Question...

[concertigrossi]

I could bore you with the details of my trials and travails of the last three months, but I can't stomach the rehash. I can't even make the oft-broken promise that I'll post more often. Let's just say it's been a growth opportunity and leave it at that.

But I've got a question:

What are some good literary examples of a three-dimensional racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-semitic character?

Because that's quite a trick, these days, right? I just read "The Help," and the main antagonist is an almost cartoonish caricature. All she lacks is a Snidely Whiplash mustache. But, while there certainly are Snidely Whiplashes in the world, they couldn't have driven the Holocaust or the Jim Crow laws without the support of the majority of ordinary people.

How do you accurately portray the banality of evil?

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Isn't this why Lolita was so acclaimed? Because the protagonist is utterly evil, and Nabokov tries to get you to sympathize with him?

Another example, maybe closer to what you want, is Toni Morrison's A Mercy. As I remember, it shows the evolution of slavery into a racist institution.

I might have other ideas as I muddle along here.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Well, Hamlet is a raging misogynist.

Faulkner is full of horrible people. But his books seem to actively resist sympathy in all of its forms. I think you can only write horrible characters well if you're not invested in the kind of reading experience that involves sympathizing and identifying. Or...I dunno. Maybe that's wrong. The guy in _L'Etranger_ is a pretty big jerk and people still seem to identify with him, even if I can't.

[stasia]

Dolores Umbridge. Banal and yet incredibly evil.

I don't know that she's exactly three-dimensional, but she's a very chilling example of the Banal Evil. Admittedly, we aren't supposed to sympathise with her, but I hear her language, her narrow-minded beliefs from people currently running for office.

Stasia

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

One further thought: part of the problem is that literature has a bias toward reflective characters, because it's easier to depict their inner lives if they have some kind of self-awareness. And it's precisely that *lack* of reflection that makes the kind of banal evil Arendt was talking about possible. I don't remember the book very well at all, but from my dim recollection, Eichmann was able to do what he did because he didn't really *think*, he just sort of...behaved and reacted. And the unexamined life is not only much more likely to be evil, but also really hard to write about, except from the position of an observer.

[soubie.livejournal.com]

I suppose it wouldn't count where you're looking at works where the writer was, by our standards, a bigot, but nobody who knew him would have considered him such? 'Cos a lot of literature from the last 200 years comes from offensive assumptions, although they're usually under the surface (check out the original Holmes novels, Rudyard Kipling, etc.)

I suppose Zadie Smith's White Teeth is full of well-rounded, intelligent characters who are full of prejudices. They're frequently the prejudice of, say, Muslims against Christians, or Jamiacan Brits against whites, etc., which muddies the waters a little, and come a lot from the perspective of minorities rather than majorities, but it more or less fulfills what you were saying.