The Scarlet Pimpernel
Baroness Orczy (1905)
“The first superhero story — a bored English aristocrat puts on a disguise and humiliates the Reign of Terror, one rescued aristocrat at a time.”
Character Analysis
The prototype for every secret-identity hero that followed. Percy's performance of idiocy is not a thin disguise but a total alternate self — maintained without slip for years, in every social setting, including in front of his wife. The loneliness of this is the novel's deepest undercurrent. He is the cleverest person in any room he enters, and nobody knows it. His heroism is real; his reward is invisibility.
Two registers: the performed fool (exclamatory, self-deprecating, full of verbal tics) and the operational Pimpernel (spare, direct, exact). The gap between the two is the character.