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The damsel in distress is a popular stock character in fiction. It is a female who has been put into a dangerous situation by an outside force and require assistance to get out of it. Specifics of the female, the outside force, the situation and the "rescuer" often vary, but the following quote is a good example:

"... 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

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 these damsels, who can be portrayed as foolish and ineffectual to the point of naïvete, along with their need for others to rescue them, have also made the stereotype the target of feminist criticism.

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.

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. The stock character did undergo a revival of sorts in Halloween, Friday the 13th, and other slasher films of the 1980s. Here, though, the stock character 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 Judgment Day.

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

Novels

Movies

Animation

Comics

Video games

See also

Stock characters

Dama en apuros | Demoiselle en détresse

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Damsel in distress".

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