An exploration of the Gothic Protagonist, particularly relating to Wuthering Heights.

1. The Gothic protagonist
Heathcliff

2. Task 1
• Create your own Gothic protagonist. Write a
brief description of someone that you could
imagine as being the main character in a
gothic tale. Include reference to physical
appearance.
• Consider: age, gender, voice, dominant
colouring, profession, nationality, status etc

3. Milton’s Satan as a gothic protagonist
• Critics have often commented on the ways in
which John Miton’s Satan has provided a
model for the doomed central characters of
gothic novels.
• In Book 1 of his epic poem Paradise Lost
(1667), Milton describes the fall of Satan and
his fellow rebel angels, cast out by God from
Heaven into the terrible darkness of Hell.

5. Satan reflects on his terrible fall
Now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.
At once, as far as Angels ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild.
A dungeon horible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 54-63

6. Milton stresses the degree to which, however defiantly
he acts, Satan is subject to God’s power
So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay,
Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence
Had risen, or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy, shewn
On Man by him seduced, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance poured.
Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 209-20

7. Characteristic features of the gothic
protagonist
• Some degree of tragic stature
• Of high social rank
• Somehow foreshadowed by doom
• A tendency to be influenced by past events
• Sharply contrasting qualities within the character
• The possession of considerable powers
• A striking physical presence
• A strongly sexual element
• Driven by siome all-consuming passion
• A connection with the exotic
• An occasional association with what is bestial or non-
human

8. The Byronic hero or antihero

9. The Byronic hero or antihero
• The Byronic hero is an idealised but
flawed character exemplified in the life and
writings of English Romantic poet Lord Byron.
• It was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb,
later a lover of Byron's, as being "mad, bad,
and dangerous to know".
• The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semi-
autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818).

10. Characteristics
The Byronic hero typically exhibits several of the following traits:
• Arrogant
• Cunning and able to adapt
• Cynical
• Disrespectful of rank and privilege
• Emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody
• Having a distaste for social institutions and norms
• Having a troubled past or suffering from an unnamed crime
• Intelligent and perceptive
• Jaded, world-weary
• Mysterious, magnetic and charismatic
• Seductive and sexually attractive
• Self-critical and introspective
• Self-destructive
• Socially and sexually dominant
• Sophisticated and educated
• Struggling with integrity
• Treated as an exile, outcast, or outlaw

11. Romanticism
• Caspar David
Friedrich, Wanderer
Above the Sea of
Fog,38.58 × 29.13
inches (98 x 74
cm), 1818, Oil on
canvas,Kunsthalle
Hamburg

12. Romanticism
• Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary and
intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th
century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial
Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political
norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the
visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on
historiography,[3]education[4] and natural history.[5]
• The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source
of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as
trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is
experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its
picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk
art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable
characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural"
epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of
language and customary usage.

13. • Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a
revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be
authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population
growth, urban sprawl, andindustrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the
exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic
than Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and
to escape.
• The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a
gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his
inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society.
• Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und
Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment
rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the
background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-
Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their
influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities;
indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a
polarized opposite to Romanticism.[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of
what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples
would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical
authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There
was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the
representation of its ideas.