“The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.”
Albert Camus
The Byronic hero is a surprisingly common feature in literature and is particularly suited to Gothic writing. Let’s look at what it is, why this type of hero is so appealing and how you can incorporate it in your writing.
The Byronic Character – Definition
The phrase, Byronic hero, comes from the writing of Lord Byron, a man whose personal character and that of his fictional characters was known to be moody and rebellious. “Historian and critic Lord Macaulay described the character as ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.’”1
If you’re familiar with the character of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, he is the quintessential Byronic hero. Even as a child, he is given to mood swings, which only become more exaggerated as an adult. He is a character with an unwavering commitment to vengeance, known for his brooding and sullen personality. And yet his passion for and tenderness with Cathy has been enough to win over the hearts of readers for the last two hundred years.
Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre is another example of a Byronic hero. He’s often short-tempered with Jane, is easily irritable, and at best is merely civil…until we see more of him. Later on, Charlotte Brontë gives us a glimpse of a man with a profound depth of feeling.
The Origins – Byron’s Cult of Personality
If you’ve seen the movie Mary Shelley (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), or just happen to know much about her life, you know that Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was a close friend of Lord Byron. Before seeing the movie, I knew little about Byron. I knew of his writing, but little about the writer himself. Thus, I was shocked to see him portrayed as a reprobate and a lascivious man with few (if any) morals.
Until I researched him more and discovered that the movie’s portrayal was startlingly accurate.
Which then leads to the question: what is it about Byron, this amoral and controversial figure, that inspired so many authors to base their lead characters after him – from The Phantom in Phantom of the Opera to Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, just to name a few?
Byron was a man known for deliberately seeking sensationalism and controversy. He kept a bear as a pet. He was moody, sullen, and unpredictable. He admitted to having many lovers, both male and female. And he was attractive. So much so that the poet Coleridge said that his face was “so beautiful, a countenance I scarcely ever saw” and “his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light.”2
Byron was a man one couldn’t overlook. A person might love him or hate him, but he would never go unnoticed. For many, like Coleridge and the Lady Caroline Lamb who described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Byron inspired something like awe. He didn’t conform to society. He protested technology in the textile industry because it was creating unemployment for the workers. He bucked traditional values and Christian morals. And he made no attempt to please those around him – from criticizing fellow writers to spurning social niceties and withdrawing into a moody and sullen isolation.3
Some of us – myself included – would dislike such a person in real life. But he certainly garnered attention. And there’s something about that hard exterior that motivates people to find the tender interior. Especially when he writes a letter in which he says, “I cannot exist without some object of Love.”
The Byronic Hero’s Appeal
That’s the first reason for the appeal of this type of character. Passion. Readers see that seed of passion, something that doesn’t come through in most characters, and they’re drawn to it. Passion is magnetic.
Heathcliff is a wonderful example. He’s mean, ruthless, cruel. He tries to destroy Isabella and attempts to kill her dog. He kidnaps Catherine II and forces her to marry his son. He swindles Hindley out of his fortune. He’s a bad person. But readers love him because we see in him a capacity to love Cathy that is largely unrivaled – in literature and in our own lives.
He’s real. And he feels strongly. We find ourselves, like Isabella Linton, wondering whether we can break through that hard exterior and find an intensely passionate man as Catherine did. To be the only person to gain the favor and attention of someone who gives favor and attention to no one else.
And second, that rough exterior is an enigma that asks to be solved. There’s something very curious about a person who doesn’t try to adhere to societal norms, who doesn’t try to people please, who says what he thinks and doesn’t worry about appearing to be emotionally stable or happy or positive. We want to know why. What is so different about this person that he runs contrary to everything we know.
In addition, much of him is a secret. Heathcliff returns home educated and wealthy, most likely through questionable means, but we never know what they are.
We see that he has an agenda. He’s out for revenge – a common tendency of Byronic heroes – but we don’t know how far he means to take that. Despite his avowed commitment to destroy Hindley and the Lintons, with each move he surprises us. His actions are so heinous that we don’t anticipate them. But he does them out of his obsession with Catherine and his grief at having lost her, so we forgive him.
There’s something of a challenge to the Byronic hero. A call to try to crack the riddle, to win over the beast. To be the only chosen one. It’s irresistible to many.
Writing the Byronic Hero
But how do we write him?
1. One thing you’ll notice is that writers generally imbue this type of character with some type of external appeal. He may be attractive (like Lord Byron himself), or educated (like Heathcliff), or wealthy (like Mr. Rochester), or gifted in a mysterious way (like the Phantom), or some combination of these. There’s something that holds readers.
This isn’t a hard rule. However, when working with a very disagreeable character, we want readers to have some reason to stick it out and wait to see if there’s a hidden redeemable trait. Frankly, giving them something somewhat superficial is often useful.
If you don’t want to use any of these, I would have the character do something that implies a capacity for strength or depth of character early on. Even just a singular moment with a child or pet or ailing grandparent in which we see a glimpse of something deeper – some compassion or capacity for self-sacrifice – is essential.
2. Make your character disagreeable. He’s sullen, moody, angry about something. Give him a reason. He has a past of great difficulty or trial. He lost someone or something that meant everything to him. Or he’s had to suffer with a terrible situation for decades (Mr. Rochester, I’m looking at you).
He’s not responding well to this. The Byronic hero won’t. He’ll brood. He’ll lash out. He might be critical, prone to drinking or fighting or gambling. But the readers need to see his behavior in light of this loss. It builds in them an empathy that they’ll need for this type of character.
3. Later…not at first…show this character as one with a profound depth of feeling. But not for everyone. Heathcliff only loved Catherine. Mr. Rochester only loved Jane. Erik (the Phantom) only loved Christine. They have this well of excessive passion, but it’s singularly focused.
The other characters will not gain from this or receive any benefit of it for themselves. That creates this situation that I referred to earlier in which readers begin to envy the character who is on the receiving end of such a rare love. That rarity gives the hero’s love more desirability. It overrules much of what is disagreeable about him, creating a strangely appealing juxtaposition that readers crave.
4. Let me know about the book. I want to read it!
The Byronic hero is so complex that we could spend all day discussing the different reasons for his appeal. I’d like to see more versions of him in contemporary literature.
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1 “Byronic Hero.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero#cite_ref-2. Accessed January 2022
2 “Lord Byron, 19th-Century Bad Boy.” Drummond, C. British Library. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/lord-byron-19thcentury-bad-boy. Accessed January 2022
3 ibid.
Photo: Detail – Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Casper David Friedrich, c.1817. Courtesy of Kotomi_. Used with no changes. https://www.flickr.com/photos/kotomi-jewelry/40944007734