Worst Literary Villains of All Time

I don't know if I'm allowed to start a thread, but, taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, I offer this for those in the Salon who have not enough of lists, yet.

Someone's ideas of the top ten fictional villains in literature. Check out # 3, soon to be, if not already, familiar to many here.

If I have committed a grievous error, O Freaky Ricky, please accept my humblest apologies.

Comments, additions, deletions, anyone?

A new list ? Jolly good !

Would a white whale fit the list ?
or a white Bison ?

Comrade geneg!!!

Risky, risky move beginning your own thread w/out explicit written permission from the State! Is it not enough for you that you are given the freedom of the speech on the threads extant?

But since you created such a bitchen thread, I'm going to forgive you! Hallelujah, eh?

Btw, what the heck is Satan doing as the #4 worst villain? I'd put him #1 and Sauron #2. Inspector Javert would not be on my list because I don't consider him a villain as villainous as a Dracula or Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman of American Psycho infamy.

Javert is a law abiding citizen who upholds the law and nothing but the law better than any law abiding citizen before or since. He is the law incarnate. Is he overly-obsessed w/the law? Yes, but is he truly villainous? Oh he's one of the greatest foils ever in literature, but I don't know if I can quite call him a villain because at heart he's not a bad guy. Misguided, graceless, uh-huh, but not outright evil like the Devil or an iconic undead, literally bloodthirsty serial murderer.

Where's Simon Legree from Uncle Tom's Cabin?

I would add Danglars from The Count of Monte Cristo, the White Witch from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities.

I wouldn't put Javert on the list either. Hugo even uses a word associated with the Bishop — "upright" — to describe him at one point (p. 177, "It was evident to any one who had known this conscientious, straight-forward, clear, sincere, upright, austere, fierce man, that Javert had suffered some great interior commotion"). He's a bit like St. John in Jane Eyre: so upright that he can never bend down to help anyone. All his good works (and they are good) are profitless because he has not charity.

I'd plump for the White Witch to be on the list, myself.

nee-nee, you read my mind! And Madame DeFarge is a great one too.

Ol' man Karamazov is no prince, either.

I noticed it's on your 2010 TBR pile, EF. I'm about 3/4 through. I didn't realize that The Brothers Karamazov was originally published as one of those Dickens-eque magazine serials. Whew, it can be a tad tedious in places.

Percy Wetmore from The Green Mile?

Villains that chilled me:
- Not Mme Dufarge - I kinda got where she was coming from. If I can empathize with them they are not the worst villains...
- The captain from the Sea Wolf by Jack London
- Chimurgh or whatever his name is from No Country for Old Men

Hm, more as I think of them. Off to check the list now. I post first and think later.

I'll second that Anna, that wicked dude from No Country gave me the willys...
And I'll add Orwell's Big Brother to the mix, and maybe the all male, all white jurors or the lynch-mob or both from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Satan is not a villain, he is a hero and the most interesting character by far in Paradise Lost. The compiler of the list has certainly not read their Milton.

I would add:

Mr Jones in Conrad's Victory
Blind Pew in Treasure Island (this character used to terrify the bejaysus out of me when I was a child)
Prince Valkovsky in Dostoevsky's Humilated and Insulted
Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop
Gilbert Osmond in Portrait of a Lady

U Po Kyin from Burmese Days

oh yes! horrible.
and Mahalingam in Earthly Powers

11. the Sea wolf : Larssen !! How could I forget that SOB

13. Blind Pew !! ( tapping around ) "Jim boy where are you ?"

*shudder* oh please stop

And remember Israel Hands climbing up the mast after Jim, knife in teeth?

It was ( is ) so scary, I have pushed it away deep in my memory. It is all coming back now...

I hear a voice, said he, a young voice. will you give me your hand, my kind, young friend, and lead me in ?

I think M. and Mme. Thenardier, in Les Miserables were bigger villains than Javert. Thenardier was not so obviously a product of his environment as (Hugo tells us) that Javert was. In fact, in a brief mention of Thenaridierʻs political stance, Hugo mentions that he was a "Bonapartist" - the same as Hugoʻs father. (Or was that Dumasʻs father?)

A villain sort of thrown at you and not developed is the psychiatrist in John Barths End of the Road. (I donʻt remember his name). He represents the Devil, if Iʻm interpreting it right, and captures the heroʻs soul at the end. He has no place in the middle of the book, being introduced right at the beginning and then not appearing again -- just through a letter or phone call from him-- at the end.

Melvilleʻs The Confidence Man is another who possibly represents the Devil, but this has been argued over by critics. Some have even said he represents Christ (as founder of a religion).

Richard III and Iago have no redeeming features that I can think of, off-hand. Macbeth does.

Felix Krull, in Thomas Mannʻs serious comedy novel has been placed beside my post by Touchstones as i write. To me, he is not a villain at all, but a picaresque hero.

Motiveness malignity. Louis Auchincloss has a nice (if that's the word) book on the subject. Shadrach is a force for 'evil' in Gwyn Thomas's VENUS AND THE VOTERS. Bradley Headstone is not such a nice fellow in Dicken's OMF. Buck Mulligan is a blasphemous type in ULYSSES. I think the man of the cloth in Russell Greenan's HEART OF GOLD (1975) one of the evillist characters in 20th Century American literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_H._Greenan

20> I completely concur that the Thenardiers are the truest villains in Les Mis, leaving Javert behind in the dust. I meant to mention it myself and am glad you did instead.

Satan is not a villain, he is a hero...

We could start a thread (no, a group) devoted merely to this debate!

Herr Naphta in the Magic Mountain may not be a villain per se, but he is so awful.

As a classicist I should have remembered
"exotic Aegistheus"* who, with Agamemnonʻs wife, killed Agamemnon -- their story is in Aeschylusʻs Agamemnon, and also touched on briefly in the opening lines of the Odyssey

*my translation of "amumonos Aigisthoio" as he is called in Oddyssey I. This has been mistranslated as "blameless Aegistheus". Anne Parry, who sarcasticaly used that phrase as a title of her book Blameless Aegistheus was aware of the Victorian mistranslation.

>22 absurdeist: but we should have a group read of Paradise Lost first no?

Mr Perkins, I think Clytemnestra - at least Aeschylus's version of her- is one of the great villains of literature.

To tomcatMurr:

Yes, I almost forgot to include "with Agamemnonʻs wife (Clytemnestra)" in my post abourt Aegistheus. She is more fully drawn than Aegistheus.

The whole Oresteia trilogy is not among my favorite works, though Aeschylus is on my list of Favorite authors, mostly on the strength of The Persians, Prometheus Bound and esp. The Seven against Thebes.

Did anybody else see Asimov's Multivac as a villain? I did. What's worse: it's a giant, cold, calculating machine.

22 and 25: Can we please read Paradise Lost - seriously? Don't we have a few more slots in 2010?

This would motivate me. I bought the beautiful edition edited by Philip Pullman and I have not had the fortitude to start reading it. Book length poetry intimidates me.

I agree that from what I do know about the poem, Satan's the hero. But I would love to read it and be able to discuss that issue better.

How 'bout Paradise Lost in January? Our already scheduled read, Miss Lonelyhearts, is only 59 pages long, so we could easily fit another book in. Is there a third yes out there for Paradise Lost? Say yes or forever hold your peace.

*sigh* Yes. Its been on my list for too long......

Yes. I'm reading Robert Grave's novel about Mrs. Milton and have Belloc's biography waiting patiently on my night table. Sam: Johnson expressed his feelings about the epic poem: "none wisht it longer," or something to that effect.

Iʻm the long time possessor of a "love-hate"
relation to Milton, so Iʻm for "Paradise lost in January".

My acquaintance with P L goes back to the 1950s with Prof. Douglas Bushs course on Milton.
Bush forwarded the weird theory that Milton meant exactly what he said, and Satan IS, after all, the villain. It may, in my own estimation, be a "Poem without a hero", as was Lucans Civil War. Almost no one has found Miltonʻs Michael, the field commander in the War in Heaven, or his God, or even his Jesus to be much of a "heroic" presentation.

"After all" what? Well, by this time (the 1950s) the conventional wisdom was that of Willilam Blake: that Satan is the real hero of the poem, and that "Milton...was of the Devilʻs party without knowing it." At least Blake admitted that Milton didnʻt KNOW he was making Satan the hero.
Bush had in the previous decade, during WW II, written that making Satan the hero is like making Hitler the hero of WW II -- on the grounds that he was heroically fighting alone
(by 1944) against the 3 most powerful nations in the world! (I guess the latter referred to the Grand Alliance of the U.S., the Soviet Union and the UK; and Bush was ignoring Hitlerʻs alliance with Japan.)

Bush also put together a little Keats biography.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bush

Yes, as well. Paradise Lost represents a huge hole in my reading over the course of my life.

To Porius:

Yes, and I didnʻt know about the Bush bio. of Keats, so thanks.

Bush used to glibly be called a "Milton man", while the "Keats man" at the university (Harvard) was Walter Jackson Bate whose main interest was the 2nd half of the 18th century, an era that, to him, was almost synonymous with Samuel Johnsonʻs writings.

I would love to read Paradise Lost in a group setting. My husband read most of it this year and he has been making me want to pick it up. I don't think I could get to it before February, but if everybody else is finished by February then I could read everybody's commentary on my own.

Splendid! Good to see so much interest in Milton. I've sampled something of the first 20 or so pages of P L, just to get a taste of it, so this will be good motivation to actually read the entire book and be able to argue one way or the other regarding Satan. I've always assumed Satan was a bad guy, forgetting, as rolandperkins reminds us, that William Blake asserted Satan's heroism in Paradise Lost a long time ago.

Let's plan on Miss Lonelyhearts the first week of January, and then finish off January with Paradise Lost (while we're also finishing Les Mis.)

Wish you were able to join us Medellia. Perhaps your husband might want to join us, eh?

Woo! Paradise Lost! Way back in college I took a course in Milton and fell in love with PL, and have read it a few times since then. I'm definitely in for a group read.

My reading is that Milton intended for Satan to be the bad guy in PL, but Milton's fascination with him - and his rather glorious descriptions - make Satan pretty darn seductive. The pull of evil is ever seductive to us fallen creatures.

oh jesus what have I started.

*Murr slinks back under the sofa to thump the Proctologist*

Ha! Better get addin' some Milton awful quick to your regular diet of Dostoy!

I would consider Frollo from Notre-Dame de Paris as a more "correct" villain than Javert. What a character study he is! Spectacular character.

Jackson Bate gave us a Johnson, a Johnson whom he dearly loved; and a lengthy biog. of John Keats.

Right, Porius. And besides dearly loving Johnson, he may have influenced a few other people to love him.

24, 25, 26> Clytemnestra is NOT a villain -- Agamemnon sacrificed her DAUGHTER to go off to sack Troy. I'd plot to murder my husband too if he killed my daughter! And even Aegisthus had motive -- Agamemnon's father Atreus had killed Aegisthus's brothers and served them up in a stew to his father, Thyestes. If anyone is a villain in THAT saga -- it is Agamemnon (and Atreus).

44> Paolo and Francesca were whirled around in the first circle of hell in Dante's Inferno

I am so shot! Thanks, Jane, Milton-Dante-Milton-Dante, me thinks it's time to get some rest.

Aye! to the group read of P L... (chimes the girl who has yet to begin Les Mis).

All you Milton people -- if you're going to read Paradise Lost with Satan as protagonist, then you have to read William Blake's Milton. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake declares, "the Reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

Okay, everybody drop what you're doing immediately and read the William Blake titles that janeajones suggests we must read before reading Paradise Lost...now!

#37 'Rique:

Wish you were able to join us Medellia. Perhaps your husband might want to join us, eh?

Oh well, I can enjoy everyone's erudite comments in preparation for my own private reading of P.L. I will pitch the idea to my husband. (You, 'Rique, may be interested in knowing that I started him a LT account a while ago: tybalt3000. :)

Blake's oeuvre is conveniently located at http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/erdman.html.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell is 10 pages, Milton 48. I've created PDF's from them so I can read them from my eReader.

>50 absurdeist:.

But if you read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, you must also then read The Great Divorce!

The Great Divorce is amazing. And not really very long, either!

Looking for a Paradise Lost on Amazon, I ran across this. Poor guy, I hope he finds what he is looking for.

BTW, anyone have a recommend as to which of the many editions of this is the best value?

>55 geneg:

I'd recommend the Gutenberg edition, as it's hard to beat "free." (But I also recommend you have an electronic reader handy, as reading off of a monitor is very, very bad).

Thanks, but having an electronic reader handy will just up the price a bunch. I used to read books off a PDA but no more. Kindle is out of my price range.

No, I'm sorry, I need an old fashioned BOOK.

>56 aethercowboy:.

Good point! I managed to get my e-reader for free. Well, I had to write an essay about the future of books and be one of thirty people selected by Google Books, but free is free in my book. :)

To be honest, I was never planning on actually buying any sort of e-reader.

Whoa...what happened to Villains???

.......ahem....i'll go with T-Bone Burnett here...THE CRIMINAL UNDER MY OWN HAT.......oh, that's Music!........sorry, Freeque-One.......my bad

*snicker*
J

>55 geneg:
(Considering how I momentarily confused Milton with Dante), that post you found just about made me pee my pants.