Bully for modern fiction, where we get inside the baddie’s head

“Ignoring is what you are supposed to do with bullies, so they get bored and leave you alone. But the problem in school is that they don’t get bored, because whatever else there is to do is more boring still.” – Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

Literature – like life – is crowded with bullies. Be they in the form of individuals, groups or governments, bullies litter the pages of novels. Whether it’s Jane Austen’s Emma, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Orwell’s 1984, we love to loathe our literary bullies. They have an insatiable desire to embarrass and upset, to control and retain control, to affirm or upend a social order.

These insatiable desires make for very good storytelling. The bully creates immediate sympathy for the protagonist. The bully propels the story into action upon action upon action, each usually worse than the last. The novelist can’t seem to resist a good bully, whatever form they might take. But as our attitudes towards bullying have changed, so too have bullies’ treatment in fiction.

Bullying isn’t new. Of course it’s not. And it’s not even exclusive to our species.

Consider this: a rat who is repeatedly attacked or deprived of food and water will be less likely to drink water or eat food in the future. A mouse that suffers consistent social defeats experiences a change in brain chemistry. Primates, not surprisingly, engage in bullying-type behaviours, with consequences strikingly similar to what we see in humans. Power must remain in the hands of a few. And to do that, the weak must be isolated. Punished. Sometimes to the point of destruction.

The immediate reaction to studies like this is to assume a lofty stance. We are not primates or rats. We have empathy. Emotion. Civilisation. But we have something else, too: language.

And here’s where things get interesting. Language allows us to understand people. Express complex emotions and thoughts. Connect.

But language allows something else too. It allows us to attack one another with another weapon. Our words. Construct elaborate verbal attacks. (Or not so elaborate, as was the case in my school days.) And language allows another weapon critical to the arsenal of the bully: gossip. Our words travel across a community or a town or a whole country and they slander, they prejudice and they cause harm. This is bullying without risk. Without the threat of physical retaliation. It’s more sophisticated – and sometimes more damaging – than physical assault. Add to this the new dimension of technology – texting, social networking – and we have another level of distance. And an opportunity for gossip to go viral.

The novelist uses the bully’s weapon to construct a world in which we might better understand and sympathise with the victims of bullying. Reading literature has been proven consistently to enhance people’s levels of empathy and understanding, particularly towards those who are different or voiceless. We watch Emma Woodhouse as she carelessly moulds and manipulates Harriet Smith. We read with horror as Jack and his savages terrorise Piggy. We recoil as Big Brother suppresses the thoughts and actions of the citizens of Oceania. We read this and we gain an insight. We see ourselves in one or two or all of the roles, at one point or another in our lives.

But while we’ve established that bullying isn’t new, then why does it seem to be such a growing cultural preoccupation? Why now? And what does our fiction tell us?

For one, technology is pushing bullying into our faces. What happened in the playground can now be recorded and shared. It can provide us with proof of a crime (and sometimes a further deepening of the crime, once this proof gets in the wrong hands). We can look at texts, Facebook feeds, Twitter trolls – and we can see just how badly we allow ourselves to treat one another.

And then there’s something else, I think. Something a little bit harder to get our heads around. Rather suddenly, we’re very keen for children and young people to be happy. We want to make sure they have a better experience growing up than we did. No matter if they are the outcast or the bully or the bystander: we want them to be happy and we want to understand them. And I think our fiction bears this out to be true.

Take a fresh look at Jane Eyre. When Jane is tortured by her cousins and subsequently locked in the “red room” for standing up for herself – does anybody seem to care? Even later in the book – is there any outcry? No. Not at all. Jane’s childhood is not considered a protected state. There is no adult intervening, no later admonishment of this bad behaviour. It is as it is. Character-forming, even.

And the bullies? Jane’s cousins and her aunt? We never get a look inside their evil little heads. There’s no sense of why they’re motivated to behave this way. They are wielding power simply because they can.

Then consider more contemporary novels: Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. When Eleanor Douglas – red-haired and crazily-dressed – begins school in Omaha she is tormented by a handful of kids at her school. It’s harrowing reading – but the author ensures that there are characters that see this happening and try to stop it. People befriend Eleanor. And we get inside the heads – for a moment – of the bullies, Tina and Steve.

In Skippy Dies, Paul Murray goes even further. Whole sections of the novel are told from Carl’s point of view, a character that Patrick Ness described as “not so much a school bully as a psychotic criminal in training”. He’s awful, Carl, but his behaviour needs to be understood, put in a context, untangled, just a little.

RJ Palacio’s extraordinary young adult novel, Wonder, takes the reader through the story of Auggie Pullman, a boy with a rare facial deformity. Told from six different points of view, Wonder is moving and warm and affirming and brave, but neglected the perspective of the bully. Until last year, that is. In 2014, the author released The Julian Chapter, in which the reader is offered the bully’s voice, his account of the narrative. The 84-page supplement to Wonder makes us question what we read before, and denies us the easy option of characterising Julian, the bully, as without humanity or motivation.

This shift reflects the desire of a contemporary audience to understand what motivates bullies. But it also underlines the changing nature of contemporary fiction and storytelling. Postmodern villains need to be understood to the same extent that our heroes historically did. Contemporary retellings of fairy tales – think Maleficent and 2015’s Cinderella – beg the audience to consider the source of the antagonist’s angst. Let’s understand what makes these villains tick. And our heroes of contemporary drama – Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White – are anti-heroes. We’re not interested in goodies, not really. We’re interested in baddies, or the not-so-good goodies. We look to our fiction not to give us moral guidance, as we did in the past, but to ask why we are who we are, what is our capacity for empathy and what are our limits? As time has marched on, our bullies have persisted, but our desire to understand them has increased, as has the realisation that the bully lurks inside all of us, and at one point or another, we let them out.

Sarah Bannan is the author of Weightless, published by Bloomsbury Circus.