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There is great empathy in our culture for the troubled hero archetype, from comic book superhero’s to contemporary soap opera characters. This distinct brand of hero was originally introduced and made popular in the early 19th century by the poet Lord Byron, father of the Byronic hero. The Byronic hero embodies an enigmatic duality, a person that embraces both dark and light, illicits both fear and desire. Ranging in diversity from Batman to James Dean, from Satan to Anakin Skywalker , the Byronic hero is now among the most commonplace of both literary and pop culture entities. Perhaps the most well known example of a Byronic hero is none other than Bram Stoker’s timeless Dracula. In his simultaneously horrifying yet seductive Count Dracula, Stoker created a Byronic hero for the ages, a character that exemplified the menacing combination of charm and cruelty.
The Byronic hero was first made popular in mainstream culture with Byron’s hugely successful poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, written in 1812. The poem tells the story of a young man’s experiences abroad, but more importantly introduces a character who is both imperfect and complex, at turns melancholy and defiantly unapologetic, “I have not loved the world, nor the world me” (404). Thought to be semi-autobiographical in nature, the poem was a hit because it appealed to a flawed and human populace grateful for a protagonist that they could relate to. This is what gives the Byronic hero his lasting appeal. There is a comfort to seeing some of the dark that resides within us residing in another. Byron pushed his archetype to an extreme in his poem “Manfred”, where the lead character is a nobleman tortured by a secret guilt associated with the death of his great love Astarte. The poem hints at topics as dark as incest, yet still shows Manfred in a somewhat empathic light, as a broken lover wracked with grief summoning spirits for aide. The idea of a dark secret is an important element of the Byronic hero. Many writers emulated this character type in Byron’s own time, but the enduring appeal of this type of personality has insured that literature, pop culture and film are rife with examples of Byronic hero’s. Written eight- five years after Byron wrote “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Dracula embraces the duality of the Byronic hero, and Bram Stoker was no doubt influenced to some extent by his predecessor.
There are, in fact, circumstantial connections of some interest between the two writers. It is widely speculated that Stoker loosely based his Count Dracula on the character in “The Vampyre” by John Polidori. “The Vampyre” was the first to introduce the concept of a vampire as an aristocratic man. Polidori wrote the piece while vacationing in Geneva the summer of 1816, employed as none other than Lord Byron’s personal physician. This was the great summer where Byron initiated the ghost story challenge to his friends, among them also Mary Shelley, whose response to the challenge was none other than Frankenstein. It is also widely believed among literary critics that Stoker based much of Dracula’s mannerisms and grandiose personality on the famous actor Sir Henry Irving, whom Stoker was quite close to. Irving was known for his penchant for playing complex villains with tremendous charm, in a very Byron-esque fashion.
The most compelling reasons for drawing a parallel resides within the text of Dracula itself. Count Dracula literally manifests duality, in that he appears as young and old, prince and beast, lover and murderer. On a deeper level, he’s both a devastated lover, wracked by centuries of grief, and a predatory, animalistic killer, driven by unholy hungers. The reader simultaneously fears and desires Dracula. There is a distinct sensuality in his approach. We see his seduction and destruction of Lucy Westenra, and the long, slow dance of seduction he does with Mina Harker. There are titillating elements of carnal lust, strongly contrasted with elements of brutal violence. As Caroline Lamb once said of Byron himself, Count Dracula is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (386), yet much like Byron and his hero’s, we are drawn to him in spite of this menacing nature. Dracula’s dual nature is best contrasted in his dramatically different treatment of Jonathan Harker as compared to Mina Harker. He imprisons Jonathan in his castle, slowly chiseling away at his sanity. He courts Mina, and is effusively charming and kind to her, while simultaneously torturing her fiancé and slowly murdering her best friend. Dracula struggles to keep his true nature secret from Mina initially, in keeping with the Byronic tradition of dark secrets, yet reveals his monstrousness to Jonathan and revels in his fear. All of these components remain true to the Byronic hero formula, and successfully worked together in this case to create one of the most enduring literary, film and pop culture characters of all time. Perhaps with the exception of Satan, there is no example of a Byronic hero more internationally well known than Dracula.
In the creation of his Byronic hero archetype, Lord Byron approached potential villains with an empathetic air of humanity. As inhuman as Dracula may be, Stoker imbued him with this same human vulnerability that gives him his uncanny appeal. That the Byronic hero has such longevity and continued relevance in the pantheon of archetypes says much about us as a culture. We identify with these tainted and troubled characters because we all to some extent are tainted and troubled as well, and it is this ability to identify that gives both Dracula and the Byronic hero true immortality.
Citations
Damrosch, David and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. Masters of British Literature Volume B: The Romantics and their Contemporaries, the Victorian Age, and the Twentieth Century. New York: Pearson Education, Inc, 2008.
Leask, Nigel. “Polidori, John William (1795-1821)”.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press,2004. www.oxforddnb.com/public/index/html
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