On Heroes and Antiheroes: Visions of Resistance and Victorian Ethos Revisited

Abstract

The aim of this project is to analyze the antagonist of H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure, Ayesha, and the main character in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes, to characterize them as anti-heroes, by conflating them with the features of the Byronic hero archetype and with Nietzsche’s Übermensch, examining if a relation can be established between these three figures. To that purpose, the work’s first section outlines the figure of the hero and its conceptualization in Victorian England through the prism of Thomas Carlyle’s seminal text, On Heroes. The influence of this work transformed the dichotomy protagonist-antagonist into the clash between the socially minded Carlylean hero and the individualistic Byronic hero/villain; a situation that changed drastically with Decadentism and its admiration for the more nuanced figures of the anti-hero and the Übermensch, both studied in the subsequent sections of the work.