Byronic Heroes in FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA

To undertake the project of comparing the Byronic hero in Frankenstein with a similar figure in Dracula is to acknowledge the Romantic sensibility that the novels share. How that sensibility informed character and theme in such texts as Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula can be seen in ways that Romanticism bubbled up from the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment in the early 19th century. Although Romanticism owed much to the Enlightenment, it deified feeling instead of reason, was suspicious of institutional constraints, entailed nature mysticism, and conceptualized humanity as "living in a world of creativity and becoming" (Baumer 274), whether of one's selfhood or of one's physical and social environment. That helps explain the affinity Romantics had with reform and revolution, which can be construed as opportunities for wholesale transformation of the human condition, even if the record of such transformations might be spotty.

The concept of the Byronic hero--a man of privilege yet devoted to principles favoring justice for all, fearless of impossible odds, and (probably) doomed to (bravely and handsomely born) death in the midst of the fight--was completely consistent with Romanticism. Barzun sees Byron as embodiment of what became the cultural referent (485-6). Byron fell in Greece, having traveled there in 1824 to join the brave Greeks in their revolution against the dastardly Ottoman yoke. That he died of a fever and not in battle seems to ha

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lling into question the social construction put on science. Mankind may be doomed to yield to what is incomprehensible, but attempting to escape that doom appears to guarantee catastrophe. In Dracula, overreach within the Romantic meaning of the term is also at work, although this novel, which appeared toward the end of a 19th century in which the Victorian value system had replaced the nature mysticism of the Romanticized, is also firmly in the tradition of Gothic horror. It is the scientific realist Van Helsing, whose regard for the psycho emotional sensibility congenial to Romanticism and essential to humanity as such, helps redeem humanity from the evil of a creature whose very existence is violation of nature and a threat to the integrity of moral being. There is no mad scientist as in Frankenstein, but there is a demonic persona at work in Dracula. No less important, however, are the portrayal of Jonathan Harker as inclined toward heroic behavior and the emergence of Mina as a heroic individual all in the context of a narrative that relentlessly mixes gothic horror with eroticism. That mixture can be construed as a comment on late Victorian social and moral norms as ambivalent toward both respectability and

Category: Literature - B