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The Romantic Rebel and the Byronic Hero. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Title Page. Themes in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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Themes in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell • Blake uses the terms of conventional morality (Heaven/Hell; Angel/Devil; Good/Evil) and then reverses their moral polarity. He speaks in ‘the voice of the devil,” a strategy that is meant to be provocative. 2. But Blake defines “good” and “evil” quite differently from the way we normally use the terms. He identifies “good” with reason and “evil” with energy, both of which are valuable and necessary.
3. Finally, Blake connects energy with liberating vision. It is through the energy of creativity and imagination that human senses can be cleansed and perceive the infinite: “To see the world in a grain of sand And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.” Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
Examples • French Revolution seen as evil by its opponents, but Blake sees it as an explosion of revolutionary energy with the potential to bring about universal human liberation. • Martin Luther King is now regarded as an American hero, but during the civil rights movement, many saw his tactics as disruptive of order. Blake would have seen King as a “devil” of energy, a rebel working against bad laws for a higher good.
Holy Thursday • In the Innocence version, the “wise guardians of the poor” are “angels” in Blake’s sense of the term; they uphold the status quo and are “good” by conventional standards. But the Experience version sees them differently – as oppressors who coerce the charity children. The entire ritual can be seen as a shame.
Don’t be fooled by Blake’s terms… • By using words like “Heaven” and “Hell,” Blake is calling attention to conventional moral attitudes which he wants to question and overturn. He is on the side of energy in terms of politics (liberty), art (originality) and human relations (a rejection of sexual repression).
Proverbs • You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. • People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. • The early bird catches the worm. • A stitch in time saves nine. • A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. • Lie down with dogs and you’ll get up with fleas. • All is not gold that glitters.
The First Seven Proverbs of Hell • In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. • Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. • The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. • Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. • He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. • The cut worm forgives the plow. • Dip him in the river who loves water.
Byron’s Manfred and the Byronic Hero Lord Byron in Albanian dress.
Byron’s Life • Byron’s father “Mad Jack” Byron abandoned his mother, Catherine Gordon after running through her fortune. • She took her son back to her home in Aberdeen, Scotland. • He was ten years old when he inherited the title of Lord Byron and the ancestral Bryon home, Newstead Abbey near Nottingham.
Childhood and Education • Byron received sexual advances from his nurse, Mary Gray, when he was about eleven. • He was educated at Harrow, where he compensated for his club foot by excelling at sports like boxing, swimming and cricket. • At Trinity College in Cambridge, he lived extravagantly (he kept a trained bear) and got into debt, which plagued him all his life. He also formed a passionate attachment to a choir boy at Cambridge.
Byron as International Celebrity • After his graduation, Byron traveled in Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania and Greece, places that were at the margins of Europe at that time, with his friend John Cam Hobhouse (1809 – 1811). • During this time he wrote the first two cantos of the poem that would make him an international celebrity, Childe Harold’s Pilgriamage.
Lord Byron Reposing in the House of a Fisherman after Having Swum the Hellespont Sir William Allan
Man About Town: The Best-Selling Author and His Affairs, 1811 - 1814 • The identification of the dashing writer with his protagonist proved irresistible to his readers and attracted many women. • Byron had infamous affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb (who wrote a novel, Glenarvon, with a villain closely based on Byron); Lady Oxford; Mary Godwin Shelley’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont; and most notoriously, his half-sister Augusta Leigh.
Marriage to Annabella Milbanke, 1815 • Byron tried to escape from the complications of his many affairs and from his mounting debt by marrying a wealthy heiress, Lady Annabella Milbanke in January, 1815. • She was an intellectual with a particular gift for mathematics. Their daughter, Ada, was born in December 1815. • The marriage was a disaster; the couple separated in 1816.
Ada Byron, 1815 - 1852 • Interestingly, their daughter, who never saw her famous father, wrote what has been called the first computer program. • She worked with Charles Babbage, who invented an early computing machine. • A software program developed by the U.S. Defense Department was named “Ada” in her honor in 1979.
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley Byron’s “novel” uses a number of themes from his life and from his work in a wild gothic story. Crowley’s novel intertwines three narrative strands – Emails (in the present) from a woman to her lover and her estranged father; Ada Bryon’s diary; and a text in code that turns out to be The Evening Land, an undiscovered novel by Bryon.
Byron in Exile • Byron left England for good in 1816 driven away by scandal and debt. • He lived in Geneva, where he first met Shelley, and later in Venice. He went to Pisa, where the Shelleys settled in 1819. • Byron worked actively for Greek independence from Turkey, and died in Greece (1824) while training troops he paid to equip from his own funds. • He is still a national hero in Greece.
Statue of Byron in Athens Byron Touched by the Muse
Welcome of Lord Byron at Messolgi Theodoros Vrisakis, 1861
The Byronic Hero • Sees himself as apart from ordinary people, a being of superior intellect and strength of will (like Manfred). • Bears his terrible suffering (in his case, guilt) and rejects any power that would make him bend a knee. • Accepts nobody’s judgment or condemnation of him, only his own. • Insists on his ambition and his identity; he seeks to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield, as Tennyson puts it in his poem “Ulysses.”
The Byronic Hero’s defiant stance was influenced by Milton’s Satan… Satan Summoning his Legions
And by the defiant Prometheus… Byron wrote a poem about Prometheus, making the titan a type of the Romantic Rebel. Despite his suffering, Prometheus refuses to give in to Jupiter. He bears his suffering with great courage and without Complaint. Byron offers him as a model – even against overwhelming odds we can remain defiant. The stance itself becomes a victory.
Brooding Portrait of Lord Byron Theodore Gericault
Characteristics of the Byronic Hero • Gloomy and solitary (Manfred alone at midnight raising spirits) • Powerful intellect and will (Manfred commands spirits and expresses his superiority to others) • Burdened by guilt (Manfred is crushed by guilt over Astarte’s death; strong implication of incest) • Defiant (Manfred refuses to bend to anyone or anything)
Byron’s Manfred: a Summary • The play opens with Manfred brooding at midnight. He has gained great power through long nights of study and labor, but he is crushed by guilt. He calls up spirits who represent various aspects of nature and asks for oblivion – total loss of consciousness – but they cannot grant that. They imply that his spirit will outlive death. One of the spirits takes the form of his beloved, whom we later learn is Astarte, probably his sister. Manfred falls senseless.
Manfred climbs high into the alps, where he attempts suicide, but is prevented by a chamois hunter. Manfred admires the hunter’s simple, decent life, but rejects the idea that he would exchange places. Though he suffers, he asserts, with great pride, that he can bear this suffering. We see his strange combination of complaint and defiance, a theme of the play.
Compare Dore’s Image of Satan Struggling to Climb out of Hell
Manfred and the Chamois Hunter Gustav Dore, 1853
