House as a Byronic Hero [SOME SEASON 4 SPOILERS]
[You can read this anyway--the spoilers are toward the end and I'll put a warning and space.]
This is actually something I'd been meaning to write about for this group, but with my MS, I just never got around to it, and it started to feel like a chore than something enjoyable (writing where I have to concentrate and think logically and organize, even fanfic, knocks out my concentration in 15-30 minutes--even a kinky fanfic scene, which is kind of depressing when you're writing one and you start falling asleep >:-| ). Thankfully, the article's been written and brilliantly by Barbara Barnett. And you can find it right here. Go read it if you have any interest in House and Byronic heroes; it's very well-written, persuasive, well-supported, and a fun read besides. And it's saved me completely from something I kept feeling I should do, but never got around to and kept finding daunting b/c, as I may have mentioned before, MS sucks. It's a great relief not to have to write it myself. House actually came around too late to be included in my book, but in my book, having to draw a line somewhere, I limited it to heroes w/ some kind of superhuman or supernatural quality: ghosts or dead people temporarily brought back from the dead to accomplish a heroic task, vampires, omnipotent superbeings, terminators, and "the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane!."* Well, except for the last chapter on the Byronic heroine. Later, a student from another university emailed me about a paper about the The Bride of the Kill Bill movies as a BH, and I had a total "D'Oh!" reaction. Like why didn't I think of that? Again she would have been too late for the book, but, man, she'd have been a great inclusion in the last chapter. But House is a quintessential BH, so you must read Ms. Barnett's essay.
Naturally, having written a book on the subject of BH's in pop culture and taught the subject before MS made me retire, I had to write an excessively long comment, so I'll pop that behind a cut. But don't read it till you've read Ms. Barnett's essay first. Mine is just footnotes. Also, a very good friend of mine, Jim Merrill, a full-time English instructor at Oxnard College for decades (and department chair for at least two stints) heard me mention that I was interested in writing this, and, back in January, he emailed me a really marvelous and well-thought out discussion of House as a BH, it kind of made me feel like, why bother write mine? But I did have some things to add, specifically references to Byron's works, so I'll throw those in at the bottom.
This is really excellent. I think you pretty much covered all the bases. This would be an A- paper. The minus for not going back to Byron's heroes themselves. But since this isn't a paper, it's totally right on and totally rocks!
"Son of Coma Guy" strikes me as a particularly good example of House's own moral code. Once he agrees to the deal that he has to answer a question every time he asks one, he comes through even when the question asked is a very personal one that is horribly painful for House to answer. A Byronic hero usually sticks to his deals.
I actually find Heathcliff of E. Brontë's Wuthering Heights to be more strictly like Byron's own heroes than Rochester (although when Rochester is maimed, I used to like to say he'd been "de-Byronized"). One example of Heathcliff's moral code is in a conversation with Nelly, the housekeeper, about Edgar the husband of his beloved/soulmate, Catherine. He says:
"Had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society, as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drank his blood! But, till then--if you don't believe me, you don't know me--till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!"
House is of course an outlaw as Byronic heroes tend to be, but he's an outlaw in the cause of saving lives. When (blanking on his name) the guy w/ money who takes over the hospital keeps harrassing and trying to get rid of House, House isn't interested in being a flag bearer for hospital independence from people who only want to make money from sick people, he just wants to be left alone.
In some ways we see, as you pointed out, these moments of caring and gently speaking truth to a patient. But in the Tritter arc, he really is literally incapable of seeing beyond his own problems (lack of drugs) to see the utterly devastating effects that protecting him have had on Wilson. Like Heathcliff, and Rochester (oh, minor detail, I'm married already--nah, better not share that w/ her until after we've committed bigamy), and jumping ahead to Gaiman's Dream, Eric Draven of "The Crow" and Angel of the eponymous series, House can never be with the woman he loves. In House and Dream's cases, as with Byron's Manfred, it's b/c he can't see past his own ego and raging self-absorption to consider that she might have needs.
BH's tend to have supernatural powers or quasi-supernatural powers. The Western gunman who never misses. House w/ his intelligence. But they're always torn b/t their superiority complex and the less desolate lives ordinary humans seem to lead. He gets there (in his head) in "Reason," [that should have been "No Reason"] and we see it in the fact that he can't lose Wilson or he'd be devastated. We saw that, one of my favorite examples in "Son of Coma Guy," when Wilson has been berating House for pushing all relationships to the breaking point so he can circularly prove to himself that all r'ships are conditional, and House says, in a line slash fans (myself included) took as a veritable declaration of love: "Maybe I don't want to push this til' it breaks."
He's way larger than life, but that doesn't stop him from being human.
And I finally stopped blathering, but in response to my comment about House and the BH's moral code in "Son of Coma Guy," Ms. Barnett added a comment I thought was worth including here:
"That's a very consistent feature of the character. Once he commits to something, he does honor it. He even tried in Role Model, but his ideals got in the way of that as well, and he couldn't quite bring himself to give that speech for Vogler. None of the people in his sphere really got what he was doing, or why he was so against giving the speech. Foreman assumed it was because he couldn't be "nice." But it was because he couldn't sell out people who would be ripped off by the drug, and couldn't lend his name to the effort for (what he believed was) personal gain."
Now I'm going to give you Jim Merrill's thoughts on the subject, from an email with the subject header "Childe Gregory?":
Gregory House, M.D., certainly has capabilities beyond those of normal folk, or even normal doctors, and he operates from a perspective of being able to detach himself from the plain of human concerns in exercising those powers. That seems Byronic.
His whole being is driven not simply by his uncontrollable drug addiction but also by some deeply seated unnamed traumas and sources of guilt. Byronic.
And he likes to think that he can operate outside the rules because of his superior abilities. Byronic.
So those factors speak to his being in the Byronic hero mode. And House would, I'm sure, be inwardly giddy to perceive himself as such.
The arc of the series, I believe, is to reveal the very human flaws of that construct. He's an ordinary man in the real world, with real skills and real flaws. We have been shown that he blows his diagnoses for the first three acts, sometimes with permanently negative consequences. His addiction has been shown as a true debilitation, not an exalted exception. While he likes to believe that he operates outside the norms and rules of his environment, we have been shown the consequences of that behavior, and that it is the conformists around him who have continually saved his bacon.
The whole Tritter arc really brought home how House does not have the chops to operate outside the norms. Even before the hearing, we saw just how he relied not on his own exalted perspective and ability but on the pitying indulgence of those around him to continue on his path. Though Tritter was an asshole, he was also the one to bring the news about the emperor's clothes: Episode by episode, we learned just how weak House would be without his tribe. The Byronic hero is a loner. House could not, I submit, carry on without his network of co-dependents.
So, the latest episode, in which we learn that Cuddy perjures herself to save House, shows just how helpless he is without community. Tritter reasserts his power by wishing House luck. And the judge points out that House is fortunate to have devoted friends.
I don't much cotton to the term "deconstruct," but if I did, I'd say that the show is deconstructing Gregory's image as Byronic hero. The jail cell admission to Wilson that his withdrawal meds were really painkillers demonstrated that he thinks he's still in charge, but we are supposed to realize that he's, pardon the pun, arrested.
My girls would add, though, that he has lovely eyes.
OK, moi again:
I agree with this argument wrt the Tritter arc, but I think the series creators restored some of House's Byronism, probably b/c that's how fans like to see him. Still we'll have to wait till the series finale to see where the arc is going, and my guess is that Jim's probably right about the series setting up House as a BH and then deconstructing him as such. Me, I'd like him or Wilson to plant a serious kiss on the other and disappear together into the sunset. :-) So, like Rochester, he may be de-Byronized, but he still gets the . . . guy.
[SEASON 4 SPOILERS]
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That guitar chord at the end of his first lecture to his 40 job candidates was purely I'm-going-to-do-things-my-own-f***ing-way Byronic. Even if it was just a gesture. But he does toss out job candidates with pure random amusing-himselfness, and he gets away with doing that entirely by his own rules.
But at the same time, he's considerably humanized. We see in "Alone," that Wilson definitely has power over him; I loved his guitar-napping and his sadistic rendition of the sounds of guitar-torture. He's in control in that whole scene.
And, of course, we see that House realizes he can't work alone; he's been de-Byronized in that respect since Byronic heroes exemplify isolation. But at the same time, BH's tend to be humanized by their creators; we need to see some vulnerability and humanity in them so we can identify with them. Pure admiration of unadulterated superiority gets old.
In Byron's Manfred (don't read this paragraph if you haven't read it--in fact the same goes for any texts I mention here), he's insisted on his isolation and his ability as a sorcerer and the fact that he doesn't need anyone else, except of course his dead sister/lover Astarte. (Named for the Semitic goddess of Love I assume--her other manifestations are Ishtar, Inanna, Esther, Ashtoreth, among others, and eventually Aphrodite (this all comes from Wikipedia, since I couldn't remember the names other than Ishtar)).
House, as I noted, can be utterly self-absorbed--my example being when Wilson has lost his car, his money, and worse, for Wilson, his medical practice and he's not allowed to see his patients--and House can only think about getting his Vicodin back and getting Tritter out of his way.
A similar example of self-absorption comes when Manfred sees the "Phantom" of Astarte. We don't know how she died; Manfred says he destroyed her "Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart; It gazed on mine, and withered"(2.2.118-19). In a way this makes me think of Stacy's breakup with House; I don't remember the episode or exact lines, but she says that she couldn't get his attention any more, he was totally absorbed in his work, and she would spend evenings home alone and crying. In both cases, the male lover destroys his relationship w/ the love of his life b/c he simply can't get over himself and his self-absorption and sense of his own superiority to pay attention to her needs. We see this in the non-conversation Manfred has with his dead sister/lover:
Hear me, hear me--
Astarte! my belovéd! speak to me:
I have so much endured--so much endure--
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. (2.4.116-20)
I mean, he's talking to the spirit of his DEAD SISTER, and all he can talk about how much he endures, and how the grave has not changed her as much as HE has changed for her. It's all about his suffering; he never asks, like, "Hey, what's it like being dead, anyway?" or even "How are you?"
The "so much endure" lines have a perfect parallel in Q (the omnipotent and immortal being who has spent countless years "torturing" "inferior" cultures), in the episode "Q-Less" of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when Q says, melodramatically and with an exaggerated sigh, "Heavy is the burden of being me."
Manfred rejects the offers of Christian redemption brought him by the elderly Abbot, and he defeats, on his own, the demons from Hell who come to claim him on the assigned day of his death, declaring:
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey--
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! (3.4.137-41)
Clearly, if House is destroyed it will be b/c he's his own destroyer. But at the same time he needs Wilson, and when his ducklings return to the hospital, we see that he clearly needed them and probably cares about them too.
The Abbot remains w/ Manfred during this whole encounter with the demons, and we see Manfred's BHian power to defeat his enemies on his own. But he can't pick the day of his death, and as he dies he asks the Abbot, "Give me thy hand" (3.4.149), not wanting to be totally alone as he faces this moment. And while throughout the play Manfred has rejected humanity as beneath him and is disgusted with mortality, he has a death wish at the same time. Thus, he can't escape the fact that mortality defines humanity, and if he wants to die, then he has to be human. And his last words are to the Abbot, "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." (3.4.151) When this line was left out of the first edition (I can testify to this; I own one), Byron wrote to his publisher, furiously, "You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking, and why this was done, I know not."
BH's always reveal their humanity or their desire for humanity; Manfred's last words always remind me of the Terminator's words to John as he's about be willingly terminated: "I now know why you cry, but it is something I can never do."
Well, those were the Byronic parallels I would have included if I had ever written my essay, and I'm glad I finally wrote them, but Ms. Barnett and also my friend Jim taught me a helluva lot about House as a BH and I'm very grateful. I also apologize for tailgaiting on Ms. Barnett's excellent work and using it as an opportunity finally to express some of what I had been thinking about House as a BH. Her essay was pure inspiration, and I hope my blathering has added simply another dimension to the topic; it's such a relief to have it dumped on a computer screen so I can have more room in my head. And I've bookmarked her site, so I can read her House reviews.
And if you have your own favorite pop culture Byronic heroes, then let's hear about them!
*The quote is Death speaking to Dream in the story "The Sound of Her Wings" in the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.
This is actually something I'd been meaning to write about for this group, but with my MS, I just never got around to it, and it started to feel like a chore than something enjoyable (writing where I have to concentrate and think logically and organize, even fanfic, knocks out my concentration in 15-30 minutes--even a kinky fanfic scene, which is kind of depressing when you're writing one and you start falling asleep >:-| ). Thankfully, the article's been written and brilliantly by Barbara Barnett. And you can find it right here. Go read it if you have any interest in House and Byronic heroes; it's very well-written, persuasive, well-supported, and a fun read besides. And it's saved me completely from something I kept feeling I should do, but never got around to and kept finding daunting b/c, as I may have mentioned before, MS sucks. It's a great relief not to have to write it myself. House actually came around too late to be included in my book, but in my book, having to draw a line somewhere, I limited it to heroes w/ some kind of superhuman or supernatural quality: ghosts or dead people temporarily brought back from the dead to accomplish a heroic task, vampires, omnipotent superbeings, terminators, and "the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane!."* Well, except for the last chapter on the Byronic heroine. Later, a student from another university emailed me about a paper about the The Bride of the Kill Bill movies as a BH, and I had a total "D'Oh!" reaction. Like why didn't I think of that? Again she would have been too late for the book, but, man, she'd have been a great inclusion in the last chapter. But House is a quintessential BH, so you must read Ms. Barnett's essay.
Naturally, having written a book on the subject of BH's in pop culture and taught the subject before MS made me retire, I had to write an excessively long comment, so I'll pop that behind a cut. But don't read it till you've read Ms. Barnett's essay first. Mine is just footnotes. Also, a very good friend of mine, Jim Merrill, a full-time English instructor at Oxnard College for decades (and department chair for at least two stints) heard me mention that I was interested in writing this, and, back in January, he emailed me a really marvelous and well-thought out discussion of House as a BH, it kind of made me feel like, why bother write mine? But I did have some things to add, specifically references to Byron's works, so I'll throw those in at the bottom.
This is really excellent. I think you pretty much covered all the bases. This would be an A- paper. The minus for not going back to Byron's heroes themselves. But since this isn't a paper, it's totally right on and totally rocks!
"Son of Coma Guy" strikes me as a particularly good example of House's own moral code. Once he agrees to the deal that he has to answer a question every time he asks one, he comes through even when the question asked is a very personal one that is horribly painful for House to answer. A Byronic hero usually sticks to his deals.
I actually find Heathcliff of E. Brontë's Wuthering Heights to be more strictly like Byron's own heroes than Rochester (although when Rochester is maimed, I used to like to say he'd been "de-Byronized"). One example of Heathcliff's moral code is in a conversation with Nelly, the housekeeper, about Edgar the husband of his beloved/soulmate, Catherine. He says:
"Had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society, as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drank his blood! But, till then--if you don't believe me, you don't know me--till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!"
House is of course an outlaw as Byronic heroes tend to be, but he's an outlaw in the cause of saving lives. When (blanking on his name) the guy w/ money who takes over the hospital keeps harrassing and trying to get rid of House, House isn't interested in being a flag bearer for hospital independence from people who only want to make money from sick people, he just wants to be left alone.
In some ways we see, as you pointed out, these moments of caring and gently speaking truth to a patient. But in the Tritter arc, he really is literally incapable of seeing beyond his own problems (lack of drugs) to see the utterly devastating effects that protecting him have had on Wilson. Like Heathcliff, and Rochester (oh, minor detail, I'm married already--nah, better not share that w/ her until after we've committed bigamy), and jumping ahead to Gaiman's Dream, Eric Draven of "The Crow" and Angel of the eponymous series, House can never be with the woman he loves. In House and Dream's cases, as with Byron's Manfred, it's b/c he can't see past his own ego and raging self-absorption to consider that she might have needs.
BH's tend to have supernatural powers or quasi-supernatural powers. The Western gunman who never misses. House w/ his intelligence. But they're always torn b/t their superiority complex and the less desolate lives ordinary humans seem to lead. He gets there (in his head) in "Reason," [that should have been "No Reason"] and we see it in the fact that he can't lose Wilson or he'd be devastated. We saw that, one of my favorite examples in "Son of Coma Guy," when Wilson has been berating House for pushing all relationships to the breaking point so he can circularly prove to himself that all r'ships are conditional, and House says, in a line slash fans (myself included) took as a veritable declaration of love: "Maybe I don't want to push this til' it breaks."
He's way larger than life, but that doesn't stop him from being human.
And I finally stopped blathering, but in response to my comment about House and the BH's moral code in "Son of Coma Guy," Ms. Barnett added a comment I thought was worth including here:
"That's a very consistent feature of the character. Once he commits to something, he does honor it. He even tried in Role Model, but his ideals got in the way of that as well, and he couldn't quite bring himself to give that speech for Vogler. None of the people in his sphere really got what he was doing, or why he was so against giving the speech. Foreman assumed it was because he couldn't be "nice." But it was because he couldn't sell out people who would be ripped off by the drug, and couldn't lend his name to the effort for (what he believed was) personal gain."
Now I'm going to give you Jim Merrill's thoughts on the subject, from an email with the subject header "Childe Gregory?":
Gregory House, M.D., certainly has capabilities beyond those of normal folk, or even normal doctors, and he operates from a perspective of being able to detach himself from the plain of human concerns in exercising those powers. That seems Byronic.
His whole being is driven not simply by his uncontrollable drug addiction but also by some deeply seated unnamed traumas and sources of guilt. Byronic.
And he likes to think that he can operate outside the rules because of his superior abilities. Byronic.
So those factors speak to his being in the Byronic hero mode. And House would, I'm sure, be inwardly giddy to perceive himself as such.
The arc of the series, I believe, is to reveal the very human flaws of that construct. He's an ordinary man in the real world, with real skills and real flaws. We have been shown that he blows his diagnoses for the first three acts, sometimes with permanently negative consequences. His addiction has been shown as a true debilitation, not an exalted exception. While he likes to believe that he operates outside the norms and rules of his environment, we have been shown the consequences of that behavior, and that it is the conformists around him who have continually saved his bacon.
The whole Tritter arc really brought home how House does not have the chops to operate outside the norms. Even before the hearing, we saw just how he relied not on his own exalted perspective and ability but on the pitying indulgence of those around him to continue on his path. Though Tritter was an asshole, he was also the one to bring the news about the emperor's clothes: Episode by episode, we learned just how weak House would be without his tribe. The Byronic hero is a loner. House could not, I submit, carry on without his network of co-dependents.
So, the latest episode, in which we learn that Cuddy perjures herself to save House, shows just how helpless he is without community. Tritter reasserts his power by wishing House luck. And the judge points out that House is fortunate to have devoted friends.
I don't much cotton to the term "deconstruct," but if I did, I'd say that the show is deconstructing Gregory's image as Byronic hero. The jail cell admission to Wilson that his withdrawal meds were really painkillers demonstrated that he thinks he's still in charge, but we are supposed to realize that he's, pardon the pun, arrested.
My girls would add, though, that he has lovely eyes.
OK, moi again:
I agree with this argument wrt the Tritter arc, but I think the series creators restored some of House's Byronism, probably b/c that's how fans like to see him. Still we'll have to wait till the series finale to see where the arc is going, and my guess is that Jim's probably right about the series setting up House as a BH and then deconstructing him as such. Me, I'd like him or Wilson to plant a serious kiss on the other and disappear together into the sunset. :-) So, like Rochester, he may be de-Byronized, but he still gets the . . . guy.
[SEASON 4 SPOILERS]
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
That guitar chord at the end of his first lecture to his 40 job candidates was purely I'm-going-to-do-things-my-own-f***ing-way Byronic. Even if it was just a gesture. But he does toss out job candidates with pure random amusing-himselfness, and he gets away with doing that entirely by his own rules.
But at the same time, he's considerably humanized. We see in "Alone," that Wilson definitely has power over him; I loved his guitar-napping and his sadistic rendition of the sounds of guitar-torture. He's in control in that whole scene.
And, of course, we see that House realizes he can't work alone; he's been de-Byronized in that respect since Byronic heroes exemplify isolation. But at the same time, BH's tend to be humanized by their creators; we need to see some vulnerability and humanity in them so we can identify with them. Pure admiration of unadulterated superiority gets old.
In Byron's Manfred (don't read this paragraph if you haven't read it--in fact the same goes for any texts I mention here), he's insisted on his isolation and his ability as a sorcerer and the fact that he doesn't need anyone else, except of course his dead sister/lover Astarte. (Named for the Semitic goddess of Love I assume--her other manifestations are Ishtar, Inanna, Esther, Ashtoreth, among others, and eventually Aphrodite (this all comes from Wikipedia, since I couldn't remember the names other than Ishtar)).
House, as I noted, can be utterly self-absorbed--my example being when Wilson has lost his car, his money, and worse, for Wilson, his medical practice and he's not allowed to see his patients--and House can only think about getting his Vicodin back and getting Tritter out of his way.
A similar example of self-absorption comes when Manfred sees the "Phantom" of Astarte. We don't know how she died; Manfred says he destroyed her "Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart; It gazed on mine, and withered"(2.2.118-19). In a way this makes me think of Stacy's breakup with House; I don't remember the episode or exact lines, but she says that she couldn't get his attention any more, he was totally absorbed in his work, and she would spend evenings home alone and crying. In both cases, the male lover destroys his relationship w/ the love of his life b/c he simply can't get over himself and his self-absorption and sense of his own superiority to pay attention to her needs. We see this in the non-conversation Manfred has with his dead sister/lover:
Hear me, hear me--
Astarte! my belovéd! speak to me:
I have so much endured--so much endure--
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. (2.4.116-20)
I mean, he's talking to the spirit of his DEAD SISTER, and all he can talk about how much he endures, and how the grave has not changed her as much as HE has changed for her. It's all about his suffering; he never asks, like, "Hey, what's it like being dead, anyway?" or even "How are you?"
The "so much endure" lines have a perfect parallel in Q (the omnipotent and immortal being who has spent countless years "torturing" "inferior" cultures), in the episode "Q-Less" of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when Q says, melodramatically and with an exaggerated sigh, "Heavy is the burden of being me."
Manfred rejects the offers of Christian redemption brought him by the elderly Abbot, and he defeats, on his own, the demons from Hell who come to claim him on the assigned day of his death, declaring:
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey--
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! (3.4.137-41)
Clearly, if House is destroyed it will be b/c he's his own destroyer. But at the same time he needs Wilson, and when his ducklings return to the hospital, we see that he clearly needed them and probably cares about them too.
The Abbot remains w/ Manfred during this whole encounter with the demons, and we see Manfred's BHian power to defeat his enemies on his own. But he can't pick the day of his death, and as he dies he asks the Abbot, "Give me thy hand" (3.4.149), not wanting to be totally alone as he faces this moment. And while throughout the play Manfred has rejected humanity as beneath him and is disgusted with mortality, he has a death wish at the same time. Thus, he can't escape the fact that mortality defines humanity, and if he wants to die, then he has to be human. And his last words are to the Abbot, "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." (3.4.151) When this line was left out of the first edition (I can testify to this; I own one), Byron wrote to his publisher, furiously, "You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking, and why this was done, I know not."
BH's always reveal their humanity or their desire for humanity; Manfred's last words always remind me of the Terminator's words to John as he's about be willingly terminated: "I now know why you cry, but it is something I can never do."
Well, those were the Byronic parallels I would have included if I had ever written my essay, and I'm glad I finally wrote them, but Ms. Barnett and also my friend Jim taught me a helluva lot about House as a BH and I'm very grateful. I also apologize for tailgaiting on Ms. Barnett's excellent work and using it as an opportunity finally to express some of what I had been thinking about House as a BH. Her essay was pure inspiration, and I hope my blathering has added simply another dimension to the topic; it's such a relief to have it dumped on a computer screen so I can have more room in my head. And I've bookmarked her site, so I can read her House reviews.
And if you have your own favorite pop culture Byronic heroes, then let's hear about them!
*The quote is Death speaking to Dream in the story "The Sound of Her Wings" in the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.