She manipulates and exploits all the vanities and childhood scars of her friends (wounds left by neglectful mothers, an abusive uncle, absent dads); she grabs at intimacies and worms her way into their comfortable lives, then starts swinging a pickax. His villainy is in his carefulness, his coldness, his self-preservation at all costs. 17-year-old Abigail is a prime example of using power and hysteria and misinformation for evil. Likable Characters In Children’s Literature. Some are terrifying because of their utter heartlessness, while others are terrifying because they pretend to care. Roz thinks: “Women don’t want all the men eaten up by man-eaters; they want a few left over so they can eat some themselves.”, Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray. Sometimes I like to think about what this novel would be like if someone wrote it today, with Dorian as a social media star. What’s their secret, asks David Robson. These dastardly baddies are some of the most memorable characters in all of children’s literature — despite their nefarious motives and questionable intent. This is an interesting study because the seeming antagonist to Jake, the main character, is his own impotence which keeps him from the love of his life, Lady Brett Ashley. That’s right, I said it. The main character is often called the protagonist. Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. In the end, she has a single feeling of remorse and promptly kills herself. The greatest villains in literature. Listen: Annie Wilkes is a fan. You’ve never met a more dedicated hustler. He maintained a serene comportment at all times but generated a threatening atmosphere, like a thunderhead that seems far away but then is suddenly overhead with a loud violence.” He’s a little more interesting and intelligent than a simple brute—in part due to that sidekick of his—which only makes him more frightening as a character. We can just make dinosaurs! Lord Voldemort. That said, the real antagonist in this novel might actually be the unknown and unexplained force that keeps transporting Dana from her good life in 1976 California to a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. David Melrose, Never Mind, Edward St. Aubyn. Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. “The book was widely read as an antisuburban novel, and that disappointed me,” Yates said in a 1972 interview. . From Batman to Gandalf, compelling heroes give the reader a character to root for and a pair of eyes through which to follow the story. Be it novels, poems or drama, all genres of literature are endowed with a huge fan following. Grimm's fairytales are sprinkled with awful stepmothers, but it's hard to compete against this queen, who hired a huntsman to cut out her stepdaughter's heart — and that's only the first murder attempt. In a prime example of religion gone wrong, Carrie's mother, Margaret White, was both physically and psychologically abusive of her young daughter, locking her in a closet to force her to pray, telling her that her period was a sign of sexual impurity, and generally driving Carrie, to, well, murder everyone. We’ve heard that one before. He is terrifying because we all know him—or someone who could oh-so-easily slide into his long overcoat, one winter’s night. Images: Universal Pictures (3); Warner Bros (3); United Artists (2); Columbia (2); 20th Century Fox; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Paramount Pictures; Lifetime; HBO; TriStar Pictures. Here’s a villain you can’t help but root for—I mean, sort of. After a lifetime spent abusing and manipulating her son into believing all women are evil sluts except for her, her son murders her — but Norma's not done with him yet. . Moriarty has become bigger than Moriarty. In Atwood’s retelling of the Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” an evil temptress named Zenia steals the partners of three women (among many, one presumes). It can’t be Romy; serving a life sentence for killing a man who was stalking her. She is Iago in a miniskirt. You could argue that it’s Harry who corrupts Dorian, and James who stalks and tries to murder him, but the real source of all this young hedonist’s problems is his own self-obsession. This sadistic teacher disguises her cruelty … Uriah Heep, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. Forget all that sexual stuff you see in the movies. She's a terrifying force of female power, praying to the gods to turn the milk from her breasts into poison, so she can better enact her horrifying deeds. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long, lank, skeleton hand.” Some Dickens scholars apparently think that Heep was based on Hans Christian Andersen, in which case, mega burn—unless Andersen was into heavy metal. He might actually be the devil—or simply evil itself. lord, fie! Dracula vants one thing:... 7 I have to say, that’s smart. Apparently all this is available to her because of her remarkable beauty. 9. Give villains explicit or implicit trauma. Heroes can be flawed, tragic, brave, or even villainous, and knowing which type of hero your protagonist is can help you write an interesting and convincing main character. There is no foreseeable problem with this. They should be got rid of as early as possible.”. Actually, the fact that he thinks he’s better than his father actually makes him worse. What’s that about? Obviously, Harry Potter is the main character. Well, she's the granddaughter of a serial killer and murders her classmate, her dog, a neighbor, and a maintenance man. In the end, of course, no amount of fancy prose style is enough to make you forget that he’s a murderer and worse, but for this reader, it’s pure pleasure getting there. Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts. Think of these as noteworthy villains, if it clarifies things. It is the whole thing, every aspect, of the American prison system—meant to catch you and bleed you and keep you and bring you back—that is the true villain in this novel (and often, in real life). It can’t be any of the prisoners, nor any of the guards in particular. ), Infertility, The Children of Men, P. D. James. By Heba Hasan. In the world of horror, there's nothing quite as eerie as a really good female villain. The Witches by Roald Dahl. Nor is this a book with no villain, because the pulsing sense of injustice is too great. Well, it might mean any number of things here: most actually terrifying, or most compelling, or most well-written, or most secretly beloved by readers who know they are supposed to be rooting for the white hats but just can’t help it. Things do not then go well for Paul, because as it turns out, Annie is already a seasoned serial killer who is very handy (read: murderous) with household objects. He is a fantastic villain, a dangerous trickster, whose character has stumped (and intrigued) critics for centuries. She is addicted to order and power, and can be quite cruel in commanding it. We may not love them in our lives, but they’re often the best part of our literature—on account of their clear power, their refusal of social norms, and most importantly, their ability to make stories happen. Since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a novel, we meet many other characters as well. ), Glanton’s deputy is over six feet tall and completely hairless. But these are only symptoms, in this the Great American Novel, of the Great American Sin. from Stoker’s “Dracula.”. He is desperately unhappy; he considers himself a god. The government that has taken control of America in the world of Atwood’s classic dystopia is a fundamentalist theocracy whose leaders have eliminated the boundary between church and state—and worse, have twisted religious principles and political power in an attempt to utterly subjugate all women, erasing their identities and allowing them to exist only so far as they may be of use to the state. to have had so much blood in him. The problem with cartoonish, caricature-like villains is that … “They don’t have a name for what he is.” Also, he has six fingers—though they’re on his left hand, so it couldn’t have been him who killed Mr. Montoya. That’s one way to do it, I suppose. To that end, below are a few of my favorites from the wide world of literary villainy. Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey. She's beautiful, except for her eyes, which are "not human eyes.". Top 10 Most Romantic Characters in Literature. a soldier, and afeard? You could also argue that the British Aristocracy is the villain in the Patrick Melrose books, but . In fact, that’s why we like them. . He is dancing, dancing. Most of the cast of Black Legion comes across like that, especially Khayon. Sure, you could make an argument that the vengeful spirit Beloved’s presence is destructive, splintering further an already fractured family. . In literature as in so-called “real” life, evil is, by far, the purview of the male gender; it is men who are the villains, evildoers, rascals and killers. In comes McMurphy, our hero, who wants to undercut her. But I can’t really put it better than Lorrie Moore did in a 1993 review of the novel: Oddly, for all her inscrutable evil, Zenia is what drives this book: she is impossibly, fantastically bad. Cathy Ames is cold as ice—a sociopath who had to learn as a child how to mimic feelings to get by—but soon also learns how easy it is to manipulate, destroy lives, and murder people to amuse herself. Tom Hardy is a shoo-in for the adaptation. Learn more. Banquo is another general in King Duncan's army and Macbeth's best friend. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Rebecca Solnit on the Empty Violence of the Underachievers’ Coup, 6 Disorienting Reads for a Very Disorienting Time. . It simply depends on the villain. He never sleeps, the judge. In fact, she'll be with him forever and ever. As slaveowners go, Rufus isn’t the worst (his father might rank) but he isn’t the best, either. Fathers don’t get much worse than David Melrose: cruel, brutal, and snobbish, a man who enjoyed humiliating his wife, who raped his young son, and who seemed to doom all those close to him to a life of pain. Most of the novel is seen from Mr Utterson's perspective. Note that an antagonist is not the same as an anti-hero like the Joker or Walter White. He’s selfish and ignorant, and (like most men of the time) a brutal racist and misogynist, who doesn’t mind raping women as long as they act like they like it. Ah, Evil Earth! Where to start? Including the reader, of course. ), Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. Thinks he can marry a nice girl like Jane anyway! It’s José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra who is the most bloodthirsty, but the unnamed General (of the Universe) who is the most compelling villain in this novel: an impossibly long-lived tyrant who has borderline-magical control over the populace, and even the landscape, whose roses open early because, tired of darkness, he has declared the time changed; who sells away the sea to the Americans. It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it doesn't all that often have villains, in the sense of coal-black embodiments of the principle of evil. He says that he will never die. account?—Yet who would have thought the old man Thank your lucky stars they only show up in books... Cathy Ames is the sociopathic embodiment of everything you hope your children will stay far, far away from. get this . . Veda is a rude, pretentious, ungrateful daughter who profits from her mother's money while mocking anyone who has to work for a living. The Prison-industrial complex, The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner. Think Lex Luthor, Lord Voldemort, or Dr. Charles Nichols in The Fugitive. Take, take, take. Repeatedly topping polls of literature and film’s best villains, “the … Few villains are quite so aggressively ugly as Uriah Heep (even the name! In one of her most memorable scenes, she forces Harry Potter to write lines in his own blood. In fact, Benchley, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, was so horrified at the cultural response to his work that he became a shark conservationist later in life. She is a “man-eater” run amok. Patrick Bateman, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis. The villain is not the whale—it’s the megalomaniac at the helm. Judge Holden, Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. The worst villain is the one who knows you best—the one you might even love. This sadistic teacher disguises her cruelty under oily smiles, fake cheerfulness, and a wardrobe saturated in pink. A sealèd bag, two sealèd bags of ducats, of double ducats, stol’n from be by my daughter! What need we Made iconic by Anthony Hopkins, of course, but made brilliant and terrifying—a serial killing psychiatrist cannibal, come on—by Thomas Harris. But I’ve always found Lady Macbeth more interesting than Macbeth himself—she’s the brains behind the operation, not to mention the ambition. The assumption that as readers we necessarily must identify with some character in the story we are reading has been seriously questioned by contemporary literary theory. She is an autoimmune disorder. He’s a shallow, narcissistic, greedy investment banker, and also a racist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe, and also a sadist and a murderer and a cannibal and Huey Lewis devotee. A cynical, manipulative, intelligent beauty with many artistic talents and a premium can-do attitude at her disposal. She is Richard III with breast implants. It can’t be the man himself, who didn’t quite understand what he was doing. Every author wants a fan like Annie Wilkes, who reads every book and hangs on every word and imprisons the writer in her creepy home and begins to torture him beyond all reason, right? She eventually goes mad, and her final days are spent scrubbing the imaginary blood of the king off her hands. For the audience: Cora is involved in a classic kill-your-husband-to-be-with-your-lover plot, but her first attempt goes wrong, and ends up giving her husband retrograde amnesia. Dresses up as a gypsy to mess with Jane’s mind! Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. Still, it puts him in rare company. All he wants is the whole world of Middle-earth brought under his... 6 Often, the creepiest villainesses in literature embody some sort of twisted femininity, like the child bride gone dark, the virginal girl turned ghost, or the mother who kills her own child. Key quote: "My orders are that every single child in the … The Grand Witch. The second time she tries to kill him, she succeeds, but it's messy, and the whole lover thing doesn't quite work out for her, either. extremely stifling. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that—felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit—and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. In the J.M. Less so when he murders his beloved and assumes his identity—but somehow, as you read, you find yourself holding your breath around every corner, hoping he will escape yet again. The housekeeper so devoted to her dead ex-mistress that she’s determined to keep her memory alive—by goading her boss’s new wife to jump out of the window to her death. The genius of old Hum is how compelling he is—that is, despite the horrible thing he spends the entire novel doing (kidnapping a young girl whose mother he has murdered, driving her around the country and coaxing her into sexual acts, self-flagellating and self-congratulating in equal measure), you are charmed by him, half-convinced, even, by his grand old speeches about Eros and the power of language. In the end, Sonoko is still so devoted to her that the grand tragedy of her life is the fact that Mitsu did not allow her to die alongside her. from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”. Utterson is a lawyer and therefore a respectable, wealthy man in Victorian London. 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