I had what you might call a romantic upbringing. I was raised by my grandparents in a small town just outside of a big university city in Romania. It was not countryside, and no urban cityscape either. It was the kind of place where everyone knew whose kid you were, and my family knew whose kids I was hanging around with. Even after starting high school, I would read until late in the night and dream of my book heroes. No real person could ever beat that.
Who’s your favourite this week, my grandma would ask. I knew her favourites, they would never change. Sometimes, when there was a flickering light in her eyes and a melancholy smile on her lips, she would tell me of her favourite poets, her favourite actors. All dead now, for all I know, and the light would lie buried under her life and under my pourout of who my favourites were that week. Because that was always more important back then. Me and my latest literary discoveries.
My favourite literary characters don’t change now as often as they did back then. Some of the old ones I still carry with me. Some I picked up on the way. It will be easy to tell which is which.
beatrice
O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place.
I stopped fearing Shakespeare since I saw a rock-opera version of Richard III in my early 20s. Ever since then I ingested everything I could from him. My latest discovery is Much Ado about Nothing, a comedy I saw when in Cambridge last year and I think it was the actress who played Beatrice that made Beatrice one of my favourite literary characters. Beatrice is the cousin of fair Hero, who is set to marry Claudio. But when the evil Don John, who seeks revenge on Hero’s father, does everything he can to prevent the marriage, it turns out that Claudio’s love for Hero might just not be enough.
Beatrice is lively and sharp-tongued, yet emotional and compassionate. Her uncle pushes her into marriage, but she openly expresses her views on marriage and rejects the traditional submissive role expected of women of her time. She has her own love story with Benedick, but she’s no easy catch. The two engage in a battle of wits and it is often Beatrice who is the winner. “A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours”, she mocks Benedick. My favourite Beatrice moment is when she pushes Benedick to take revenge for Hero. She wishes she could stand up for her cousin, but knows that only a man could do it. As a woman she can only grieve, and that is her biggest regret.
jane eyre
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you and as full as much heart.
I’m trying now to remember why I picked up Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece in the first place. For the life of me, I can’t. I just have this image of me in my head reading Jane Eyre for the third time in an old, battered rocking chair and skipping paragraphs to reach the most exciting moments, when Bertha makes her appearance in all her gothic splendor.
I changed my mind a lot about Jane as a character, but what never changed was the interest which she sparked in me. At first, I took it for granted that there’s something wicked within her (rebellion and all that was lost on me), and then it was her friendship with Helen (and mostly Helen) which grabbed my attention. Now, when I know a thing or two more about life, it’s her relentlessness and determination which I admire most. Her resilience in the face of adversity, her sense of self-worth and her self-respect in a society which keeps pushing her down really resonates with me.
mary poppins
Mary Poppins sighed with pleasure, however, when she saw three of herself, each wearing a blue coat with silver buttons and a blue hat to match. She thought it was such a lovely sight that she wished there had been a dozen of her or even thirty. The more Mary Poppins the better.
P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Mary Lennox were my childhood companions. They would always switch places as to who was my favourite, but they were both always there. I’m going with Mary Poppins today because she’s a rock in the midst of an ocean. Meaning she doesn’t change. She’s not somebody you learn from, somebody who grows from her experience, somebody you sympathize with. She’s living on the edge of things. Mary Poppins makes stories, she is not a story like all the other characters.
I haven’t read the books probably in 25 years now, but I would pick her any day over many modern female characters I’ve come to know and even love over the years. Her quirkiness and her knowledge of the hidden facets of the world inspire me to look beyond the surface. I’m not saying I might stumble one day on a tea party held on the ceiling, but I do harbor the hope that people can be surprising. Like Mary Poppins, I just need to open the right door and maybe wait for the wind to change.
danaerys targaryen
The fire is mine. I am Danaerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons.
The HBO series Game of Thrones is so famous now, that it shadows the experience and the memory of reading the book. I started reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire when the fifth book of the series came out, when it was simply no longer possible to say no. Everybody was talking about the series, and everybody was talking about the latest book. So when I was randomly browsing through a book store, I decided to see for myself what all the fuss was about.
The storylines are intoxicatingly complex, yet the book is impossible to put down, just as it is impossible to stop watching the series. You follow seven or eight main characters as some struggle to survive, while others seek to overpower the kings and become themselves kings and queens. Danaerys has at one point belonged to both categories. She is resilient and starts to crawl her way up and regain what she sees as her birthright, being queen. She fights to keep ahold of her Targaryen lineage, yet on her way she attracts foreign groups of followers. In the midst of her inner conflicts though, she always knows who she is. I am. This is her lifeline and her rock in the storm.
lila cerullo
It slowly became clear not only to me, who had been observing her since elementary school, but to everyone, that an essence not only seductive but dangerous emanated from Lila.
I for one was quickly seduced both by Lila and by Elena Ferrante’s spellbinding writing. I picked up My Brilliant Friend, the first book of the Neapolitan Tetralogy, just in the spring of this year and was instantly hooked. Ferrante’s writing pulled me in and her characters, half despicable, half mesmerizing, felt as real as if they had been penned by Tolstoy.
It is Lila’s personality that pulls the narrative thread. When Lila goes missing, her childhood friend, Elena, starts telling the story of their friendship, starting with their hardships growing up in a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in the 1950s. Their friendship is complicated, to say the least, marked both by deep affection and by rivalry, first at school, then in love relationships. Lila is both an inspiration and a frustration for Elena, whose personality shapes the story we read of Lila. What I most like about Lila is that she’s an action person. She does things and deals with the consequences. She’s fearless and resourceful, but also volatile and insecure.
I thought long and hard about what it means to have a favourite character. Does it mean you like the adventures they go through? Or the style the author wrote the book? Well, could be, I guess. But for me it mostly means that there are characters which walk alongside me as I grow through life. Beatrice, Jane, Mary, Danaerys and Lila grew and are growing with me. They are people under whose gaze my life is being shaped and who are milestones in how I see myself and how I change over time. Maybe that’s why I used to change my favourites all the time in the past. It happens rarely now.
— Images generated with Stable Diffusion —
your thoughts?