Let’s Talk! – A Damsel Not in Distress

Are you ready to switch off your screens and ponder or discuss another writing/conversation prompt during dinner tonight? You want to know about my thoughts on it? Here’s my take:

We all know the archetype of a damsel in distress, don’t we? We grow up with stories stuffed with them. Basically, all fairy-tale princesses in dire need of rescue from dragons (another archetype), wicked wizards (another archetype), or wicked step-mothers (another archetype) by a strong and handsome prince to be king (another archetype, yawn!) are such damsels in distress. There are fewer fairy-tales that deal with other outer sources (an overly vain father in Rumpelstilzkin) or with commoners (Cinderella).

And even rarer are the damsels who put themselves in distress through a flawed character – these don’t seem to occur in folklore, but only in literary fairy-tales, such as in The Princess on the Pea, The Little Mermaid, and The Swineherd, by Hans Christian Andersen. These literary fairy-tales obviously point out where a “damsel” goes wrong and could have avoided all the harrowing experiences she undergoes from the get-go. They are disillusioning and not necessarily ending happily.

Basically, a whole lot of fairy-tales focus on damsels in distress. So does romance. In romance, though, we mostly deal with protagonists with whom everybody would love to identify. Therefore, if flawed, the female protagonists’ flaws are minor and prone to be repaired by circumstances and a handsome partner waiting for the happy ending. An alternative reality to immerse into and delight over.

Can we come up with damsels NOT in distress? What’s the opposite of a damsel in distress? Take the term damsel in itself, an Anglicized version of the French term demoiselle, basically, a virgin or an innocent woman. Argh! Now look around yourself and check how many of the latter you know in today’s world. Given the (social) media being all over the place and even in the hands of little children, real innocence seems to be left to the children who are not yet capable of speech and coherent, causal thought. As to distress – where doesn’t it lurk?! So, a damsel NOT in distress would be a woman unflawed AND a power house. Alas, that seems to be the material of literature only.

Superwoman comes to mind. A character who sees the flaws and dangers of Earth but overcomes them with her superpowers. If she stayed in her own world, she’d even not expose herself to ANY distress. Surreal! As are all such damsels NOT in distress. The material of fantasy, just as the damsel in distress is that of fairy-tales.

Of course, we know of women who ARE powerhouses. Who never seem to need help, who never seem to get themselves into any distress. Are they real? Or do they just manage to put the distress aside and overcome it so gracefully, so persuasively that we have to blink twice before we realize what they went through? Maybe in reading their memoirs – or even better, a biography after they passed away, because that is probably more objective?

Let’s face it: women are in charge of a lot that occurs in our lives. It depends on how much we make our lives our own and how much we believe in our capacity of dealing with the nasty. There is no thing as “no distress.” It all comes along at one stage or another in our lives. But we can rescue ourselves by our shoestrings more often than we think. We don’t have to sit and simper, waiting for a hero to come along and drag us off to fairy-land. But it is nice to have friends and/or a partner who are willing to lend us a hand, just as we are willing to help THEM out. It saves a lot of energy not to have to be a superwoman, after all.

Damsels and superwomen are fictional. The real heroines of all times are women who leave their own footprint in the memories of others by who they are and what they do. They have always been around everywhere. Look at the women next to you or into the mirror. No tiaras needed.