The Allure of Immorality, Criminality, & Evil in Fiction

Satan, repellent to Christians, but stood as a Romantic figure post-Paradise Lost and as a counter-culture icon in the 20th century. Evil can be equated with rebellion, and may attract.

We love villains.

Villainy, in contrast to heroism, can paradoxically be both revolting and appealing. Throughout history, civilised societies have always been fascinated by violence, from the Roman gladiator pits, to public executions, and to the French theatre of Grand Guignol – and this is a fascination that has carried over into literature. Subversive literature dealing with immoral characters and criminal behaviour fascinates and entertains because they exist outwith the traditional hero’s journey. Literary depictions of immorality have held fast because mankind has continuously questioned and struggled with morality, and successive generations have always re-evaluated the acceptable and the intolerable. Yesterday’s villainy could be today’s heroism, or vice versa. The novels and actions of the Marquis de Sade, though not seen as moral novels and actions today, have been rehabilitated somewhat over the centuries, and can acceptably be distributed and sold. De Sade argued against laws criminalising atheism and blasphemy, and claimed that, “A republic is not in the business of prescribing morality ... what is more immoral than war? And how can a state which must perpetuate immorality to fulfil its sole reason for existence turn around and insist that its citizens live morally?” The struggle between judicial law and evolving common senses of justice were reflected in proletariat literature and informed its readership of a particular movement’s creed. In this respect, tales of criminality may be enjoyed because they rally against perceived injustices.

However, not all stories of immoral behaviour are so mission-orientated. They may be written to explore the psychology of villainy in itself [as in Dostoyevsky], to exploit villainy to thrill readers with dastardly characters [as in some of Shakespeare’s comedies], to follow criminal character on the path to redemption [as in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables], or may even feature behaviour that, in the society under which it is written, is conceived to be examples of virtue and bravery, but to a later society is interperated as ancient barbarism. When Homer composed The Iliad, he was telling a story of heroes and glory, but to modern sensibilities, the Trojan War is a war of folly, not glory, and its hero, Achilles, more mercurial, vain, and selfish than Homer may have intended. Though the story remains entertaining and widely read, to a modern audience the Olympian worshipping Greeks of Homer may be little more than warring invaders, though it is not to be mistaken that ancient audiences cheered on Achilles simply because he was a powerful protagonist, but rather because he was a successfully violent and merciless one, [Shakespeare would later parody the Greek ‘heroes’ in Troilus and Cressida.]

Literary villainy hit a stride in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, at a time of ecclesiastical upheaval and reform. In an age obsessed with sin and wary of pleasures, suffering was given reign over festivity.

“The history of human pleasures -of festivity, games, jokes, and amusements- has seldom met with the same dignified attention accorded the history of human suffering ... This imbalance reflects a standard interpretation of experience: that suffering is perpetual, fundamental to human life, and hence worthy of discourse ... In Goethe’s words, ‘the most lively and exquisite delights are, like horses racing past, the experience of an instant only, which leaves scarcely a trace on our soul.’”
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: the carnivalesque in eighteenth-century English Culture and Fiction, (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1986) p.1.

Many works of fiction which explored immorality were tinged with the supernatural [for example, the story of Faustus], and other tales of criminality were derived from actual events, or at least paralleled them. John Webster’s The White Devil derived its plot from the real-life murder of an Italian woman named Vittoria Accoramboni [Vittoria Corombona in Webster’s story] and the play further explores murder, infidelity, and revenge. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment explored criminal behaviour through the character of Rodian Romanovich Raskolnikov, who decides to rob and murder an elderly pawnbroker, ostensibly to help his family and to allow himself to return to university. The question of whether a criminal act such as murder can be justified is raised to the reader: Raskolnikov and his family are in need, and his intended victim is “an ugly, nasty, parasitical hag.” Raskolnikov commits his crime and the story goes on to explore the character’s underlying motivations and subsequent guilt, all in a thriller format to captivate the reader. When the novel was sent to his publisher, a real-life murder paralleling the crime of lead character Raskolnikov occurred in Moscow. So great was the public’s interest in the macabre that upon the book’s release, the odd similarity and timing between the real and fictional murder even “helped to publicise the novel.” Crime was commerce, especially real crime, and Dostoyevsky’s novel turned out to be his most popular to that point, [of course, his literary ability is not to be diminished.]

But depictions of villainy can do more than stretch or explore the boundaries of the acceptable; they can also reinforce conventional notions of morality. When, in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess refuses to lower her integrity when faced with assassination at the hands of the wicked [if not conflicted] Bosola, it affirms the power of respectability -and heroism- rather than degrades it, even though the pious character is killed at the hands of the villain. In Renaissance and Shakespearean tragedy, villainy represented typical assumptions about immoral characters – they are ugly, unfit, and detestable, such as Shakespeare’s Richard III, and characters who stray from a good path invariably become unwell or divorced from good health, such as Hamlet, who wrestles with a moral dilemma and is unable to force his hand, becoming ever more reluctant in his actions and who may or not be tinged with madness.

“[Sir Francis Bacon] condemns revenge as a ‘wild justice,’ a necessary result of mental unhealthiness: ‘A man who studies revenge keeps his own wounds green, which would otherwise heal and do well.’ ... That the revenger was thought to be not merely diseased but also allied mentally and spiritually with supernatural forces of evil is abundantly clear in Bacon, who sees such figures as living the ‘life of witches.’”
Molly Smith, The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successor, (USA: Associated University Press, 1991) p.49.

John Wilks, in The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy, points out that for one to “‘smile and smile, and be a villain,’ was a phenomenon bafflingly unnatural to the Elizabethans, for it sundered the correspondence between soul and body.” Shakespeare’s villains were either as physically repulsive as they were morally repugnant, or they were treated comically, and protagonists who were morally divided or inconclusive often met with misfortune. Comic villains usually carried out their misdeeds with zest, and “several of Shakespeare’s blackest villains are virtuosos in their art, dedicated to the endless pleasure of the game, and alarmingly witty in their frank verbal revelations of technique.” The marriage of evil and comedy did not serve to undermine or soften wicked characters; rather it made such characters devilishly appealing to readers and spectators, and it confirmed to the audience what they had always believed – that villains were ugly, and found great glee in being so.

Bad and ugly. Shakespeare's deformed Richard the III.

The belief that wickedness could be predicted physiologically was a variation on an ancient, earlier idea that cowardly figures were likewise physically detestable, expressed in Homer’s The Iliad through the character of Thersites, who is “the ugliest man that had come to Ilium,” as well as a coward. This was carried over into Middle Age storytelling, but the hag was no longer cowardly, but wicked and perhaps in league with supernatural forces. John Milton’s Paradise Lost continues this notion, presenting an initially statuesque Satan, who by the time of his lowest ebb crawls in the dust. And still, the public regarded Milton’s handsome Satan as an anti-hero, which drove William Blake to famously proclaim: “[Milton] wrote in fetters when [he] wrote of Angels and God and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, [because] he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”

By the time of the nineteenth century, thoughts of mental impurity spelling physical impurity [which had also stemmed into Elizabethan medicinal belief] had crumbled somewhat, resulting in Dostoyevsky’s handsome but morally defective Raskolnikov. Today, this progression has resulted in two clichés; the ugly villain and the suave criminal, but Dostoyevsky offers a more complete view of immorality than his Elizabethan predecessors or many of his successors. His Raskolnikov is not a deformed, witty Richard the III-like villain, but handsome and “the very opposite of cowardly and downtrodden.” Nineteenth century Russia had laid aside the fallacious idea that wickedness was expressed physiologically, as we see in the character of Raskolnikov, and the reader enjoys exploring his failure of conscience because Raskolnikov is more than a Middle-Age caricature: he is a man, though prone to a Napoleon-complex, physically like any other walking the streets of modern Moscow. For Dostoyevsky’s readers, the thought [coupled with the coinciding real-life murders] was tantalising. The idea of immoral characters fascinates and entertains so much because it is inextricably tied to the shifting times and attitudes of the populace.

Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov. Not a thumb-twiddling, moustache-curling pantomine villain.Raskolnikov was inspired by a real-life murderer. In August 1865, Gerasim Chistov murdered two eldery women during a robbery. Chistov belonged to a religious denomination known as the Old Believers, for which the Russian word was raskolnik. A later, similar murder helped publicise the novel.

Evil continued to evolve throughout the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The rise of the novel and the later Gothic genre helped usher in less fantastical portrayals of villains and introduced greyer moral characters, specifically the anti-hero. The anti-hero is of course a synthesis of the hero and villain. Often, we find him/her as a character who, despite their moral flaws, are usually appealing, limited in/ignorant of their wickedness, and ultimately serve to at least explore immorality. One example would include Dostoyevsky's aforemetioned Raskolnikov, and one of the earliest examples in literary fiction is Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, though a more infamous example may be that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Shelley’s novel, the character of Victor Frankenstein is our protagonist, but as the tale unfolds we question his purity as a ‘hero’ and we question his Monster’s role as ‘villain’. Frankenstein is ultimately a story of two initially pure characters who propel each other into madness and murder; though we shouldn’t forget that it is Victor Frankenstein’s neglect and temperament that spurs the initially innocent but dejected creature into misery and murder. “I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn,” the Monster claims. In fact, Victor’s creation turns out to be more thoughtful and considerate than he is, but realises that he is “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and all men disavowed.” Victor makes no secret of the fact that it is his Creature’s ugliness that causes him to repel it, not its nature. So, who is the real villain here?

In William Golding’s 1948 novel Lord of the Flies, evil is less a character and more of a state of mind or circumstance. For Golding [disturbed by his WWII experiences] mankind had the natural tendency for evil and only needed the appropriate environment to be let loose, [a theme explored in the writings of Joseph Conrad, though Flies arguably owes more to Ballantyne's Coral Island than Heart of Darkness.] Pessimistically, it is the characters’ ability for destruction that saves them. Where the boys are unable to keep a signal fire lit to save themselves, it is in their burning of the island to flush out one-time leader Ralph that attracts the attention of rescue. “The island was scorched up like dead wood ... with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart...”

Looking back, finding a villain who is so successfully evil that the reader/viewer is unable to even like him for all his wickedness is a difficult task. People love to hate dastardly characters. We don’t have to look further than the horror genre to see the idolisation of villains. Some may argue that the villains in horror movies are usually better defined and likeable than their victims, and it is true for the most part, though we shouldn’t forget that movies such as Halloween, Alien, Aliens, and The Terminator featured acclaimed [and much loved] heroes as well as villains, as did 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars:  it would be a stretch to say that HAL 9000 and Darth Vader -both murderers and subjugators- are even mildly disliked among fans. To the contrary, they are loved. Michael Myers, the silent face of evil, is more mystical than detestable, and Freddy Krueger a figure of fun. One of the closest examples of a detestable villain may be Kevin Spacey's John Doe, from the David Fincher film, Seven. Again, it's hard to separate Spacey the actor with John Doe the character, but Fincher keeps Doe out of the spotlight until near the end of the film, whereas other films involving serial killings often introduce us to the killer before he meets the hero, and usually attempts to humanise the character somewhat, [Silence of the Lambs, another film that features a loved, if not loveable, serial killer in Hannibal Lector.]

Seven is a meditation on evil - where most people are too comfortable with [and thrilled by] evil in most movies, what Fincher does in Seven is give a no holds barred presentation of ruthless evil. There's a story that one day, Jean-Luc Godard woke up and realised that he hadn't made a film he liked; hadn't made a film that was truly affecting. People saw movies and the messages within them - then went on to their ordinary lives! Fincher shook people with Seven, and showed murder and immorality as it should be seen - as disgusting, life-destroying, and gut wrenching. The last thing Seven does is represent John Doe [standing in for evil itself] as being likeable, poseable, hip, cool, or an action figure, or even as vanquishable in a Hollywood-styled action sequence. It also presented the killing of a villain as a defeat for morality. Brad Pitt's character seals his doom by wreaking revenge as Morgan Freeman pleads for clemency. Most Hollywood movies celebrate heroes ruthlessly killing villains. For a change, viewers were left hoping for mercy, but evil proves to be too distorting, disturbing, and uncharacteristically too evil for movies.

Good[?] and evil in David Fincher's Seven.

For some, exploring criminal behaviour in fiction can be more than a beacon of the times; it can also be progressive, an indication of a fermenting changing attitude. One of the first Grand Guignol plays, Mademoiselle Fifi, was the first theatre production to put a prostitute on the stage, an act which saw the play shut down by the authorities. The gory productions were wildly successful in the interims between the two World Wars, and it is perhaps telling that the Guignol theatres met their decline after World Word II, to which the last of the Guignol directors commented, “We could never compete with Buchenwald.” French society had graduated beyond the excesses of the theatre through the brutal oppression of the Nazi’s. Molly Smith, in The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors, postulates that literary depictions of wickedness and immorality are precursors to societal change:

“The violence of the 1640’s may be seen in socio-psychological terms from society’s viewpoint as the ‘temporary retrogression into chaos’ that precedes every movement towards wholeness ...  it is precisely this delving into the psyche by the collective mind of the age, by its creative artists, that made the creation of a new social environment possible ... Stuart fascination with evil, therefore, provides an instance of what Victor Turner characterises ‘plural reflexivity,’ in which groups ‘strive to see their own reality in new ways,’ ... one might characterise Stuart fascination with evil as transformative and creative.”
Molly Smith, The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successor, (USA: Associated University Press, 1991) p.22-23.

Literary evil, more than being a sign of the times, actually helps to usher in moral and social progression. Such tales invoke and question the current social climate and are enjoyed because they are emblematic of the population’s everyday, and incoming, problems. By writing, staging, and developing immorality in fiction, societies can slowly come to terms with terror and overcome their suspicion of change. Tales of immorality do not fade because society does not stop changing, and tales of immorality do not stop being enjoyed because they act as symbols for evolving notions of good and evil; because they parallel the real world; predict changes in attitude; satisfy a wish fulfilment on the part of the reader or audience to see an impious character punished; satisfy a need to confront and overcome wickedness in a safe manner; and because they, more often than not, are presented in characters who can be enjoyed – either through comedic interpretations of a scheming villain, or through a villain who, though morally reprehensible, is reprehensible and knows it.

And we will continue to enjoy.

Bibliography

Gillette, Paul J. and Yankowski, John S. (trans.) Marquis de Sade, The Complete Marquis de Sade Volume 1, (Los Angeles: Holloway House Publishing Company, 1966).

Castle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilisation: the carnivalesque in eighteenth-century English Culture and Fiction, (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1986).

Hingley, Ronald, Dostoyevsky, His Life and Work, (London: Paul Elek Limited, 1978).

Smith, Molly, The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors, (USA: Associated University Press, 1991).

Wilks, John, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy, (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

Spivack, Charlotte, The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare’s Stage, (London: Associated University Press, 1978).

Rieu, E.V., (trans.) Homer, The Iliad, (England: Penguin Books, 1950).

William Golding, The Lord of the Flies, (London: Faber & Faber, 1948).

Agnes Pierron, ‘House of Horrors’, Grand Street magazine, (1996), http://www.grandguignol.com/grandstreet.htm