Category: Odyssey

I’ve been thinking about fridging a lot recently as at the outset of my sequel novel, there’s a female character who’s been murdered and in a way that sets her brother on his journey (though a kidnapping and an attempted assassination of the brother by the same man who murdered her also spurs this along the way). If you don’t know fridging, tvtropes.org provides a quick definition:

When a loved one is hurt, killed, maimed, assaulted, or otherwise traumatized in order to motivate another character or move their plot forward. …

It should be noted that while the term most commonly applies to a male character’s female love interest, it can actually be used in numerous different scenarios of all genders and different relations from romantic, platonic and familial. The core part is that one character is killed (or at least, has something very bad happen to them) for the sake of causing emotional trauma for the target, with said victim often acting as a plot device more than a real character in the worst-case scenarios.

The term comes from Gail Simone in a critique of comic book treatment of female characters/heroes, named from Green Lantern finding his love interest in a literal refrigerator. Her website, Women in Refrigerators, provides quite a list (along with responses to her critique and response to the responses).

Both because of the frequency and the so often gendered nature of those occurrences, this trope has come under justified critique. As Geek Feminism Wiki says:

WiR is a trope in aggregate, and while well-built solid narratives that use the trope well, it is the overall pattern, not individual works, that forms the problem.

Points of objection

• cheapening and normalizing murder, abuse, and sexual violence of women by rote execution of the trope
• sexualisation of the same
• the use of female characters as disposable plot enhancers, especially if the Sexy Lamp test comes out positive

It has been addressed by numerous writers (I provide a little catalog of some discussions at the bottom). So what new do I have to offer to this old subject?

I want to take this trope back to the beginning, to some very early human literature and the Homeric Iliad.

I thought about Enkidu in the much earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, but decided he did really fit (not just because of gender). He gets his own journey before being killed. He does then serve as motivation for the main hero Gilgamesh, not to seek revenge but to seek out Utnapishtim in his attempt to overcome Death and gain immortality.

Other SWANA literature well predates the Greek epic (and The Iliad is certainly influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh), but I’m not familiar enough, so if I have overlooked an earlier example of fridging in those works, mea culpa!

Addendum: One of my students suggested Sita in The Ramayana as another ancient example of Fridging, which would be roughly contemporary (potentially – there’s a breadth of possible dates) with The Iliad. 

In The Iliad, Achilles, the epitome of wrath, is motivated by the loss or death of two beloveds, first Briseis (an enslaved, captive Trojan woman, lit. “Daughter of Briseus,” so she doesn’t even get an independent name) and second Patroclus. I’m going to lay aside Patroclus because he (like Enkidu) does get more of his own story (albeit still mainly a motivator for Achilles), even moments of glory. And I think Gail Simone has a point about fridging being very gendered in general.

Even before Achilles gets going, the whole epic begins with a mini-version of the whole story involving fridging. A Trojan priest of Apollo comes to the Greek camp to ransom his daughter, taken in a raid, from King Agamemnon. Neither the priest nor his daughter really gets names. They come from the town of Chryse. The father/priest is known as Chryses and his daughter Chryseis (“Daughter of Chryses”). Agamemnon brutally refuses, saying his daughter will live out her life laboring in Agamemnon’s home and “ἐμὸν λέχος ἀντιόωσαν” (“visiting my bed,” a euphemism for being raped). Chryseis’ captivity and sexual assault motivates her father to pray to Apollo to curse the Greeks. Apollo sends a plague, and this will lead directly into Achilles’ tale. (Chryseis does then get returned, along with offerings as atonement and her story is over).

In the confrontation over the situation with the plague, Agamemnon says if I have to give up my prize (Chryseis), I’ll take your prize (Briseis, another enslaved Trojan woman, “Daughter of Briseus”). And then he does take her. Briseis is passed as a trophy from one man to another. This sets forth 23 more books (as The Iliad is divided into books, rather than chapters) of action all motivated from Achilles’ anger over this loss. He will go on to allow hundreds of Greeks die as he sulks in his tent over her loss (then, after Patroclus is killed, to kill countless Trojans in revenge for that loss). Briseis herself is not fleshed out. She doesn’t get her own story, other than a brief summary as part of her mourning Patroclus (Iliad 19.282-300):

Βρισηῒς δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ
ὡς ἴδε Πάτροκλον δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
ἀμφ᾽ αὐτῷ χυμένη λίγ᾽ ἐκώκυε, χερσὶ δ᾽ ἄμυσσε
στήθεά τ᾽ ἠδ᾽ ἁπαλὴν δειρὴν ἰδὲ καλὰ πρόσωπα.
εἶπε δ᾽ ἄρα κλαίουσα γυνὴ ἐϊκυῖα θεῇσι:
Πάτροκλέ μοι δειλῇ πλεῖστον κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ
ζωὸν μέν σε ἔλειπον ἐγὼ κλισίηθεν ἰοῦσα,
νῦν δέ σε τεθνηῶτα κιχάνομαι ὄρχαμε λαῶν
ἂψ ἀνιοῦσ᾽: ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί.
ἄνδρα μὲν ᾧ ἔδοσάν με πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ
εἶδον πρὸ πτόλιος δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ,
τρεῖς τε κασιγνήτους, τούς μοι μία γείνατο μήτηρ,
κηδείους, οἳ πάντες ὀλέθριον ἦμαρ ἐπέσπον.
οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδέ μ᾽ ἔασκες, ὅτ᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ ἐμὸν ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεὺς
ἔκτεινεν, πέρσεν δὲ πόλιν θείοιο Μύνητος,
κλαίειν, ἀλλά μ᾽ ἔφασκες Ἀχιλλῆος θείοιο
κουριδίην ἄλοχον θήσειν, ἄξειν τ᾽ ἐνὶ νηυσὶν
ἐς Φθίην, δαίσειν δὲ γάμον μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσι.
τώ σ᾽ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.’
ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ᾽, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες
Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ᾽ αὐτῶν κήδε᾽ ἑκάστη.

Briseis stood there like golden Aphrodite.
But when she saw Patroclus’ mangled body
She threw herself upon him and wailed In a high, piercing voice, and with her nails
She tore her breast and soft neck and lovely face.
And this woman, so like a goddess, cried in anguish:
“My poor Patroclus. You were so dear to me.
When I left this hut you were alive,
And now I find you, the army’s leader, dead
When I come back. So it is for me always,
Evil upon evil. I have seen my husband,
The man my father and mother gave me to,
Mangled with sharp bronze before my city,
And my three brothers, all from the same mother,
Brothers I loved—they all died that day.
But you wouldn’t let me cry when Achilles
Killed my husband and destroyed Mynes’ city,
Wouldn’t let me cry. You told me you’d make me
Achilles’ bride, told me you’d take me on a ship
To Phthia, for a wedding among the Myrmidons.
I will never stop grieving for you, forever sweet.”
Thus Briseis, and the women mourned with her,
For Patroclus, yes, but each woman also
For her own private sorrows.

-trans. S. Lombardo pp. 382-3

These lines are the only action or speech Briseis gets to make in The Iliad. Even when she gets to share her biography, it is still simply as part of how she reflects on the men around her. (I’m looking forward to seeing how Emily Wilson will handle this is in her new translation – it comes out tomorrow!).

This is the earliest example of fridging I can think of, over 2500 years ago.

Mary Louise Lord analyzed this story pattern in her article, “Withdrawal and Return: An Epic Story Pattern in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in the Homeric Poems.” She focuses on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where the loss is a mother’s loss of her daughter, but finds it in other works. One could think not only of The Iliad, but also The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (where it is the son’s loss of a father), Disney’s Lion King. Indeed, this revenge story pattern is so common, one of my assignments in my mythology class to analyze a movie for it (and other traditional story patterns). The list from which students can choose is ever growing but include Batman Begins, The Princess Bride, Sweeney Todd, Gladiator, and more.

Essentially broken down, Lord’s pattern is:

1. protagonist suffers outrage/disgrace (often in the form of a quarrel and the loss of someone beloved)
2. calls curses down on social unit and/or disaster occasioned by the absence of the hero/ine
3. withdraws from social unit (closely linked with 1; make take the form of a prolonged absence)
4. the theme of hospitality to the wandering hero/ine
5.  sometimes embassies sent to the protagonist by the social unit to offer restitution. The offer is at first refused, and finally accepted after 7 (when meaningless) or offer is not renewed after 7
6. returns secretly (theme of disguise during absence or upon return of hero/ine, frequently accompanied by deceitful tales)
7. exacts revenge
8. reconciliation of the hero/ine; (re)gains honor and recognition by benefiting the community

Once you know the pattern, you’ll see it everywhere. NBC even had a series called Revenge that seemed to follow this (I never watched it, but saw trailers/ads upon which I’m making this judgment, especially the return in disguise). I guess all this is to say this trope is ancient and well-embedded into story-telling, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reflect on how it is used (esp. in misogynistic ways) and avoid lazy writing.

I’m thinking all this while thinking about my own story. I’m probably going to keep the murder even while recognizing a person murdered before the outset is more prop than character. Her death is part of a larger web of political intrigue and while it motivates her brother, it is also part of a larger web of motivation. Since she is never alive in my book, I can’t really call her a character, though we get to know her some through reflections and flashbacks. As strands of stories intertwine, the brother will meet a young woman whose whole family is killed as she is set along her journey (as I’m playing at the intersection of myth, history, and fiction, her actual historical family members that we know of were killed, though history being what it is, we don’t actually know what happened to her afterwards). Their journeys both parallel and run together as they seek their goals.

One last Iliad thought: while Briseis never gets her own voice in The Iliad (other than briefly telling her story in the lines above), she does get her due in Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls. Barker brilliant tells her story, but it is a rough read. The momen when Briseis says slaves are not treated as objects, they actually become objects and internalize that sense has stuck with me. (I hadn’t realized she had a follow up, but Women of Troy is now on my TBR list.) Patroclus also gets his own story in Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles.

Side note: Because the revenge pattern involves a withdrawal from community it fits well with and is often overlapped with tales about rites of passage (first articulated by Arnold van Gennep, followed heavily by mythologist Joseph Campbell and anthropologist Victor Turner). Although rites of passage can involve various status transitions within a society, most often in story telling, this involves coming of age (people often mistake Hamlet for being younger than his 30s because of this overlap).

Rites of passage follow the following structure:

1. Separation from community
2. Liminal period of transition, often marked by inversions of normative behavior and/or ritual morning of initiand as dead (symbolic of the death of the old identity/status)
3. Reintegration to community in a new status

My students often struggle with distinguishing Withdraw and Return from rites of passage due to their parallels. Rites of passage, however, are anthropological models which describe cross-cultural ritual behavior. The use of such rites in narratives is secondary. The Withdrawal and Return pattern is primarily a narrative device. And while the structures are similar, the goals differ:

• Rites of passage mark and facilitate transition between statuses in community (child ->adult; outsider->member; unmarried->married->widowed, etc.)
• Withdrawal and Return plots out revenge.

Some sites discussing the trope of fridging

• Women in Refrigerators
• Stuffed into the Refrigerator and Disposable Women (tvtropes.org)
• Women in Refrigerators (Geek Feminism Wiki)
• 10 Examples of Fridging from the Last Two Decades (movieweb.com)
• What is Fridging in Fiction Writing? (scribofile.com)
• What Is ‘Fridging’, And How Can You Avoid It? (standoutbooks.com)

• Gail Simone’s “Fridging” Becomes Official DC Comics Terminology (bleedingcool.com)

• And the list could go on much longer…