Guilt

The first few lines of the section of Manfred that we were assigned to read, though not spoken by Manfred himself, already set he tone of deep guilt: “If fault there be, I must see him.” Manfred is severely tormented by some guilt. Regardless to his inner turmoil he seems to be outwardly stable and respected by those around him. In fact he seems superior to those around him, he even acts this way towards the spirit. He succeeds in challenging the spirit, which would appear undefeatable and generally represents a successful force in literature, yet Manfred casts the spirit off and decides to take his death into his own hands, “but was my own destroyer and will be my own hereafter.- Back ye baffled fiends! The hand of death is on me- but not yours!” Manfred has made his intensions clear- he refuses to answer to anyone or anything but himself and therefore must be in charge of his own destruction. His suicide will allow him to punish himself and paradoxically it will allow him to escape his mysterious guilt. He no longer must “grovel on earth in indecent decay.” In the beginning of his soliloquy Manfred states: “the night hath been to me a more familiar face than that of man,” admitting his feelings of isolation from humanity and perhaps his familiarity with the thought of death. However, in his last words he forced to overcome his self-imposed isolation from humanity, for he realized the hardship of leaving the “ruinous perfection” when he turns to Abbot and says: “Old man! ‘tis not so difficult to die.” Byron wrote this after his marriage failed due to a scandal surrounding charges of an incestuous affair between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta and their illegitimate daughter, Medora. Because Manfred was written immediately after this and because the main character of Manfred is tortured by an unknown sense of guilt, Manfred could be written out of the shame Byron felt after all his own personal scandals.