User blog:12345B/PE Proposal: Helen Vaughan

What's The Work
Helen Vaughan is the secondary antagonist of the horror novel The Great God Pan, by the writer Arthur Machen.

Who is the Candidate? What They Did?
It is a wicked and perverse semidress born from the carnal union between a human woman and the god Pan. Helen Vaughan was born when an English scientist, Dr. Raymond performed in an on-the-spot young woman named Mary, in order to open her inner eye and make herself as contact with a parallel reality. The experiment is successful, but the girl is raped by the god The woman dies after giving birth to Helen.

Many years later Helen marries a rich English gentleman named Herbert, who will seduce and "corrupt in body and spirit", ending up reducing him to poverty. Following a meeting between Herbert (now reduced to a homeless man) and his old friend Villiers, the latter, assisted by Clarke (protagonist of the story) and another man named Austin, will carry out some investigations not only the marriage between Helen and Herbert, but also the complicity of the two in causing the death of another wealthy gentleman. Herbert is later found dead (presumably killed by Helen).

Intrigued, Villiers begins to investigate Helen's past and discovers that as a child has spent much of his time in the woods, taking his children on long walks in the twilight and disturbing the parents of the city. One day, a little boy who had stumbled upon his "having played hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr, permanently insane. Furthermore, Helen has an unusually strong friendship with a neighboring girl, Rachel, who leads several times in the woods. On one occasion, Rachel returns home shocked, half-naked and inconclusive: Rachel returns to the woods and disappears forever shortly after explaining to her mother.

Helen disappears, meanwhile, for some time, presumably participating in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. Eventually he returns to London under the pseudonym of Mrs. Beaumont, followed by a series of suicides. Villiers and Clarke, united and confronted Helen in her home, persuaded her to hang herself, and Helen has a very abnormal death, transforming herself between the human and the beast before she finally dies.

What they did
Helen is an extremely perverse creature. Conscious of his own seductive qualities, he loves to ensnare men and bring them to ruin and suicide, to appropriate their possessions and for pure sadistic pleasure to see them suffer. For the same pleasure he enjoys inducing his victims to madness, and is also a faithful adept of his father Pan (with whom an incestuous relationship is also suspected), in whose honor he performs orgiastic rites and human sacrifices.

Freudian Excuse/Mitigating Factors
There is no excuse or mitigation for his actions.

Heinous Standard
The most terrible deeds he has done is to have induced to madness a child after having seen him while he was dancing in the woods with "a naked man" (surely his father) and having caused a frightening trauma in a girl named Rachel, with who had become friends and therefore trusted her. It is never revealed what he did to her, but the girl remains terribly upset (given that she returns home half-naked and in shock, so it is presumed to have been raped by Pan) and, after going back into the woods again, not will never return. Add to this the fact that he has deceived his various lovers by making her love him and then rob them and take them to suicide.

Final Verdict
Although she is considered the secondary antagonist of the book and is virtually less powerful than Pan, Helen proves to be far more dangerous, cruel and manipulative than he is. Most of the terrible events described in the novel take place by his hand rather than those of his father, and therefore could be a potential Pure Evil.