Worst best friends in literature

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess is one of my favorite books of all time, and a cherished childhood read. However, even as a child it pisses me off that while Sarah is starving to death in that attic, her rich, spoiled friends do fuck-all to help her. Lottie at least has the excuse that she was like 6 or something, and therefore too young to understand what was happening to Sarah. But Ermengarde, who basically owes every scrap of her self-esteem to Sarah, can’t summon two brain cells to rub together to figure out that her best friend and protector is slowly dying alone, hungry, and cold. I mean, goddamn, Ermengarde can’t sneak her a sandwich? Beg her rich daddy to give Sarah a job where she can earn enough calories to stay alive? The *monkey *accomplished more than Ermengarde ever did.

So who are your nominees for worst best friend in literature?

Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as “best friends” of Prince Hamlet, count? Those familiar with the play will remember that in the end it was a question of whether R. & G. got Hamlet killed, or Hamlet got R. & G. killed, by the King of England.

Heathcliff and Cathy. Bestest of friends as kids until she gets the hots for the local squire. So Heathcliff runs off in a snit, comes back, runs off with Cathy’s sister-in-law, knocks her up and abandons her, waits til she dies, takes the kid, forces Cathy’s kid to marry him so he can get the property left behind after Cathy went insane (at least partially due to her feelings for Heathcliff).

Mercutio never seemed like that great of a friend to Romeo. Or was Juliet his best friend? She was no good either.

R&G were ignorant of the plot to kill Hamlet (or else they wouldn’t have given the King of England the letter ordering their own deaths). Hamlet, OTOH, sent them off to be killed, knowing what the letter contained.

In some continuities, Lex Luthor was a best friend of Superboy, but later became his nemesis.

1.) Erm was pretty slow on the uptake.
2.) IIRC, it’s clearly stated that she didn’t realize how bad things were for Sarah.
3.) As soon as she did figure it out, she brought up a basket full of food. And got busted by the headmistress and in a load of trouble. And it was after that night that the guy-across-the-street-who-was-Captain-Carew’s-partner started helping Sarah.

If you wanna talk bad friends, how about Sarah and the other servant girl (Becky?). “Hey, I’m all rich again now, come be my personal maid, and be grateful for having such a great position as a servant, because being lower-class you still aren’t deserving of an actual childhood.”

Or how 'bout Captain Carew’s partner, who got his friend killed through worry, and then couldn’t even come up with such a simple means of tracking his daughter down as asking Carew’s old solicitor?

Tradd St. Croix from Pat Conroy’s best novel, The Lords of Discipline. I started a thread here once in which I held him up as the examplar of the banality of evil.

I see your point but it seems somehow contrary to the spirit of Mississippienne’s post. If anything Catherine is the bad best friend for what she did to Heathcliff, if only because they can’t properly be termed friends at any point after that. Sure they’ve got that life-long (and beyond) on-again-off-again deranged love affair going on where he destroys pretty much everyone in the novel, but a friendship it is not.

Not the worst, just bad: in the Mayor of Casterbridge, Elizabeth-Jane is great friends with Lucetta, untill Lucetta decides she has better chances with Elizabeth-Jane’s dad (her former lover) if Elizabeth-Jane isn’t hanging around with her. When that plan fails, Lucetta steals Elizabeth-Jane’s suitor Farfrae and marries him.

Tom Sawyer, at the end of Huck Finn. What a wiener.

I wouldn’t call her the WORST, but Isabella Thorpe in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is pretty bad best friend to heroine Catherine Morland. She seems nice enough initially, albeit rather shallow, but she turns out to be dishonest, disloyal, a gold-digger, and something of a tramp.

Isabella’s friendship with Catherine and her eventual engagement to Catherine’s brother James are based largely on the mistaken belief that the Morland family is much wealthier than it is. Isabella also tries to pressure Catherine into a relationship with her (Isabella’s) jerk brother John for the same reason. Meanwhile, Isabella starts fooling around on James Morland as soon as he’s out of town…with the older brother of the guy Catherine really likes! When James realizes what’s going on he wisely breaks off the engagement with Isabella. Not long afterward she’s cast off by the other, wealthier man too. Isabella then writes a very manipulative and dishonest letter to Catherine (after having ignored two previous friendly letters from Catherine to her) acting all innocent and trying to get Catherine to patch things up between her and James. Catherine fortunately sees through this little ploy.

In defense of Ermengarde - I imagine somewhat well-to-do people of that time, like she must be since she is in a boarding school, were used to servants living in servant’s quarters. Sarah was being fed, had a job - Sarah was much better off than the beggar girl in the street that Sarah later gives most of her muffins too. Little Becky has lived that way for longer than Sarah - did Sarah ever think to bring Becky some food or give her any of her clothes or anything, before Sarah herself was relegated to the attic? I actually give Ermengarde some credit - as Graham Greene said in one of his novels (I think it was The Comedians) - I’ll have to paraphrase because I don’t remember it exactly: “At least he could recognize suffering when it was out in the open before him - so many people cannot.”

An example of “worst best friends”: in the last novel in the Three Musketeer Series (The Three Musketeers - 20 Years After - The Viscount of Bragelonne), Aramis, one of the four heroes, ensnares his friend Porthos into a plot against the French King, taking advantage of Porthos’ innocence and trust. Porthos ends up dying as a result of this plot. A very sad ending to the bonds of friendship between Aramis, Athos, Porthos and d’Artagnan.

Most of Bertie Wooster’s friends didn’t seem to care if he was humiliated, beaten, inprisoned, or killed, as long as they got what they wanted.

Ermengarde being an idiot is precisely why I don’t like her. It’s not that she’s not book-smart, it’s that she’s not life-smart. Sarah loses her fortune and goes to live in the attic and works herself down to the bone, and all Ermengarde can do is blubber and stare with her big watery eyes in confusion. Even Lottie figured out how bad Sarah’s situation was, and Lottie’s an immature six-year-old. And then Ermengarde bungles her one attempt at helping Sarah, and IIRC, she showed up with food and then had Sarah tell her stories, delaying the actual important part [the meal] in favor of Ermengarde’s entertainment so that Miss Minchin could find them and snatch away the food. I earnestly hope that after the end of the story, Sarah and Becky lived lives of quiet happiness, spreading goodwill, and Ermengarde was shipwrecked on an island and ritually sacrificed to the volcano god. She was TDTL (Too Dumb To Live).

By the standards of her day and age, Becky being Sarah’s handmaiden and companion was far and above any other fate that could have befallen her. It’s made clear that Becky receives abundant clothing and food, warmth, and love in her new home. The best she could’ve hoped for otherwise was a few more bitter, stunted years of drudgery before her inevitable untimely death. In comparison, being Sarah’s ‘personal maid’ (not at all a bad position to be in, especially considering that Sarah is largely self-sufficient, and all Becky’ll have to do is dress her hair, talk, and play with her) was like a fairy tale coming true. Plus, she and Sarah undertake the task of helping out other orphans and abandoned children in the city.

I do agree with you when it comes to Carrisford. To be fair, he was a bit brain-addled from the fever, but you’d think he’d at least have the resources to write letters to Captain Carew’s associates and get better leads on Sarah (surely to god a father who loved his daughter as much as the captain loved Sarah would’ve told SOMEONE were her boarding school was, if even in passing mention).

I may be misremembering it, but doesn’t the letter originally only order the death of Hamlet, and Hamlet rewrites it to spare himself, and get them killed instead? If I’m remembering correctly, they aren’t necessarily off the hook for the letter - we don’t know for sure that they were ignorant of its contents.

It looks like at the start of Act 3, Scene 3, Claudius tells R&G that Hamlet’s so mad, it’s not safe for anyone for him to stay there, so they should go to England with him. By the end of Act 4, Scene 3, after the death of Polonius at Hamlet’s hands - who thought he was murdering Claudius, so he’s not exactly admitting to why he stabbed through a curtain - Claudius tells R&G they’re leaving with Hamlet tonight, and after those two leave, he reveals his plot to have Hamlet killed. Finally, at the start of the last scene (Act 5, Scene 2), Hamlet reveals to Horatio how one night on the ship he couldn’t sleep, and checked R&G’s papers from Claudius, finding the orders to kill him. Since he had a copy of the seal, he forged new ones ordering the deaths of the bearers (R&G), sealed them, and replaced them.

I don’t think we know if they knew what the papers said, but Hamlet seems little concerned by their fates, judging by lines 62-67. (“Why man, they did make love to this employment; They are not near my conscience; their defeat does by their own insinuation grow” etc.)

Boy, howdy! And all so that he (Aramis) could become a Cardinal and then Pope. All for the greater glory of France, of course :rolleyes:

Of the four of them, Aramis seems to be the one (even early on) who subordinates his honor for scheming and power.

A tiny nitpick: 20 Years After is a self-contained story that covers the execution of Charles 1 of England. The Viscount of Bragelonne is the first book in what is usually published as a trilogy that culminates in The Man In The Iron Mask, which is where this unfortunate ending happens.
Roddy

I can never keep the English titles straight. In French, the books are:
The Three Musketeers (shortest) Les Trois Mousquetaires
Twenty Years after (longer) Vingt Ans après
The Viscount of Bragelonne (longest) Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.