To Sympathize with the Villains: A Study on Characterization of 19th-Century Villains in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
             The British novel started off its popularity in the 18th century as the 'new' genre for the newly-established middle class. In the hands of such writers as Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, it 'subsumed into recognizably English middle-class ways of thinking and brought into line the worldview of the time' (Carter, 151). In other words, the novel had become not only a mere tool for household entertainment but the 'manual of righteousness' suitable for mass production and distribution and fundamental to bourgeois morality (Sanders, 303).
             Nonetheless, similar to the Morality Play, the early British novelists concentrate more on the novelistic ability to disseminate didacticism, or sometimes, detailed realism. That is, a character is but a caricature and tends to embrace only one quality or one representative force, which can be either good or evil. As a result, the novels lack plausibility and sophistication in characterization. Observable as it is, the integration of virtues and vices together with motives into one character, especially into antagonists, that hardly exists in the 18th-century fiction has become eminent in the 19th-century British novel. From Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, the villains are crafted with more complication. Personal and social attributes are added to achieve one purpose of creating real antagonists to be sympathised, all of which contributes to the fact that most villains in the Victorian novel are more enticing, more multifaceted, and above all, close to human.
             Initially, the villains in both Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, specifically George Wickham and Alec Stoke-D'Urbervilles, are seasoned with relevant personal backgrounds. This in...