Damsel in distress

[1] Throughout the history of the trope, the role of the woman as the victim in need of a male savior has remained constant, but her attackers have changed to suit the tastes and collective fears of the period: "monsters, mad scientists, Nazis, hippies, bikers, aliens..."[2] The word "damsel" derives from the French demoiselle, meaning "young lady", and the term "damsel in distress" in turn is a translation of the French demoiselle en détresse.

It can be traced back to the knight-errant of Medieval songs and tales, who regarded protection of women as an essential part of the chivalric code, which includes a notion of honour and nobility.

The homosexual variant is also present in the stories of Cleostratus and Alcyoneus, youths who are to be sacrificed to man-eating serpentine monsters before they are saved by their love interests Menestratus and Eurybarus respectively.

The Emprise de l'Escu vert à la Dame Blanche (founded 1399) was a chivalric order with the express purpose of protecting oppressed ladies.

[9] Obscure outside Norway is Hallvard Vebjørnsson, the Patron Saint of Oslo, recognised as a martyr after being killed while valiantly trying to defend a woman—most likely a slave—from three men accusing her of theft.

The damsel in distress 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.

Early examples in this genre include Matilda in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Emily in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Antonia in Matthew Lewis' The Monk.

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

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.

[14] Small screen iconic portrayals, this time in children's cartoons, are Underdog's girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred and Nell Fenwick, who is often rescued by inept Mountie Dudley Do-Right.

In other films, Bond is shown tied up and in peril (examples include Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, The World Is Not Enough, Casino Royale and Skyfall) and in some cases is rescued by the female lead (such as in Licence to Kill and Spectre).

The protagonists of the Disney Princess franchise are often depicted as damsels in distress, with the leads of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty requiring rescue by Prince love interest from a witch's evil plan.

[15] Frequently cited examples of a damsel in distress in comics include Lois Lane, who was eternally getting into trouble and needing to be rescued by Superman, and Olive Oyl, who was in a near-constant state of kidnap, requiring her to be saved by Popeye.

3 #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that the villain Major Force had killed his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, and stuffed her in a refrigerator.

Feminist criticism of art, film, and literature has often examined gender-oriented characterisation and plot, including the common "damsel in distress" trope, as perpetrating regressive and patronizing myths about women.

[citation needed] C. L. Moore's short story "Shambleau" (1933) – generally acknowledged as epoch-making in the history of science fiction – begins in what seems a classical damsel in distress situation: the protagonist, space adventurer Northwest Smith, sees a "sweetly-made girl" pursued by a lynch mob intent on killing her and intervenes to save her, but finds her not a girl nor a human being at all, but a disguised alien creature, predatory and highly dangerous.

The damsel in distress theme is also very prominent in The Spy Who Loved Me, where the story is told in the first person by the young woman Vivienne Michel, who is threatened with imminent rape by thugs when Bond kills them and claims her as his reward.

The character and her reactions, portrayed by actress Diana Rigg, differentiated these scenes from other film and television scenarios where women were similarly imperiled as pure victims or pawns in the plot.

A scene with Emma Peel bound and threatened with a death ray in the episode From Venus with Love is a direct parallel to James Bond's confrontation with a laser in the film Goldfinger.

The serial heroines and Emma Peel are cited as providing inspiration for the creators of strong heroines in more recent times, ranging from Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone and Princess Leia in Star Wars to "post feminist" icons such as Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena and Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess, Sydney Bristow from Alias, Natasha Romanoff from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kim Possible from the series of the same name, Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise, and Veronica Mars, also from the series of the same name.

The film Sherlock Holmes (2009) includes a classical damsel in distress episode, where Irene Adler (played by Rachel McAdams) is helplessly bound to a conveyor belt in an industrial slaughterhouse, and is saved from being sawn in half by a chainsaw; yet in other episodes of the same film Adler is strong and assertive – for example, overcoming with contemptuous ease two thugs who sought to rob her (and robbing them instead).

In the final scene of the Walt Disney Pictures film Enchanted (2007) the traditional roles are reversed when male protagonist Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey) is captured by Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) in her dragon form.

A similar role reversal is evident in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in whose climactic scene the male protagonist is captured by a serial killer, locked in an underground torture room, chained, stripped naked, and humiliated when his female partner enters to save him and destroy the villain.

After Jack Dawson is handcuffed to a pipe in the master-at-arms' office to drown, Rose DeWitt Bukater leaves her family to rescue him and they head back to the upper deck.

In Robert J. Harris' WWII spy thriller The Thirty-One Kings (2017), the chivalrous protagonist Richard Hannay takes time off from his vital intelligence mission to help a beautiful young woman, harassed on a Paris street by two drunken men.

[29] Destined to an ignominious watery death, it is the would be rescuer who is in very big distress; fortunately, his friends show up in the nick of time to save him from the clutches of the femme fatale.

Nesbø's protagonist Harry Hole is faced with his beloved Rakel having been bound and forced to sit on a fast-melting seat of ice; once it has melted she would fall into an infernal device and be torn to pieces.