having participated in the “universalizing” approach to Manfred, however, I would like to conclude by suggesting that now may be time to return to the autobiographical interest, to dig a little deeper for its roots in Byron's psyche: not only his feelings for his sister but also the still deeper feelings that drove him to such destructive and self-destructive behavior as incest. Byron was unusually self-aware, and unusually frank, even for a major writer, and his life is unusually well documented, even for a celebrity's. The material is there if we have the courage to examine it, and if we do, we may discover a better way of relating his “impelling principles” to a “universal idea.”

Note

1. All quotations from Byron's poetry refer to the McGann edition, with the exception of those parenthetically identified as Works (which refers to the Coleridge edition).

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