The Role Of Lord Byronic Hero In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the availability of gothic literature was steadily improving as more and more authors were producing it. Lord Byron was a huge pioneer of this type of writing in his poems and short stories. He was the first author to become trademarked with the ‘Byronic Hero’, a damaged protagonist that has difficulty sticking to morale codes, often times completely disregarding them. He also had a friendship with Percy and Mary Shelley, and it was not uncommon for Percy and Byron to be found discussing philosophies that would later be present in works made by Mary Shelley. In fact, Lord Byron, influenced her most famous piece. Lord Byron, his Byronic heroes, and characteristics of gothicism play a large

He is an egotistical man, sailing solely for the purpose of concurring the North Pole, something no man has done before. He tells his sister how his “life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but [he] preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in [his] path” (Shelley 20). Walton doesn’t care if he receives any profit from his line of work here, he just desires to be the one to put in the history books. He is “going to unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow,’ ... there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all [his] projects which hurries [him] out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions [he is] about to explore” (23). He is reckless in this sense, as well as arrogant, further identifying him as a Byronic hero. He sets himself above the rest of the crew as the captain, and puts his own personal desires to conquer over the safety of his crew as they grow closer to their final destination. When members of the crew become concerned by the fact that they are “immured in ice and should probably never escape ... They insisted ... that [he] should engage with a solemn promise that if the vessel should be freed [he] would instantly direct [his] course southwards” (142). He agrees to this, but as a result he has his “hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision” (143). Walton believes that the crew are malingers and are too scared of what could happen instead of being excited for what should happen if they were to make it to the North Pole. With this attitude, Walton envisions himself alone amongst a whole crew of men on his journeys. He is isolated socially from the rest of the group, even with their physical proximity. He believes that he will “certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and