Villain
A villain (also known as a "black hat" or "bad guy"; the feminine form is villainess) is a stock character, whether based on a historical narrative or one of literary fiction. Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines such a character as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot".[1] The antonym of a villain is a hero.
Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Villain (disambiguation), Villainy (disambiguation), Bad Guy (disambiguation), and Badman (disambiguation).The villain's structural purpose is to serve as the opposition of the hero character and their motives or evil actions drive a plot along.[2] In contrast to the hero, who is defined by feats of ingenuity and bravery and the pursuit of justice and the greater good, a villain is often defined by their acts of selfishness, evilness, arrogance, cruelty, and cunning, displaying immoral behavior that can oppose or pervert justice.
Classical literature[edit]
In classical literature, the villain character is not always the same as those that appear in modern and postmodern incarnations, as the lines of morality are often blurred to imply a sense of ambiguity or affected by historical context and cultural ideas. Often the delineation of heroes and villains in this literature is left unclear.[9]
William Shakespeare modelled the villain archetype to be three-dimensional in characteristics and gave way to the complex nature that villains showcase in modern literature. However, Shakespeare's incarnations of historical figures were influenced by the propaganda pieces coming from Tudor sources, and his works often showed this bias and discredited their reputation. For example, Shakespeare famously portrayed Richard III as a hideous monster who destroyed his family out of spite.[10]
Folk and fairy tales[edit]
Russian fairy tales[edit]
In an analysis of Russian fairy tales, Vladimir Propp concluded that the majority of stories had only eight "dramatis personae", one being the villain.[11]: 79 This analysis has been widely applied to non-Russian tales. The actions that fell into a villain's sphere were:
Portraying and employing villains in fiction[edit]
The actor Tod Slaughter typically portrayed villainous characters on both stage and screen in a melodramatic manner, with mustache-twirling, eye-rolling, leering, cackling, and hand-rubbing.[23][24]
Use of the term "villain" to describe historical figures and real-life people[edit]
The ethical dimension of history poses the problem of judging those who acted in the past, and at times, tempts scholars and historians to construct a world of black and white in which the terms "hero" and "villain" are used arbitrary and with the pass of time become interchangeable. These binaries of course are reflected to varying degrees in endless movies, novels, and other fictional and non-fictional narratives.[26]
As processes of globalization connect the world, cultures with different historical trajectories and political traditions will need to find ways to work together not only economically, but also politically. In this evolving framework of globalization, tradition, according to political theorists like Edmund Burke, historical figures perceived and evaluated as either positive or negative become the embodiment of national political cultures that may collude or collide against one another.[27]
The usage of villain to describe a historical figure dates back to Tudor propaganda, pieces of which ended up influencing William Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard III as a spiteful and hunchback tyrant.[10]
