SOURCE: Boker, Pamela A. “Byron's Psychic Prometheus: Narcissism and Self-Transformation in the Dramatic Poem Manfred.” Literature and Psychology 38, nos. 1-2 (1992): 1-37.

[In the following essay, Boker suggests that the usual Oedipal reading of Manfred leaves much of the play's complexity unexplained; she offers a reading that also accounts for the protagonist's narcissism.]

I

Since its publication in 1917, Manfred has been viewed by literary scholars as one of the most enigmatic of Byron's works. As recently as 1982, Philip Martin dismissed it as a “very bad drama,” and as one which was “not capable of supporting a psychological or emotional dimension worthy of interest.” Martin's negative valuation is based on his belief that the play reveals “an emotional and intellectual immaturity of the kind usually associated with adolescence” (107,110). Ironically, this observation is also the strongest evidence employed by other critics to support an opposite interpretation: that Manfred's adolescent themes indeed contain a wealth of hidden psychological significance. These studies, however, merely point toward an understanding of this issue, while none yet seem to have uncovered the true nature of the deep, internal struggle of the dark, mysterious character of Manfred.

William Calvert admits that the play effectively “mirrors a storm tossed mind,” caught up in some desperate psychological situation; but he feels the mind of Manfred “gets nowhere,” and the play as a whole offers “no solutions” (139). Of all Byron's critics, Peter Manning has come the closest to elucidating the play psychologically. Manning, however, restricts his interpretation to an Oedipal analysis, and in doing so, I believe, leaves many elements of the drama unaccounted for. He perceives Manfred's grief as a reenactment of the child's loss of the all-protective mother, and suggests that the hero's desire for “forgetfulness” is a longing to undo what he has become by returning to a state prior to identity, that is, to the security of the maternal embrace represented by the female figures in the play. The male characters Manning groups together as representatives of the “paternal hostility” resulting from the child's Oedipal fear of castration by the “threatening father” (13, 83). Perhaps Manning was following up a lead suggested by Freud who concluded in his brief commentary on the play that “the essence and the secret of the whole work lies in—an incestuous relation between a brother and a sister” (“Case of Paranoia” 44). But Freud, like Manning, failed to carry his analysis any further than this, insisting that beyond the issue of incest “our thread breaks off short.” Manning is correct, I believe, in assuming, as Freud, that an Oedipal conflict lies beneath Manfred's anxiety and grief, but this situation accounts for only a relatively small part of the play's psychological complexity.

Left unexplained by Manning are Manfred's active narcissistic traits manifested primarily in the over-valuation of his own mental processes, his severe melancholia which is the impetus from which the drama emanates, his intense display of shame and guilt, the separate, psychological functions of the many spirits and characters in the play, and finally, the mysterious dissolution of the protagonist which is the concluding event of the play. As we will see, these problematic components can be worked out, and the many disparate elements of the play tied together, if we recognize that Manfred is suffering from an ego, or object relation disorder in addition to the libido conflicts observed by Manning. The two primal instincts, which Freud described as the self-preservative or ego instincts, and the sexual or erotic instincts, are ultimately inseparable in a person's psychological development (Ego and Id 129). The psychological meaning of Manfred remarkably begins to unfold once we come to view it as a dynamic interplay of conflicts having to do with both of the primal instincts—the ego and the libidinal. But before we can isolate and begin to connect the separate pieces of the puzzle that make up the play, we must first gain an understanding of Manfred's character, and identify the nature of his pathological condition.

From the point of view of ego psychology it can be readily observed that Manfred's personality disorder is symptomatic of severe narcissism. It will become clear in the course of our analysis that Manfred's narcissism may have resulted from, as Heinz Kohut proposes, the lack of optimal internalization of parental self-objects (117);¹ or, it might be attributed to “the fusion of some aspects of the real self, the ideal self, and the ideal object” which Otto Kernberg asserts results in the condensed grandiose self of the pathological narcissist (279).

“From my youth upwards,” Manfred confesses to the Witch of the Alps:

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;

His “Mother or Father,” in particular, he claims, “seem'd not such to me—” For whatever reason, Manfred clearly lacked “strong positive attachments” to either of his parents, the probable result of which is well known to be associated with a superego and ego ideal deficit in later life, and a fixation at the narcissistic stage due to inadequate identification with and internalization of parental figures (Marcus 182,188). This failure to identify with the parents as “self-objects,” as Steven Marcus explains, “combine in a number of permutations to produce the disorders known as narcissistic personalities” (188).

Characteristic of narcissistic personality types is an overestimation of subjective mental processes, an intensification of the critical conscience, a preference for isolation, a pervading feeling that life is empty and meaningless, a tendency toward incestuous impulses, and a fascination with beauty (Freud, Civilization 32). A large part of the play is in fact taken up with Manfred's extensive poetic exhibition of these character traits. Most outstanding among these is his firm belief in the omnipotence of his “magical” powers of thought, which he acquired in Faustian fashion, as he explains to the Witch of the Alps:

                                                                                I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old-time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space, and the peopled infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,
Such as, before me, did the Magi, and
He who from out their fountain dwellings raised
Eros and Anteros, at Gudara,
As I do thee;—

The “over-valuation of psychical acts,” Freud relates in Totem and Taboo, may be “regarded as an essential component” of narcissistic neuroses, and was the essential psychological state of primitive peoples (89). The animistic phase, in which the subject held an “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world,” corresponds to narcissism both “in its content” and “chronologically” as it occurs during the “stage of object choice” in the development of the child. It is this “belief in the power of words … the art of ‘magic,’” so overtly exhibited in Manfred's behavior, which Freud claims is the key to the narcissist's “grandiose” attitude toward the world (“On Narcissism” 58).

However, to possess the “magic” of words is also the narcissist's “curse,” since words are the means by which his heightened self-consciousness and over-bearing conscience perpetually haunt him. As the strange “voice” reveals to Manfred in its Incantation: “a magic voice and verse / Hath baptized thee with a curse.” As Manfred implies, the power of words is the curse as well as the joyful narcissistic fulfillment of the creative artist, for as Freud pointed out: “In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained and that is in the field of art” (Totem 90). Indeed, Manfred begins the play where the tragedy of Oedipus left off, with the lament first heard by Adam in response to his consciousness of man's “Original” crime: “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of life.”

To return to Manfred's impaired superego formation, we can conclude that without proper identification with his parents, by which he might have suffered the fear of castration, internalized his father's superego, and derived a healthy ego ideal through identification with his mother, Manfred is left in a narcissistic limbo with active incestuous impulses. As Janine Casseguet-Smirgel explains, “he who has not been castrated—who, in other words, has not lost his omnipotence—is incestuous.”² As we have observed thus far, Manfred is suffering from an unresolved Oedipal complex and a superego deficit which seems to have resulted in a fixation at the stage of narcissistic omnipotence.

We can assume that throughout most of his life, Manfred's narcissistic supplies have been adequately provided by his omnipotence of thoughts. However, there is one person with whom Manfred did establish a “human” relationship—his sister, Astarte:

                              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—

In his thorough investigation, Manning convincingly established that Byron experienced an early transference of Oedipal longings from his mother to his sister, Augusta, and that “the fusion of sister and mother” is recognizable in nearly all of his works. Astarte, Manning claims, represents merely another of Byron's maternal/sibling Oedipal figures (68). We will here adopt this assumption and add to it the element of ego-instincts which seem to be equally important in Manfred's choice of his sister as a love object. It is not unusual for a person to choose his sister rather than his mother as an ego ideal. It is in fact often the case that the projection of narcissism onto an object substitutes for the introjection of an idealized parent (Chasseguet-Smirgel 174). In the narcissistic stage, Freud explains, “the subject behaves as though he were in love with himself; his egoistic instincts and his libidinal wishes are not yet separable” (Totem 89). Thus, we may conclude without hesitation from the above passage that Astarte was not only an Oedipal figure, but also a narcissistic object-choice in the formation of Manfred's ego ideal.³

For a healthy ego ideal to be established it has to develop in the direction of abstraction, (by being introjected), and not become fixed to a living person (Chasseguet-Smirgel 174). Nevertheless, Manfred has unfortunately fallen in love with his sister, who is also, as we have seen, his narcissistic “double.” In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud explains that “doubles” are persons who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike. Further, there is a transference of mental processes from one person to the other—called “telepathy” so that “the constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several generations” (39-40). In addition to their obvious physical resemblance and syncronal mental processes, which Manfred himself points out, the “crime” which he has shared with his sister is of course their incestuous love, which is twice surreptitiously admitted to by Manfred in the play, and once nearly spoken of directly by Manfred's servant. There are yet additional reasons why Manfred has chosen his sister as an ideal self-object. When a person of the narcissistic type falls in love he will tend to choose among four types of objects: someone whom he once was, someone whom he would like to be, someone who is much like himself, or someone who was once a part of himself (Freud, “On Narcissism” 81). By choosing his sister Astarte, Manfred has fulfilled all of these criteria for narcissistic object-choice. Operative in the shaping of a person's ego ideal is the concept that: “Although I am not good, I am, at least, able to participate in somebody else's goodness” (Fenichel 500). Astarte, as Manfred admits, represents many positive qualities such as “pity,” “tenderness,” and “humility,” which Manfred felt he himself was lacking. By displacing a part of his narcissism onto Astarte, Manfred has come to idealize her (Freud, “On Narcissism” 74). Consequently, it is on this figure that much of his narcissistic gratification and self-esteem depends.

Thus, Astarte was for Manfred the object of his ego-drives and his erotic wishes. In Kernberg's terms, Manfred has made an “infantile self-investment” in her as an Oedipal mother substitute, and has projected important aspects of his own self onto her, also making her his narcissistic “double” both in his intrapsychic life of object relations and in his use of her for sexual fulfillment (323). His love for his sister is therefore (as Freud distinguished the two types of love relations) of the “narcissistic” or homosexual type, and of the “anaclitic” or “attachment type of love to an object that represents a significant parental image” (Freud in Kernberg 323). In playing the role of both a libidinal and self-object choice, Astarte is thus doubly connected to Manfred's grandiose self in providing him with much needed narcissistic supplies.

We might even propose that because of Manfred's “uncanny” mirroring of his own “magical” mind with that of his sister, and his attempts to raise her at will from the dead, he is exhibiting symptoms not only of simple narcissism but of the most severe type of narcissistic pathology which Kernberg characterizes as—“a profound deterioration of object relations, in which the relation is no longer between self and object but between a primitive, pathological, grandiose self and the temporary projection of that same grandiose self onto objects” (325). Moreover, by fixating on an Oedipal mother-substitute as an actualized love-object, Manfred has unfortunately succeeded in damming up any further working out of his still unresolved Oedipal conflict, first by providing himself with the illusion that he has attained his Oedipal object, and second, by circumventing the need to face the threat of castration by the rival father.⁴

Manfred's choice of his sister as an ego self-object and as a libido-object has placed him in an untenable position with regard to the possible future development of a detached, reality-based superego. In his essay “On Narcissism,” Freud asks the question: “whence does that necessity arise that urges our mental life to pass on beyond the limits of narcissism and to attach the libido to [non-parental] objects?” (66). The answer, he suggests, is when some disruption of the person's narcissistic equilibrium forces a “narcissistic withdrawal of the libido away from its attachments back to the subject's own person,” thereby reactivating the Oedipus-complex, or causing, in Kernberg's terms, a “reactivation of past internal relationships” (258). Once such regression occurs, the parental object may be desexualized and the opportunity to erect the absent incest barrier is reintroduced. Thus, if Manfred is ever to resolve his ego and libido conflicts, he must in some way experience the anxiety resulting from a severe disruption of his ego's narcissistic equilibrium (Simmel 160). Freud explains this process as follows:

First there existed an object-choice, the libido had attached itself to a certain person; then owing real injury or disappointment concerned with the loved person, this object-relationship was undermined.

(“Mourning and Melancholia” 169)

For Manfred this precise event of undermining occurred with the death of his sister, Astarte. The main prerequisite for this neurotic response, however, is that the object-choice originally made was done so on a narcissistic basis, so that a complete regression to primary narcissism is the inevitable result of mourning.⁵ In the case of Manfred's choice of Astarte as a love-object, this connection has been firmly established. It is this experience of loss which I believe activated his narcissistic neurosis, set the play in motion, and now directs the action throughout. It also explains Manfred's “half-mad” state of mind as one of a man suddenly plunged into a state of mourning and melancholia.

The play Manfred, is thus analogous to Hamlet, which Jacques Lacan astutely identified as “a drama about the destruction and loss of the object” (23). But unlike Hamlet, who fails to resolve his Oedipal conflict once given the opportunity to return to it through the loss of the object, Manfred succeeds, as we will see, in acting out the conflict fully and is able in the end to replace it with a healthy superego, thus paving the way toward his further development as a full moral and social being (Marcus 171). The “hidden key to the humanization of sexuality,” Lacan concludes in his essay on Hamlet, is “punishment, sanction, and castration” (43), all of which, as we will see, Manfred will successfully accomplish in the course of the play through a complete working-through of the process of mourning.

The distinguishing characteristics of mourning, Freud tells us, are dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, sleeplessness, inability to love, lowering of self-esteem, self-reproach and self-reviling, an extension of self-criticism over one's whole past, delusional expectations of punishment, and a “remarkable overthrow of life-clinging instincts” (“Mourning” 165-167). Let us now look at the evidence in the play itself to support the assumptions we have made regarding Manfred's melancholy and narcissistic state of mind, which it seems has become activated by his experience of loss.

After the loss of the loved one, the person establishes identification of his ego with the abandoned object. The self-reproaches of the bereaved are actually reproaches against the loved object which have been shifted onto the person's own ego. This dissatisfaction with the self, Freud explains, “is far the most outstanding feature” of the melancholia resulting from mourning (“Mourning” 169). When the play begins, Manfred is passing another sleepless night plagued by acute self-conscious remorse:

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 close
To look within …

All interest in the outside world has been abandoned, and Manfred is beset by an apathy and morbidity of thought reminiscent of the suffering of Oedipus in response to the conscious awareness of his irremediable and unspeakable crime. In his initial, expository speech, Manfred exclaims:

                                                            —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.

As he says, Manfred seeks only for “Oblivion, self oblivion—” But it is not clear whether the suffering Manfred is experiencing is a manifestation of guilt, shame, or remorse. Guilt, says Freud, is usually “present prior to transgression” (“Some Character Types” 179). Since Manfred has acted out his “crime” by committing incest with his sister, we can assume that what he is experiencing is primarily a sense of remorse, which Freud maintains is a “term for the ego's reaction to a sense of guilt,” and which he states, “should be reserved for the reaction after an act of aggression has actually been carried out” (Civilization 94). Remorse, he adds, “is itself a punishment and can include a need for punishment,” and as Manfred readily admits, he is eager for any form of punishment that the characters he confronts in his drama can provide. “Have I sinned / Against your ordinances?” he asks the Abbot: “Prove and punish!”

Furthermore, shame, unlike guilt, is linked to narcissism (Chasseguet-Smirgel 149). It is a consequence of the loss of love, “when love is food for narcissism,” and it is certainly this event that is predominant in Manfred's experience. When he has called up the phantom of Astarte, the symptoms he exhibits are those of shame in that he is unable to face her or speak to her directly: “Oh God! that I should dread / To look upon the same—Astarte!—No, / I cannot speak to her—but bid her speak—” What Manfred desires above all is “Oblivion”—to disappear; and when he does “expire” at the end of the play, it is not so much the result of killing himself as it is the fulfillment of his wish simply to “undo” himself. According to Chasseguet-Smirgel, a person who experiences shame says, in effect, “I wished the ground could have swallowed me up; I wished I could have vanished.”⁶ This impulse is a particularly accurate description of Manfred's dissolution at the end of the play.

The most outstanding manifestation of Manfred's experience of loss, aside from his self-imposed isolation and sense of self-reproach, is his increased feelings of the omnipotence of his thoughts. This symptom, we may assume, is a consequence of his augmented narcissism resulting from the regressive re-establishment of original, infantile omnipotence which Freud tells us must inevitably occur in response to the loss of a narcissistically chosen love-object. With the experience of his loss and resultant augmented narcissism, Manfred's animistic stage of development has been re-activated, and in keeping with Freud's description of the primitive man, Manfred wants “to alter the whole face of the earth in order to satisfy his wishes” (Totem 84). Manfred's omnipotence of thoughts appropriately correspond to the primary dramatic technique which impels the action throughout the play. To each of the spirits Manfred has merely to exclaim: “I do compel ye to my will—Appear!” and each in turn appears before him. In complete deference the first spirit responds: “To thine aduration bow'd / Mortal—be they wish avow'd!” The third replies, “To the spirit of Ocean / Thy wishes unfold!” And the fourth similarly submits with the words: “Thy spell hath subdued me, / Thy will be my guide!” Manfred wishes to erase an aspect of reality from his consciousness, and at this point believes that through his omnipotence of thoughts he will be able to reorder the world such that the event over which he feels remorse might seem to him never to have happened.

Although Manfred must eventually repudiate his own narcissistic powers in order to establish a reality-based superego, he will use them in the course of the Acts I and II to work through the component elements of his Oedipus-complex which is the essential precondition for the internalization of the later superego (Kernberg 285). The megalomaniac characteristics of neurotic narcissists, Freud explains—of which the omnipotence of thoughts if foremost—permits an “internal working-over of the libido which has returned to the ego to be made”; and he adds, it is “a matter of indifference whether the objects of this internal process of ‘working-over’ are real or imaginary” (“On Narcissism” 67). For the pathological narcissist, internal working-over of existing conflicts is the only available path toward health, since the “intrapsychic world of these patients,” Kernberg explains, “is populated only by their own grandiose self, by devaluated, shadowy images of self and others” (282). All of the characters in Manfred's drama, we may therefore conclude, are imaginative projections of the active principles which play a vital role in his internal conflicts. Kohut as well believes that decisive, therapeutic results in the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personalities can be achieved only by a working out of conflicts “within the narcissistic realm” (Kohut in Kernberg 285).

II

As we will see, each character and spirit in the drama plays a crucial role in the self-designed resolution of Manfred's hitherto unresolved Oedipus complex and its resultant narcissistic disorder. Through his interaction with the Seven Spirits, Manfred will repudiate his own narcissistic omnipotence and in effect force upon himself a replacement of the pleasure principle with the reality principle. He will give up his identification with the mother by refusing to submit to the Witch of the Alps, and encounter his previously by-passed castration threat by confronting and breaking away from the paternal Chamois Hunter. His rejection of the phantom of Astarte will force a desexualization of his once dearly-held ideal, and sever him at last from this narcissistic “double.” Further, he will come to acknowledge his protective superego represented by the Abbot, internalize his redemptive powers, and reject once and for all the external manifestation of his punitive superego which is the final “evil spirit” Manfred confronts at the end of the play. Whatever hope we have for Manfred's establishment of a higher moral and socially positive superego subsequent to the conclusion of the play itself, rests on the hints we get regarding its possible nature through the strange historical-sublime reveries which Manfred falls into during the final act.

In Act I, Manfred exhausts every magical power that his “nights” of study in “sciences untaught” had won for him in an effort to attain the “forgetfulness” of the past—“Of that which is within” him—that he so strongly desires. The spirits, however, are “powers of the air” and for them: “the past / Is, as the future, present.” Manfred realizes here, possibly for the first time, that his psychic powers cannot undo a physical reality, and he concludes:

                              The spirits I have raised abandon me—
The spells which I have studied baffle me—
The remedy I reck'd of tortured me;
I lean no more on super-human aid,
It hath no power upon the past, and for
The future, till the past be gulf'd in darkness,
It is not my search.

What on the surface appears to be an existential desire for self-negation is merely a superficial symptom of Manfred's need to put his infantile instincts behind him by sublimating his Oedipal parents and thereby opening the way for the development of his superego and the re-establishment of a non-sexualized ego ideal. Before we meet Manfred at the beginning of the play, he has maintained his happiness entirely by way of phantasy through his omnipotent mental powers, and insulated himself from reality through his self-imposed isolation. Just as all psychic conflicts are based in physical, biological realities, and ultimately must be accepted as such, Manfred's escape into fantasy is doomed to failure. Through his frustrating confrontation with the Seven Spirits, he realizes that his narcissistic, artistic powers have finally failed him, as Freud predicts they inevitably must:

… one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusions.

(Civilization 30)

When Manfred sees that the Seven Spirits are incapable of granting him “Forgetfulness,” or relief of any kind, from the remorse he feels over his “bodily” crime, he admits to himself at last that “—my sciences, / My long pursued and super-human art, / Is mortal here.” And although he still longs to be “A living voice, a breathing harmony,” he is forced to realize here that he is merely “A Child of Clay”—a mortal being in a real and palpable world.

With the exception of Manfred, the Chamois Hunter, I believe, is by far the most complex symbolic figure in the drama. He has been referred to by some critics as a kindly superego, and by others as a hostile father figure. Both descriptions, I believe, are accurate to some degree. Before the Oedipus complex can be replaced by its healthy heir—the superego—it must, as Freud symbolically states, be “smashed to pieces by the shock of threatened castration” (Freud in Marcus 175). Narcissistic aggrandizement is frequently a defense used by the neurotic to ward off castration fear (Chasseguet-Smirgel 112). But in his recent confrontation with the Seven Spirits, Manfred's narcissistic powers of omnipotence have suffered a severe blow from the reality principle, and he has recognized the fraudulence of his grandiose, imaginative defense against physical reality. Immediately following this encounter, he meets the Chamois Hunter in the mountains.

The meaning of this mysterious character in terms of Manfred's drama will be easier to decipher if we turn to the hidden resources which language so frequently provides. The “chamois” is a mountain goat indigenous to the higher Alps region. It is known for its nimbleness of gait and is hunted for its soft leather hide. The word itself is often spelled “shamois” or “shammy” which in French or English can readily be turned round to reveal: “shame-mine” or “my shame.” The German word for hunting is hatzen, which is a derivative of Hass, meaning “hatred.” Hunting, as we know, is the pursuit of an animal for the purpose of killing and devouring it. With these derivations in mind, we can see the Chamois Hunter as the “shame-hater” or “shame-devourer,” which is, of course, the definition of the guilt-seeking “conscience.”

If we continue this linguistic investigation a step farther, it becomes of interest to note that between Sham (“a trick, hoax, fraud, imposture”), and Shame (“the painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonoring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances”; also from the Germanic hamo, clothing, and Old English hemethe, a shirt, chemise) in the Oxford English Dictionary, we have the words: Shama (an Indian songbird); Shaman or Shamanism (“the primitive religion of the Ural-Altaic peoples of Siberia, in which all the good and evil of life are thought to be brought about by spirits which can be influenced only by the high priest or Shaman”); and Shamble (1. “place where meat is sold”; “a flesh-or meat-market”, “a slaughter-house”; and, 2. “to go with an awkward ungainly gait,” “an awkward motion in walking or progression”).

All of the concepts which these words represent, it is interesting to note, are of vital concern to Manfred in his struggle to free himself from the Oedipal conflict with his father, symbolized in the play by the elderly Chamois Hunter; although in retrospect it is impossible to establish with certainty the extent to which Byron was familiar with or even consciously aware of the linguistic connection of these analytically relevant concepts with the word “shame.” That Byron, crippled since birth with a congenital club-foot, and forced to walk with a “shamble” all his life, placed Manfred in the role of the chamois with her “nimble feet” pursued by the experienced Hunter for its skin, or hide, is certainly no coincidence, but a wish fulfilled in “song” by the poet's magical or “Shamanistic” powers of omnipotence of thought. Byron assuredly felt an acute sense of masculine inferiority from his physical defect, confessing to his wife that “he had often wished to revenge himself on Heaven” for his “little foot” (Marchand, A Portrait, 93). And surely this sense of inferiority played a significant role, whether conscious or unconscious, in his Oedipal contest with his rival father.

To return to the poem, before Manfred notices the presence of the Chamois Hunter, he is wishing himself to be an old man—“Grey-hair'd” as the winter pines and “furrow'd o'er / With wrinkles.” “To be thus—” as he says, is also to be as impotent as are these “branchless,” “blasted pines,”: “A blighted trunk upon a cursed root.” The Hunter, meanwhile, who is returning from an unsuccessful day at the hunt, (and evidently frustrated as a result), quietly approaches from behind as Manfred is entreating the “toppling crags of ice! / Ye avalanches … In mountainous o'erwhelming” to “come and crush me—” But they fail to serve him in this way and so he resolves to “plunge” himself “upon the rocks.” Through death, Manfred might instinctually be seeking the “shortest route to achieving the ever-longed-for satisfaction”—the return to the mother's womb, which Manfred here says would be “a fitting tomb” for him. But just as he is about to execute this longed for union, the Chamois Hunter foils his plan and (as the stage direction indicates) “seizes and retains him with a sudden grasp,” exclaiming:

                    Hold madman!—though aweary of thy life,
Stain not our pure vales with thy guilty blood.—
Away with me—I will not quit my hold.

To this Manfred replies:

                    I am most sick at heart—nay, grasp me not—
I am all feebleness—the mountains whirl
Spinning around me—I grow blind—What art thou?

“I'll answer that anon.” the hunter responds; and he orders Manfred to “now lean on me— … take this staff, and cling / A moment to that shrub— … hold fast by my girdle.” This Manfred does and submissively allows himself to be led away.

So ends the first ordeal in the “feeble” boy's contest with his “shamehunter.” His incestuous desires have been found out; he has been restrained by the stronger parental figure from attaining the union he so desired, and like Oedipus, is made blind by the consciousness of his act. In The Ego and the Id Freud maintains that “the fear of death” is linked to “the fear of conscience” in that both can be regarded as “a development of the fear of castration” (45):

The superior being, which turned into the ego ideal, once threatened castration, and this dread of castration is probably the nucleus round which the subsequent fear of conscience has gathered; it is this dread that persists as the fear of conscience.

(Ego and Id 47)

Whether the Chamois Hunter is a projection of Manfred's superego which saves him from death because of his unconscious fear of it, or whether he is Manfred's “shame-hater” or conscience which “catches” him before he can escape into restful self-annihilation, the resultant interpretation is the same: Manfred has experienced the threat of castration which Freud has many times confirmed is so decisive an event for the demolition of the Oedipus-complex and the subject's subsequent development (Lacan 46).

The confrontation with the Chamois Hunter is not yet over, however. Back in his Chalet the Hunter warns Manfred: “—thou must not yet go forth: / Thy mind and body are alike unfit.” But now, having matured through his experience of the threat of castration, Manfred feels certain that he is fit to assert his masculine independence from the hunter-father and set out into the world on his own: “I do know / My route full well, and need no further guidance.” Still, the Chamois Hunter is not ready to let Manfred go, and tempts him with the offer to “Come, taste my wine; / 'Tis of an ancient vintage; many a day / 'T has thawed my veins … Come, pledge me fairly.” But to Manfred this pledge of bodily communion brings back the guilt of his incestuous, Oedipal crime with his sister-mother, and reminiscent of the words of Lady Macbeth cries:

                    Away, Away! there's blood upon the brim!
Will it then never—never sink in the earth?
.....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,

What Manfred perceives is not a cup of wine being offered him but the conspiratorial designs of the castrating father to solidify the “intense object-cathexis” which the child has formed towards its parents. This fear of castration, Freud claims “has not been inappropriately compared with the oral cannibalistic incorporation of another person” (Simmel 187). The cannibalistic image of this temptation scene points again to the “shamble” or “slaughter-house” so closely aligned to the word “shame” and the role of the “shame-hater” in Manfred's Oedipal fantasy.

Echoing now another of Shakespeare's characters—this time Queen Gertrude as she responds to the guilt-ridden Hamlet—the Chamois Hunter says:

Man of strange words, and some half-maddening sin,
Which makes thee people vacancy, …

“I am not of thine order.” replies Manfred in defiance. Again the Chamois Hunter tries to assert his superiority over the young man: “I am thine elder far” claims the hunter-father, and he asks Manfred the decisive question: “And would'st thou then exchange thy lot for mine?” By this time, however, Manfred has fully awakened to the nature of his confrontation with the Hunter and is ready to sublimate his aggressive instincts to a higher moral will. He replies:

          No friend! I would not wrong thee, nor exchange
My lot with living being: I can bear—
However wretchedly, 'tis still to bear—
In life what others could not brook to dream,
But perish in their slumber.

With the Hunter's parting words—“restore thee to thyself”—Manfred departs. “Follow me not—” he orders the elder, “I know my path—the mountain peril's past;— / And once again, I charge thee, follow not!” With Manfred's final but not unfriendly repudiation of the Chamois Hunter, we can conclude that another decisive desexualization of a part of Manfred's Oedipal conflict has been accomplished.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud contends that: “Along with the demolition of the Oedipus-complex, the boy's object-cathexis of his mother must be given up” (22). This action is symbolically accomplished by Manfred through his consummate rejection of the offer made to him by the Witch of the Alps to grant him his wish of “Oblivion” under the condition that he “swear obedience” to her will.

In his in-depth study of Byron's Oedipal conflict with his mother, Manning asserts that the Witch represents Manfred's “desire for the vanished security of the maternal embrace” (79). Despite the biographical information which Manning brought to bear on his interpretation, the maternal images in Manfred's adjuration by which he conjured up the Witch of the Alps are sufficient by themselves to warrant Manning's conclusions. The phrases, “sleeping infant's cheek,” “mother's heart,” and “serenity of soul,” combined with Manfred's hope that she will grant “pardon to a Son,” point toward a suitable casting of Manfred in the role of Son, and the Witch in the role of Mother. The Witch's initial exclamation of “Son of Earth! I know thee …” indicates that she is willing to reciprocate in his projected Oedipal drama. Manning is therefore correct, I believe, in assuming that in order for Manfred to “move into the world of men,” he must reject this figure of the temptress mother, (79). This Manfred swiftly accomplishes by defiantly renouncing the Witch with the words: “I will not swear—Never!” and casting her off with the final command—“Retire!”

Kernberg has determined that in order to work through the defensive organization of pathological narcissism, the subject's oral conflicts must come to the surface and he must experience the intense hatred and fear of the dangerous, aggressive mother (257). The mother-spirit of the Alps is clearly perceived by Manfred as a menacing figure. His recognition of her as a “Witch,” and his repudiation of her, represent a critical gesture in his progression into adulthood.

Astarte, as we have already established, was Manfred's narcissistically chosen love-object. She therefore largely comprised what little ego ideal Manfred possessed; and in this capacity she played a major role in the maintenance of his narcissistic equilibrium. In melancholia, the ego of the person suffering loss establishes identification with the abandoned object and experiences a sense of “self-loss” or impoverishment within his own ego. In addition, the conflict between the ego and the loved person becomes a cleavage between the criticizing faculty of the ego, and the ego now altered by identification (Freud, “Mourning” 170). Manfred's narcissism is again evidenced in his reaction to the death of his sister. He shows little empathy for his dead sister, but responds to her death only in so far as it reflects his own pathology. He is more eager to obtain forgiveness and love from her than to express any sorrow he might feel in response to losing her.

Before her death, Astarte was Manfred's narcissistically chosen “double,” and as such, probably acted as his “observing and criticizing” conscience, which Freud described as that “faculty” available to man “by which he is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object” (Freud, “Uncanny” 40). Because she was a “real,” external object, however, Manfred was able to assign to her the separate traits of “tenderness” and “goodness,” and so had no reason to fear her harsh critical judgments. Now, as a part of his own ego, she has turned against him with sadistic fury. The enormous pressure now placed upon Manfred's ego from his internalized superego results in a strong need for punishment. As Otto Fenichel explains, this “punishment longed for is a means of achieving forgiveness; the individual in question certainly would prefer it if they could achieve forgiveness without first undergoing punishment” (138).

Manfred's first words to the phantom of Astarte are therefore typical: “Forgive me or condemn me.” But she is silent, and Manfred must assume, as he then says, that “in that silence I am more than answered.” He asks again, however, but is again denied forgiveness. The request itself, as Fenichel explains, was futile from the start:

The intended forgiveness [from the superego] cannot be achieved because the courted part of the personality, through the regression, has become inordinately cruel and has lost the ability to forgive.

(400)

With no aid forthcoming either from an external or introjected agency, Manfred is forced to realize that he has been left entirely to his own resources. His ego has two possible recourses at this point: it may feel there is no hope of ever regaining the lost self-esteem, and as Freud says, see “itself deserted by its superego and let itself die”; or, it may find a way to restore its source of self-esteem and rebel against the harsh superego (Freud, Ego and Id 48). We must wait to see what Manfred's ego can contrive for itself by way of achieving sanction and renewed narcissistic supplies. The only clue we get in the encounter with Astarte is Manfred's behavior following the disappearance of his sister's phantom. At first Nemesis believes Manfred is a broken, “convulsed” mortal; but suddenly one spirit observes: “Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes / His torture tributary to his will.”

Manfred has emerged from this exhausting series of failures and rejections in Acts I and II with a depleted ego but a staunch will. Most importantly, he has responded to the reactivation of his Oedipus-complex with the successful desexualization—or deflection from direct sexual aims—of both parental figures. And his loss of Astarte has set in motion his working-through of the mourning process which has resulted in the introjection and relinquishment of his idealized object. As Freud says of this response from mourning: “It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible” (Freud, Ego and Id 48). Through these actions, Manfred has paved the way to finally overcoming the Oedipus-complex. He has left only to overcome the punitive pressure exerted by his superego, which he feels more strongly than ever since his self-imposed rejection by Astarte, and to establish some means of replenishing his lost self-esteem (Freud, “Economic Masochism” 197).

III

When we enter Act III, Manfred has settled into an “inexplicable stillness” which he can describe only as a feeling unrelated to anything he previously “knew of life.” Perhaps his “calm” is a result of his ego's now certain resolution to die; or it might simply be the relief that comes when one has put an end to internal, infantile conflicts and has opened the mind to the pleasures and pains of the real world. For it is certainly this new realm which Manfred inhabits in the third and final act.

The Abbot is Manfred's main adversary in Act III. The elderly man's alignment with the social institutions of family and religion clearly identify him as a superego figure. When he first enters the scene, the Abbot expresses his concern to Manfred over the knowledge that—

                                                  Rumours strange,
And of unholy nature, are abroad,
And busy with thy name—a noble name
For centuries: may he who bears it now
Transmit it unimpaired!

The Abbot begs Manfred to “reconcile” himself with “the true church, and through the church to Heaven.” But Manfred flatly insists that “—whate'er / I may have been, or am, doth rest between / Heaven and myself—I shall not choose a mortal / To be my mediator—” It is here that Manfred assumes heroic proportions by rejecting out of hand all external sources of forgiveness. When the Abbot reminds Manfred that the Lord “saith”—“Vengeance is mine alone!” Manfred makes the ultimate gesture of mortal rebellion by designating the human conscience—the highest ethical faculty of man—as the sole arbitrator of morality. His full heroic reply is worth noting:

                              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—wrongs—sufferance—and revenge
Upon itself; there is no future pang
Can deal that justice on the self-condemned
He deals on his own soul.

Manfred's end is near at hand; but before he disappears, an “evil spirit” comes to claim his soul. The Spirit's argument is that Manfred's “many crimes” have made him a candidate for Hell. But Manfred refuses to “render up his soul” to the spirit, insisting, “I'll die as I have lived—alone.” As the self-possessed ruler of his mortal fate, Manfred will rely solely on his own internal code of justice. He asks the Spirit: “Must crimes be punished but by other crimes. / And greater criminals?” Manfred's wisdom here is brilliant if we view his words in terms of the psychological tragedy of Oedipus. If “first crimes” such as those we are all guilty of in childhood are punished by further crimes, what hope can there be for the future development of the individual? Such crimes must be resolved internally to the satisfaction of one's own ego. Then, and only then, will good result from bad and develop into further good.

An external superego may be capable of bestowing apt punishment or redemption, but as Marcus appropriately advises: “The intensity and cruelty of an exacting super-ego is no surrogate for responsibility for oneself” (181). Religion is a “protection against neurotic illness,” writes Freud in his essay on Leonardo; without it, “the unbeliever has to grapple with the problem on his own” (73). If a person's ego is resilient and resourceful enough, it is quite possible that he can save himself by following his inner, psychic impulses. It is thus not Manfred alone but the resourceful human psyche itself that is the true hero of Manfred's drama:

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 stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

These words are not of a man ready for irremedial death, but of one willfully determined to be reborn. Hence, Manfred “expires”; but not without a conciliatory handshake and a “Fare thee well—” to the well-intentioned Abbot. His last words: “Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.”—which Byron said contained “the whole effect and moral of the poem”—has been a great puzzle to critics. However, if we view the play not as Manfred's private drama but as the tragic drama of the human psyche, the “morality” of these last lines becomes clear. Manfred does not “kill himself” by any physical means, nor is he engulfed in flames as he was in Byron's first version of Act III; he simply “wills” himself into oblivion with the same inner moral strength of will that enabled him to withstand the loss of Astarte and the tremendous blow to his narcissistic equilibrium which that event represented. Nor does Manfred use narcissistic magic to annihilate himself at the end of the play. He submits to the ego's natural inclination to preserve itself; and without any reservations, quite literally, allows his moral conscience to be his guide. We might also assume that this tremendous exhibition of will power by Manfred suggests that he is equally capable of willing himself back into existence with similar ease; that is, if his ego so directs him and his will remains strong.

Before Byron revised Act III, he had created the Abbot as a thoroughly cruel and revengeful figure (Butler 635). In the revised and final version, however, Byron splits the superego into the benevolent Abbot and the punitive Spirit of Hell. It is here that we may discover the key to the mysterious conclusion of the play. Manfred does not “die,” I believe, but experiences a change of cathexis which frees his ego from the terrible forces within itself (Fenichel 401). As in mania, he has killed the punishing superego and is able to unite his ego with the purified protective superego—a union which his rejection of the evil spirit and reconciliation with the Abbot before his “death” favorably implies.

Manfred dies a symbolic, psychic death. He has resolved his Oedipus-complex, and given up his narcissistic omnipotence after divesting himself of his sexualized ego ideal. In Act III he shows no manifestation of his previously held magical powers, and therefore, in effect, has given up the pleasure principle for the reality principle. He is now ready to erect a healthy ego ideal and enter the world of mortal men. According to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel:

To accept the superego is to place oneself within a tradition, to become a link in a chain, to resign oneself also to being but a man. To be a superman is to refuse all that en bloc, that is, to refuse the human condition.

(187)

When the Abbot tries to convince Manfred that his submission to the church could absolve him of his crimes and grant him pardon, Manfred takes recourse not in magic, but in history. Instead of casting a spell on the Abbot and spiriting him off to the top of the Shreckhorn, as he does in the unrevised version, Manfred aligns himself with “Rome's sixth Emperor” and replies confidently with Nero's words—“It is too late—is this fidelity?” There are many additional clues throughout Act II that reveal the possible nature of Manfred's new superego. In his speech to “the Sun,” which Byron felt was “one of the best in the thing,” he appeals to the star as: “Glorious Orb! the idol / Of early nature” which he then addresses as “Thou material God!” This identification of his ego with the “material” world is again a strong indication that Manfred's superego is taking on a reality-based, non-sexualized identity.

Later that evening Manfred gazes out on the moon and identifies it as the same “rolling Moon” which shone on “Caesar's chambers, and the Augustan halls.” With great excitement he realizes that this same moon—

                                                                      filled up;
As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not—till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the Great of old,—
The dead, but sceptred, Sovereigns, who still rule
our spirits from their urns.

It is history itself that is to “fill” the “gap” in Manfred's psychic life. The moon, with “her starry shade / Of dim and solitary lovliness,” will be his ideal, a symbol of poetry from whom he “learned the language of another world.” The sun will be his newly erected “monarch,” the superego—his “Sire of the seasons” whose role it is to “draw down / The erring Spirits” and “mak'st our earth / Endurable, and temperest the hues / And hearts of all who walk within thy rays!” Just as the moon receives the light bestowed upon it by the sun, Manfred's ideal will be modified by this superego as must be the case for the normal development of the ego (Chasseguet-Smirgel 187). But here again there is every indication that Manfred is experiencing an increasing acceptance of reality, a decisive fusion of his ideal with his superego, and the related growth from primitive into mature narcissism.

However, it is not yet the proper time for Manfred to fully identify himself with these higher forces. He has still to reject the external, traditional redemptive powers of the Abbot, and of the vengeful spirit of Hell, and follow out the full course of his rebellious conscience. He does not know at this point what he is searching for; nor is he cognizant of the reason why these thoughts of nature and history have so strongly taken hold of his mind:

'Tis strange that I recall it at this time;
But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight
Even at the moment when they should array
Themselves in pensive order.

We might say that what Manfred has discovered here is, very simply, the redemptive power of “free-association.” His mind dimly perceives the ensuing course toward health that his ego hopes to take. If Manfred's poetic musings on history and nature carry him to the impenetrable regions of the sublime, at which point he must stop to collect his thoughts into “pensive order” once again, it is merely a further positive indication that his reason is in command of what was once his omnipotent imagination.⁷

The one remaining mystery in Manfred's drama involves the unexplained presence of the enormous willpower which saved his ego from destroying itself at the end of the play, and provided it with the inner strength to carry on in the development of a detached, healthy superego. According to Kernberg, “Every narcissistic character who is to be successfully treated must undergo periods of severe depression and suicidal fantasies, and if he does not have sufficient ego strength to tolerate this development, his life is in serious danger” (256). The prognosis for pathological narcissists, Kernberg suggests, is infinitely better for persons who are able to achieve some authentic creative development in a certain area of their life (252). Despite Manfred's fragile self-esteem and the narcissistic injury which he has recently suffered in his life, he has remained confident of one single ability—his art, the “voice and verse” and “written charm” by which he originally gained access to “the wisdom of the world.” The pathological, grandiose self, says Kernberg, “takes its character from the ‘specialness’ of the child reinforced by early experience” (265). Thus, Manfred's true belief in his “special” poetic ability was a pre-existent part of his “real self” that became distorted only through its abnormal fusion with his ideal self, and his sexually charged ideal object. This powerful and yet submerged source of “goodness” stayed with Manfred throughout his narcissistic crisis, and provided his ego with the inner strength necessary to pull him through his devastating ordeal. This underlying confidence in the essential “goodness” of his artistic “real” self, which Manfred himself was not in a position to recognize, was acknowledged for him by his protective superego, the Abbot:

                              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 passion and pure thoughts
Mixed, and contending without end or order,—
All dormant or destructive.

Manfred never lost his poetic ability; but the nature and use of his creative “powers” underwent a radical change in the course of the play. Whereas in Acts I and II he directed his omnipotence of thoughts to instinctual wish-fulfillment and primitive self-indulgence, he has now raised his powers to a higher moral purpose. The intrinsic value of poetry as an end proved stronger than the lowly, immature means for which he had for so long mistakenly used it. We can expect that in the future, Manfred's “arts” will not be “magical” emanations of his narcissistic delusions, but the reason-guided poetic phantasies inspired by an historically and culturally aware superego. Although Manfred has categorically rejected religion as one of his life's substitutive satisfactions, he has effectively replaced it with art, which Freud firmly believed was equal to science and religion as the fulfillment of the “highest achievement of man,” and as an activity that is crucial to the healthy development of civilization (Civilization). By finally enacting the differentiation of the superego from the ego, Manfred has accomplished what Freud described as “the most important characteristics of the development both of the individual and of the species” (Ego and Id 125).

The course of our hero in Manfred has been a tortuous and painful one. He has been shocked through loss into a reactivation of his Oedipus-complex, sublimated his Oedipal parents, (thereby resolving his infantile conflicts), repudiated his narcissistic omnipotence, and redirected his ego instincts toward the establishment of a higher moral and culturally-grounded superego. Through the object-cathexis symbolized by his death, Manfred is finally stripped of the guilt from his accumulated crimes, and has recaptured his good and noble heart's core, which the Abbot was fully convinced Manfred still possessed: “Could I touch that,” the Abbot said during his first encounter with Manfred, “I should / Recall a noble spirit which hath wandered. / But is not yet all lost.” Unlike Hamlet, whose “noble heart” “cracks” in true tragic defeat, Manfred is able to willfully restore his through sheer mental endurance, winning for himself the title of the new “psychic” Prometheus.

Keats, Shelley and T. S. Eliot all agreed that Manfred was a Romantic figure of heroic proportions. They recognized, in Sperry's words, that Manfred “is the imprisoned or self-imprisoned Prometheus, the prey of his own reflections” (Sperry 193). According to Freud's definition of tragedy, Manfred is also a “tragic hero” in the true spirit of classical drama. In the essay “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” Freud writes that “Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine … a character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything” (306). In his symbolic Oedipal struggle as the chamois goat, Manfred is even more particularly suited to adopt the classic heroic role of the sacrificial divine goat, Dionysus, who bears the burden of “tragic guilt” in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs (Totem 156).

Manfred might even be viewed as the long awaited resolution of the psychic tragedy which began with Oedipus Rex. The pain and suffering of mortal Oedipus, cast out from his land and overcome with conscious remorse, is taken to task by Manfred and subdued, with no other support or guidance than his own mortal Mind, and the sanction offered to all men as the rightful inheritors of nature, a collective human past, and an invincible vision of future civilization.

In his defiant Oedipal struggle between his libidinal impulses and his prohibitive superego, Manfred takes on the figure of the “Guilty Man,” as defined by Kohut. And by confronting and attempting to resolve his narcissistic disorders—his depleted self, depression, and loss of ideals—Manfred can be further depicted as exemplary of Kohut's “Tragic Man.” Thus, if Manfred is not the greatest literary achievement, as some critics have claimed, as a psychological myth the enormous significance of this poetic drama can no longer be denied.

IV

The success of a work of art is often judged by its ability to stand apart from its creator as a complete and meaningful portrait of history, culture, or human nature. As we have seen, the dramatic poem Manfred satisfies this criteria. In and of itself it represents a complex psychological tale of the ending of childish narcissism and the emergence of the mature artist. Manfred showed us a man who took upon himself the burden of the unrepressed consciousness of his universal crime and followed out the psychic course directed to him by his conscience—a course which began with painful self-knowledge and ended in wilful redemption. But if ever there was insight to be gained into the dynamic relationship between the artist and his creative work, it is in the case of Byron, one of the most flagrantly confessional writers in the history of literature. In an early essay on Lord Byron composed in 1890, W. J. Dawson made the observation that “No poet was ever more fearless in putting himself into his work … Every character he sketched was himself in various disguises, and the disguise deceived no one” (93-94). If this is generally true of all of Byron's works, the poem Manfred, Stuart Sperry noted, is “among the most self-consciously confessional that Byron ever wrote” (193). The purpose of this corollary study is not to draw arbitrary parallels between the character of Manfred and his creator, but rather to explain in psychological terms the important role which this singular work apparently played in the mental life and artistic career of Lord Byron.

In the past, literary scholars have only been able to intuit a connection between the poem and the poet's personal and stylistic metamorphosis. In his essay “Byron and the Meaning of Manfred,” Sperry makes the argument that the poem represents for the poet “an important transitional place within the scope of his career as a writer and thinker” (193). E. E. Bostetter similarly observed that “Manfred is the drama in which Byron symbolically works his way through to mental sanity, to the psychological perspective that made Don Juan possible” (185). Neither critic, however, professes to a full psychological understanding of how this transformation came about. In light of what we now know about the character of Manfred and the psychological dynamics of his dramatized experiences, the true nature of the change which this work effected in the psychic life of its author can perhaps finally be apprehended. The similarities between the traumatic ordeal suffered through by Manfred and the problematic events in Byron's life which correspond to the poem chronologically are far too remarkable to be overlooked. Not only should the following comparison provide us with new insight into the life and personality of Lord Byron, but by identifying the psychological function of this work in the career of its author, we may perhaps effect an improvement upon the value of the poem.

We will begin our investigation by making some fundamental observations of Byron's lifestyle and poetic works before and after the composition of Manfred. The Corsair, The Giaour, and Cantos I and II of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, all of which preceded Manfred were conspicuously narcissistic in nature and reflected, according to Sperry, Byron's “intense involvement with the complex of guilt and self-recrimination that had provided the vital impulse of much of his earlier work.” In Manfred, Sperry concludes, Byron “was in effect killing off part of himself.” And he adds, “It is only when we go on to Byron's later work, to the comic irony and detachment of Don Juan, that we can judge the necessity of this divestiture and the liberation it provided” (201).

After Manfred, William Calvert observes, Byron's lifestyle altered drastically. He expressed a new interest in money and in “serious worldly affairs,” and became an “ordinary” man—a creature of routine and habit (124). After the completion of Manfred, Calvert explains, Byron “is no longer a dilettante and his art is no longer the expression of idle moments or unsatisfied desires” (143). The apparent “detachment” and renewed strength of Byron's culturally-grounded superego, which followed the completion of Manfred, is most clearly visible in the style of Don Juan. Perhaps Manning best expressed the change in Byron which Don Juan reflected when he observed that in this final and most successful of his works, Byron at last “goes beyond mere self-expression to illuminating the cultural situation in which he is placed” (17). The evolution of Byron's psychic development which took place during the period of Manfred's composition is thus one from self-absorption to cultural awareness. His artistic focus was displaced from a narcissistic interest in himself to a concern with the world at large. It becomes no mere coincidence, then, that the maturation process which evidently occurred in Byron is identical to the one that we saw dynamically acted out within the character of Manfred himself.

Throughout most of his early career Byron adequately sustained his narcissistic equilibrium through a combination of artistic notoriety, the sexual attention of his male and female fans, and periodic doses of Augusta's affection. In 1816, Byron's life took a critical turn. Pursued by financial and “moral” creditors eager for remuneration on his delinquent past, Byron was forced into exile from his country and separated from his wife, his child, and his sister. Marilyn Butler relates this event as follows:

[Byron's] ambivalent reputation contributed to his fall from favour in the political panic of 1816. In that year his marriage failed, amid rumours of unnatural practices inflicted on his bride and even the possibility of incest with his half-sister. The scandal brought to the attention of the public his other unconventionalities, all of which became symptomatic in a year when the stability of society seemed in question.

(119)

In one year Byron was deprived of all the narcissistic supplies on which his self-esteem had for so long depended. When Byron left the country, notes Friswell Hain, a near contemporary of Byron's, “scandal and evil tongues assailed him” and “reached him as far as Italy and Greece” (3). The shameful reality of Byron's suspected crimes replaced their previous romantic appeal in the eyes of his public. His charming poetic narratives could no longer disguise his eccentric behavior as the enviable adventures of a romantic hero. In the essay “Recollections of Lord Byron; with those of the Eyewitnesses of his Life,” which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1869, the Countess Guiccioli related the story that after Byron was “hunted out of England”:

His countrymen were in a bad humour with him; his writings and character had lost the charm of novelty; he had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; he had been overpraised; he had excited too warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its own folly …

(Buono 21)

In the harsh light of this new reality, Byron's confessional rhymes appeared to his readers merely as repulsive; and what before was starry-eyed admiration, now became disillusionment and disgust.

Byron's narcissistic injury was made further complete in that during his exile, his wife and mother-in-law saw to it that all of his correspondences with Augusta were cut off. In an early letter that did get through to his sister, Byron called her his “Guardian Angel” and confessed:

I shall never find any one like you—nor you (vain as it may seem) like me. We are just formed to pass our lives together, and therefore—we—at least I—am by a crown of circumstances removed from the only being who could ever have loved me, or whom I can unmixedly feel attached to.

(Marchand 251)

Although Augusta did not die, as Astarte did in the play, as far as Byron was concerned, his exile represented a permanent separation from his sister. This is only a minor discrepancy, however, since as Freud tells us in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the loved one does “not have to actually die” for the bereaved to experience a sense of mourning: “Melancholia may also be a reaction to the loss of a loved one … like a deserted bride” (166). It is also possible that Byron was driven by his ego to unconsciously “kill off” his love-object in order to force on himself the introjection of her, and as Freud said, thus make “it easier for the object to be given up” (Ego and Id 19). It was under these circumstances, in this state of complete narcissistic loss, that Byron composed the poetic drama Manfred. He described his feeling during this time in a letter to his publisher:

I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law …

(Marchand 267)

The similarity between Byron's state of melancholy and loss and the psychological state of Manfred at the beginning of the play is unmistakable. The total depletion by Byron's ego led him close to suicide, and this same situation was poetically depicted in Manfred's drama. When circumstances of severe loss occur to narcissists, Storr writes, “unless supplies of approval are forthcoming from outside, they relapse into a state of depression in which self-esteem sinks so low, and rage becomes so uncontrollable, that suicide becomes a real possibility” (76). Both Byron and Manfred suffered from extreme isolation and the loss of their ideal Object; and both were abruptly forced to realize that their omnipotent magical powers of verse no longer served to satisfy their narcissistic needs. Whether or not Byron internally and imaginatively experienced along with Manfred the threat of castration, the rejection of the dangerous and loving mother, the deflation of the grandiose self, and an ego liberating object-cathexis, can only be a matter for speculation. And yet the evidence that we do have strongly suggests that some kind of cathartic identification between the author and his tormented protagonist did in fact take place. According to Marchand, through the composition of Manfred, Byron was able to:

free his mind with a poetic catharsis different from anything he had attempted before. All the unhappiness, the sense of guilt, the frustrations, and the dismal brooding which had grown out of his reflection during the summer on his relations with Augusta, his marriage, and the separation found relief in a poetic drama that had been conceived in the high Alps and now burned for expression.

(252-253)

Like Manfred, Byron possessed a powerful, inner strength that enabled him to work through the component elements of his devastating ordeal—an experience which the Countess Guiccioli suggested “might have shaken a more constant mind” (Buono 21)—and in the end, make “His torture tributary to his will.” “If I live ten years long,” Byron wrote to Thomas More in 1817, “you will see, however, that it is not over with me—” (Marchand 263). Byron became fascinated with Tasso in 1817, Marchand insightfully suggests, because he “identified himself with the ‘eagle-spirit of a Child of Song,’ who had suffered anguish, but had found resource in ‘the innate force’ of his own spirit” (Marchand 265).

The life and works of Lord Byron after Manfred suggest a confirmation of our prediction in Act III of the drama that Manfred was indeed on the verge of establishing a healthy, reality-based superego. Byron's early “Eastern Tales,” clearly reflect an immature use of the poet's creative power to imaginatively fulfill the narcissist's infantile fantasies, (the same immature use to which Manfred applied his “magic voice and verse” in Acts I and II of the drama). The poet himself was the subject matter of his poems, and each character and conflict was a poorly disguised, romantic reflection of the artist's inner psychic turmoil. The works which followed Manfred still boasted of the poet's confidence in the omnipotence of his creative powers, but this time the author's narcissism was of an indisputably more mature nature, and the choice of tasks to which his “magical” powers of verse were employed reflected a higher moral and social awareness in the mind of the author. In his late short poems, as in Don Juan, Byron's ego was not inwardly directed as before, but outwardly focused toward cultural issues such as politics, religion, historical events, and living individuals. Nevertheless, the poet's belief in his ability to mentally “alter the world to suit his wishes” remained for Byron (as it did for Manfred in Act III), as absolute as ever. The subject matter of these works, however, revealed that a superego of true moral and social character was beginning to play an increasingly significant role in the artist's psychic life.

What we see in Don Juan is merely the culmination of a trend in the development of the author's superego toward greater moral maturity—a trend that began with the heuristic success of Manfred. There is not a single surrealistic or fantastical element to be found anywhere in Don Juan, and what is even more remarkable in view of Byron's earlier works, is that it has been described by critics as a work of “historical naturalism” (Kroeber).⁸

It is safe to conclude at this point that something of great significance occurred in Byron's psychic and artistic life between his visit to the Alps and his move to Italy following the completion of Manfred. Before 1817 the poet lived a romantic life of creative wish-fulfillment, made real only through artistic phantasy and the external reinforcement of his false self-image provided by his devoted readers. With the composition of Manfred, Marchand believed a “chief purpose” had been served in Byron's life. In the course of writing this drama, Marchand claims, Byron “discovered that his real quarrel with life was that he could not transcend the bounds of mortality: the ‘half deity’ did not compensate for the ‘half dust’” (254). After 1817, Byron himself admitted that he had become genuinely “devout,” and as the annals of European history record, he entered history and culture, not only through his poetic fancy, but with his whole physical and mental being.

It seems more than apparent that the solution which Manfred imaginatively devised for himself in the play to work out his neurosis did in fact carry over into reality to become an actual, working force in the mind of his creator. We have no proof but only surrounding biographical evidence to suggest that through the working-out in his art of his internal, psychological conflicts, Byron found the strength of will to replace the self-esteem which his ego once obtained from childish phantasy, with the authentic satisfaction that a mature adult can conceivably derive from participating as a mere mortal in the world of men and human civilization. As to how precisely art functions in this salutary way for the creative artist is at this point still a matter for future investigation.

Notes

1. Kohut tells us that the absence of adequate self-object choices early in life result in an “abandonment of the core of the self and lead … to a sense of meaninglessness and despair.” Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: IUP, 1977) p. 117.

2. Although Freud did not draw a sharp distinction between the superego and the ego ideal, they have been clearly separated and defined in recent years by Nunberg, Reich, Lampl de Groot, and Hendrick, to name a few. The following points represent a consensus of the opinions of this group and are also the assumptions on which the use of these two terms are based in this study: 1) The ego ideal may be part of the superego but distinguished by its narcissistic character in relation to the superego. 2) The ego ideal is linked with the wish for fusion with the mother. 3) The ego ideal is linked to libido, while the superego is linked with aggression. 4) The projection of narcissism onto an object is the same as the introjection of the idealized parent which together make up the ego ideal. 5) Normally, the ego ideal and the superego will ultimately coalesce. 6) The superego is imposed from without (introjected) while the ego ideal (which is of narcissistic origin) is projected onto the outside from internally. 7) The ego ideal and the incest phantasy are closely linked. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal (New York: Norton, 1984) pp. 174, 176, 183.

3. In “On Narcissism” Freud points out that “Idealization is possible in the sphere of the ego-libido as well as in that of the object-libido.” p. 74.

4. According to Chasseguet-Smirgel, Manfred's overt acting out of his incestuous impulses characterizes him as a “pervert” who maintains the “deception that he doesn't need to grow since he is already loved by the mother, and that he doesn't need to transfer desire to the love-object because he already has taken the father's place.” Chasseguet-Smirgel, pp. 104-105.

5. “Patients who react to disappointments in love with severe depression are always persons to whom the love experience meant not only sexual gratification but narcissistic gratification as well.” Fenichel, p. 391.

6. Shame is linked with narcissistic defeat and may lead to suicide in order to fulfill the fantasy of disappearing from the eyes of others. Chasseguet-Smirgel, p. 149.

7. According to Thomas Weiskel, as quoted by Neil Hartz in the essay “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” (The End of the Line), the sublime is “the very moment in which the mind turns within and performs its identification with reason … the reason taking the role of the superego, that agency generated by an act of sublimation, and identification with the father taken as a model …” Hertz, p. 51.

8. As quoted from a lecture by Professor Karl Kroeber, Columbia University, April 19, 1988.

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