SOURCE: Stein, Atara. “‘I Loved Her and Destroyed Her’: Love and Narcissism in Byron's Manfred.” Philological Quarterly 69, no. 2 (spring 1990): 189-215.

[In the following essay, Stein discusses the destructive qualities of Manfred's narcissism and assesses the character's culpability for Astarte's death.]

In Manfred, Byron examines in detail the effects, both positive and negative, of the inevitable narcissism and egotism of the Romantic hero. Manfred is not only the center of his universe, he is his universe, with the surrounding environment and the other characters serving as aspects of his own dominating personality. This is particularly true of Astarte, his lost love; in fact, Byron's placing of the love affair in the distant past places her even more firmly within the province of Manfred's mind alone. Manfred's love for Astarte perfectly exemplifies the concept of love that Shelley presents in his short essay, “On Love”; Astarte is, for Manfred, an idealized version of himself. According to Shelley, love “is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.”¹ Yet, Shelley comments, such an ideal love is ultimately “unattainable” (p. 202).² The lovers' shared qualities and interests make for an apparently perfect relationship. But this ideal relationship ends in the death of one lover and the perpetual guilt and torment of the other. Summarizing the paradox of Romantic depictions of love, Manfred declares, “I loved her, and destroyed her!” (2.2.117).

The lover's narcissistic search for a reflection of himself leads him to a perfect love, one that transcends ordinary human life, but it is this same narcissism that ultimately destroys his loved one.³ In this essay I wish to explore the causes for this ultimate destruction as well as address the question of Manfred's guilt for Astarte's demise. Is he culpable? He has destroyed her, he says, but not through any direct action on his part. I wish to argue, however, that Manfred is directly responsible—for the destruction of Astarte arises naturally and inevitably from Manfred's narcissism. Manfred desires a passive reflection of himself, one who will further his goal of transcendence of the human condition he so despises. When she fails to aid him, and, in fact, tries to humanize him, he must destroy her. For what Manfred particularly fears is domination by a woman; female influence, to him, can only reinforce his humanness and violate his sense of superhuman self-sufficiency. To prevent Astarte from exerting such an influence upon him he must effect her destruction.⁴

Gilbert and Gubar comment that “male-engendered female figures … have incarnated men's ambivalence not only toward female sexuality but toward their own (male) physicality.”⁵ They are referring to male authors, of course, but the Romantic hero, in effect, creates his loved one as an author would a character; she has no existence apart from his narcissistic perception of her as an extension of himself. This is why her sexuality is so threatening; the Romantic hero, such as Manfred, wishes to deny his own physicality, to achieve the ideal. Thus, he is repulsed by female sexuality, and he must avoid contact with it at all costs in order to maintain his transcendent, superhuman condition. For this reason, he wishes to render his lover inaccessible and thus permanently desirable; as Kristeva remarks, “Eros is essentially the desire for what man lacks” (p. 62). As long as his beloved is inaccessible, she can be whatever her lover wants her to be. To use the categories Gilbert and Gubar explore in detail, the Romantic hero desires an “angel,” for she can mirror his aspirations toward the ideal.⁶ At the same time he fears that the angel conceals a “monster” (for he sees humanity as monstrous) who will drag him down into a physical, and thus mortal, state.

Byron's examination of romantic love in this play is but a part of his exploration of the nature of the Romantic hero. He wishes not only to analyze the narcissistic character of his hero, but also to reveal its decidedly mixed effects. He wishes to uncover Manfred's flaws as well as reveal his potential greatness, much as he does in his look at Napoleon in canto 3 of Childe Harold.⁷ However much he admires the “Promethean spark” that characterizes such a hero, he must also indicate the destruction such a hero inevitably unleashes. Byron's portrayal of Manfred, then, is thoroughly ambivalent; with each positive image he presents of his hero, he must counter it with a negative one. Manfred may be, in some ways, a reflection of the author, but he is also a means for Byron to examine the dangers of those aspects of himself or of his public image that Manfred epitomizes. Byron reveals his simultaneously critical and admiring perspective on his hero in his portrayal of Manfred's desire for self-sufficiency and his quest for transcendence; but he particularly develops these themes in his delineation of the destructive nature of narcissistic love.

The opening of the drama sets up Byron's presentation of the paradoxical nature of Manfred's egoistic self-sufficiency. Byron introduces this notion with the setting of the drama and the stage directions “The Scene of the Drama is amongst the Higher Alps,” and the first scene takes place in “a Gothic Gallery” at midnight (1.1). Furthermore, he introduces his hero in the stage directions as “Manfred, alone.” These elements emphasize the isolation into which Byron has placed his hero; Manfred must be physically separate from other men as well as above them in his lofty castle. Yet his apparent self-sufficiency amounts to a self-tormenting solipsism:

My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men.

(1.1.3-8)

For all his powers, Manfred cannot “resist” the pressing of his own thoughts; instead of providing an escape, sleep for him begins an inner “vigil” of self-examination and guilt.⁸ Manfred seems almost surprised that he yet resembles other humans, as if the very grandeur of his grief should render him far superior to “breathing men.” Byron thus promotes the notion of the superiority of the suffering Romantic hero to ordinary human beings.

Throughout the drama, Byron continues to emphasize the paradox of Manfred's pride and self-sufficiency. On the one hand it renders him powerful and enables him to resist any authority imposed on him; on the other hand, it simply increases the intensity of his suffering. He glories in his pride while at the same time revealing the state of continual torment to which it has led him. In refusing to submit to the power of Arimanes and kneel, Manfred declares:

                                                                                                    I have known
The fulness of humiliation—for
I sunk before my vain despair, and knelt
To my own desolation.

(2.4.39-42)

Manfred accepts no authority other than himself, and at the same time he takes full responsibility for his condition. He will submit only to the power his own “despair” and “desolation” have over him; in his solipsistic universe no other power exists. And as we see throughout the drama, no figure is able to assert authority over Manfred. He rejects the authority of the Church as well as the authority of demon who comes to claim him.

While defying the power of the spiritual realm, Manfred is even more contemptuous of his own kind, continually asserting his superiority to and isolation from the rest of humanity:

                                                                                                    From my youth upwards
My Spirit walked not with the souls of men,
Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys—my griefs—my passions—and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh. …
For if the beings of whom I was one,—
Hating to be so,—crossed me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again.

(2.2.50-79)

Manfred wishes to deny his own humanity, yet he realizes that he is formed of the same clay that constitutes other men. In order to maintain his aura of superiority, he must isolate himself from others, insisting that he has nothing in common with them. His ambition, his emotions, and his powers demonstrate his difference from his fellow beings, yet it takes simply a chance encounter with another human to make him feel the utter futility of all his striving. Thus, he must remain isolated in order to avoid the feeling of degradation he gets from contact with other human beings. For all his knowledge and powers, he can remain superior to others only in their absence; his narcissism forces him into isolation so as to allow him to deny his humanness; he must insist “I am not of thine order” (2.1.38), although he realizes this is not the case. Instead of using his powers to benefit his kind, Manfred instead causes destruction, however unintentionally. Ehrstine comments, “in Manfred, the ‘Promethean spark’ of intellect or spirit dehumanizes man, rendering him unfit for other human company” (p. 6). When the Abbot asks, “And why not live and act with other men?” Manfred replies:

Because my nature was averse from life;
And yet not cruel, for I would not make,
But find a desolation. Like the Wind,
The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoom …
Which seeketh not, so that it is not sought,
But being met is deadly,—such hath been
The course of my existence; but there came
Things in my path which are no more.

(3.1.124-35)

Manfred's rejection of mankind has caused him to become destructive, however much against his conscious will. He acknowledges this effect, while denying playing any role in it “there came / Things in my path which are no more.” The verbal flatness of this line shows Manfred's attempt to portray himself as completely passive in his destructive effects. As in his description of Napoleon in canto 3 of Childe Harold, Byron insists on the necessary destructiveness of the prideful and powerful Romantic hero, but Manfred does not realize that the actual desolation that he has caused simply manifests his narcissistic rejection of those beings he encounters, those “things,” as he describes them. Instead of admitting that he destroyed them, he simply notes that they “are no more.” Manfred cannot sustain this isolation, however; as he approaches his death, the final proof of his humanity, he reaches out to the Abbot, saying “Fare thee well— / Give me thy hand” (3.4.148-49). Ultimately he finds a need for human contact, despite his self-imposed isolation and self-proclaimed superiority.

We see this isolation of Manfred's manifested in the setting Byron has chosen for the play; Manfred resides on a high lonely peak in the Alps in a Gothic castle which reinforces the aura of sin around the hero and enhances the sense of his dealings beyond the ordinary human world. And at the same time the grandeur of the setting serves as a parallel to Manfred's image of his own grandeur and superior powers. As his knowledge is great, so must his sufferings take on an epic scale, and Manfred frequently engages in the pathetic fallacy, using the landscape as yet another mirror with which to examine himself. Thus, Byron presents a dual aspect to nature. During act 1, scene 2 the imagery evokes purity and serenity. Manfred desires to succumb to the untouched, virginal beauty of the Jungfrau, describing the “fresh-breaking day” (1.2.8) and the eagle “Whose happy flight is highest into heaven” (31). Yet within the same scene, Byron depicts quite another aspect of nature, old and violent, like

                                                                                                    these blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root.

(66-68)

Manfred projects his passion and guilt outside himself, declaring,

                                                                                                    Ye toppling crages of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'er whelming, come and crush me!

(74-76)

Desiring his own destruction, he calls upon nature's violent elements to act upon his wishes. For he emphasizes the destructive side of nature, even as he celebrates its beauty; thus, the eagle, though beautiful, hunts “prey” to “gorge” her young (33). Manfred is himself a predator, and a powerful one, despite his original good intentions; gazing at the scene outside himself he sees the dominant elements of his own character. In each aspect, beautiful or violent, nature becomes a projection of Manfred's moods as they vary throughout the scene. In itself the scene is neutral, but it varies according to the perspective of the viewer. In this case, the perspective shifts within Manfred himself, depending on the varying predominance of his emotions. David Eggenschwiler remarks, “As the tragic rhythm becomes more dominant, Manfred's view of nature … darkens accordingly. All of nature now seems transformed by Manfred's suffering.”⁹ Immediately before attempting suicide, Manfred sees nature at its most fearsome:

The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned like pebbles.

(85-89)

Nature's hellish appearance becomes a projection of Manfred's frenzied mood. His guilt causes him to see an image of “deep Hell” in the landscape; seeing himself as inevitably damned, Manfred views the scene before him as an image of what lies ahead of him. Again Manfred narcissistically transforms the landscape into a mirror; even when awake, “his eyes but … look within.” Later in the drama, as Manfred tames his emotions with resignation to his fate, he sees nature with less subjective eyes. He says, in a simple and accurate description, “The stars are forth, the moon above the tops / Of the snow-shining mountains” (3.4.1-2). Yet while he can appreciate nature here, instead of viewing it as an emblem of his own destructiveness, he nonetheless continues to see himself in his surroundings:

I linger yet with nature, for the Night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world.

(3-7)

Even in a more peaceful state of mind, Manfred still perceives nature selectively; he feels an affinity with the night because he can transform it into a mirror of his own solitude and desire to escape from the ordinary world.

We see Manfred's employment of the landscape as a mirror particularly as it embodies the conflicting sides of his character. For instance, when Manfred analyzes the condition of mankind as “half dust, half deity,” before attempting suicide, he stands on cliff, on a brink between life and death just as he describes man as being poised precariously on a brink between the two irreconcilable sides of his nature. Given his fundamental alienation from his own kind, Manfred cannot be satisfied with his position on the Chain of Being. He thus reveals his discomfort with his mortal nature, his attempt to transcend it, and his awareness of his inability ultimately to escape it. Manfred cannot accept this fact although he understands it; he remains torn between his earthly nature and the aspiration of his spirit which tries to transcend it:

How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will,
Till our mortality predominates,
And men are—what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other.

(1.2.36-47)

Manfred sees man's two sides as fundamentally irreconcilable, causing a “conflict of its elements.” Thus the passage cites extremes “half dust, half deity,” “sink or soar,” “low wants and lofty will.”¹⁰ Yet Byron's use of alliteration reinforces the notion that these qualities do coexist in one being, mankind, and inability to reconcile them will lead to despair. And ultimately mortality must “predominate”; Manfred's existence revolves around trying to evade that inescapable fact. As Harold Bloom points out, Manfred “desires to sink to destruction, or soar to a still greater destruction, but either way to cease being human.”¹¹ Manfred cannot find a suitable combination of his opposing elements; nor can he gravitate to one or the other, thus “dramatizing what for Byron always was the essential war, the one within man himself.”¹² According to Eggenschwiler, “Manfred cannot renounce his mind, the ‘Promethean spark’ that makes him both a hero and a sufferer; because of his essence and his will, he cannot be reduced to the purposeless clay in which he is imprisoned” (p. 68). He desires to soar, yet cannot prevent himself from sinking, later attempting suicide as if to prove the predominance of mortality. The more earth-bound Chamois Hunter qualifies the grandeur of the occasion, while humorously echoing Manfred's very words, in describing the same basic opposition “Thy mind and body are alike unfit / To trust each other” (2.1.2-3).

In his fundamental dissatisfaction with his human condition, Manfred must try to transcend his position on the Chain of Being. To a degree he succeeds, and therein we see the Promethean side of his character. But he ultimately fails, and like another Romantic icon, Milton's Satan, he creates his own hell within his mind and is the source of his own misery and ultimate destruction. We see the extent of Manfred's powers in his ability to command the spirits. Although human, he has, through sheer will, been able to dominate supernatural beings:

                                                                                          Slaves, scoff not at my will!
The Mind—the Spirit—the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being, is as bright,
Pervading, and far darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours, though cooped in clay!

(1.1.153-57)

Here it seems that Manfred is truly a superior being, with abilities far beyond those of his kind. The spirits come at his bidding and seem willing to cooperate with his desires, for they recognize the extent of his superhuman powers. Ultimately, however, this very ability to command the spirits reveals Manfred's limitations. Although they are willing to obey, the spirits cannot grant Manfred's desire for forgetfulness. The spirits' inability to perform his orders show the boundaries to his superhuman powers; as the Spirit explains, “We can but give thee that which we possess” (1.1.139). Apparently their powers derive from Manfred's own; they cannot give him what he cannot achieve by himself. For all his bluster and his ability to transcend his human position, Manfred cannot get what he most wants. In fact he cannot even accomplish his own suicide; ironically, a far “lesser” man, the simple Chamois Hunter, prevents him. It would seem that this would not be a difficult goal, particularly since Manfred will perish the next day anyway, but Manfred's inability to choose the manner and time of his own death emphasizes his limitations. He dies, but not through his own means. Here again we see Byron's ambivalence toward the very Romantic ideals his hero espouses. His hero must strive to be superhuman, but ultimately he must fail. As one of the Destinies comments,

                                                                                                                                  his sufferings
Have been of an immortal nature—like
Our own; his knowledge and his powers and will,
As far as is compatible with clay,
Which clogs the ethereal essence, have been such
As clay hath seldom borne.

(2.4.54-58)

We see here the limitations Manfred must face; even his superior abilities must be “compatible with clay, / Which clogs the ethereal essence.” However much he tries, he cannot deny his humanity; the more knowledge he attains the more aware he becomes of his limitations.

The conclusion of the drama, which represents Manfred's greatest triumph, the demonstration of his tremendous powers, also reveals what all his powers amount to in the end the ability to die on his own terms. The only reason the demons have no power over Manfred is that they cannot possibly create a level of torture or despair that Manfred has not already achieved on his own. Like Byron's Prometheus, Manfred makes “Death a Victory,” but his triumphant death only serves to emphasize the ultimate failure of his life. The real triumph Manfred attains is the acceptance of his own mortality; in reaching for the Abbot's hand and accepting his own humanity and in remarking “'tis not so difficult to die” (151), Manfred effectively repudiates his earlier self-imposed isolation and his unquenchable desire to transcend his human state. This repudiation was particularly significant to Byron; when the line was omitted in the first edition, Byron declared, “You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking.”¹³ For all his aspiration, his mortality did predominate; on the one hand Byron wishes us to see Manfred's aspiration as noble, but on the other hand he insists that it is ultimately futile.

Not only is such aspiration futile and self-destructive, but it is dangerous to others. For all his initial good intentions, Manfred destroys others as well. He had originally wished to benefit mankind, to use his powers for the common good:

                                        I have had those early visions,
And noble aspirations in my youth,
To make my own the mind of other men,
The enlightener of nations; and to rise
I knew not whither.

(3.1.104-8)

Typical of the Romantic hero, Manfred wished to enlighten mankind and improve their lot; he had revolutionary aspirations. But despite his ability, Manfred could not fulfill this role, for he disdained the very people he meant to assist:

I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway; and soothe, and sue,
And watch all time, and pry into all place,
And be a living Lie, who would become
A mighty thing among the mean—and such
The mass are; I disdained to mingle with
A herd, though to be a leader—and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I.

(3.1.116-23)

Manfred's pride and egotism prevented him from being a leader to mankind. Even as a leader he “disdained to mingle with / A herd,” seeing the “mass” of mankind as “the mean,” and thus below his notice. The egotism of the Byronic hero gets in the way of his initially idealistic and altruistic impulses; his contempt for his fellow creatures forces him to reject the notion of trying to improve their condition. Yet Byron does not simply wish to demonstrate that such men are ultimately unfit to be leaders; they are also dangerous. Manfred comments:

My injuries came down on those who loved me—
On those whom I best loved: I never quelled
An enemy, save in my just defence—
But my embrace was fatal.

(2.1.84-87)

Manfred has very definite moral scruples; he will not even kill an enemy except in self-defense, but he nonetheless destroys those he loves. This destruction is simply the expression of Manfred's egotistical sense of superiority; he could not be satisfied even with those he loved. Ultimately no human being could live up to his expectations for a companion. His frustration and narcissism make him destructive, however unintentionally; essentially he wants to be alone in his lofty position. For any other human being to be able to join him there would remind him of his own humanity that he wishes so strongly to deny.

Manfred, then, presents the paradox of a hero with great talent and ability coupled with a destructive narcissism that prevents him from taking positive actions. For all the powers he has acquired, he has essentially wasted his life, as the Abbot notes:

This should have been a noble creature: he
Hath all the energy which would have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled; as it is,
It is an awful chaos—Light and Darkness—
And mind and dust—and passions and pure thoughts
Mixed, and contending without end or order,—
All dormant or destructive.

(3.1.160-67)

Instead of taking advantage of his energies, Manfred remains in a state of constant inner conflict; since he cannot completely transcend his human side, he refuses any attempt to reconcile “mind and dust.” His spirit and his body as well as his reason and his passions remain in perpetual contention, leaving Manfred essentially unable to function in any effective way. He can summon the spirits, but they cannot fulfill his commands. He can climb to a height inaccessible to all but the best of climbers, but he cannot kill himself there on his own initiative. He has attained superhuman knowledge, but it only brings him sorrow. Thus, our opinion of Manfred must also be mixed; we can admire his power while also realizing its ultimate futility. After he has succeeded in defying Arimanes and summoning the Phantom of Astarte (who, again, fails to provide him with what he wants), Manfred collapses from the ordeal, and two Spirits sum up the essential paradox:

          A Spirit. He is convulsed—This is to be a mortal,
And seek the things beyond mortality.
          Another Spirit. Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes
His torture tributary to his will.
Had he been one of us, he would have made
An awful Spirit.

(2.4.157-62)

The first Spirit offers a skeptical view, expressing the dangers of such aspirations as Manfred's. Manfred's physical being cannot sustain the tremendous mental effort he has made in seeking “the things beyond mortality,” and he succumbs to exhaustion and pain. But as the second Spirit points out, Manfred's will is yet strong enough to enable him to recover quickly. The Spirit pays ultimate tribute to a mortal, commenting that Manfred would be superior even as an immortal. Byron does not in any way indicate that either Spirit expresses the “correct” view; both do so. Or, as James Twitchell points out, “Like a neo-Classicist, Byron has built a very sturdy Chain of Being; but like a Romantic, he has used it not to keep man in his place, but to show there are certain links man can snap and certain links he cannot.”¹⁴ Manfred can transcend his human limitations to a degree, and this ability testifies to the tremendous powers of his will, but ultimately those limitations must defeat him. He can never completely escape his mortality.

But more significant than Manfred's necessary limitations is the very destructiveness of his superhuman aspirations. Byron is not simply concerned that Manfred cannot achieve his ultimate goals, but rather that in the process of trying he destroys both himself and others, particularly his beloved Astarte. It is in his delineation of Manfred's relationship with Astarte that Byron most fully explores the dangers of Romantic narcissism. Manfred can love only an idealized reflection of himself; he destroys Astarte rather than discover her flaws and mortal nature. In this way, he can avoid facing his own. Manfred seeks a mirror of his own best qualities and a vehicle for his search for transcendence. As a human being, Astarte cannot fill the roles Manfred wants her to, and he must destroy her to preserve her in her ideal state. Dead, she can be what he wants her to be, and he can freely imagine her to be the perfect reflection of himself that he desires without her own identity getting in the way.

Manfred's love for Astarte follows exactly the pattern Shelley sets out in “On Love”; Shelley describes the ideal object of love as “not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed; a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul” (p. 202).¹⁵ Manfred similarly objectifies Astarte; she becomes an idealized version of himself whose function is to provide a mirror for Manfred to use to confirm his own goals and desires:

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 softened all, and tempered 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 destroyed her!

(2.2.105-17)

Astarte resembles Manfred closely physically, not simply in the general fashion of a family resemblance, but down to details such as tone of voice; she reflects the “minutest particles” of her lover, but in an idealized form “softened all and tempered into beauty.”¹⁶ Astarte's only differences from Manfred, according to his description, lie in her traditionally feminine qualities: beauty, pity, humility; she embodies, thus, the angel-woman that Gilbert and Gubar analyze. He idealizes her virtues, which “were her own” while ascribing any faults to himself, and in this process of idealization he dehumanizes her, in order to make her into a worthwhile object for his love. He particularly cannot admit the notion that she might have faults of her own and thus not be perfect. Since Manfred so resents his membership in the human race, he cannot see his beloved as an individual human being but rather an “assemblage” of abstract virtues and his own physical features and intellectual concerns. And this is where Astarte's principal significance for Manfred lies. She apparently shares his “lone thoughts,” his search for “hidden knowledge,” and his intellectual ability. Thus, she mirrors her lover in his voluntary isolation from his fellow beings and in his superhuman aspirations. Similarly, the Poet's dream lover in Shelley's Alastor was a poet as well and shared his interests. And in the same manner, Cythna adopts Laon's revolutionary concerns in The Revolt of Islam. An ideal woman, for the Romantic hero, is one who will confirm and assist him in advancing his beliefs. Since he isolates himself from the rest of humankind, he needs some sort of external validation for his thoughts and emotions; he finds a lover, then, who functions as a reflection of himself, not an individual from whom he might acquire different types of knowledge or concerns. In fact, Manfred strongly denies possessing any of Astarte's “feminine” virtues and “gentler powers.” While he influences her, even to the extent of adopting his faults, he cannot allow her to reciprocate and influence him, even in a beneficial manner.¹⁷

Like Laon and Cythna, Manfred and Astarte are brother and sister, and the theme of incest particularly reveals the narcissism of the Romantic hero. According to Peter Thorslev, “if brother-sister incestuous love, then symbolizes perfectly the Romantic hero's narcissistic sensibility, it also symbolizes his intellectual solipsism. For the Romantic hero, as for many Romantic poets, the mind is its own place.”¹⁸ Astarte's familial relationship to Manfred makes his narcissistic objectification of her possible; since she shares his blood, she must also share all other aspects of his being, at least according to his self-centered perceptions.¹⁹ And as in The Revolt of Islam, the brother-sister relationship facilitates the very intensity of the lovers' relationship; they can achieve a total communion because of the closeness they already share. Thus, Manfred asserts that he and Astarte “had one heart / And loved each other as we should not love” (2.1.26-27). But the ultimate destructiveness of their love inheres in the incestuous nature of the relationship itself.²⁰ Manfred, in his guilt, sees “blood upon the brim” of the cup the Chamois Hunter offers him (2.1.21) and declares:

I say 'tis blood—my blood! the pure warm stream
Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love,
And this was shed.

(2.1.24-28)

This passage is significant in its revelation of the results of Manfred's extreme narcissism. Astarte's death was inevitable, for Manfred's image here merges the blood the brother and sister share and the blood that has been shed when Astarte died.²¹ It is as if the fact of Manfred and Astarte's relationship leads inevitably to her destruction, for her death is the ultimate manifestation of Manfred's egotism. Particularly significant is Manfred's use of pronouns. Instead of imagining the blood of his victim on the brim of the cup, Manfred declares, “'tis blood—my blood … / Which ran in the veins of my fathers.” Clearly his destruction of Astarte is a form of suicide; he cannot see her as separate from himself. In effect, he destroys the human side of himself; if Astarte could not serve as the vehicle for his quest for ultimate transcendence in life, Manfred uses her destruction as a means to quell his mortal part and allow him to soar in complete isolation.²² Manfred does not wish to be reminded of his own membership in the human race. His idealization of Astarte basically amounts to a declaration of his own superiority. Yet he fears that Astarte might reveal herself to be merely human after all, which would, of course, reveal the same in regards to himself. But Astarte's death does not free him from his human side either; he must ultimately destroy himself, not a proxy.

We see further evidence of Manfred's narcissism in his assumption that the entire universe revolves around himself. He does not grieve so much for Astarte and her untimely death as for the effects upon him. He has destroyed her, but he nonetheless expects her to sympathize with his troubles:

                                                                                                                        Hear me, hear me—
Astarte! my belovd! speak to me
I have so much endured—so much endure—
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee.

(2.4.116-20)

Seeing the Phantom of Astarte, Manfred evinces no concern for her condition or even curiosity about her state; instead he complains about what he had “endured,” about the extent of his own suffering. He almost resents the fact that she seems unchanged while he has been so much affected by her death. He had intended her to be a mirror of himself, a means to achieve his own goals; instead he remains influenced by her, a fact which is a blow to his sense of total autonomy. Throughout his address to her Manfred cries “Speak to me!” and remains continually frustrated. He insists that he only wants to hear her speak “I live but in the sound—it is thy voice!” But although Astarte does speak and predicts Manfred's imminent death, he remains unsatisfied, and she refuses to say what he wants her [to] say despite his questioning “am I forgiven?” and “Say thou lovest me” (150-54). As he has in life, Manfred uses Astarte here to serve his own ends; he wishes her to assuage his guilt and assure him that her love for him is everlasting. It is perhaps her refusal to fulfill his wishes that causes Manfred to collapse for it clearly reveals to him the limits of his powers.

What this scene reveals, in fact, is that Astarte exists essentially as a projection of Manfred's mind without an independent existence. Before Manfred's encounter with her Phantom, we have seen another instance of the power of his mind to project its visions into the external world. He asks the spirit to appear in the form “As unto him may seem most fitting” (1.1.187), and the spirit appears in Astarte's form. Manfred is fooled by this delusion, as he expects the external world to conform to his desires:

Oh God! if it be thus, and thou
Art not a madness and a mockery,
I yet might be most happy. I will clasp thee,
And we again will be—

(188-91)

Just as the spirits cannot grant Manfred's wishes beyond what he can achieve on his own, they can only appear in the form that exists within his mind. Since Astarte is what he most wants to see, the spirit naturally takes that form. And like the spirits, the Phantom of Astarte is limited in her powers. She cannot grant to Manfred that which he cannot attain himself. He begs her to “forgive” or “condemn” him (2.4.105), but she remains silent, as she does not exist independently of Manfred. She can neither forgive nor condemn him, for he must resolve the issue of his guilt within his own mind. Similarly she cannot declare love for him as he demands at the end of the scene. He does not realize that she has no real existence of her own, and he continually uses the imperative (“Speak to me!” “Say thou lovest me,” etc.), expecting to be able to command her to satisfy him. But she has no power to do so; she is bound by Manfred's own limitations. All she can do is predict his death and serve to remind him of his own mortality. Astarte's appearance as a phantom effectively reveals the results of Manfred's narcissism; during her life he idealized her as a distillation of his best qualities, not an autonomous human being. Dead, she has become a pure abstraction, a dehumanized ghost utterly devoid of human flaws, virtues, or personality. She cannot assist Manfred, but she cannot threaten him either.

And Byron clearly sees women as threatening and potentially “monstrous.” Like Donna Inez, Don Juan's mother, they attempt to assert their will over men, threatening to engulf them and destroy their manhood. We see this fear throughout Don Juan in the array of powerful women Byron has created, women from whom Juan must continually escape. Even Haidée becomes a threatening figure with her possessive attitude towards Juan.²³ Manfred destroys Astarte before she has the chance to become similarly dangerous to him, but we can see Byron's fear of women in his depiction of the Witch of the Alps.²⁴ She elicits a full confession from him of his isolation from mankind and his relationship with Astarte, then volunteers to assist him but only on the condition that he submit himself to her:

                                                                                                                                            if thou
Wilt swear obedience to my will, and do
My bidding, it may help thee to thy wishes.

(2.2.155-57)

On the one hand, the Romantic hero sees women as means to serve his ends; their role is to assist him in achieving his goals. But on the other hand, they threaten his autonomy and affront his pride in their desire to possess him and submerge his will under theirs. Thus, Manfred sees women as potentially engulfing. The Witch appeals to him with her idealized, unearthly beauty, with her “hair of light / And dazzling eyes of glory” (13-14) and her “celestial aspect” (23). But as a femme fatale, she uses her beauty to try to lure him to the destruction of his independence and his will. Her angelic exterior contrasts with the aggressive and seductive monster within. Could Astarte's beauty have similarly concealed a monstrous interior? Could her traditionally feminine virtues and humanizing influence have been a means to drag Manfred down into the mortal state he is trying to transcend? The Witch seems to embody Manfred's fear of what Astarte might have revealed herself to be. He, of course, resists the Witch's demands; she tries to trap him but does not succeed, for Byron must portray men as ultimately more powerful. Thus, Manfred rejects her with contempt:

I will not swear—Obey! and whom? the Spirits
Whose presence I command, and be the slave
Of those who served me—Never!

(158-60)

In this scene Manfred has used the same imperative mode he had with Astarte “Daughter of Air … Come and sit by me!” (127-29). The parallel further demonstrates his attitude toward women as beings to command; he views them merely as mirrors of his own desires and vehicles for his own aspirations. But when they do not function in this manner, they reveal themselves as beings with their own ideas and aspirations, which may differ from his own. To Manfred this notion is profoundly threatening, and his destruction of Astarte effectively forestalls any possibility of her making demands similar to the Witch's. Astarte's death, then, preserves her as Manfred wishes her to be preserved, as his reflection, not an individual being.

Manfred conceives of his relationship with Astarte in ideal terms; in fact, her death prevents the relationship from becoming stale. They had achieved a complete union, as Manfred says, “When we were in our youth, and had one heart” (2.1.26). Manfred and Astarte's familial relationship allows them to reach a far greater closeness than ordinary lovers. Thus, their love attains a superhuman intensity, but it is an intensity humans cannot sustain. Manfred declares,

                                                                                                              Thou lovedst me
Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other—though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved

(2.4.120-23)

In loving “too much” they have brought each other grief, not lasting happiness. And, according to Manfred, it is not the sinfulness of their incestuous love that has destroyed it, but rather the intensity. They aspired toward a transcendent love where they could become one, but their love instead “tortures” and divides them. The sinfulness of it, in fact, contributes to its intensity. By violating society's codes, the lovers isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, that race Manfred so despises, and create their own world in which they are isolated both physically and morally. Manfred's servant remembers them as sharing the same mysterious activities, alone together in a tower which places them above the world that they wish to transcend:

Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower,—
How occupied, we know not, but with him
The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings—her, whom of all earthly things
That lived, the only thing he seemed to love,—
As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do,
The Lady Astarte his——

(3.3.41-47)

Manfred and Astarte must create their own universe, separate from the society they reject and that would only condemn them. Astarte is the only “thing” Manfred can love, for in her resemblance to himself, he can perceive her as a proper companion for his aspirations. He must idealize her, for he could not love an ordinary human being, only a reflection of his own superiority.

Yet even within their isolation, their love ultimately fails. The dangers to their relationship arose not from external pressures, but rather from within. No human being, even Astarte, could live up to Manfred's expectations, and she might have eventually begun to assert her own identity; to avoid any such reminder of her humanness and to preserve her in an ideal state, Manfred must effect her destruction, however indirectly. In his memory he can maintain her under his control and thus remember her as existing solely for him, as an idealized version of himself. In memory she can function more completely as the mirror he desires without any potential flaws or marks of individuality to interfere. Manfred's destruction of Astarte is the ultimate manifestation of his narcissism; as a human being she could not function as the vehicle for his aspirations that he desires. In order to achieve the transcendence he seeks, he must destroy her and preserve her as an abstraction within his own mind, not a fellow human. For any human being, even Astarte, reminds Manfred of his own humanity; to achieve his goals his isolation must be complete. His love for her was actually a hindrance not a help to him, for any human ties would interfere with his attainment of the fullest reach of his powers:

                                                                                                              —Good—or evil—life—
Powers, passions—all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear,
Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes,
Or lurking love of something on the earth.

(1.1.21-27)

Since Astarte's death, Manfred has been able to divest himself completely from human concerns and feelings; they mean nothing to him. Having rid himself of his one tie to humanity, his “lurking love of something on the earth,” he can achieve mastery over the spirits and elements and attain powers that warrant the admiration of supernatural beings.²⁵ The Witch expresses this notion much more explicitly:

                                                                                                                                                      And for this—
A being of the race thou dost despise—
The order, which thine own would rise above,
Mingling with us and ours,—thou dost forego
The gifts of our great knowledge, and shrink'st back
To recreant mortality.

(2.2.121-26)

The Witch resents that Manfred refused the offers of power and longevity the Spirits offered him in favor of a mere human being, but she has in fact expressed Manfred's own earlier attitude, the reason for his destruction of his beloved. She was “a being of the race” he despised, despite his idealized perception of her, and interfered with his pursuits, rather than facilitating them. Much later, when he has realized that his powers have not brought him happiness either, he turns down the offers of the Spirits, but this realization comes too late for Astarte.

No human being could live up to Manfred's ideal, not even one who so resembles himself. In order to maintain his idealized image of Astarte, Manfred must destroy her. While Manfred accepts responsibility for his deeds and admits, “If I had never lived, that which I love / Had still been living” (2.2.192-93) and realizes that he has made Astarte “a sufferer for [his] sins” (196), the reader cannot be sure that Manfred's crimes were as unintentional as he makes them out to be.²⁶ We have only his word for that, but Byron also provides a contradictory voice, the voice of the Incantation:

From thy false tears I did distil
An essence which hath strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatched the snake,
For there it coiled as in a brake;
From thy own lip I drew the charm
Which gave all these their chiefest harm;
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.
By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
By thy unfathomed gulfs of guile,
By that most seeming virtuous eye,
By thy shut soul's hypocrisy;
By the perfection of thine art,
Which passed for human thine own heart;
By thy delight in others' pain,
And in thy brotherhood of Cain
I call upon thee! and compel
Thyself to be thy proper Hell!

(1.2.232-51)

This voice accuses Manfred of committing evil acts deliberately, citing his “delight in others' pain.” This accusation directly contradicts Manfred's claim that he only killed enemies in self-defence (2.1.85-86). The voice also directly compares Manfred to Satan, with his references to the snake and the allusion to Paradise Lost, an allusion Manfred himself makes at two other points in the drama. Byron leaves this voice unidentified; it could be the deceitful voice of the demon who tries to claim Manfred at the end, for it similarly accuses Manfred of evil deeds and motives he denies. But the fact that this voice uses similar language to Manfred's, in the allusion to Milton's Satan, suggests that this might be Manfred's own unconscious speaking. Byron does not make this clear, leaving the readers to draw their own inferences. Regardless of the speaker, the accusations of “guile” and “hypocrisy” have the effect creating doubt in the reader's mind as to Manfred's own proclamations of innocence.²⁷

Byron leaves similarly ambiguous the means of Astarte's destruction. When Manfred declares “I loved her and destroyed her!” and the Witch asks, “With thy hand?” Manfred replies,

Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart;
It gazed on mine, and withered. I have shed
Blood, but not hers—and yet her blood was shed;
I saw—and could not stanch it.

(2.2.117-21)

That gazing on Manfred's heart was sufficient to break Astarte's suggests that the Incantation's characterization of Manfred may be accurate. Byron does not specify exactly what took place, but we can only speculate that Astarte realized the extent of Manfred's narcissism and the ultimate hostility towards her that it would lead him to.²⁸ His quest for perfection, which had to be mirrored in Astarte's own utter flawlessness, necessitated that she be divested of her human qualities and her particular identity to be rendered as an idealized image, an abstraction of Manfred's own desires. While he may not have shed her blood directly, his utter egotism so overwhelmed her that she had no separate existence, and thus no existence outside Manfred's own mind. Astarte, the woman, had to die so that Astarte, the mirror of Manfred, could be the vehicle for his quest for transcendence. No human being could assist him in his aspiration beyond his human state, but Manfred hoped that someone so like himself could. This attempt fails as have Manfred's other attempts to transcend the human sphere. Ultimately, in the moment of his death, he realizes the necessity for human contact and reaches out for the Abbot, although he embodies all the ideas Manfred rejects.

We see, then, in Manfred that while this narcissistic and idealistic brand of love may allow the lovers a brief period of intense and transcendent passion, it inevitably leads to the destruction of both of them. This type of romantic love is inherently destructive of the love object, for she becomes just that, an object, a distillation of her lover's ideals and desires. In Astarte, Manfred sees only the resemblances to himself, coupled with some traditionally feminine qualities of tenderness and pity. These qualities might have served to humanize Manfred, to allow him to attain a true connection with another human being, and it is perhaps those qualities that were so fatal to Astarte. What Manfred wants is not connection with that race he despises, but rather to be elevated above it. In fact, he fears any influence Astarte may have on him, humanizing or otherwise, for he views it as a threat to his self-image and a negation of his will. The narcissistic Romantic hero wishes to project himself on everything around him; he imagines that any external influence will overwhelm his sense of his own identity and reduce him to a merely human state, for he particularly fears that his loved one will make him lose his superhuman abilities and powers. With her death and only with her death, Astarte can become precisely what Manfred desires, “a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness.” Ironically, however, her death does not allow Manfred to attain his aspirations. He has tremendous powers, but as we have seen, they are powers that remain useless to him. In succumbing to his impending death, and accepting his own mortality, Manfred finally achieves a genuine connection with another human being and thus affirms his own humanity. Despite his powers, what Manfred has in common with other humans is his mortality; it is not so difficult for him to die after all.

Notes

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Gordian; London Benn, 1965), 6:201.

2. Julia Kristeva, in her discussion of the neo-Platonic view of erotic love (Tales of Love, tr. Leon S. Roudiez [Columbia U. Press, 1987]), comments that “The feathered Platonic soul gave way to a Plotinian soul bearing a narcissistic mirror. This mini-revolution has bequeathed us a new conception of love—a love centred in the self although drawn toward the ideal Other. This is a love that magnifies the individual as a reflection of the unapproachable Other whom I love and who causes me to be” (p. 59). Similarly to this process, the Romantic hero uses his idealized object of love as a means to magnify himself. As an ideal, she serves as a vehicle for his aspirations. Yet she is an ideal to strive toward only insofar as she reflects her lover's qualities. In the Romantic paradigm, the lover creates the ideal other, not the other way around.

3. Freud's concept of narcissism is apropos here. Quotations are from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, tr. Joan Riviere (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1943). He notes that “narcissism is the libidinal complement of egoism,” remarking that, “A man may be egoistic and at the same time strongly narcissistic …, and this again either in the form taken by the need for direct sexual satisfaction, or in those higher forms of feeling derived from the sexual needs which are commonly called ‘love’” (p. 361). The Romantic hero, who is both egoistic and narcissistic, satisfies his self-interest simultaneously with his libidinal needs by loving a self-projection, which has clearly detrimental effects on both lover and love object. For psychoanalysts such as Heinz Kohut, narcissism is the major psychological malady (Self-Psychology and the Humanities, [New York: Norton, 1985], 97-160).

4. Freud analyzes the idealization of the love object thus “As a rule the sexual object draws to itself a portion of the ego's narcissism, which becomes apparent in what is called the ‘sexual overestimation’ of the object.” He remarks, however, “If to this is added an altruism directed towards the object and derived from the egoism of the lover, the sexual object becomes supreme; it has entirely swallowed up the ego” (p. 362). This is precisely what Manfred dreads; he has idealized or, as Freud would have it, “sexually overestimated” Astarte, but in the process he fears the loss of his own ego—that his love object will dominate him instead of serving as a passive tool of his own needs.

5. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale U. Press, 1979), p. 12.

6. Gilbert and Gubar analyze the complete passivity and selflessness of the “angel,” who ultimately must be dead to fulfill her role “Whether she becomes an objet d'art or a saint, however, it is in the surrender of her self—of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both—that is the beautiful angel-woman's key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven. For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead” (p. 25). By contrast, men fear aggressive, autonomous women as monsters (p. 28).

7. Byron could be describing Manfred in the following lines from Childe Harold:

   But Quiet to quick bosoms is a Hell,
             And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire
             And motion of the Soul which will not dwell
             In its own narrow being, but aspire
             Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
             And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,
             Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
             Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,
   Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

   (3.42)

   Napoleon's aspiration “beyond the fitting medium of desire” is ultimately fatal to him, as it is to all heroes with a similar “fire / And motion of the soul.”

8. For an analysis of Manfred as an ultimately weak character, see Allen Perry Whitmore, in The Major Characters of Lord Byron's Dramas (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974). Taking a different approach, John W. Ehrstine, in The Metaphysics of Byron: A Reading of the Plays (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1976), sees Manfred's problem as fragmentation, noting that “the only integrity, the only unity, Byron thinks one may attain in the universe is within his own mind” (p. 13).

9. David Eggenschwiler, “The Tragic and Comic Rhythms of Manfred,” Studies in Romanticism 13 (1974): 73.

10. For detailed analyses of this passage and Byron's imagery of dust and deity, see B. G. Tandon, The Imagery of Lord Byron's Plays (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1976) and Rolf P. Lessenich, Lord Byron and the Nature of Man (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1978).

11. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Cornell U. Press, 1971), p. 249.

12. Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 251.

13. Letter to Murray, August 12, 1817. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Harvard U. Press, 1976), 5:257.

14. James Twitchell, “The Supernatural Structure of Byron's Manfred,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 15 (1975): 601.

15. For a psychoanalytic reading of Manfred's relationship with Astarte, see Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Wayne State U. Press, 1978). According to Manning, “The crisis at the center of Manfred reaches back to the crisis of separation and individuation. Manfred does not so much seek for Astarte as a separate, independent being as he searches for a state prior to identity, the state in which mother and child form one organic unit. Astarte is an ideal, mirror image, a reflection in which the self can discover and ground itself, or, in this instance more accurately, a vision of wholeness may be imagined by a being in discord. It is clear, however, that in these terms Manfred's quest for Astarte can only be, literally, self-defeating: the symbiotic reunion with Astarte Manfred desires so intensely would be the annulment of his individuality, the death of the self. To end the pain of separate identity is his goal: to fuse with another, or to die, are but different avenues to the same destination” (pp. 83-84).

    I find Manning's approach quite enlightening in terms of its analysis of Manfred's narcissism. On the one hand he desires an intense relationship with an idealized reflection of himself; on the other hand, he fears such a relationship for it would negate his assertion of self. Astarte's role is quite complex, and Manning's focus on the mother-child relationship is, I believe, a difference in emphasis, not in substance, from my own approach.

16. “Love, as everyone will agree, reigns between the two borders of narcissism and idealization. Its Highness the Ego projects and glorifies itself or else shatters into pieces and is engulfed when it admires itself in the mirror of an idealized Other” (Kristeva, p. 6). Astarte is a projection of Manfred's lofty view of himself.

17. David Eggenschwiler offers a suggestive comment on this issue: “he has destroyed the part of himself that would have balanced his aggressive egoism. This theme is presented symbolically through the death of Astarte” (p. 76). He notes, further, “Although the manner of this destruction is vague, the sequence of his narrative and the transition, ‘until,’ imply that in some way his solitary, aggressive self-assertion destroyed her. Since she was like him in appearance and mind but was more gentle, pitying, and tender, she seems … to represent his feminine alter-ego, his anima, his capacity for communion and love” (pp. 76-77). Thus, “his intensely masculine egoism has killed his ability to escape from his selfhood” (p. 77). Viewed from this perspective, it is Astarte's virtues that lead to her destruction, for Manfred's pride and self-sufficiency are crucial to his image of himself. He would not want his egotism to be tempered in any way, for it would interfere with his aspirations and abilities. If anyone could have brought out Manfred's gentler side, it is Astarte, and Manfred wishes to avoid such influence at all costs. Alan Richardson, in “The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic Poetry,” SEL 25 (1985), notes that in “the Romantic age … sympathy and gentleness were still considered qualities belonging to the female nature. Through identification with a female counterpart, the Romantic poet or protagonist could incorporate those qualities into his own being” (p. 748). He argues, “The effective cause of Astarte's obscure death is never revealed, but Manfred's words suggest that his love was itself fated to destroy its object, as its end was not to cherish Astarte, but to assimilate her,” for he “wanted a power tempered by the pity and tenderness embodied for him in Astarte” (p. 751). While I would agree that Manfred sees Astarte as embodying such feminine virtues, I would contend that instead of desiring such qualities, Manfred fears their influence upon him and the resultant diminishing of his powers and sense of self-sufficiency.

18. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., “Incest as Romantic Symbol,” Comparative Literature Studies 2 (1965): 54.

19. While it is hard to imagine that Byron did not have Augusta Leigh in mind when he created the character of Astarte, I think the prevalence of the incest theme and its narcissistic implications in the period are far more significant than the biographical concerns in this work. Thorslev's essay provides a thorough examination of the Romantic attraction to the notion of sibling incest and the solipsism and narcissism it implies. Like Thorslev, James D. Wilson, in The Romantic Heroic Ideal (Louisiana State U. Press, 1982), asserts, “The incestuous attachment highlights the fact that the ideal woman is the male's mirror image, that she depends entirely for her identity upon the narcissistic male. Just as God created man in his own image, so the romantic poet fashions his ideal mate from a Platonic conception of self” (p. 97). Thus, for Byron, while the biographical information is not irrelevant, it is not the most significant influence on the poet's use of the incest theme. In “Byron and the Meaning of Manfred,” Criticism 16 (1974), Stuart Sperry sees “Manfred's infatuation with Astarte” as “the expression of his disastrous love-life as a whole—the compulsive self-destructiveness that characterized all his affairs and even his marriage” (p. 193). Thus, according to Sperry, the guilt he feels results from “the promptings of his own conscience, particularly in the area where he was most susceptible, the area of his sexual and emotional transgressions” (p. 197). This approach is more helpful than singling out the affair with Augusta Leigh. Byron clearly wished to reveal the destructiveness of narcissistic love generally, of which the incest theme is an emblem.

20. See Joanna E. Rapf, “The Byronic Heroine: Incest and the Creative Process,” SEL 21 (1981): 637-45, for a discussion of the self-love of the Byronic hero and the relationship of the theme of incest to the creative process.

21. Tandon states, “Blood is used in two senses: first, in the sense of blood-relation; second, in the sense of bloodshed” (p. 62).

22. Manning notes that “So far from being the cause of Manfred's isolation, Astarte represents his one link with humanity” (p. 79), but this is precisely why Manfred must destroy her.

23. “He was her own, her ocean treasure, cast / Like a rich wreck—her first love and her last” (2.173). Byron's portrayal of Haidée also reveals her threatening nature. He notes that “her eyes / Were black as death” and compares her glance to a snake “who pours his length / And hurls at once his venom and his strength” (2.117). She also resembles her pirate father and wears an expression “Serenely savage”; she is “a Lioness, though tame” (4.44).

24. In Byron and His Fictions, Manning's “psychoanalytically-influenced study of Byron” (p. 11) analyzes Byron's ambivalent attitude toward women in his works in terms of Byron's relationship with his mother and the resulting “conflicts of autonomy versus dependence upon a nurturing female presence” (p. 13). In his analysis of Manfred, he argues, “the core of Manfred's grief is a re-enactment of the child's loss of the all-protective mother. The witch, like Astarte whom she duplicates, is a projection of Manfred's desire for the vanished security of the maternal embrace” (p. 79). At the same time, the witch represents “the threatening implications of the mother figure” (p. 80), for “like the child, he wishes to remain with the mother, but his adult status is predicated precisely on his ability to leave her and establish his independence” (p. 81). Other interpretations of the witch's role do not go as far. Gleckner sees the Witch as an emblem of a “primeval Edenic past” (p. 261). Whitmore asserts that she represents “the beauty of nature” (p. 23); similarly, Sperry sees her as “some Wordsworthian or transcendent spirit of beauty” which he “summarily rejects” (p. 196). Using almost identical language, Ehrstine sees the Witch as “a kind of Wordsworthian, transcendent spirit of nature” (p. 19). While the Witch is clearly associated with the natural setting of the Alps, if she merely represented a type of spirit of nature, it is hard to make sense of the vehemence of Manfred's rejection, particularly considering Manfred's apostrophe to the beauty of Nature in act 3, scene 4. What is significant is that she is the only other female Manfred encounters, other than the Phantom of Astarte, and her association with nature, if anything, serves to make her a maternal figure, which would reinforce Manning's reading.

25. Ehrstine comments that, “The pursuit of knowledge gives him an ideal, a wholeness and integrity by which he can surmount the fragmented world of reality, and overcome self-hood. But like other ideals, it is insufficient because it carries the possibility of another fall within it. One dilemma is that since the joy of this pursuit is possible only apart from people, it separates Manfred from the possibility of human love” (p. 22). Astarte then, instead of serving as a means for Manfred to perfect his abilities, becomes a hindrance: “sexuality carries with it the ‘deadliest sin’; if sexual love is genuine, it brings on man's renewed fall precisely because of its fire and intensity. After all, by her mythical name, Astarte, the earth mother, paradoxically gives life and takes it away. Thus, while sexuality contains a paradox within itself, sexual love also interferes with knowledge as a human pursuit. What more potent way to reduce man to pure clay than by re-absorbing him into it? Hence, for post-lapsarian human nature, love also leads to a perversion and a reduction of human fulfillment” (p. 23).

26. There is a good deal of critical dispute as to the source and nature of Manfred's guilt and whether it is the sin of incest or Astarte's death that tortures him. The cause of Astarte's death is also a matter of dispute. For some representative readings, see Manning, Gleckner, and K. McCormick Luke, “Lord Byron's Manfred: A Study of Alienation from Within,” University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1970).

27. The Incantation has given rise to varying interpretations. For example, see Whitmore, Eggenschwiler, Sperry, and Luke. For a particularly detailed discussion see Daniel M. McVeigh, “Manfred's Curse,” SEL 22 (1982): 601-12. I would argue that Byron meant the Incantation to be ambiguous, just as he leaves the question of Manfred's responsibility for his fate open to question.

28. Manfred does allude to Pausanius who “slew / That which he loved, unknowing what he slew” (2.2.184-85), which may provide a clue as to Astarte's death, for in a parallel situation Cleonice's spirit replies to Pausanius' request for pardon “In words of dubious import, but fulfilled” (p. 191), predicting his imminent death, much as Astarte does Manfred's. Yet, Manfred insists that he did not shed Astarte's blood, merely that it “was shed,” leaving the cause of her apparently violent demise ambiguous. If he did slay her “accidentally,” we may assume that it was an accident that fulfilled his unconscious desires.