First was an examination of the enigma that is Heathcliff by Dr
Sandie Byrne. She spoke of the way modern adaptations of Wuthering Heights underplay his villainy, instead focusing on his
victimization, and a skewed version of his love for Cathy. Wrong-footing us
slightly, rather than dissecting his character in the tradition of villainy,
instead we looked at the different tropes of hero figures and whether or not he
could fit into these. The Brontës having been fans of
the Romantics we looked to the Romantic hero to which he loosely fits due to
his extremes of emotion and fixation on one thing. There were also comparisons
to the trend ignited by Henry MacKenzie’s The
Man of Feeling which allowed men to be as emotional as women until its
popularity waned with a backlash accusing such men as being effeminate, an
accusation unlikely to be leveled at Heathcliff, he does nonetheless have a
great sensitivity to certain stimuli.
One other possible link to the hero type is
being the moral centre of the novel. Heathcliff’s morality is not one that’s
held up as being admirable, but Byrne argues he could be seen as the only
character in the book that stays true to themselves. Catherine betrays not just
Heathcliff but her own true nature by entering the world of the Lintons. His
behaviour toward the other characters could be seen as testing them. They
repeatedly fail and as a result he sees them as weak. Yet, Heathcliff is full
of contradiction. He is hellbent on revenge and yet before it is fully realised
he stops, claiming in the famous line ‘I have lost the faculty of
enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.’ Why is
this? Has seeing Hareton and Cathy defy his attempts to force a repeat of his
own history softened him? Was he merely worn out? Is his desire to be reunited
with Catherine in death greater than his desire for revenge? Why does he seem
to regret some of his actions yet refuse to reconcile with Catherine on her
deathbed? (I don’t hold Heathcliff to account for this, she continued to
torment him to the end).
What are we to make of
his nature? We see Hindley tormenting him in his youth and Catherine’s
desertion of him wounds his very soul. Yet as Byrne points out, these actions
skew traditional morality – he has done nothing wrong at this point, it is not
punishment. There is much we don’t know of his history however, was it the
actions of the Earnshaws that led him to becoming bitter and vengeful, had
something in his past that we aren’t privy to affected him so deeply? Or,
perhaps, Emily is expressing in him her belief that people should act according
to their nature, like animals, and be held to no account? Heathcliff could
therefore be seen as simply having a violent and fierce nature and living out
his inevitability. A strange stance you may think from the daughter of a
priest, and yet some have gone as far as to claim she was not a woman of faith
at all. Fundamentally, it is this unknown surrounding Heathcliff that has made
generations of readers fascinated, dissecting his character, pitying or
reviling him.
Dr Charlotte Jones then
led a discussion of the villains in Dickens’ Hard Times. In this we questioned what it meant to be a villain
during the Industrial Revolution. Jones took us through a whirlwind history of
the term, explaining how words that once denoted social rank became moral terms
during the sixteenth century. The drastic changes brought about during the
Victorian period raised questions once again of how we measure morality and it
is this that Dickens bases his villains on in this novel. Thomas Gradgrind is
the first character we meet and he is introduced to us as a villain, obsessed
with utilitarianism, losing sight of what makes us human in his obsession with
facts and figures. The fact he has fundamentally misunderstood Bentham’s
philosophy make his character almost comically distressing, and somewhat
sympathetic. He does not set out to make people miserable and yet his actions
do, raising questions of what makes a villain.
On the other end of
the spectrum is Bounderby who has created his life on a fantasy, lying about
his past to fit into the ideal of the self-made man. Samuel Smiles’ Self Help was hugely popular at the time
and emphasized the perceived difference between the ‘deserving’ and
‘undeserving’ poor, intended to stimulate action as it frames the gentleman as
a moral status rather than an economic one. In pretending to have come from a
life of poverty and abuse to create financial success for himself Bounderby is
abusing his position and making a moral judgment on those less fortunate than
himself. In having these two opposing villains Dickens broadens the definition
of a villain.
Jones argues however,
that labour is in fact the main villain in the novel. Dickens was writing for a
specific audience – literate and wealthy enough to buy journals. In writing
about a world alien to them he was attempting to open their eyes to the
problems of factory work. It is widely acknowledged that working conditions at
the time were dangerous and grueling and yet he seems to be suggesting that the
most pervasive problem was the repetitious inevitability of life. The monotony
wears the workers down and makes them miserable. In his description of Coketown
everything looks the same, from school to hospital to gaol, the workers leave
home at the exact same time every day, and in the descriptions you begin to
feel how claustrophobic and tedious this is, the writing begins to reflect the
repetitive monotony of life in industrial towns at the time.
Next, Barrie Bullen led us through the complex world of villains and
Greek gods in Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles. The two main villains are Alec D’Urberville and Angel Clare.
Alec claims to be a villain and yet Bullen believes he is merely
ventriloquizing bourgeoisie values. There’s no doubt he doesn’t treat Tess
well, regardless of what you believe happened the night he impregnated her.
Yet, Bullen claims it is Angel’s rejection and desertion of her that is the far
crueler villainy enacted on her.
He believes they are symbolic of something much more significant than mere
stage villains. Likening them to Dionysus (Alec) and Apollo (Angel) he points
out that even Tess and Angel’s courtship mirrors the solar year, beginning in
Spring, attaining its passionate climax in summer and then the abandonment by
winter. The scene at Stonehenge and discussion of sacrifice to the sun is
appropriate as one in which Angel plays a part. In fact, this scene and the
earlier scene in the Chase with Alec are carefully mirrored. Bullen pulls out
the similarities in the ancient settings, the darkness, dominance of the man,
and ultimately, of Tess’s sacrifice. It is in the final lines of the novel that
Bullen argues reveals the true villain – the President of the Immortals.
In all of the novels so far it has been shown that their villains
are not as straightforward as one might originally have thought, and indeed it
is often not the characters that prove to be the most villainous but the
environment in which the action takes place or the gods who kill humans for sport. In
the final lecture of the day, delivered by Dr David Grylls, we perhaps see the
most traditional antagonist in Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Yet, his character
is not all that simple, Collins himself described him as both ‘a brand-new
villain’ and ‘the quintessence of a hecatomb of villains’. He meets many of the
traits of a classic villain; he is intelligent, subtle, foreign, fallible, and
attractive, and yet Collins created a character that he enjoyed writing and
that readers often come to admire.
His intelligence is genuine, although disturbing for being devoid of
morality. He plays against expectations, when providing Marian with medication
the reader is led to assume he is poisoning her when he is not; he is aware of
the suspicion he might encounter due to his nationality and he plays up to it,
constantly keeping one step ahead of the rest of the characters. Collins can be
seen to be mocking parochial xenophobia as it is the least intelligent
characters that believe the stereotypes. Percival Glyde, who sat happily in the
role of villain in the first volume of the novel, before Count Fosco appears,
is soon shown to be clumsy and crude in comparison. As in Hard Times and a number of other Dickens novels, Collins uses
opposing villains that complement each other in their disparity.
Similarly, as we saw with Heathcliff, Fosco is full of
contradictions. He is physically large yet light on his feet. Once a radical, he
abandons his beliefs for social pretension, a fact which ultimately leads to
his downfall. His fondness for pets and in particular his mice, is a childlike
image yet in every other way he appears cultured and sophisticated, possessing
not just the fruits of study but also emotional intelligence. We saw throughout
the day that a villain can take many forms, are often strengthened by a counterpart, and need some relatable qualities to make them believable and
interesting.
