On the subject of heroes and heroines
At a party a little while ago, somebody came up to me to say how much she and her husband liked the Wilderness novels. Nathaniel, she assured me, was the perfect hero. Which is meant as a great compliment, but actually got me thinking, because I don’t think I ever consciously set out to make him a hero, and certainly I don’t think of him as perfect. So I started reading in various places, looking for definitions of heroes and essays that addressed the characterization of main characters. This subject is an old one. Aristotle wrote about it and so has just about everybody else.
The first thing I do when I’m trying to take apart a problem like this is look at the data. I came up with a list of fictional male characters I like tremendously, enough to re-read the novels in which they live. This list is not in any particular order, and of course this is my list; no doubt your list will look different. I’ve put Nathaniel at the end, for comparison.
| Character | Novel | Author |
| Fitzwilliam Darcy | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| Phin Tucker | Welcome to Temptation | Jennifer Crusie |
| Philippe de Saint-Christophe | The Bride of the Wilderness | Charles McCarry |
| Niccolo van der Poele | Niccolo Rising | Dorothy Dunnett |
| John Crichton | Farscape | did you really think I could leave him out? |
| Daniel Josselyn | Hearts and Bones | Margaret Lawrence |
| Nathaniel Bonner | Into the Wilderness | S.D. |
Many psychologists make their careers evaluating and categorizing personality types. I could take that approach here in trying to figure out what appeals to me in a hero, and how I ended up with Nathaniel. There are many possible models to use: Myers- Briggs (or the Keirsey temperament sorter, which is pretty much the same thing); the Enneagram approach is also quite popular. But I’m not going to take the quantitative route, not just now. Nor am I going to try to work with the clasic eight-way split you often see discussed in the literature: the Chief, the Bad Boy, the Best Friend, the Charmer, the Lost Soul, the Professor, the Swashbuckler, the Warrior (but there’s a good break down of each by Tami Cowden, here.)Having set up my list, I’m going to go away and think about commonalities and differences, and I’ll be back tomorrow with more on this.
Some interesting questions came up in the comments to yesterday’s post, where I made a short list of male characters I love best, as a first step in trying to figure out what goes into a well-written lead male, or hero.
1) Can the appearance of a given character on my list (or anybody’s list) be simply a matter of sexual attraction? That is, is sexual attraction the chicken, or the egg?
2) Can a fictional hero be perfect, but not sexually attractive?
3) Can a fictional character be sexually attractive, but not any kind of hero?
Christina’s point: “For the record, I don’t think a fictional hero can be perfect AND sexually attractive.” And she’s right, of course; perfect characters, I have said elsewhere, make for lousy fiction. So that was a poor choice of words on my part to start with, unless we’re going to get into sticky semantics where perfection brings with it the idea of its own imperfection. With that in mind, the question is now:
Assuming that sexual attraction is the result of a number of characteristics that add up to a good match between reader and character, what are those characteristics?
The first issue to get out of the way is the physical. Looking at my own list, these men don’t have a lot in common physically except that they are all fairly large in stature and physically strong. We are told so directly about Darcy, Philippe, Niccolo, Nathaniel; it’s possible to extract that conclusion in the cases of Phin and Daniel; John Crichton, of course, we can see. Not all of them are handsome in any traditional sense. Niccolo especially we are told is considered plain, if not ugly, by many. Some are handsome, and that’s made clear: Darcy, Phin, Nathaniel. Others we are left to draw our own conclusions, and then, of course, there’s John Crichton, who (sometimes life is good) we can judge for ourselves.
I’ve been trying to think of a fictional character who I found physically unattractive but would still put on my short list. So far I haven’t come up with one, but I’ll keep thinking. I’m also thinking about the rest of the characteristics that go into making these seven characters work for me personally.
On my list of female protagonists are more than a few difficult women. If you go looking, you’ll find (for example) that readers either love or hate Melanthe of Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart. The comments I have heard is that she is too hard and even abrasive, although I think some of the dislike of Melanthe has to do with the fact that this novel is not an easy read; Kinsale does a good job of approximating Middle English for a modern audience, and it takes a little work to get into it. I loved Melanthe, particularly because she seems — if you look at the surface only — to be manipulative and disdainful but is in fact struggling hard to survive in a world inimical to independent women. She has suffered some terrible losses which have made her hard, but the beauty of this novel is in the way she adapts to Ruck, and he to her.
Something that is true of all these women (as it is true of the men) is that they all stand on the social periphery. Christine noted this in a comment to an earlier post about the men:
I think there’s always something about those guys that don’t quite fit in whatever the ‘norm’ is. Perhaps that’s part of their self-possession, but those characters always seem slightly on the fringe.
For me personally, traditional female characters may be interesting and well done, but they don’t make it onto my short list. Which is why I could make a second list of female characters whose stories I liked, but are too traditional for my tastes. This list would include Minerva from Jenny Crusie’s Bet Me (an actuary working for her father’s company) and Maud Bailey of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (a fairly run of the mill academic). Christabel LaMotte, also from Possession, is one of the women who probably should be on my list. Please don’t misunderstand: I truly love and admire both these novels (for different reasons); I’m distinguishing here between individual characters and the work as a whole.
A look at my list shows all these women to be rebellious in one way or another.
Elizabeth Bennett talks back to gentlemen and old ladies, flaunts expectations, refuses marriage proposals
Marie Du Gard In turn of the century France a single woman of good family evades the match her father has made for her, and pursues a career in the new industry of film making
Maddy Timms The most traditional of my seven, Maddy, an observant Quaker, flaunts authority to help a man who is being mistreated by the medical authorities.
Melanthe A rich woman runs away from the men who control her life and does everything in her power to establish a safe haven for herself.
Aeryn Sun Ah, Aeryn. Pulled against her will out of her native environment, it takes a while for her to recognize the rebel in herself and the streak of independence that comes from a mother she never knew.
Hannah Trevor a midwife, Hannah struggles to make a life for herself after she loses her children and a treacherous husband; she gets pregnant because she wants to be a mother again, but rejects the idea of another husband. She is in constant conflict with the men in this late 18th century Maine village, and with her own needs.
Elizabeth Middleton wants an education, the opportunity to learn without restrictions, to teach girls as boys are taught, and to pursue her life without being made to feel aberrant.
Following the discussion at LanguageHat on anachronisms in historical fiction, particularly in terms of language, this interesting comment was posted by aldiboronti:
…with people we cheerfully accept, nay demand, that, the heroes and heroines of popular fiction, no matter what period it is set in, are fully equipped with 21st century mindsets. Only the villains are permitted to share the prevailing opinions of their times.
There is certainly some truth to this, although my first reservation has to do with the idea that this sin is committed in popular fiction. It seems to me that the tendency to this kind of anachronism shows up in all kinds of fiction in all genres, including what might be considered more literary (and yes, I am sidestepping the very fraught issue of popular/literary for the moment; I’ve certainly posted enough about it in the past, for example, here and here). The first such example that came to mind is the Victorian poet Ash in Byatt’s novel Possession. I find him not typical of his time or background, but if he had been, the central conflict of the story would have been nullified, and I like to story the way it is. But aldiboronti’s observation is an important one in a more general way because it gets to the heart of the matter when talking about language anachronisms.
The reason I might hesitate to put an eighteenth century term for African slaves into the mouth of a hero is, of course, because I don’t want him to be prejudiced, and neither do my readers. If he’s going to be an admirable character, he can’t believe (as most of his contemporaries did) that African natives and their descendents were cowardly, sullen, dishonest, “remorseless of tyrants to men and animals when invested with authority. Promiscuous, licentious and dissolute, incapable of love or affection.” I apologize right now for not being able to provide the citation for this quote, which comes from the late eighteenth century. As soon as I track it down in my notes, I’ll post a follow up. Unless somebody beats me to it here.
Is it possible to write a character who lives in London in (say) 1790, who believes these things about Africans, and who is acceptable to readers as a protagonist? Probably only if, over the course of the novel, he or she changes and comes to be more open minded. Most readers will not tolerate anything else, maybe because most writers are not capable of writing such a character in a way that transcends the shock value of having that character really be typical of the times.
Having said that, I’d like to point out that there were prominent examples of men who not only rejected the negative evaluation of Africans, but who wrote about it eloquently and who worked against slavery. Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) was one such person, active in the abolitionist movement in England. He wrote of Phyllis Wheatly and Ignatius Sancho that such accomplished individuals would be nothing unusual “if the minds of the Africans were unbroken by slavery; if they had the same expectations in life as other people, and the same opportunities of improvement, they would be equal, in all the various branches of science ….inferiority of their capacities is wholly malevolent and false.”
So the writer of historical fiction has only a few choices. Sidestep the problem by never having the protagonist (a) encounter anyone of another race or (b) talk about the news of the times (the morally ambiguous don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach); cast the progatonist not such much as an anachronism but as one of the rare individuals of his or her time and place, ala Clarkson; find a way to write a protagonist who confronts current sensibilities but in such a way that the modern reader is willing to accept it.
Let me point out, just to be clear, that this difficulty extends far beyond the matter of slavery. For most of known history men in general and many women have not been supportive of women’s rights; religious freedom was considered a bad idea; labor practices were atrocious; and the list goes on.
Robyn, clever woman that she is, has pointed me to Doris Egan‘s essays. Doris writes science fiction, which of course I must now read because anybody who would write this particular essay: Why I Like Heroes With Unsolvable Problems is someone whose fiction I suspect I will like. Here’s a paragraph:
“Dramatic structure most often asks the question, “How will they solve this problem?” Character asks, “How will they adapt to this problem?” And it’s watching them attempt B while having to do A that evokes the flash of empathy in the audience — that in fact makes “A” worthwhile. Because, after all, a mere court case or a murder is not enough — we want to know how Sherlock Holmes will deal with this. Or Peter Wimsey or Fox Mulder or our boy Miles or Ally McBeal. We want the specifics, the style of this particular dance, the scent of the rose and not merely the dried petals.
We want a little bit of mess in the perfection of structure, and the hint that we have here a life that will go on after we close the book or turn off the television.And that’s why I like heroes with unsolvable problems. “
