Who is your favorite literary hero?
Dr..
Kamal Abdul Malik
September 23, 2022
We all have our favorite literary characters: the heroes and heroines in novels and plays with whom we like to be friends in real life and even invite to dinner at our homes, and the villains we long to see fail and get cured in the end.
While I was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the University Journal polled faculty members about their favorite literary heroes and villains.
Some of the answers came as a surprise.
Dr. said.
Stephen Greenblatt, Professor of Humanities, The character Iago, the false friend who betrays Othello in Shakespeare's famous play, tops the list of villains.
He described him as "the enemy of love and happiness." As for his literary hero, he mentions "Leopold Bloom" in James Joyce's Ulysses, whom Greenblatt describes as "tolerant, inquisitive, and always optimistic."
In contrast, David Damrosch goes back in time - to the second century BC.
"My favorite choice for both villain and hero must be Gilgamesh, the hero of the first great masterpiece of world literature."
The head of the Department of Comparative Literature explained why he hated and loved the Mesopotamian hero in the epic poem of the same name.
“He began in fact as a villain—a tumultuous young king, who persecutes his subjects, rapes women on their wedding night, plunders a sacred forest and murders its owner.
Then the death of his good friend Enkidu forces him to face the inevitability of death and annihilation, and at the end of the epic he returns to his city sad, but wiser and ready to judge as he should.
As for me, my favorite literary hero is Heathcliff, the protagonist of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
He is a romantic hero and a tragic villain.
This is reflected in the intensity of his love, the intensity of his ambition, the sharpness of his temper, and the tragedy manifested in his death without a memorial ceremony.
He is the archetype of the Byron heroes (after the romantic poet Lord Byron): outcast, arrogant and intelligent, with a magnetic and mysterious handsomeness that attracts women with destructive tendencies to self and others around them.
And the novel is much more than just a romantic love story, in which hatred is intertwined with love and revenge with affection and passion between lovers and the class difference between them, which is one of the prevalent issues in Victorian literature.
We see Heathcliff driven by a desire whose purpose transcends the natural world.
He has a lifelong passion for union with Catherine, but when physical union becomes impossible due to her death, he seeks a mystical union with her, always haunted by the specter of impossible happiness.
Like hero Byron, we see Heathcliff's action in this supernatural appeal as part of his extraordinary personality.
Catherine describes the semi-supernatural bond between them: "Whatever the make-up of our souls, they are alike...My love for Heathcliff is like eternal rocks...I am Heathcliff!"
Heathcliff revealed the extent of his obsession with Catherine years after her death: "I can't look down...her features are formed in every cloud, in every tree--yes her features fill the air at night, and take over the features of every being by day."
What do we do when our love becomes like Heathcliff's love for Katherine: sweeping and supernatural, but unattainable?
Perhaps we will not find the definitive answer here, but our reading of the biographies of these heroes and villains will always remind us of our perplexing existential questions.
Visiting Scholar at Harvard University
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