Now, before anyone gets too overly concerned about That Lady at the Circulation Desk, allow me to explain to you what, precisely it is that makes me love a good baddie.

A good villain is so much more than a hunchbacked crone with a crooked nose (think of the Wicked Witch in Snow White, or the Wicked Witch of the West in the film version of The Wizard of Oz), and it isn’t just a rampant dislike of the hero or heroine…a lot of James Bond villains fall into this category…actually, they usually fall under the category of ‘inexplicably scarred’, as well…
These characters generally adhere to the old Victorian concept of physiognomy (which they borrowed from Aristotle), which said that ugly people had ugly souls.  Oscar Wilde plays with this concept in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but his characters are far, far more complex than, say Mr. Hyde.

Some villains are villainous simply because they are mirror images of the hero, and exist to show up his or her darker traits.  Take, for example, Mr. Hyde, of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  There is no doubt that Hyde is a bad guy, but he doesn’t have an independent agenda.  He is, literally, the embodiment of all of Jekyll’s bad qualities.  Similar, though a bit less obvious, is the character of Clare Quilty in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who literally and figuratively embodies all the evil, lascivious, and predatory qualities that Humbert refuses to see in himself.  Indeed, there are plenty who believe that there was no murder in Lolita, because Quilty is nothing more than Humbert himself.  The same argument has also been made for character of Professor James Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes canon–that he is a figment of Holmes’ imagination, the man on whom he blames all the cases he cannot solve…or he might even be Holmes himself, who has all the makings of a master criminal, as well as a master detective.

There are other villains who are psychotic, sociopathic, or otherwise…warped.  For the record, there is a huge difference between characters who are inwardly deformed and those who are mentally ill, both realistically and in a literary sense.  The ones I am describing here are ones like Hannibal Lector, or Francis Dolarhyde, from The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, respectively, or  just about any villain from the Pendergast novels from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.   These villains are generally utterly chilling and terrifying, particularly because they are physically human (usually), but psychologically, they are totally untranslatable.  Their psyche is so skewed that looking at them is like looking in a broken mirror.  That line between human and monster is a very interesting one, but not an easy one to walk.  It’s very, very easy for a character to become a caricature or cartoonishly wicked, which is why the good ones are so memorable.

But those villains who exist as independent entities…who have their own narrative arc, and drive, and desires?  Those are the kind that really get my attention.  Because it actually takes a lot of work to make a really good villain, because there is so much psychology, so much humanity, and so much passion that goes into making them really great.  For villains like this, it’s not so much what they do, as why they do it, and the object that drives them–because we, as readers, are allowed to get close enough to them to understand this.  This is a dangerous game to play with readers, because we are taught to sympathize with the hero of a story, to find a bit of ourselves in the protagonist and his quest.  So to give us the chance to see the world through a villain’s eyes, to taste their desire and understand their drive, not only transforms them into something more like an anti-hero than a villain (in most cases), but also transforms us, by forcing us to realize that we may, in truth, have a little villain in us, as well.

Just who are we talking about here?

I’m thinking of Lucifer from Paradise Lost, the fallen angel that Milton painted as the arch-enemy of God and Mankind, but whose real ‘crime’ was to demand the right to exercise his free will.  His exile from Heaven only resolves Lucifer further to thumb his nose at the intractable deity that scorned him–and the fact that he is still a popular character on tv, in films, and in books, shows just how enduring Milton’s image of the Prince of Darkness has become:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deifie his power…

Or how about Mr. Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?  We only ever meet through the reminiscences of Marlow, the book’s narrator, and because of this, Kurtz’s real personality remains somewhat obscured.  Nevertheless, Marlow (and Conrad, who took the same trip in real life) is able to describe the total incomprehensibility, size, and foreignness of the African jungle in such powerful terms, that it becomes frighteningly easy to see how one could become like Kurtz–how one could demand to control everything and everyone in the hope of imposing order, and how that need for control and dominance could warp a person’s soul permanently.  In a time when colonialism and imperialism, particularly in Africa, was being held up as a duty and a privilege for the heroic White Man, Conrad’s depiction of Kurtz was all the more startling for its brutal honesty:

He began by saying that we whites ‘must seem like supernatural beings to savages, we must look like gods to them,’ and so on. ‘By applying our will, we can do endless good,’ etc. It carried me away, though it’s difficult to remember what exactly it said. I know it gave me the impression of an immense land overseen by gentle and noble rulers. It was exciting, so full of brilliant words. There was no practical advice at all, except for a note on the last page, which he apparently scrawled sometime later, in a shaky hand. It was a very simple method of rule that he proposed, and after reading all of those pages of pure poetry about helping the natives, it was like a terrifying flash of lightning in a clear sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’… As it turned out, I had to handle his affairs after he died. After everything I’ve done, I should have the right to put his memory in the trashcan of history, but I don’t have a choice in the matter. He won’t be forgotten.

And finally, the whole reason for this post, is because of Draco Malfoy.  In a discussion with the wonderful Melissa, who writes the fabulous “Wednesdays at the West” posts, I admitted to having a sort-of, kind-of thing for Malfoy, which I probably wouldn’t admit to in public.  There just seemed to be so many layers to him, even when he was being a sneer-y, misogynistic jerk.  There was fear there, and a sense that Malfoy was as lost in Voldemort’s plans as Harry was, at times.  Apparently, I am not alone in my feelings, as J.K. Rowling went on record saying that Malfoy was not the guy you wanted him to be:

Draco remains a person of dubious morality in the seven published books, and I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character… All of this left me in the unenviable position of pouring cold common sense on ardent readers’ daydreams as I told them, rather severely, that Draco was not concealing a heart of gold under all that sneering and prejudice and that no, he and Harry were not destined to end up best friends.

AND YET.  Once you’ve read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, perhaps we should revisit this discussion again, and accept that even some of the darkest of villains are far, far more human that any of us might like to admit.