Wednesday, 2/27 - The Byronic Man, er, Hero

George Gordon, Lord Byron

To introduce you to the original "bad boy" of literature and his low-life/no-life  groupies, check out this excerpt from a Vanity Fair article by Laura Jacobs entitled "Charmed and Dangerous":

The baddest of the bad boys, the guy who goes all the way back to before the beginning, has been called many things: the Prince of Darkness, the Tempter, the Bringer of Light. As portrayed in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he was the most beautiful of the angels before he rebelled. Also the most arrogant. “Better to reign in Hell,” he taunts, “than serve in Heav’n.” Charisma incarnate, he gets all the good lines and almost all the girls. This fallen angel, a primal archetype, is undying: whenever men misbehave we think of him. Robert Lovelace in Clarissa, the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Don Juan in print and in opera, the Willoughbys and Wickhams, wily and wicked, of Jane Austen.

More recently, in real life, fabled Hollywood ladykillers like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty come to mind, along with hot tempers Steve McQueen and Sean Connery, and men for whom the word “moderation” is moot—though this is often a consequence of youth, as with Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Colin Farrell. Let’s just say there would be very little art without our attractive little devils, and centuries of stories would be boring.

America has always loved its bad boys, but it wasn’t until the movies that we got to revel in them as one nation. Suddenly, in the 1930s, the libertine, gangster, outlaw, scofflaw, public enemy, serial seducer, bank robber, and sexy barn burner had faces. And what faces! James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart as bootleggers, the young Clark Gable as a meanie in black leather (more than once he played dubious characters called “Blackie”), Paul Muni and George Raft as mobsters. Darkness, temptation, light—the black-and-white film of early Hollywood caught it all in deep shadows and gray velvet, compositions of smoke and pearl. And then there was that gleam, which you cannot get in Technicolor, those dangerous gleaming eyes with lashes you can count.

Odd how we so often root for the bad boy, wanting him to succeed, or at least to get away. Why? Because he’s the one with the energy. And though William Shakespeare wrote that “ripeness is all,” energy is everything. It is light and therefore illumination; it is movement and therefore change; it tests the boundaries of freedom. . . .

Now, from Byron's bio from the Poetry Foundation, read the following excerpt concerning the Byronic Hero:

[Childe] Harold is the first "Byronic Hero." Of complicated ancestry . . . he descends, with inherited traits, from Prometheus, Milton’s Satan, the sentimental heroes found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, hero-villains in Gothic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, Friedrich von Schiller’s Karl Moor, and Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion. . . . Byron’s various heroes exhibit not uniformity, but considerable diversity . . . protagonists [classified] under such rubrics as "Gothic Hero-Villains," "Heroes of Sensibility," and "Noble Outlaws." Among their possible traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman. Their later Byronic incarnations include the heroes of the Eastern tales . . . as well as Manfred and Cain.  

Now, let's merely discuss the following questions for J12 - The Byronic Hero (you need not turn this in; just take notes on our discussion and have it in your binder notes section)

1. How many literary allusions can you identify in the "Charmed and Dangerous" excerpt above? Which ones?
2. What do you think of Jacobs' assertion that the Bad Boy is attractive because he full of energy, light, illumination, change and that he is even a man who "tests the boundaries of freedom"? What does scripture say about this sort of attractiveness, this sort of power? Quote a verse or two.
3. What modern day Byronic Heroes can you think of that trifle with the affections of many unmoored young women? Why do you suppose they have this effect?
4. Read Byron's "Darkness." What do you like about it? Dislike? How might it be considered "Romantic"?
5. Now read "Prometheus" and, consulting the second excerpt above on the Byronic Hero, identify any Byronic traits you see present in the poem. 

 HW: (see yesterday's post for a view of what is due this week); CWP Link...and the grammar is on Focus