Stick Figures

In today’s literary climate, to call a character one-dimensional is an insult on par with slandering an author’s mother. Given the current emphasis on depth and complexity in characterization, it may seem startling that not so long ago such an emphasis would’ve been considered misguided.

Up until the English Restoration, what writers referred to as characters were in fact types—broad sketches often premised on a certain set of qualities meant to define a recognizable category of individual: the Gossip, the Prude, the Scold, the Cuckold, and so on. This reliance on types has a long history, dating back to Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, who authored a guidebook outlining specific “moral types.”

English writers especially found Theophrastian character types useful, all the way through the 19th century, and not just in satire. John Dryden and other playwrights of the Restoration relied on types, but they intended for the audience to associate those types with prominent and well-known individuals of the day. This nod to realism continued with Daniel Defoe, who took great pains to make sure his fictional creations—from Robinson Crusoe to Moll Flanders—were recognizable as bona fide human beings. The trend intensified with the rise of the realist and naturalist schools in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, and became entrenched in our thinking with the advent of cinema.

In the 1927 book , E.M. Forster distinguished between “round” and “flat” characters, implicitly provided a different terminology, distinguishing “opaque” from “transparent” characters, on the basis of how much the reader knows about them from a mere glance. Wood also made the argument that there are a great many “transparent” characters who serve legitimate dramatic purposes. They abound in Dickens, for example—Jeremiah Flintwinch in , John Perrybingle in , Sir Mulberry Hawk in often serve capably in secondary roles even in contemporary fiction.