Introduction

14
Vanessa Mangione
that is self-consuming in its intensity (62). Lutz agrees with Thorslev that the Byronic
hero is primarily a lover; she adds that his whole existence is based on this
all-consuming love that will however, never be fulfilled. 5 Lutz defines the very
essence of the Byronic hero most accurately:
The Byronic philosophy sees love as the ultimate, and only, essential truth
and final resting place for one in this life. Love is the only force that still
holds meaning. […] The very foundations of love for the Byronic hero are
based on failure and forgetting of what is possible. The Byronic hero in its
purity can, by definition, never be redeemed by becoming a couple, he is interminably
thrown back upon black despair; he is unremitting cast adrift
into absence and dark night. In The Corsair, Conrad loses Medora because
she pines away when she thinks he is dead. In The Giaour, Leila is murdered
by her master because of her love for the Giaour, and the Giaour’s life becomes
one of vengeance against her murderer and then a tortured living in
the past of his life. In Manfred, Astarte has died because of his unspecific
sin. But finally the hero fails because this is the definition of the Byronic
hero. He is the tormented melancholy failure who nears success and then
fails and experiences eternal loss, the repetition of the impossibility of bliss.
He retains his status as the outcast, the dangerous lover whose subjectivity
is as large and as impoverished as the world. (52)
The Byronic hero has never had a chance of being either redeemed or fulfilled by
his true love as his story often begins when it is already over, namely after the
death of his love and he feels that his life and being have lost all meaning and
purpose. Often he has been outlawed and robbed of his inheritance and status in
society by envious relatives who have murdered his father. Thus, he turned him
into a misanthrope who is isolated from society.
In addition, Thorslev states that “the Romantic heroes epitomized many of the
most important aspects of Romanticism, and the Byronic hero shows the elements
of every major type of Romantic hero” (4). Consequently, according to
Thorslev, the Byronic hero is a combination of every major pre-existing type of
hero. He represents characteristics of the “Child of Nature”, “Hero of Sensibility”,
“Gothic Villain”, “Faust” and “Cain” and “Prometheus”. These Romantic
heroes, whose genesis started in the Bible, and are then used by the likes of Shakespeare
and then later Milton finally accumulate in the Romantic period in the Byronic
hero. However, the question concerning the origin and development of
Byron’s creation continues to be debated.
Academic discussions are split into two groups. In one group, we find those
who believe that Byron’s heroes are direct descendants of the eighteenth-century
Gothic Villain, and in the other group, we find those who position his origin
5 This concept of love is beautifully demonstrated in John Keats’ Ode to an Grecian Urn.