Tag: tropes

A Book Trope I Wish Wouldn’t Happen IRL

Time for Long and Short Review‘s Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. Ooh, this one seems even harder. Some tropes just don’t (and seem likely to never) happen in real life at all (superpowers, for example). But this challenge seems ask for one that does happen or potentially is looming in the future, but I wish it wouldn’t.

Well, living in the era of generative AI, I guess a good one to go with would be I hope that the Singularity doesn’t happen and an AI/robots don’t destroy human civilization and/or all of humanity (not that we aren’t doing a good job of that ourselves, with pollution, climate change, war, human-instigated famine – yep, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, at least according to the Good Omens version, in which pestilence has retired in favor of pollution).  Of course, the Robot/AI apocalypse would just be another form of human self-destruction. Here’s hoping we do a better job of avoiding that one.🤞

Of course, then, I immediately started wondering when this AI takeover trope first started and turned to Wikipedia. It suggested Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 19th century, but that seems more than a little questionable as an example of the trope per se (even if it directly inspired at least one story in this trope, which in turn inspired the World Wide Web). A better contender seems to be Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon (which I had never heard of, but Alan Turing even cites as a warning of Ai takeover). The Wikipedia article also notes the 1920 Czech play R.U.R., which gives us our word robot, has robots revolt and kill most of humanity. So this trope is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but it does seem increasingly possible.

Among this trope, some of my favorites are Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Linda Hamilton is one tough mother – Yes, the series of movies, like the terminator itself, keeps coming, but I stop with T2); The Matrix (again, I’d stop there in the series); Battlestar Galactica (not the 1980’s series, but the post-9/11 series; I was sorry the spin off Caprica didn’t make it); and on the lighter side, I loved The Mitchells vs. the Machines.  On a smaller scale, who could forget:

I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

There are probably others but these are the ones that first jump to mind when I think of the trope. Yep, all movies or t.v. series. I’m sure I’ve read books with these tropes (esp. since the prompt is about book tropes), but the ones that first come to mind are all video.

So it’s my trope I wish wouldn’t happen. 

NaNoWriMo Day 9

A good writing day (1863 words). I’ve been working (I’ve probably said) on a sequel to my alernative-myth in which Dido kills Aeneas and raises a Carthaginian empire in place of a Roman one. This novel is set a few hundred years later, at the end of the 6th century BCE around the founding of popular governments (democracy/republic).

Historically, in 510/509 BCE, the Athenians kick out the Pisistratid tyrants and head on the road to deomocracy (which is usually credited to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 503/502 BCE). And in what is a probably a case of synchronism, the Romans kick out the Tarquin kings/tyrants and found the Republic.

What’s striking to me is how both stories of the founding of popular rule are based basically on the woman in fridge trope (which trope I have discussed before). It is such an ancient and pervasive trope, in history stories as well as fiction. In Athens, what sets the revolution in motion involves a sexual shaming of the sister of Harmodius (one of the Tyrannicides). In Rome, it is the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king, and her subsequent suicide. Both motivate their male relatives to revolution, which leads to popular government.

I’m not a fan of the trope, but yet I find it at the center of some of my action. I think I’m using it subversively (the Tyrannicides in Athens historically fail and die and in my fiction I follow the shamed sister as one of my main characters; in my fiction, Lucretia doesn’t commit suicide – although the public is misled to believe she did – and she too will be a major player), but nevertheless it feels weird.

Onwards tomorrow.

World’s Oldest Trope Reconsidered

I’ll admit I was being a tad flippant when I asked whether Fridging was the world’s oldest trope. Mostly I was interested in tracing just how old that trope was and that it went back to some of the earliest literature. But I mentioned it in front of an English department colleague and he said, “What about the Femme Fatale?”

In short, the Femme Fatale is a stock character, a seductive woman who leads (mostly) men to their doom or downfall (link to tvtropes.org, which also provides links to other, closely paralleling tropes).

My colleague was right. The Femme Fatale beats Fridging by over a millennium (see examples below).

But I was also struck about what these two ancient tropes have to tell us in conjunction with one another. Both these tropes center on the use of women as plot devices to advance the male protagonist’s story. And that parallel function spoke volumes to me. At the very root of recorded human story-telling lies the treatment of female characters not as actual characters but more as props for male characters and their journey. No wonder we end up with the Bechdel-Wallace test, which sets a very low bar for stories (literature, movies, etc.) to cross, but yet so many (even otherwise great) stories don’t pass. 

So how does the Femme Fatale beat Fridging as a trope by over a millennium?

My colleague at first mentioned The Bible, but the Hebrew Bible (despite covering the creation of the world) isn’t (relatively speaking) that old, although the oral traditions upon which it is based are no doubt older.

(Side note: I read the term “orature” as the counter-part to written literature in a scholarly article on African mythic tradition and quite like it.)

But then we both thought about The Epic of Gilgamesh and agreed that the Femme Fatale did actually occur there – pushing it back to ca. 2100 BCE vs. the mere 8th/7th cent BCE of The Iliad or the 7th-4th cent. BCE of The Ramayana.

While my colleague and I talked, I brought up Shamhat, the temple prostitute who domesticates the wild man Enkidu, who had been terrorizing the countryside but then becomes Gilgamesh’s loyal sidekick. In the words of an on-line translation, what happens when Shamhat meets Enkidu is:

His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.
But when he turned his attention to his animals,
the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,
the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.
Enkidu … his utterly depleted(?) body,
his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;
Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.

Her seduction reduces the power of this wild man and brings him to heel for Gilgamesh (who had sent her out for this purpose). Later in the epic, Enkidu, facing his own death, does curse Shamhat for leading him on the path to this doom. He does, however, relent and say it’s not her fault.

But there’s an even better Femme Fatale in The Epic of Gilgamesh. I only later thought also of Ishtar. When I started looking at the trope, Wikipedia has a nice list of ancient Femme Fatales and includes Inanna, a Sumerian goddess who does show up in The Epic of Gilgamesh and who later gets conflated with the Akkadian-Assyrian-Babylonian Ishtar. Yet it is not the Inanna-face of the goddess who’s the Femme Fatale in the epic. It’s the Ishtar-face of the goddess. (Inanna has a story about the huluppu tree in the epic).

In the epic, Ishtar comes to Gilgamesh and tries to seduce him. In his rejection of her, Gilgamesh lists all the human male heroes who have been destroyed by Ishtar’s amorous advances (from the same translation):

Where are your bridegrooms that you keep forever’
Where is your ‘Little Shepherd’ bird that went up over you! See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers.
Of the shoulder (?) … his hand,
Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth,
for him you have ordained lamentations year upon year! You loved the colorful ‘Little Shepherd’ bird
and then hit him, breaking his wing, so
now he stands in the forest crying ‘My Wing’!
You loved the supremely mighty lion,
yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle,
yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad, and the lash, ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours, ordained for him drinking from muddled waters,’
you ordained far his mother Silili to wail continually.
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins.
You loved Ishullanu, your father’s date gardener,
who continually brought you baskets of dates,
and brightened your table daily.
You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:
‘Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength,
stretch out your hand to me, and touch our vulva. Ishullanu said to you:
‘Me! What is it you want from me!
Has my mother not baked, and have I not eaten
that I should now eat food under contempt and curses
and that alfalfa grass should be my only cover against the cold?
As you listened to these his words
you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),
and made him live in the middle of his (garden of) labors,
where the mihhu do not go up, nor the bucket of dates (?) down.
And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for me as
for them!

In addition to the doom for these former lovers, Ishtar almost destroys the world due to her anger over Gilgamesh’s humiliating rejection of him – and the consequences of that do lead to Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s grief over that loss. A true – and very early – Femme Fatale.

Fridging: World’s Oldest Trope?

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

The Framing of Violence against Women in Fantasy

Below is a recommended video by Bookborn on violence against women in fantasy and the excuse that it’s historically accurate. As she notes, a lot of fantasy is set in a medieval-esque setting, so that’s the time period she focuses on. I write about earlier periods (Bronze Age, Archaic, Classical), but still what she speaks to has parallels and resonance.

I like how Bookborn tackles how such things are framed and the language used (as she said, “the how, not the what”). Bookborn also notes that sadly, many of the issues around violence against women and the problems around prosecution of such cases are not just relics of the past. At the end, she has a nice list of take-aways.

One thing Bookborn talks about is the class bias and how what we see in fantasy is related to aristocratic marriages, and thus to the importance of heirs to property/titles, and thus the concern around regulating the woman’s sexual activity (as Bookborn says, chastity and virginity) to ensure legitimate heirs. I see similar potential bias when thinking/wriiting about women in the Classical Greek world.

When it comes to Classical Greece, our sources tend to be Athens-centric and thus may skew our understanding of women and marriage in Ancient Greece (much the way the focus on aristocratic marriage in the Medieval period does). Democracy in Athens begins in the very late 6th century BCE and over the 5th cent., as the power of citizens increase, so does a concern of who may be a citizen. Pericles led the passing of a law that requiring that a child could only obtain citizenship if both parents were citizens (which would later bite Pericles in the behind when his legitimate sons died, but the Athenians passed a special exemption so that he son by the non-Athenian courtesan Aspasia could be a citizen). So the tightly controlled lives of Athenian women in the Classical period may be linked to the desire to control who got the privileges of citizenship. Our sources for other city-states are much scantier, but one may look to Sparta to find greater freedom, education, and a later marriage age for girls, for example.

Finally, as The MarySue (where I found this video) notes,

At the end of the day, we are also talking about fantasy. These stories don’t have to be historically accurate. The dragons and wargs aren’t real, so why does the terrible treatment of women have to be?