Meg wrote an interesting rant about heroes the other day that has since sparked an interesting conversation about the topic. One of Meg’s complaints is that the notion of the hero is being weakened by using the term to describe pretty much anyone who does pretty much anything. She also contends that labeling someone a hero actually tells you more about the person using the term than the person upon whom the term is, um, bestowed.
Meg’s post got me thinking about the differences between heroes and protagonists and the way that the figures change over time–specifically in the 18th and 19th centuries. In some ways, my thinking here boils down to something like this: Pip ain’t Beowulf; Jane Eyre ain’t Achilles; Maggie Tulliver ain’t Odysseus.
What I’m suggesting here is that, when literature in English hits the 18th century and becomes increasingly interested in the interiority of individuals as they work their way through the world (Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Shamela, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Evelina), and then winds its way into the Gothic of the middle of the century with people like Walpole and Radcliffe, and then as all those proto-Romantic impulses come to a head in Lyrical Ballads, with its obsession with representing the mind of the poet, the older notion of the hero was simply incompatible with this new artistic impulse.
Certainly, there are episodic bits and pieces (I’m thinking here of something like Burney’s Evelina), but when the day is done we wind up with texts that are a mess of interiority (e.g. Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe), or that are cautionary tales/instructive works or bildungsromane or kunstlerromane (most everything else). And once that Gothic impulse is in place–especially in the way that Walpole sets it up as a kind of thought experiment designed to explore how ordinary people would behave in extraordinary situations–we wind up with a wildly popular form of art (at least in England) that is suddenly uninterested in representing the heroic activities of great men (and this is one of the key differences between someone like Wordsworth and someone like Milton or Dryden) and is instead interested in ordinary people in more or less ordinary situations. Jane Austen is, I think, the obvious example of this movement, although Jane Eyre in some ways is an even better example.
Byronic heroes are significant in all of this, too, if only because they are creatures of titanic emotion whose interior landscapes the readers are privy to. Manfred or Mary Shelley’s Creature, for example, focus almost entirely on the emotions.
As I think about this (and all of this is coming out half-baked), Walter Scott strikes me as a last gasp of the heroic, but he accomplishes this, at times, by writing protagonists who simply keep bumping into heroes (like Waverly). The Scott novel that seems to lay all of this out most clearly is The Bride of Lammermoor, where Scott attempts to fuse the Gothic and the historical novel, since in it, we can see the mutually exclusive impulses or historicity and interiority collapse–or, more accurately, unceremoniously fall off a cliff.
Austen even lampoons some of this hero-worship in Northanger Abbey, where Catherine constantly attempts to interpret the world in a Romance-y way only to find that nothing works like it ought. And in every novel of hers that follows, we see the drama of what is, really, the quotidian–who will the girls marry? how will they overcome the impediments to that marriage?
Some of this, too, is the result of the breakdown of the feudal system of relations and its replacement with what Carlyle calls the “cash nexus” wherein relations are fluid and arbitrary, and I wonder if, in all of this, that this is what Carlyle was on about in his hero-worship: what if it wasn’t just an anti-democratic, fascistic, authoritarian streak in him, but was, instead, a real sense that by the 1830s and 1840s, the Hero was effectively dead, replaced by Maggie Tulliver up in her attic driving nails into her doll’s head?
This urge to represent the interior in the novel continues, of course, through the “sensation fiction” of the 1860s. And by the time we get to the 1880s and 1890s, we find that good old Sigmund Freud has replaced both the poet and the hero by revealing not only that we are all Oedipus, but that there are some great men who are simply better equipped to interpret our individual versions of the story. And in his case studies, he produces a kind of Gothic fiction right out of the Walpole-ian mold: the ordinary person attempting to cope with extraordinary emotion. And in the end, we are all Maggie Tulliver, up in the attic, driving nails into the dolls head.