Discussion Topic
The main character in Byron's "Manfred" as a representation of a Byronic hero
Summary:
The main character in Byron's "Manfred" exemplifies a Byronic hero through his complex personality, profound inner conflict, and rejection of societal norms. Manfred is introspective, melancholic, and tormented by guilt and a sense of lost love. His defiance of authority and supernatural elements further highlight his embodiment of the Byronic hero archetype.
How does the main character in Byron's "Manfred" represent a Byronic hero?
Byron's Manfred is a character who, like Goethe's Faust, is seeking some ultimate goal or experience outside the boundaries set by God and man. Beyond this, the essence of the Byronic hero is that he is haunted by a mysterious past. In biographies of Byron himself, the poet is often described as a man who believed himself damned, cut off from any hope of eternal salvation. The Byronic hero attempts to escape his past, but in contradictory ways. Childe Harold becomes a wanderer; he is escaping something, but regretting doing so, with his poignant "My native land, good night!" as the ship pulls away from the English coast. Don Juan is exiled from his native land as well, but by others, and he becomes a wanderer as well. He thinks he has found an idyll, and his one true love, in the isles of Greece, but this paradise is destroyed,...
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like a second fall of man. The Byronic figure is an outcast, barred from normal human joy and fulfillment.
Manfred is a wanderer too, but it is a mental, not a physical, displacement we see in him. He has banished himself to the remoteness of the Alps to commune with spirits, in search of some mystifying realm or truth beyond "all of this," but the ultimate experience he seeks, unlike Faust's, is a negative one: "forgetfulness." This is emblematic of Byron's own personal struggle with his past. In his final poem, written just before his death at Missolonghi, in Greece, he asks,
If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?
At the close of the drama when Manfred expires, the Abbot asks the eternal question:
His soul hath taken its earthless flight—
Whither?—I dread to think—but he is gone.
Beyond the specifics of the Byronic hero, Manfred is the haunted, archetypal Romantic outcast. He lives outside the bounds prescribed not only by man but by religion, and in the end, he is like Goethe's Werther, at whose funeral (after his suicide) we are told that "no clergyman was present."
A Byronic hero is a tortured soul who is often reckless or violent, always brooding and introspective, and alienated from the rest of humanity. He isolates himself and suffers in solitude as a dark, misunderstood figure. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is a well-known example of the Byronic hero.
Manfred stands as well as as a fine example of the Byronic hero: he is tortured by the conviction that he destroyed Astarte, the woman he loved (though we are not given any details); he wanders alone in the Alps; he is on the brink of suicide when the Chamois Hunter saves him from that fate; he has to defend himself to the Chamois Hunter as not insane; and he questions and rebels against both the authority and "heaven or hell" doctrine of the Christian church. He is determined to face both life and death on his own terms and dies having refused to capitulate to institutionalized religion. He lives and dies as an individual who asserts his own will by refusing to conform to social norms.