Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker

Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker

SOURCE: Boker, Pamela A. “Byron's Psychic Prometheus: Narcissism and Self-Transformation in the Dramatic Poem Manfred.” Literature and Psychology 38, nos. 1-2 (1992): 1-37.

In the following essay, Boker suggests that the usual Oedipal reading of Manfred leaves much of the play's complexity unexplained; she offers a reading that also accounts for the protagonist's narcissism.

I

Since its publication in 1917, Manfred has been viewed by literary scholars as one of the most enigmatic of Byron's works. As recently as 1982, Philip Martin dismissed it as a “very bad drama,” and as one which was “not capable of supporting a psychological or emotional dimension worthy of interest.” Martin's negative valuation is based on his belief that the play reveals “an emotional and intellectual immaturity of the kind usually associated with adolescence” (107,110). Ironically, this observation is also the strongest evidence employed by other critics to support an opposite interpretation: that Manfred's adolescent...
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