My literary crush
Although my favourite characters are almost always men, except Aravis in "The Chronicles of Narnia" and Mary Lennox is "The Secret Garden," it tends to be more a matter of identification than admiration. I feel like I'm supposed to identify with heroines rather than heroes, because we're both girls and presumably socialised similarly, but usually I just can't bring myself to because they're too - foreign, somehow, and too specific. Except a few, like Aravis and Mary. But it's . . . it's as if male characters, or at least some male characters, have a sort of innate androgyny that female ones generally don't. Women are - usually - innately feminine in some fashion or another; it's not just external influences, being female is part of their basic identity. A male character is a person who happens to be male; a female character is a woman who happens to have such and such attributes.
I think this is why - quite awhile back - somebody asked JK Rowling why her hero was a boy and not a girl - or, as she (JKR) put it, why is he Harry and not Helene? Implicit in this, I think, was the assumption that Harry's gender, as a boy, is arbitrary; nobody would ask why Hermione, or Tonks, or Petunia, are female. They could not be themselves without also being women; Helene would still be Harry.
(In case there is any doubt, I do not approve of this. I think it exists - that it's prevalent through all kinds of literature, and that the consequence, for me, is that the characters I instinctively sympathise with almost invariably male.)
This is all somewhat of a tangent, however. (I've been thinking about this issue for awhile, so it rather tumbled out as I headed towards something else.) To summarise, I usually register sympathetic male characters as personalities I can identify with, or not. Occasionally, I won't particularly identify with someone, but I'll find them so admirable that I can't help but love them, and feel somehow invested in them, all the same. The ones I talk about the most, Darcy and Faramir, are respectively Types A and B.
And sometimes there's a character so admirable, and so sympathetic, and so bloody awesome that I just fall madly in love, right into a sort of eternal literary crush. There's Henry Tilney, to some extent, but there's a distance there that keeps me from ever being very interested in him. He, like so many heroines, feels so essentially foreign - for some reason, I require a touch of affinity.
Thankfully, I've had the pleasure of revisiting my ultimate literary crush in Shakespeare; my teacher assigned Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2) and Henry V. It's like a feast of awesome, and my teacher fully sympathises with my feverish crush on Prince Hal.
Yes, it's Hal, and not any of the other general favourites who appear in the play. This hard, scheming boy who, you can't help but feel, is walking a very fragile tightrope over a very deep abyss while pulled in every direction by causes and philosophies and worlds and personalities.
He has an immense vitality, a joy in being alive that links him to Falstaff - who all but worships vitality as a cause in itself, a morality in itself, and in his bizarre Falstaff way tries to mentor Hal into doing the same. Yet alongside this vibrant self, overflowing with pranks and high spirits, is a deep allegiance to real honour, to virtue and duty and ideals, in stark contrast to his would-be mentor's cheerful amorality.
Hal can understand the pursuit of honour that drives his fiery archrival Hotspur, and admire his nobility of spirit even while the impulses he shares with him are restrained by his own pragmatic good sense. Hal's blood runs cold, not hot, as Falstaff foreshadowingly observes; his objectives are, ultimately, good - and the greater good, at that (eg, he attacks and robs Falstaff, who himself robbed some pilgrims, for the sole purposes, evidently, of (1) restoring the money to the pilgrims, and (2) mocking Falstaff) - but there's no escaping the ruthlessness with which he accomplishes them, or the icy edge to his dialogue and indeed his character.
Yet it is not that he is completely dispassionate - he is warm enough to genuinely mourn Falstaff's (ostensible) death, to wish tiredly for some watered-down beer, to grieve - and indeed, weep - for his estranged father. Rather, it's that all the pieces of his complex and divided nature are held together, barely, by the iron control he exerts over them, and only reconciled when he puts away his false personas and finally realises that it's time to be "more myself" - and, of course cuts himself off from his most violently divergent influences (Falstaff he exiles - not from England, just his presence, in a sort of medieval restraining order, while Hotspur he kills in battle and King Henry dies in bed).
So Hal walks his tightrope, all the way making cunning plans and delivering fine speeches, and he's too heroic to be a villain and too calculating to be purely heroic and he's odd and complicated and brilliant and not a tragedy, because he survives and he wins by being - or becoming, depending on your interpretation - his true self, who is all of those things. And he goes on to be Henry V and win some more.
Yet though I love the St Crispin's Day speech, and the victory at Agincourt still sends chills down my spine, I have to admit that I love Prince Hal, troublesome and troubling, best.
(I am determined to make him, or at least the play, a motif in one of my stories - especially since he married his own Catherine. And I shall pretend that I don't know he died young. He's the sort who shouldn't get old, anyway.)
I think this is why - quite awhile back - somebody asked JK Rowling why her hero was a boy and not a girl - or, as she (JKR) put it, why is he Harry and not Helene? Implicit in this, I think, was the assumption that Harry's gender, as a boy, is arbitrary; nobody would ask why Hermione, or Tonks, or Petunia, are female. They could not be themselves without also being women; Helene would still be Harry.
(In case there is any doubt, I do not approve of this. I think it exists - that it's prevalent through all kinds of literature, and that the consequence, for me, is that the characters I instinctively sympathise with almost invariably male.)
This is all somewhat of a tangent, however. (I've been thinking about this issue for awhile, so it rather tumbled out as I headed towards something else.) To summarise, I usually register sympathetic male characters as personalities I can identify with, or not. Occasionally, I won't particularly identify with someone, but I'll find them so admirable that I can't help but love them, and feel somehow invested in them, all the same. The ones I talk about the most, Darcy and Faramir, are respectively Types A and B.
And sometimes there's a character so admirable, and so sympathetic, and so bloody awesome that I just fall madly in love, right into a sort of eternal literary crush. There's Henry Tilney, to some extent, but there's a distance there that keeps me from ever being very interested in him. He, like so many heroines, feels so essentially foreign - for some reason, I require a touch of affinity.
Thankfully, I've had the pleasure of revisiting my ultimate literary crush in Shakespeare; my teacher assigned Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2) and Henry V. It's like a feast of awesome, and my teacher fully sympathises with my feverish crush on Prince Hal.
Yes, it's Hal, and not any of the other general favourites who appear in the play. This hard, scheming boy who, you can't help but feel, is walking a very fragile tightrope over a very deep abyss while pulled in every direction by causes and philosophies and worlds and personalities.
He has an immense vitality, a joy in being alive that links him to Falstaff - who all but worships vitality as a cause in itself, a morality in itself, and in his bizarre Falstaff way tries to mentor Hal into doing the same. Yet alongside this vibrant self, overflowing with pranks and high spirits, is a deep allegiance to real honour, to virtue and duty and ideals, in stark contrast to his would-be mentor's cheerful amorality.
Hal can understand the pursuit of honour that drives his fiery archrival Hotspur, and admire his nobility of spirit even while the impulses he shares with him are restrained by his own pragmatic good sense. Hal's blood runs cold, not hot, as Falstaff foreshadowingly observes; his objectives are, ultimately, good - and the greater good, at that (eg, he attacks and robs Falstaff, who himself robbed some pilgrims, for the sole purposes, evidently, of (1) restoring the money to the pilgrims, and (2) mocking Falstaff) - but there's no escaping the ruthlessness with which he accomplishes them, or the icy edge to his dialogue and indeed his character.
Yet it is not that he is completely dispassionate - he is warm enough to genuinely mourn Falstaff's (ostensible) death, to wish tiredly for some watered-down beer, to grieve - and indeed, weep - for his estranged father. Rather, it's that all the pieces of his complex and divided nature are held together, barely, by the iron control he exerts over them, and only reconciled when he puts away his false personas and finally realises that it's time to be "more myself" - and, of course cuts himself off from his most violently divergent influences (Falstaff he exiles - not from England, just his presence, in a sort of medieval restraining order, while Hotspur he kills in battle and King Henry dies in bed).
So Hal walks his tightrope, all the way making cunning plans and delivering fine speeches, and he's too heroic to be a villain and too calculating to be purely heroic and he's odd and complicated and brilliant and not a tragedy, because he survives and he wins by being - or becoming, depending on your interpretation - his true self, who is all of those things. And he goes on to be Henry V and win some more.
Yet though I love the St Crispin's Day speech, and the victory at Agincourt still sends chills down my spine, I have to admit that I love Prince Hal, troublesome and troubling, best.
(I am determined to make him, or at least the play, a motif in one of my stories - especially since he married his own Catherine. And I shall pretend that I don't know he died young. He's the sort who shouldn't get old, anyway.)