Literary heroes that readers fell in love with, although the author did not want it

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It is known that the creators of the beloved series "Well, wait!" they tried very hard to make the bunny a purely positive hero, and they gave the wolf many outrageous features. But, despite this, at the very first views it turned out that the children's audience considers a poorly educated bully with a bunch of flaws to be a much more interesting character. Similar situations sometimes arise in the literature. There are several famous heroes that the authors were going to make negative, but sometimes it is impossible to predict the sympathy of the audience.

Scarlett O'Hara

- wrote Margaret Mitchell, outraged by the fact that the eccentric and stubborn Scarlett has slowly ousted the quiet and modest Melanie from the first place. After all, it was this woman, an example of virtue and wisdom, who was supposed to win the hearts of readers, and not her stormy antipode.

Scarlett O'Hara became an example of a literary character, painted "not with one paint", but from this - only more lively and vivid. Mitchell was especially outraged when this restless "brainchild" was compared to herself, because the writer tried very hard to emphasize her negative features and even worried that she "went too far" with misadventures for the heroine, which she sometimes ran into out of her own stupidity. In the preface to the first edition, the author even asked readers not to be too hard on her. But for almost a hundred years now, the punchy, though not possessing "wisdom of the heart" heroine of the novel "Gone with the Wind" has aroused sincere sympathy among readers all over the world.

Sir Robert Lovelace

Richardson's character (to whom Tatyana Larina was also read) also became an example of a hero who accidentally escaped from the strict author's control. In the middle of the 18th century, the image of a man who killed a gentle and strict girl could not arouse sympathy under any circumstances, however, as they say, "something went wrong." Some time after the publication, Samuel Richardson noticed with horror that his readers liked him for some reason more than the virtuous Clarissa. Over time, the name "ladies' man" even became a household name, and the image of the seducing hero is considered one of the brightest in English literature of that time.

Anna Karenina

In this case, a woman who succumbed to her passions and destroyed her family should not have turned into a character dearly loved by readers. In the original version of the novel, the heroine should have even more clearly convinced of the impossibility of building happiness on such a fragile foundation. Having received a divorce and finding the opportunity to live with her lover (they have two children, theirs), she still commits suicide after meeting with her ex-husband (this).

In a letter to A. A. Fet, Lev Nikolayevich wrote that, it is true, the latter did not refer to the heroine herself, but to the work as a whole. However, gradually, repeatedly rewriting the novel (ten versions of the manuscript were created), Tolstoy nevertheless painted the image of the main character so lively and sincere that this love story turned, according to Dostoevsky, into. Modern readers, freer from the shackles of the strict morality of past centuries, are all the more imbued with sympathy for a woman who tried to challenge social norms. More than thirty film adaptations of this book have been created, and many wonderful actresses have embodied the image of Anna Karenina.

Soames Forsyth

The hero, who embodied to the greatest extent the spirit of his family - a passion for hoarding and collecting, but who was unable to preserve the only strong feeling in his life, also had to become an openly negative character. Galsworthy did not hide his irritation when, in the pages of The Saga, he described the desire to constantly acquire something - new companies, houses or paintings. Even his beloved wife became another "valuable asset" for Soames. In the preface to one of the editions, the author even added a warning for readers who treat this hero with sympathy, although, perhaps, here he contradicted himself, because by the end of The Forsyte Saga, Soames evokes more and more sympathy and understanding.

Probably true, sometimes heroes on the pages of novels begin to live their own lives. When Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was reproached for the fact that Anna Karenina's death was too cruel, the writer replied: It is known that the famous novel was written very hard and for a long time.