The most hateful character in fiction?

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Fanny Price, George Eliot, Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt, Gwendolen Harleth, hateful fictional characters, Henry James, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mrs Norris, The Portrait of a Lady

‘Make your nasty characters ten times nastier,’ advised the creative writing tutor. ‘Readers want strong definition so exaggerate the light and dark.’

She had a point. Even if you aren’t writing crime novels, it’s no good running away from the evil side of human nature. But it’s July 18th, the day that Jane Austen died 201 years ago, and I found myself remembering the careful subtlety of the unpleasant characters in her novels, such as Mrs Ferrars, Lucy Steele, General Tilney, Mrs Norris. Jane Austen never goes over the top.

If asked who we hate most, many of us would probably opt for Mrs Norris, the horrible aunt in Mansfield Park, because of the way she bullies Fanny Price, the terrified little girl taken away from her own family and Portsmouth home to live with her grand relations. Her vindictive spite continues to find fresh expression in the years that follow, but it’s the abuse of a defenceless child that we can’t forgive. Mrs Norris is both loathsome and entirely convincing: we know her. If Jane Austen had overdone Mrs Norris’ awfulness, she might have slid into a caricature and become less real.

Re-reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I could see the same elegant restraint in the portrayal of the corrupt and manipulative Gilbert Osmond. We shiver because we see the trap Isabel has walked into, but it is not until chapter 42 that we know what she is suffering: ‘… it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one … under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.’  Her real offence ‘was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own …’

In my mind, Gilbert Osmond and the sadistic, chilling Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, husband of Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (described in the ninevoices post Emotional abuse from a monster husband – and a complex fascinating heroine)  now tie for first place as the most hateful men in literature, while Mrs Norris is still without a serious female rival. But this is perhaps from a sheltered and limited viewpoint. What other fictional characters do we fear and hate?

 

‘Horribly good’ heroines?

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Agents, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, goodness, heroines, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford, moral fiction, Saki, The Story-Teller

A man in a railway carriage, driven to desperation by noisy small children around him being unsuccessfully entertained by their unimaginative and strait-laced aunt, shuts them up  with a story about a little girl called Bertha.

‘Was she pretty?’ asked the bigger of the small girls.

‘Not as pretty as any of you,’ said the bachelor, ‘but she was horribly good.’

There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life. (from Saki’s The Story-Teller)

It looks as if adults don’t like heroines who are ‘good’ any more than children do. In modern fiction it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of heroines we might describe using the word. Is this because we no longer look to fiction for moral guidance or inspiration in the way that people once did?

This might help explain why Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine; she hasn’t aged well. Patience and gentleness and a faithful loving heart combined with strong principles were enough in a heroine at the time Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park, but modern readers often find Fanny’s passivity spineless and her virtue irritating. They prefer the amusing and witty Mary Crawford, who takes active steps to get what she wants.

It may be that readers often dislike Fanny because she comes across as naturally good – and therefore difficult to identify with. There might even be a sense in which she shows us up, and we don’t like that either. She doesn’t make mistakes about people or find herself initially attracted to a dodgy man, like Elizabeth Bennet does. Elizabeth is morally upright, but she combines virtue with a sense of fun, dawning self-knowledge and awareness of her own errors of judgment; it’s not surprising that many people say she’s their favourite Jane Austen heroine.

I can’t think of a Fanny type heroine in modern fiction – and if a new author tried having one in a novel, agents would probably advise making them less wet. So is it that we don’t want heroines to be any more ‘good’ than we know ourselves to be?

Or can modern writers get away with a ‘good’ heroine if enough of their moral vacillation is shown? Maybe this is the problem with Fanny. Secret suffering and standing up for principles in silence: what’s the interest in that? But if a heroine is seen to struggle with moral choices, between right and wrong and the muddle between them, and then act on her decisions, her goodness is not the passive quality that we are warned to avoid when writing a novel.

 

 

 

 

Visit to Jane Austen’s House and Museum at Chawton

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Chawton, Emma, Jane Austen, Jane Austen House and Museum, Mansfield Park

It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers loathe people creeping up on them while they’re at work. I have just returned from a visit to the house where Jane lived for the final seven years of her life and completed her masterpieces, Mansfield Park and Emma. The house still retains the squeaking door that gave her time to hide her writing materials if a visitor approached. Not far away, in Winchester Cathedral, is her tomb and memorial – adorned each week with fresh flowers paid for by her admirers in North America. It has taken me far too long to make this pilgrimage to the home and to the final resting place of the creator of Elizabeth Bennet. If you can, I urge you to organise a visit – it is inspirational. When she arrived in Chawton she apparently decided to take out and polish work she had laid aside years before. Thank heavens she did…

Austen House