The Rescue and Who It Serves: The Structural Case Against the Damsel

Damsel in distress criticism is usually reported as a political complaint and is at its strongest as a structural one. The objection that survives scrutiny is not that a woman was frightened in a story. It is that the story used her as an occasion. Something happens to her so that something can happen in someone else, and the something in someone else is what the book is actually about.

That is a craft failure before it is anything else, and it can be described without reaching for a single word about representation.

The structural objection, stated properly

A character in a functioning story has three things: a want that predates the plot, attempts that belong to her, and consequences that land on her afterwards. Strip any one of them and the character starts to thin. Strip all three and what remains is a device with a face.

The damsel construction removes all three at once, and does it efficiently. Her want is replaced by the general want of not being in danger, which every human shares and which therefore characterises nobody. Her attempts are removed by the premise, because the point of the situation is that she cannot act. Her aftermath is handed to the rescuer, whose growth, guilt or triumph is the scene the story returns to.

The diagnostic is uncomfortable and quick. Replace her with a locked briefcase. If the plot runs unchanged, she was a briefcase. A great deal of otherwise competent adventure fiction fails this, and it fails it in a way that has nothing to do with the author’s opinions.

The second half of the objection is about volume rather than instance. Any single story is entitled to make one character the occasion for another. A century of stories choosing the same character for that role stops being a series of independent choices and becomes an instruction about what a category of person is for. In the late 1990s a comics writer compiled a public list of female characters who had been killed, maimed or depowered to give a male lead something to feel about, and the list did its work through sheer length. No individual entry proved anything. The column of them did.

Peril is plot, and the defence has a case

The reply is not a dodge, and it deserves better than the summary it usually gets.

Stories are made of trouble. Someone has to be in it. A rule that no character may be reduced to a plight would eliminate hostages, victims, patients, the missing and most of crime fiction, which is not a rule any working writer would sign. Endangerment is the raw material, and complaining that a story endangered someone is close to complaining that it had a plot.

The stronger form of the defence goes further. Protecting female characters from the plot has its own failure mode, easy to see once you look for it. If a character cannot be hurt, cannot lose and cannot be caught, she cannot be tested, and untested characters are not respected characters. They are mascots. A fiction that keeps its women safe is not obviously more serious about them than one that puts them in the way of things.

There is also an honest point about images. The critique frequently reads intention out of composition, and composition is a technical business with commercial pressures behind it, most of which are documented on the peril cover. An artist who tilted a figure off vertical to get a diagonal was solving a legibility problem on a wire rack, not making an argument about anybody.

Where each side is strongest

The critique is strongest on aggregate, on aftermath, and on the specific sub-case where the endangered character has no interior life at all. Aftermath is the underrated one. A story that never returns to what the experience did to her has quietly told you what she was for, and no amount of sympathetic drawing in the moment repairs that.

The critique is weakest when it moves from pattern to verdict on a single page, when it treats an image as evidence of an intention, and when it implies a protective rule that would make women narratively inert.

The defence is strongest at the level of the individual story, where a writer really is allowed to put anyone in trouble, and on the craft point that danger is where character is revealed rather than concealed.

The defence is weakest at the level of the shelf. Explaining each instance as a local decision does not explain why the local decisions all came out the same way for fifty years, and treating a pattern as a coincidence is the one move in this argument that nobody should be allowed.

The question that survives both

This page does not settle it, and the disagreement is held by people who have read the same books and looked at the same covers.

What both positions can share is a question that is answerable on the page. Does she want something before the trouble starts. Does she try something inside it, even if it fails. Does the story follow her out the other side. Three yeses and the objection rarely arises, whatever the plot did to her. Three noes and the picture was scenery, however carefully it was drawn.

That question is a writing question, but it has a drawing equivalent, laid out in drawing agency: whether the figure in the frame is given a verb or a pose. What modern comics have done with the whole inheritance, including the versions that answer it cleverly and the versions that only look as though they do, is taken up in who gets rescued now. The inversion drawn deliberately, with the strongest line handed to the person in the rope, is she cuts the rope.