SOURCE: “Incest, Narcissism and Demonality in Byron's Manfred,” in Mosaic, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 25-38.

In the following essay, Macdonald theorizes that Manfred is a powerful revision of Goethe's Faust and of the tradition behind it. Macdonald explains that the central act of the poem, the pact with the devil, can be traced to the psychodynamics of incest.

In 1816, Byron left England forever, his reputation ruined by the collapse of his marriage and the rumors of his affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He went first to Switzerland, where he met the Shelleys and suggested that they all pass the time by writing ghost stories. The most famous fruit of this suggestion was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Byron himself began a story but soon gave it up; it was completed by his personal physician, J. W. Polidori, and eventually published, under Byron's name, as The Vampyre (1819). Byron did not...