"Dear object of defeated care"" an analysis of character transformation in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Abstract

Heroes are an indispensable part of nineteenth century verse and prose, and none so dominate the period as the weary travelers of Childe Harold, plagued with spent emotions and satiated desire. Byron's earlier canon evidences minor examples of such characters, but Childe Harold and the narrator of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I A Romaunt have been accorded the distinction of the first characters in English literature who fully display the facets of Weltschmerz. This study proposes to analyze the development of those characters within Childe Harold. Although a definite direction of alteration is apparent in the characters of Harold and the narrator, inconsistencies in character attitudes are evidenced in the work.Byron's haphazard composition techniques are generally responsible for such inconsistencies, Coleridge notes, in fact, that Byron had inscribed on the verso of the original manuscript the linel "Dear Object of Defeated Care," indicating, it seems, the author's aw"areness of inadequacies in the text. Lines struck from the Preface of the original manuscript are explicit in their identification of Byron as the narrator from the poem's inception. To facilitate this examination, however, the narrator will be considered solely in his relationship to the text of the poem, Parallels which might have been drawn between incidents in the poem and Byron's private life were not drawn in the belief that such matters were foreign to a textual examination, Lastly, it.has been necessary to specify the dominant character in each stanza of the poem. The result is, of necessity, a rather artificial framework. It is necessary because most serious critics of the Byronic Hero in ChiIde Harold have constructed similar structures, none of which are in strict accord. Some scholars have even considered a third character, a narrator- Harold, in Canto III. For the purposes of this study, however, all sentiments emanating from a narrator-like character have been considered the sentiments of the same character.