Damsel in distress

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A poster for The Perils of Pauline (1914).
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A poster for The Perils of Pauline (1914).

The subject of the damsel in distress or persecuted maiden is a classic theme in world literature, art and film. She is almost inevitably a young, nubile woman, who has been placed in a dire predicament by a villain or a monster and who requires a hero to dash to her rescue. She has became a stock character of fiction, particularly of melodrama.

Some claim the popularity of the damsel of distress is perhaps in large measure because her predicaments sometimes contain hints of BDSM fantasy. The helplessness of the damsel in distress, who can be portrayed as foolish and ineffectual to the point of naïvete, along with her need for others to rescue her, has made the stereotype the target of feminist criticism.

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[edit] Her History

In her earliest misadventures the damsel in distress was often left as bait for monsters, as in the myth of Andromeda, where her plight, chained naked to a rock, became a favorite theme of later painters. This theme of the Princess and dragon is also pursued in the myth of St George.

The damsel in distress was an archetypal character of medieval romances, where typically she was rescued from imprisonment in a tower of a castle by a knight-errant. Chaucer's Clerk's Tale of the repeated trials ands bizarre torments of patient Griselda was drawn from Petrarch.

She makes her debut in the modern novel as the title character of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) where she is menaced by the wicked seducer Lovelace.

Reprising her medieval role the damsel in distress is a staple character of Gothic literature, where she is typically incarcerated in a castle or monastery and menaced by a sadistic nobleman, or members of the religious orders. Early examples in this genre include Isabella in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Emily in Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Antonia in Matthew Lewis's The Monk.

The perils faced by this Gothic heroine were taken to an extreme by the Marquis de Sade in Justine, who, arguably, exposed the pornographic subtext which lay behind the damsel in distress scenario.

One of the most profound explorations of the theme of the persecuted maiden is the fate of Gretchen in Goethe's Faust. According to the philosoper Schopenhauer:

The great Goethe has given us a distinct and visible description of this denial of the will, brought about by great misfortune and by the despair of all deliverance, in his immortal masterpiece Faust, in the story of the sufferings of Gretchen. I know of no other description in poetry. It is a perfect specimen of the second path, which leads to the denial of the will not, like the first, through the mere knowledge of the suffering of the whole world which one acquires voluntarily, but through the excessive pain felt in one’s own person. It is true that many tragedies bring their violently willing heroes ultimately to this point of complete resignation, and then the will-to-live and its phenomenon usually end at the same time. But no description known to me brings to us the essential point of that conversion so distinctly and so free from everything extraneous as the one mentioned in Faust. (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, §68)

The misadventures of the damsel in distress of the Gothic continued in a somewhat caricatured form in Victorian melodrama. Such melodrama influenced the silent cinema, where the damsel in distress makes a dramatic debut, tied to a railway track by a sleazy villain with trademark waxed curly moustache, in The Perils of Pauline. Sawmills were another danger faced by our heroine:

   
“
 "... A bad gunslinger called Salty Sam was chasin' poor Sweet Sue

"He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh,
"If you don't give me the deed to your ranch
 "I'll saw you all in half!
"And then he grabbed her (and then)
"He tied her up (and then)
"He turned on the bandsaw (and then, and then...!) ..."
   
”

Along Came Jones, by The Coasters

Later, with the advent of the talkies, in a seeming reprise of her earliest mythological role, she is once more tied up as an attractive bait to attract the attention of a giant ape in King Kong. (She does end up attracting the monster, but not in the way the tribesmen intended.)

Today damsels in distress are not used nearly as often as they were previously, and current depictions of the stock character usually play the role as camp, although video games still feature the occasional old-style damsel. She did undergo a revival of sorts in Halloween, Friday the 13th, and other slasher films of the 1980s. Here, though, she was played with a twist: there were several young women characters, most of whom (often those who had been sexually active or promiscuous) were killed by the serial killer villain, but one survived to defeat him. The young woman survivor herself became a stock character, the Final Girl, embodied in characters such as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series. Sarah Connor, a damsel in distress in The Terminator, became the effective survivor type in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

A Damsel in Distress is the title of a book by P. G. Wodehouse and a motion picture that starred Fred Astaire.

[edit] Critical and Theoretical Responses

Damsels in distress are an example of differential treatment of genders in literature, film, and works of art. Feminist criticism of art, film, and literature has often examined gender-oriented characterization and plot, including the common "damsel in distress" trope.[1] Many modern writers, such as Angela Carter and Jane Yolen, have revisited classic fairy tales and "damsel in distress" stories or collected and anthologized stories and folk tales that break the "damsel in distress" pattern.[2] Often, such stories reverse the gender disparity by empowering the "damsel," or by placing boys or men in distress to be rescued by the damsel.

[edit] Notable damsels in distress

[edit] Mythology and Fairy Tales

[edit] Opera

[edit] Television and movies

[edit] Comics

[edit] Video games

[edit] References

Mario Praz (1970) The Romantic Agony Chapter 3: 'The Shadow of the Divine Marquis'.

  1. ^ See, e.g., Alison Lurie, "Fairy Tale Liberation," The New York Review of Books, v. 15, n. 11 (Dec. 17, 1970) (germinal work in the field); Donald Haase, "Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography," Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies v.14, n.1 (2000).
  2. ^ See Jane Yolen, "This Book Is For You," Marvels & Tales, v. 14, n. 1 (2000) (essay); Yolen, Not One Damsel in Distress: World folktales for Strong Girls (anthology); Jack Zipes, Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Fairy Tales in North America and England, Routledge: New York, 1986 (anthology).

[edit] See also

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