Defining “Anti-Hero”
A Note on Etymology
I plan to discuss the concept of the “anti-hero” for the next instalment of my blog, Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. As I’m certain terms and definitions will become relevant, I thought I should discuss etymology first.
According to a Reddit post (linked here), the oldest recorded use of the term “anti-hero” is from Alcide de Saint-Maurice’s 1666 oeuvre Fleurs, fleurettes et passe-temps, ou les divers caractères de l’amour honneste which apparently uses the phrase “Le Heros & l’Anti-Heros portoient leur Cartel, s’embrassant mutuellement”. (The Hero and the anti-hero carried their cartel, embracing each other).
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary’s page on the word “antihero” (linked here), the English word “anti-hero” first appeared in print in 1714 meaning the “opposite of a hero, a villain”.
That said, the earliest easily verifiable reference I could find to the word “anti-hero” was in a digitally accessible transcript of the 1723 books The Lover and the Reader by Sir Richard Steele, (linked here). On page thirteen, Steele wrote
“THUS I every Day [see] Innocents [abused], [scorned], betrayed and neglected by Brutes, who have no Sense of any thing but what indulges their Appetites; and can no longer suffer the more charming and [accomplished] Part of the Species to’ want a Friend and Advocate. I [shall] enquire, in due time, and make every Anti-Heroe in Great Britain give me an Account why one Woman is not as much as ought to fall to his Share”.
It seems Steele used ‘anti-hero’ to mean ‘evildoer’. This, more or less, vindicates the Online Etymology Dictionary as accurate.
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Likewise, Fyodor Dostoyevsky concluded his 1864 novel Notes from the Underground by having his narrator say
“[Hadn’t] I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.”
In 1876, the British social reformer Jane Ellice Hopkins wrote the novel Rose Turquand -Volume One. On page twenty-seven, she wrote
“The strain had been too great, and so he betook himself to the only thing left for him to do, a lame and impotent conclusion in which many a victory ends, and altogether anti-heroic; he laid his head down upon his folded arms, and wept like a child.”
Now, at the time of this writing, Wikipedia claims that Doctor Hervey Cleckley talks about antiheroes in his 1941 book The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. That statement is true but misleading. Firstly, what Cleckley called degenerate and perverse wasn’t the fictional anti-hero but the idea that a psychopath could ever be a capable or useful leader. Secondly, Cleckley has an entire chapter devoted to analysing a vast array of characters from the work of Shakespeare, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Faulkner, Proust, Henry James, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Huxley, Emily Brontë, and Margaret Mitchell (among others) to determine if said characters are psychopaths. Thirdly, at no point does Cleckley use the term “anti-hero” to describe the “partial psychopaths” featured in fiction.
Even so, it’s fair to assume that the term anti-hero became increasingly popular throughout the 1950s and 1960s considering that, by 1972, the Oxford English Dictionary defined “anti-hero” as “one who is the opposite or reverse of a hero; [especially] a chief character in a poem, play, or story who is totally unlike a conventional hero” and considering that, by 1973, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defined “anti-hero” as “a protagonist who is notably lacking in heroic qualities (as courage or unselfishness)”.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there is a difference between a villain and an antagonist. A villain is, by definition, an evildoer, and an antagonist is, by definition, an enemy of (or opposing force to) the protagonist. Calling a character a “protagonist” only means said character is the central figure of the story being told. One can be both a protagonist and a villain (e.g. Frank Underwood from House of Cards). The 70s dictionary definitions seem to indicate that an anti-hero is simply a villain protagonist. My issue with that is that it doesn’t seem to me to be how the noun anti-hero is commonly used. That is why, I’ll explore the concept of the anti-hero in the upcoming instalment of my blog.
My name is Matitya and this has been one of my Miscellaneous Musings.
