Edouard Tartuffe, known as Tata, is the novel’s primary antagonist, a round and complex character whose artistic genius is inextricably linked to his tyrannical nature. Publicly, he cultivates the persona of a reclusive genius who has turned his back on the world to devote himself to his art. This carefully constructed image, a key element of the novel’s exploration of Appearances Versus Reality, hides a deeply insecure and dependent man. His most significant vulnerability is his illiteracy, a secret that makes him entirely reliant on his niece, Ettie, to navigate the world. She reads his mail, writes his letters, and manages his accounts, performing the invisible labor that allows his myth as a self-sufficient hermit to persist. This dependence reveals the hollowness of his authority; his power is propped up by the very person he oppresses.

Tartuffe’s defining trait is his need for absolute control. He dictates every aspect of life in the farmhouse, from what food is eaten to Ettie’s physical movements, isolating her to ensure she can never leave him. His control extends most crucially to her artistic expression. He actively suppresses her talent, ripping up her childhood drawings and warning her, “There is only one artist in this house […] And it will never be you” (128). This psychological abuse stems from a deep fear of abandonment, a fear rooted in his sister Gabrielle’s departure and death. He conflates love with possession and seeks to prevent Ettie from repeating her mother’s perceived betrayal. This desperate need for control, which poisons his relationships and his art, portrays Patriarchy as Rot.

Artistically, Tartuffe is obsessed with capturing fleeting moments. In particular, his fixation with painting still lifes of rotting food gives the novel its titular Feast and a motif of the moral decay of patriarchy. While he possesses a genuine gift for rendering light and color, his creative process is parasitic. He emotionally and artistically feeds on Ettie, stealing the composition of her dinner plate for a study and extinguishing her joy to fuel his own vision. He is a man who can create immense beauty but ignores the human cost of his art. His ultimate downfall comes from the rebellion of the person he has most completely controlled, as Ettie’s final act of arson destroys the physical and symbolic monuments to his oppressive genius.

Joseph Adelaide serves as the deuteragonist and the novel’s main point-of-view character. He is a dynamic, round character who undergoes a significant transformation in his understanding of art, truth, and power. He arrives at the farmhouse as a naive young journalist, driven by a hero worship of Edouard Tartuffe, whom he reveres as the “Master of Light.” His initial perspective of Tartuffe and Ettie is clouded by the romantic myth of the male genius. Tartuffe’s first act is to remove Joseph’s glasses, a symbolic gesture that renders him vulnerable and dependent. By forcing Joseph to become a passive model for the painting Young Man with Orange, Tartuffe strips him of his identity as a writer and observer, turning him into an object for the artist’s gaze.

Joseph’s development is a journey of learning how to see. Initially, he fails to perceive Ettie as anything more than a silent servant, a background figure in Tartuffe’s world. His attempts to understand Tartuffe through direct questions are constantly rebuffed, forcing him to observe the subtle dynamics of the farmhouse. It is through his growing connection with Ettie that his perspective begins to shift. She challenges his simplistic assumptions about art and truth, teaching him to look beyond the artist’s biography and focus on the work itself. This lesson is important for his growth as a writer and as a person, moving him from a state of idolization to one of critical understanding. His own personal history, marked by the trauma of his brother’s shell shock and his pacifist rejection of the war, makes him receptive to questioning patriarchal authority, a quality that allows him to eventually see the tyranny at the heart of Tartuffe’s work.

Ultimately, Joseph’s role is to bear witness to Ettie’s story. When he discovers her secret life as a forger, his entire worldview is upended. He is forced to confront the fact that he, along with the rest of the art world, has been deceived. His loyalty shifts decisively from Tartuffe to Ettie, and he becomes a co-conspirator in her secret, choosing to protect her rather than expose the truth for the “scoop” it would represent. He transitions from an unreliable narrator, who presented a limited and flawed version of events, to a privileged witness who understands the deeper truth. In the end, he helps facilitate Ettie’s liberation, recognizing that her story, not Tartuffe’s, is the one that needs to be told.

Rupert is a minor but thematically significant character whose presence, though mostly off-page, deeply influences his younger brother, Joseph. When he’s first introduced, he’s trapped in a state of severe psychological trauma, or “shell shock,” from his experiences in World War I. Before the war, he was Joseph’s vivid and handsome older brother, an ideal of manhood that Joseph admired. His return as “an empty carapace” of his former self depicts the destructive consequences of modern warfare. Rupert’s suffering is what solidifies Joseph’s pacifism and his rejection of the aggressive, dominant masculinity that their father and Tartuffe embody. The recurring allusions to Homer’s The Odyssey, Rupert’s favorite book, contrasts the classical ideal of a glorious homecoming with the grim reality of modern warfare. By the end of the novel, Rupert begins to reclaim a sense of hope and identity thanks to the sketches that Joseph sends him, an authorial decision that emphasizes art’s capacity to heal and inspire despite the toxic conditions of the Tartuffe household.

Peggy Guggenheim appears briefly but acts as a significant foil to the patriarchal art world represented by Tartuffe and Raimondi. As a wealthy, independent American art collector, she introduces a modern, transatlantic perspective into the closed world of the farmhouse. During the chaotic dinner party, she directly challenges Tartuffe’s misogynistic views on art, asking, “Why are there so many women in paintings but so few doing the painting?” (206). Her pointed questions articulate the systemic barriers that prevent women from becoming artists and expose the sexist foundations of the art establishment. By leaving her contact card, she provides Ettie with a tangible escape route and a connection to a world where a woman’s artistic ambition might be taken seriously. She shows a future of female patronage and power, planting the seed of possibility that helps spur Ettie’s final rebellion.

Raimondi is a minor antagonist who functions as the worldly agent of the patriarchal art establishment. As Tartuffe’s art dealer, his primary motivation is profit, and he is deeply invested in maintaining the lucrative myth of Tartuffe’s reclusive genius. He is complicit in Tartuffe’s isolation because it adds to the artist’s mystique and drives up the prices of his paintings. Raimondi also demonstrates the art world’s systemic barriers to female talent. When a teenage Ettie shows him her own, original paintings, he dismisses them with contempt, telling her she is “nothing” and reinforcing the idea that there can only be one great artist in the family. However, he is repeatedly fooled by Ettie’s forgeries, a fact that emphasizes the novel’s argument that genius is often a matter of perception rather than inherent quality.