The Romantic Hero

 

 

I.  Romantic individualism (and nationalism) writ large:  These Romantic heroes are commanding figures, with strong wills and personalities, who challenge accepted norms of behavior and evoke what John Keats called the “egotistical sublime.”

·       Napoleon as an historical example of the Romantic hero and its contradictions

--a Corsican peasant who crowns himself emperor

--a champion of the “revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality” who yet went on to wage an imperial war against nations of Europe (see Map 34.2)

--a brilliant military tactician who over-reached himself in the Russian campaign (lost 500, 000 men!)

--an individual with petty habits and towering egotism

 

II.  “Antithetically mixt”:  some characteristics and types of the Romantic hero

 

          There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,

          Whose spirit, antithetically mixt,

          One moment of the mightiest, and again

          On little objects with like firmness fixt;

          Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt,

          Thy throne had still been thine, or never been;

          For daring made thy rise as fall: thou seek'st

          Even now to re-assume the imperial mien,

          And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!

 

          . . . quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,

          And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire

          And motion of the soul which will not dwell

          In its own narrow being, but aspire

          Beyond the fitting medium of desire;

          And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,

          Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire

          Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,

          Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

          Byron on Napoleon, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (see reading 34.3)

 

1.  gifted with intellect and imagination, the hero is at odds with the “common herd” of mankind: see Byron’s Childe Harold

 

2.  the hero’s desires are insatiable; his is a will not satisfied with ordinary things.

          Fate has given this man a spirit

          Which is always pressing onwards, beyond control,

          And whose mad striving overleaps

          All joys of the earth between pole and pole. (on Goethe’s Faust, reading 34.7)

 

3.  the Promethean hero:  an over-reacher who unsettles traditional moral categories.  Some types:

·       The Faustian hero:  Goethe’s unique treatment of the Faust myth (the fact that he never finds satisfaction on earth is what ultimately redeems him)

·       The Byronic hero:  aristocratic, darkly handsome, manly, brooding, brilliant, erotic, melancholy, indomitable.  “Prometheus” (see figure 34.3)

·       Percy Shelley’s unique Prometheus (reading 34.4)

·       The Gothic villain-hero

 

III.  Dangers of Romantic Egotism

 

·       Romantic suicide: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter

·       Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein