SOURCE: Luke, K. McCormick. “Lord Byron's Manfred: A Study of Alienation from Within.” University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (fall 1970): 15-26.

In the following essay, Luke claims that Manfred's guilt stems not from a possibly incestuous relationship with Astarte, but from his failure to prevent her death.

From the time of its publication, critics have ever emphasized the Faustian elements in Byron's Manfred. The emphasis is crucially misleading because by definition the Faustian character deliberately chooses to strike a bargain with evil in exchange for knowledge and power. Byron makes it explicitly clear that Manfred has at no time bargained with evil, that he has gained his knowledge of earthly and occult matters by means of studious and daring endeavour. His quest is self-oblivion, not the self-gratification pursued by the central character in Marlowe's A Tragical History of Dr Faustus, with which Manfred is most often compared. The perversion of...