Byronic Hero: the Gothic villain

The first person who uses the Byronic hero as a variant of the Romantic hero was Lord Byron (hence the name). In England, some authors focused on Lord Byron and a large number of Gothic novels and dramas contain a protagonist who is a Byronic hero.
As Gothic writers,  Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe introduced in their novels the figure of the Gothic villan, which develops into the Byronic hero. As states in the web page http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACTE.htm, the characteristics of the Byronic hero would be: 
- A rebel man.
- Possession of dark qualities instead of heroic virtues.
- Isolation from society.
- He is often moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue.
- Emotional and intellectual capacities superior from those of the average man.
- Characterized as arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, etc.
- Characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed sexual crime.
For all of these characteristics the Byronic hero is considered a figure of repulsion but also fascination.
Examples of this byronic hero would be the ominous hero-villain of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the brooding, guilt-haunted monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian(1797).

Representation of women in Gulliver´s Travels

Many female critics have considered the book Gulliver´s Travels as a misogynist work. The many references to the female sex and body in Swift´s book are negative and they tend to degrade and disfigure the vision of women. Women are continuously separated from men in Gulliver’s accounts and are described in a superficial manner. The accumulation of these descriptions creates a sense of male superiority. These kind of references can be seen through the whole book.

Women are seldom discussed in the first book, during Gulliver’s first voyage to Lilliput.  This shows the minimal role women play in this society. One of the few examples is the event of the Majesty´s apartment on fire. Gulliver says that it was "by the carelessness of a maid of honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a romance”. This illustrates the defects and bad habits of women.

In the second book, in his voyage to Brobdingnag, Gulliver shows his repulsion towards women´s physical appearance. He usually uses women as the objects of refusal to speak about an unpleasant vision of mankind in that country.

In Balnibari, a country included in the third part of the book, women are taxed in a different way than men. While men are taxed on characteristics such as wit, valour, and politeness, women are valued superficially: their most important virtues are fashion and beauty.

I have taken the ideas for this post from:

http://bookstove.com/classics/a-feminist-perspective-of-gullivers-travels/

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Literature-697/Gulliver-travels.htm

The Lilliputian Emperor vs. George I

This first book of Gulliver´s Travels by Jonathan Swift is full of political satire. Describing the Lilliputian Emperor, Swift is definitely playing with fire. There are some characteristics related to the Emperor of Lilliput which can be compared with the actual King of England at the time of the publication of the novel:

Gulliver  kneeling down in front 

of the Emperor of Lilliput

- The Lilliputian Emperor represents George I of England. Swift had no admiration for this king, and uses Lilliputian court practices allegorically to criticize the English monarch. 

- George was a Whig king who actively persecuted the Tories, hence the whole high heel/low heel thing described in the novel. The Emperor of Lilliput is described as a partisan of the Low-Heels, just as King George I employed only Whigs in his administration; the Emperor's heir is described as having "one of his heels higher than the other", which describes the encouragement by the Prince of Wales (the future George II) of the political opposition during his father's life.

- The Emperor's vulnerability to manipulation by his ministers, Flimnap (Robert Walpole) and Bolgolam, implies that George I was easily influenced by his favorites. 

- The Emperor of Lilliput also wants to enslave the people of Blefuscu, his neighbours. When Gulliver refuses to help him destroy Blefuscu, the Emperor starts to hate Gulliver. This may be a reference to George I's war with France and Austria over Spanish territories in the War of the Spanish Succession.

- The tiny emperor also represents tyranny, cruelty, lust for power, and corruption. This can be seen as a symbol of bad government at the time in England.