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11 Literary Characters With Terrible Phobias
Fictional characters and irrational fears go together like bread and butter, like Romeo and Juliet, like Dave Eggers and long book titles. Where would we be, canonically speaking, if Macbeth wasn’t all weird about murdering the king? If the Ancient Mariner wasn’t frightened by the albatross around his neck? If Batman wasn’t terrified of bats?
For all of literary characters’ quirks, though, it’s hard to find books where the characters have explicitly defined phobias. You’re far more likely to encounter a character who “spends a lot of time at home” and “dislikes crowds” than a character who is clearly referred to as “agoraphobic.” Perhaps this is because specific phobias can seem like too much of a plot crutch, or too deliberately quirky, to be considered legitimate character traits. But if we examine some of literature’s famous nervous wrecks, it’s not too hard to spot the phobias lurking in their psyches.
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Peter Pan suffers from gerascophobia (fear of growing old)
You don’t need a degree from the Freudian School of Parental Abandonment to diagnose this one. Peter Pan is petrified of growing up—so petrified, in fact, that he forms an entire colony of mild gerascophobics (you may know them as Lost Boys) and teaches them to basically worship him. And while we’re in Neverland…
Captain Hook suffers from herpetophobia (fear of reptiles)
His herpetophobia is incredibly specific—it’s limited to one type of reptile, and one particular specimen of that type. Say it with me, now: THE CROCODILE WITH THE CLOCK INSIDE IT.
The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper suffers from xanthophobia (fear of the color yellow) with a smattering of koinoniphobia (fear of rooms)
Sure, the poor narrator was phobia-free at the beginning of the story, but by the time she’d slept in that yellow-papered room for a couple of weeks, her various new phobias combined to make something so much worse than the sum of their parts.
Ron Weasley suffers from arachnophobia (fear of spiders)
This one’s the most obvious of the bunch. Ron would do anything to avoid spiders, but unfortunately for Ron, the world he lives in (or the author who created him) seems to delight in throwing him among spiders as often as narratively possible. “Why couldn’t it be ‘follow the butterflies?'”
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Miss Havisham suffers from metathesiophobia (fear of changes)
She got jilted at the altar and didn’t even put away the wedding cake, ya’ll. So don’t you dare bring your New Year’s resolutions and your spring cleaning and your lifehacks to her door. This is one broad who’s not changing a thing about her life…ever.
The Narrator of “The Premature Burial” suffers from awful taphephobia (fear of being buried alive)
Like many of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters, this guy can’t deal with the thought of waking up six feet underground. Irrational, huh? In order to avoid this awful fate, he builds an elaborate tomb with all sorts of devices for getting out—you know, just in case someone puts him away too soon.
Damien from The Omen is often struck with hierophobia (fear of priests or sacred things)
But you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few holy eggs!
The narrator of Notes from the Underground suffers from a sort of generalized social anxiety
A quick armchair diagnosis confirms this one: he can’t look people in the eye, he gets obsessed with tiny social interactions, he has trouble communicating with others. In short, he’s a nervous (disturbed) wreck.
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Humbert Humbert pairs gynophobia (fear of women) with a healthy dose of gerontophobia (fear of old people)
But really, that’s just a fancy way of saying he’s into little girls.
Don Quixote suffers from pragmatophobia (fear of reality—also, ironically, a made-up word)
Everyone occasionally dives under the covers and pretends like the real world doesn’t exist, but Don Quixote really takes reality avoidance to the next level. This results in some truly touching moments of situational irony (think windmills/giants), but the degree to which he’s immersed in this fantasy suggests his avoidance of reality might be rooted in fear, making this situation worthy of the suffix –phobia.
The unnamed character in Green Eggs and Ham may have sitophobia (fear of food or eating)
Again and again, he refuses Sam-I-Am’s aggressive insistence that he eat, eat, eat! By the end of the book, though, the careful reader can rest assured the unnamed character has overcome his phobia through Sam-I-Am’s controversial yet effective use of immersion therapy.