Introduction

12
Vanessa Mangione
filled with compassion for his suffering, even now, as he confessed his
craving to take my life. (Meyer 238)
In 2003, Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga, had a dream about a girl
and a vampire in a meadow. She turned her dream into a book and became one of
the bestselling authors of our time (Lev Grossman). The first book was soon
turned into a movie and its male lead, Robert Pattinson, became a star over night.
By portraying the mysterious, handsome, guilt-ridden and tortured vampire Edward
Cullen, Pattinson strongly evokes characteristics of a well-known literary
persona, the Byronic hero. 1 These characteristics combined with a bitter outlook
on the world that has resulted from an incident against which he was powerless
and can never break away from are qualities that are commonly connected to the
Byronic hero. This persona seems to have struck a chord since it has aroused an
intense emotional response within the female readership, precisely as it did back in
1812 when the first Byronic hero appeared in the form of Lord Byron’s Childe
Harold and won the public over. Henceforth, Byron’s heroes dominated the literature
of the Romantic period and emerged in numerous variations through the
decades. Those heroes are represented in the term of the “Byronic Hero”.
The Byronic hero has been a prominent figure in literary fiction since the early
nineteenth century and still dominates popular modern romances. He appears,
although slightly transformed, in modern vampire fiction, such as Stephenie
Meyer’s Twilight Saga, in novels by Anne Rice, but also as the dark lover in historical
novels by authors like Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Elisabeth
Chadwick. They all make excessive use of the tortured hero. He appears in Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, where he emerges in the shape of Rhett Butler, a
dandified version of the original dark lover. During the nineteenth century, the
persona of the Byronic hero dominated sensational, Silver fork and Newgate novels.
Famous authors like Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
and Benjamin Disraeli are said to have been strongly influenced by Byron’s creation
and portrayed him in many varying and sometimes opposing forms, as the
dark Gothic lover, the soulless seducer or the superficial dandy (Lutz 60).
During the Romantic period, a growing fascination with a wild and melancholy
facet of nature arose. Thus the adjective “romantic” does not only refer to a specific
literary genre but is attributed to the combination of beautiful and terrifying
aspects of nature. Praz advocates in his book The Romantic Agony the thesis that a
new erotic sensibility emerged within the Romantic period. According to him, this
new sensibility was a perverse one in which contradicting sensations such as tenderness
and sadism, pleasure and pain, and love and hate are inseparably connected
to each other. Hence, Praz argues that the Romantics took pleasure in the
1 There has always been a notion to link Byron to vampires as Dr. Polidori’s, Byron’s physician,
short story The Vampyre was thought to be written by Byron. Although both confirmed that this
was not the case, the connection between Byron and vampires never ceased to be.