The most common female character in Gothic novels is the innocent maiden threatened with rape or death, perhaps reflecting how the female writers and audience of the Gothic viewed themselves. The most common male character in the Gothic, the Hero-Villain, may indicate what these women feared most about men.

The Hero-Villain is “a complex and quintessentially human character endowed with the potential for both great accomplishments and dreadful deeds.”¹

Whether he be a debauched monk, rapist nobleman, cruel count, ferocious brigand, or malicious caliph, the Gothic villain is a two-sided personality, a figure of great power and latent virtue whose chosen career of evil is the result of a clash between his passionate nature and the unnatural restraints of conventions, orthodoxy, and tradition.²

The source of the Hero-Villain is Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667-1674). Unlike previous villains Satan’s personality has such a strong mixture of admirable and objectionable qualities that many critics—and many readers—have seen him as the hero of the poem. As one critic put it in 1976, “for roughly three centuries, readers have demanded justice for Satan; and the validity of his title as hero has been the oldest, and possibly the most persistent, of many controversies over Paradise Lost.”³ Milton’s Satan is a combination of dignity, evil, and defiance against a power he knows he cannot beat. While some of the villains of Jacobean tragedies approached this, it was Milton’s Satan who most impressed writers and influenced their creation of later villains. Among these writers were the Romantics, for whom the genius was a figure always at war with the pettiness of materialistic bourgeois society. The German Romantics’ emphasis on the misunderstood, unappreciated genius led to the outlaw heroes of the räuberromane but also influenced the Gothic writers in the creation of antagonists (and later protagonists) for Gothic novels.

Another element influencing the Gothic Hero-Villain’s creation was Sensibility (see: The Gothic) and the privileging of one’s emotions over rational self-control, despite the potential and probably negative effects of this privileging. During the height of the Cult of Sensibility most English writers did not acknowledge the negative aspects of Sensibility, but Goethe did. In his Egmont (1790) and then later in his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben (1811-1813), he wrote about the dämonisch (“daemonic”) impulse, which he saw in himself and which is the source of Egmont’s self-destructive impulses. The dämonisch impulse is an unquestioning trust in the correctness of one’s instincts and emotions, regardless of the laws of morality and society. Goethe notes that men dominated by the dämonisch tyrannize others, and implies that men such as Napoleon, Byron, Peter the Great, and Friedrich II were possessed by too much of the dämonisch impulse.

The Gothic writers used the model of Milton’s Satan and the Sensibility/dämonisch to create the Hero-Villain, the dominant villain of the Gothic genre. The Hero-Villain commits evil but is never purely evil. He–and the Hero-Villains is, with few exceptions (see: Zofloya: Or, The Moor), always male–is a mix of violent passions and uncontrollable impulses which he knows to be evil but cannot resist or overcome. He has great intellectual and physical gifts, great strength of character and will, but uses them for evil ends. The Hero-Villain is attractive to the reader because of his passion and great abilities as well as for his temptation and suffering, but he is villainous because of his final surrender to evil. The Hero-Villain is tormented by his own dark urges at the same time that he torments others. He is, in the words of Herman Melville, one “who can apprehend the good, but is powerless to be it.”⁴ He is not an anti-hero, for he is set in opposition to the hero or heroine of the Gothic, and his downfall is the hero’s triumph and the victory of good. But the Hero-Villain is a waste of potential and a lesson in what the inability to resist temptation and one’s impulses can lead to. (He is also usually the most interesting character in Gothics, which may be an object lesson for writers: heroes are boring, villains are fun). The Hero-Villain appeared in nearly all of the major Gothics, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to William Beckford’s Vathek to Matthew Lewis’ The Monk to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, many of the minor Gothics, and a number of the significant post-Melmoth the Wanderer Gothic novels, including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

Most Hero-Villains have certain physical attributes in common. They are pale but handsome and physically strong. Their expressions mix contempt, scorn, gloom, and anger. And their gazes are dangerous. Ann Radcliffe described Father Schedoni (see: The Italian) as possessing "large melancholy eyes which approached to horror¼his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men and to read their secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny or even endure to meet them twice."⁵ The penetrating gaze of the Hero-Villain became a Gothic motif and outlasted by the genre by decades (see: The Dead Letter, The Quaker City).

A common critical assumption is that the Byronic Fatal Man (see: The Fatal Woman) was an influence on the Hero-Villain, but the reverse is true. Every major Hero-Villain with the exception of John Melmoth appeared before Byron wrote “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and “Manfred,” the two poems which most articulate the Byronic Hero.

Finally, there are two recurring subtypes of the Hero-Villain: the Promethean Hero-villain, who “earns reader sympathy by rebelling against a power structure”⁶ but whose judgment is “typically questionable¼hero whose overreaching brings terrible destruction to all about him and who suffers many moments of torment himself;”⁷ and the Byronic Hero-Villain, "the most enigmatic of villains...an ambiguous, quasi-demonic male figure whose aloofness and secretive, cynical behavior project sexual allure and mystic renown."⁸

¹ Carol Margaret Dawson, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2009), 69.

² Frederick S. Frank, “The Gothic Vathek: the Problem of Genre Resolved,” in Kenneth W. Graham, ed., Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 163.

³ John M. Steadman, “The Idea of Satan as the Hero of Paradise Lost,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120, no. 4 (Aug. 13, 1976): 253.

⁴ Herman Melville, “Billy Budd, Sailor,” in Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, Tales and Billy Budd (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1385.

⁵ Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, volume one (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 69-70.

⁶ Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 351.

⁷ Douglass Thomson, “William Godwin,” in Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Volker, and Frederick S. Frank, eds, Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 129.

⁸ Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature, 351.