Villain
Lionel Trilling explicates, “And it is thus that the conception of the villain survived well into the Victorian era. A characteristic of the literary culture of the post-Victorian age was the discovery that villains were not, as the phrase went, 'true to life', and that to believe in the possibility of their existence was naive. It became established doctrine that people were 'a mixture of good and bad' and that much of the bad could be accounted for by 'circumstances'.” The villain’s standing diminishes ominously during the post-Victorian epoch, which involves a deviance from the Victorian epoch when villains are glorified. The cultural situations during the post-Victorian age would not permit a villain to endure smoothly. Inauspicious social settings contract the villain’s prospects of flourishing.
Renaissance
Lionel Trilling elucidates, “In literature, as in our personal lives, the debate between the heroic and the anti-heroic principle would seem to be a natural rhythm of the psyche, an alternation of commitment to the superego, which is the repository of our governing ideals, and to the id, which is the locus of our instinctual drives. In the Renaissance, however, the heroic style of the superego was confronted with a new antagonism, that which was offered by the ego, the aspect of the self which has for its function the preservation of the self.” The Renaissance discloses the irrationality of heroism which heartens deception instead of pragmatism. Renaissance thought emphatically undermines the grandeur which the hero embodies through works whose the heroes’ finales is disaster-prone.
