The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

106 Hero
and portents. But when these figures
appear in the Homeric epics, their status,
as Aristotle showed, is changed – they
have become aspects of literary structure,
and ‘Unity of plot does not, as some people
think, consist in the unity of the hero’
(Poetics). Homer’s heroes, for Aristotle,
are elements in the unity of an action, not
its sole origin and end as they had been in
the loosely cumulative preliterary legends;
in epic or tragedy heroes exist for
the sake of the literary whole. But the
hero is not easily demoted from his
mythic status: Romantic criticism, culminating
in A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean
Tragedy (1904) is now notorious for the
fallacy of considering heroes in artificial
separation from their dramatic context
(see L. C. Knights, How Many Children
had Lady Macbeth?, 1933). Conversely,
the New Critics who de-mythologized the
hero stressed ‘unity’ to the point where
plays became ritual re-enactments of
order rather than actions. The concept of
the hero seems inextricably involved with
the discussion of dramatic structure.
Though by an illusion they seem so,
Shakespeare’s heroes are rarely continuous
creations. When the hero returns to
the scene after an absence we do not take
up where we left off, or reconstruct some
biographical fiction; we take the hero up
from where the play, in the language and
action of other characters, has got to. This
is perhaps the clearest indication of the
distinction (and the interaction) between
dramatic structure and the structure of the
hero’s consciousness or career; we may in
some works be more aware of one or the
other, but neither can dominate without
evaporating the drama.
The critical issues raised by the
Protean forms of the hero in narrative
poetry and novels are more complicated,
and have been aired less. Paradise Lost
provides an example: Milton established
a distinctive ‘heroic’ diction, but initiated
simultaneously a fertile debate about who
(if anyone) was the ‘hero’. Satan, as
Dryden said, was technically the hero –
but was the concept even relevant to a
work claiming truth to universal moral
and spiritual experience? Surely, Addison
urged, Milton had no hero in the classical
sense (though if we wanted one, it must
be Christ)? When, in the romantic period,
Blake and Shelley declared Milton was
on the Devil’s side, very different valuations
of the heroic came into the open: on
the one side radical individualism (represented
diversely by Byron, the Brontës
and Carlyle), on the other the communal
values of restraint, civilization, maturity,
first in Scott and Austen, later in the
social novels of Mrs Gaskell and George
Eliot. Thackeray, who subtitled Vanity
Fair (1847–8) ‘A Novel without a Hero’,
applied in Henry Esmond (1852) the
searching perspective of domestic realism
to the great figures of the past. The
eighteenth-century epigram, ‘No man is a
hero to his valet’ encapsulated the kind of
scrutiny that cut the hero down to size.
Carlyle argued, ‘It is not the Hero’s blame,
but the Valet’s: that his soul, namely, is a
mean valet-soul!’ – but his own version of
‘the Hero’ demonstrates grotesquely the
vices of essentialism: ‘For at bottom the
Great Man, as he comes from the hand of
Nature, is ever the same kind of thing:
Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns. . .’
Getting rid of ‘the Hero’ seemed a
critical necessity: as wielded by Carlyle
the concept was unmanageable, a barrier
to the understanding of literary structures.
Critics preferred the slippery term ‘CHAR-
ACTER’, and analysed social and/or verbal
detail; rhetoric, action, conventional
motifs and large-scale effects were
systematically played down. There were,
however, many nineteenth-century novels
where this obviously did not work