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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. 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. 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 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. Notable damsels in distress Mythology and Fairy Tales Opera Television and movies Comics Video games See also | ||||||||||
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