Books for Company: Guest Post : Top Ten by Anna Stothard

25.4.12

Guest Post : Top Ten by Anna Stothard

Please welcome Anna Stothard to Books for Company!

Thank you Anna for a great guest post, you have included some great villains!

Top Ten Villains and Anti-heroes

"The very grandest poetry is immoral, the grandest characters wicked," wrote the poet William Blake. From John Milton’s silver-tongued Satan in Paradise Lost to Roald Dahl’s Grand High Witch trapping children in paintings or turning them into rodents, it’s often the villains in literature who capture our imaginations with the tightest grip.

The protagonist of my second novel, The Pink Hotel, is by no means evil, but she’s no angel either. These are some of my favorite villains and antiheroes in literature:

1. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis
This is the woman responsible for freezing Narnia in perpetual winter, but stopping Christmas from ever coming. Her cronies are ogres and spectres, giant bats, minotaurs and other beings who the author claims to be, “so horrible that if I told you, your parents probably wouldn't let you read this book.” She seduces poor besoted Edmund with Turkish Delight and, in sympathy, I have never eaten a single square of Turkish Delight in my life.

2. Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
“Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust,” Greene writes of Pinkie, the sociopathic antihero of Brighton Rock. He has fair hair, scars on his neck, and “grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes”. I had nightmares for weeks after readingBrighton Rock, yet there’s something dreamily compelling about this neurotic young gangster.

3. Miss Havisham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Miss Havisham was my go-to Halloween and fancy dress costume as a kid. I had a moth-eaten white dress, a pair of yellow plastic teeth, and fake-spider webs to go in my hair. In Great Expectations, Dickens describes how Miss Haversham stopped all the clocks in her house at the exact moment she learnt that her fiancé had betrayed her, then uses her beautiful daughter Estelle to exact revenge on the male race. The vengeful old woman repents late in the novel, but she’s still fantastically villainous.

4. Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Sensitive to beauty and goodness, fiercely ambitious and individualistic yet fatally flawed, Satan is such a spellbinding character that William Blake thought Milton was “of the Devil's party without knowing it”.

5. Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair by Thackerey
Becky is ruthless and dissembling, but boy is she charming. From the moment she flings a dictionary out of her carriage window and announces, “revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural. I’m no angel,” it’s difficult not to be besotted by Thackeray’s anti-heroine.

6. Grenouille from Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Perhaps one of the most uniquely evil and haunting villains in literature, Grenouille doesn’t kill for the thrill of it but to collect the scents belonging to his victims. After 272 pages with this olfactory evil-doer, you’ll find your senses torturously heightened.

7. Mrs Danvers from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Mrs Danvers is a master of psychological warfare, carefully breaking the sanity of du Maurier’s nervous and self-conscious heroine. Mrs Danvers is fiercely loyal to Rebecca, the former mistress of Manderley, and offers only false advice to the current Mrs de Winter. Danvers is so powerful that she almost succeeds in inciting the novel’s heroine to commit suicide. Scary stuff.

8. Iago from Othello by Shakespeare
Cynical and brutal, the key to Iago’s villainy is jealousy. He destroys because he can. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock/The meat it feeds on.” But Iago is racked with jealousy first, before he spreads the disease that consumes Othello.

9. The Grand High Witch from The Witches by Roald Dahl
Possibly the most creatively sadistic villain in any children’s book, The Grand High Witch applauds the act of turning children into hot dogs so their parents will eat them. You don’t get much more evil than that.

10. Frederick Clegg from The Collector by John Fowles
Frederick Clegg collects butterflies, carefully pinning their wings into boxes. Then one day he decides to “collect” a woman, hoping that she will learn to love him. Though shards of sympathy are incited for this lonely, delusional man, he shifts from strange and cruel to just plane evil by the end of the novel.