The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Middlemarch</span> and <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">North and Sou

Abstract

The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South Sarah Wootton Almost two hundred years after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero remains, as Andrew Elfenbein argues, an ‘unprecedented cultural phenomenon’.1 This essay is not concerned with the more direct descendants of the Byronic hero (Rochester and Heathcliff, for example); rather, I shall be focusing on the less immediately obvious, and in some respects more complex, reincarnations of the Byronic hero in two nineteenth-century novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Establishing previously neglected connections between these authors and the figure of the Byronic hero not only opens new avenues of debate in relation to these novels, but also permits a reassessment of the extent and significance of Byron’s influence in the Victorian period. The following questions will be addressed: first, why does a Byronic presence feature so prominently in the work of nineteenth-century women writers; second, what is distinctive about Eliot and Gaskell’s respective treatments of this figure; and, third, how is the Byronic hero subsequently reinvented, and to what effect, in modern screen adaptations of their work? Critical interest concerning the inheritance of the Byronic hero has traditionally centred on male writers (ranging from Melville and Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Dickens and Pushkin). Recently, however, Susan Wolfson’s essay on Felicia Hemans and Byronic Romance not only argued for the impact of Byron’s work on this female poet, but also explored the intricacies of a literary relationship that culminated, for Hemans, in an ‘oppositional conversation’.2 Similarly, a published lecture by Caroline Franklin has investigated the ambivalent responses of women writers to the cult of Byronism in the nineteenth century (focusing mainly on Harriet Beecher Stowe). According to Franklin, depicting this figure facilitated a paradoxical position of ‘conservatism and radical vision’.3 During the nineteenth century, the Byronic hero acted as a model of profligacy to be denounced, thereby reinforcing women’s assumed spiritual superiority, whilst also evoking a subversive voice. Women writers retained their propriety and gained an attitude of defiance, a controversial edge, from this notorious figure. Most importantly, literary engagements with the Byronic hero afforded women writers of this period an opportunity to probe and renegotiate a range of gendered identities. George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell seek to redefine masculinity in their work. J. R. Watson argues that Gaskell answered Byron’s famous call in Don Juan, ‘I want a hero’, by ‘provid[ing] them in every story and every novel’.4 The most innovative aspect of Gaskell’s fiction, according to Joseph Kestner, is her ability to ‘defamiliarize and individuate male prototypes’, [End Page 25] a position elaborated upon by Catherine Barnes Stevenson who states that Gaskell, bettering even Charlotte Brontë, ‘wrote the masculine’.5 Eliot was equally instrumental in reformulating contemporary models of masculinity. Middlemarch, in its insistence on the communal, can be read as an antiheroic novel with Lydgate as an underachiever and Ladislaw as an insubstantial dilettante. Mario Praz stated that, in fact, Eliot’s microscopic attention to the imperfect and disparate details of human life ‘led to the eclipse of the hero’.6 However, as I argue in this essay, Eliot’s approach to her male characters is more complex and challenging than this position allows. Neither endorsing nor rejecting the Romantic hero, both Eliot and Gaskell subject this figure to rigorous psychological scrutiny: the Byronic hero is certainly refashioned, and even rehabilitated, yet his presence remains. In addition to the contentious issues relating to masculinity, the Byronic hero also plays a pivotal role in the interconnections that both Eliot and Gaskell form between gender politics and social change. Middlemarch, set immediately prior to the Reform Bill of 1832, is a novel infused with possibilities (even if they remain unfulfilled), and its political concerns offset and reflect upon the relative positions and ambitions of male and female characters. Similarly, the potential for change in North and South is generated by forcing together Margaret and Thornton’s evolving relationship with the clashes between masters and men. As Gaskell wrote, I suppose we all do strengthen each...