I never have read Uncle Tom, but I’ve always herd it used as a pejorative. So one day I looked it up on-line and was surprised to see
Also, I never read about Little Lord Fauntleroy but have always heard the name in a negative connotation. So I was surprised to see
So, I was going to ask how these characters went from being the heroes to being the bad guys, but I guess the Wikipedia articles answer that. So my second question is, are there any other characters who are thought of as bad, but were originally written as good, or vice-versa.
Romeo was so dedicated to Juliet that he killed himself when he thought she was dead, but now his name is more often applied to a man that jumps easily from woman to woman. (Of course, there was the Rosaline thing.)
Well, a good example would be Homer Atkins, the title character of the novel The Ugly American.
Most people haven’t read the book, and just use the term “Ugly American” to refer to any Yank tourist who’s boorish, loud and vulgar. But Homer Atkins is not such a man- he’s an idealistic engineer who tries very hard to show respect for foreign cultures, and wants very much to help the Asian peasants he works with. He’s referred to as “the ugly American” because, despite his good heart, he is far from handsome.
Pollyanna is used to mean someone who is overly and mawkishly optimistic. The character in the book did look on the good side of everything, but was a realist about it.
This one’s debatable, but a lot of people seem to point to John Galt as an exemplar of cutthroat, oppressive capitalism and pro-rich sentiment, but Ayn Rand (in Atlas Shrugged, at least) is really emphatic that proper capitalists should never profit by the suffering of others or through unfair practices, and a big part of her argument is that the poor would be better off because they’d have more opportunity for success if they tried and wouldn’t be exploited by governments that keep them poor.
It’s questionable whether her ideas really add up, but it’s definitely clear that Galt (and the other protagonists) were intended to represent a way of doing business that DIDN’T exploit the workers.
A Lolita is a sexy but underaged girl, when the Lolita of the book was a child abuse victim who only seemed sexy through the eyes of the perverted and damaged Humbert Humbert. It’s a really misunderstood book.
The Cisco Kid originated in an O. Henry short story, “The Caballero’s Way.” He was a cold-blooded bastard who killed his own girlfriend just to show a Gringo soldier how ruthless he could be, a cross between Pancho Villa and Keyser Soze. Subsequent depictions of the character on radio, TV and comic books make him out to be a hero on the order of Zorro.
Harry Lime, the villain of The Third Man (played by Orson Welles), turned up as the morally ambiguous hero of a British radio show a few years after the movie.
Frankenstein’s Monster is frequently portrayed as tragic and misunderstood. In the novel, he is neither, just a calculating killer.
I never read the novel, but I heard that he was very different than how we see him in movies. I heard that far from being mute and not very bright, that he spoke fluent French and was at least of average intelligence. However, I never heard that he was a calculating killer. That’s interesting. Thanks.
Hamlet is suppose to represent overly intellectual vacillation, indecision and ineffectuality. But Shakespeare’s character is a hot-blooded young man of action who can barely restrain his rage; does so only because assassinating a king is extremely dangerous; and almost all his tragically destructive errors (pushing away Ophelia, killing Polonius) come from passion and impulsiveness. The one exception is his failure to slay Claudius when he catches him at prayer; and that is because he is so mad at Claudius that he wants him not only dead but damned. Otherwise that would have been the perfect moment – Claudius having just tacitly and publicly admitted his guilt by fleeing from the play that re-enacted the murder of Hamlet’s father, Hamlet could at only that one moment gotten away with killing him and become king himself. That’s an often overlooked aspect – Hamlet is ambitious; he doesn’t just want revenge, he wants the crown (of which Claudius cheated him by killing his father, and securing the election, while Hamlet was away studying in Wittenberg); and in most circumstances, he couldn’t hope to get it just by killing Claudius. He’s not indecisive or ineffectual; it’s just that all his actions are restrained by danger on one side and ambition on the other; and he’s very painfully aware of that and it just makes him madder.
King Midas was a greedy, rat bastard who was granted his wish of turning everything to gold in order to teach him a lesson. This ability quickly, predictably turns into a curse with the dual moral of being careful of what you wish for in addition to stop being a greedy, rat bastard.
Now use of the “Midas touch” has completely abandoned the point of the original myth whatever.
Hercules has become a byword for brute strength. While the mythic Hercules certainly was well gifted with that, he performed most of his Twelve Labors by using his brains. (Or, in the case of Hippolyta’s girdle, other parts not directly associated with brute strength.)
Of course he was tragic. He was created and instantly banished by his creator. He hid in a basement and came to love the people upstairs, who rejected him as soon as they saw him even though he did everything in his power to save them. He confronted his creator and demanded a companion so he could leave the world of men who hated him without being eternally lonely. His creator complied but then destroyed the companion.
If anyone had a right to be furious it was the monster.
Back on Romeo and Juliet: this is not a story of true love thwarted by the winds of chance. The tragedy here is not that these crazy kids couldn’t make it work – how often have feuding families been brought together by the marriage of their scions? No. A couple of fourteen year olds (actually, it says specifically that Juliet is maybe two weeks away from fourteen, and we can’t really expect Romeo to be much older – sixteen, tops) meet each other, fall in lust, and end up causing violent riots in the city based on their and their friends’ inability to keep their mouths shut. They’re hasty and overdramatic and willing to kill themselves and plenty of other people for a person they met over the weekend.
It is not tragic that they could not be together forever. It is tragic that two horny teenagers started riots in the streets of Verona and got innocent people killed for a brief infatuation.
You can say that again. I honestly thought she was a bit of a temptress, taking advantage of a broken man. Wow. I am very bad at interpreting art, though…my husband sometimes gets angry at me, I get stuff so wrong. And I really do try to see the layers, and the symbolism, and everything. But I still rarely get it.
Canute, a real man, is often depicted as trying to hold back the waves as an expresion of his insane hubris. The real point of the story was that Canute was shaming his sycophantic advisors and telling them to shut up with the praise and give him some useful information.
Niccolo Machiavelli, though an author, came to be stock literary character throughout northern Europe - known as Mack or Match Evil. One later commenter put it best when he noted that this was an ironic admission in those types of plays of the very political evils he railed against. In fact, Machiavelli was greatly in favor of honest, effective Republican-style government with great respect for the common man and rule of law. He simply acknowledged he realistic neccessities of rulership: namely, that there are people who may well try to kill you and many mor who will betray you. The prince (or president/prime minister) doesn’t owe anything to other princes.
Captain Bligh, a real person, was perhaps not as bad as Mutiny on the Bounty portrays, and the mutineers were not that good. Nevertheless, he wasn’t a great guy either.
I think the most tragic part of the story is that the adults that they turned to for guidence utterly failed them by helping them find a way to be together rather than try to talk sense into them. The nurse probably wasn’t an educated person, but shouldn’t the friar been a bit more sensible?
I had this experience after watching, ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, in popular culture a ‘Colonel Blimp’ is a buffonish upper-class figure of fun whereas I found the character in the film to be a decent, likable and honourable man, if somewhat out of touch with the times.
The film wasn’t what I expected at all and is worth a watch.