Why Do All These Women Keep Fainting?

Why Do All These Women Keep Fainting?

In the 192o silent classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, passive heroine Jane (played by Lil Dagover) has fainted, and is taken hostage by the zombie Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who drags her limp form across rooftops and down alleyways.

This archetypal image of virile male captor and helpless female hostage reflects the situation of countless heroines in horror, action and fantastic literature and films, all of them passing out and being hauled around like so many sacks of barley.

Amazingly, both the publishing industry and Hollywood have not grown much beyond this stage of treatment for female characters, and readers and audiences still accept such weakling behavior as a necessary convention in pulp novels and movies.

In literature, for instance, the Twilight series has spawned countless imitations, all revolving around female teens who cower and lose consciousness while their male vampire lovers perform mop-up rescues. 

On celluloid, just to give one example, the action hit The Expendables features a leading lady who is smacked into semi-consciousness near the end and slung around the compound for at least twenty minutes, her extra weight only adding to the villain’s determination to fight his way across an armed forces facility.

Why is there still such a need to keep women in the role of the helpless (and literal) baggage of masculine forces, whether they’re supernatural or just plain cranked, in fantasy/action literature and film? Why do audiences still embrace the stereotype?

The Expendables, with its testosterone-soaked cast and helpless heroine, was a huge hit; Suckerpunch, a CGI-filled epic with a group of sleek fighter females doing the dirty, was a resounding flop. And even if it had been a gender-reversal hit, there would be no scene in it with a helpless male knocked out and made into a target on a baddie's back.

It's depressingly the same no matter what heroine one uses for counterbalance; for every Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there's the protagonist of True Blood who, despite her seer-like powers, still cringes before the beasts. 

Not many Bond girls did side-fighting with 007; when Michelle Yeoh tried it in Tomorrow Never Dies, audiences found their fade-out embrace distasteful (a woman can't fight by a man's side and still love him, apparently). And while Marion Ravenwood in the Indiana Jones series did hit a few men over the head with pans (like Sabu in his jungle movies), she mostly lived on a diet of steady screams.

If Hollywood screenwriters or modern pulp authors do manage to turn out a female toughie, she's invariably a ninja'd, muscular Martial master who castrates any man getting close to her. In other words, she's a man, and a bad-ass hater at that. (Shakespearean actress Edith Evans once said, "I can understand a woman wanting to be a man, but why doesn't she want to be a nice man?").

Speaking of Shakespeare, whose literature is the most cinematic of all, I don't recall a single female character of the Bard's ever fainting for hostage practice (Lady Macbeth swoons once, but that's shamming, to distract her husband's accusers). Cleopatra, Rosalind, Beatrice all hold their men firmly by the balls but still manage to love them anyway; Kate the shrew, despite conventional sops to male sentiment, remains untamed at the play's end.

Even the women who might be punching bags, such as Desdemona, have moments of defiance; at Othello's slap, she remonstrates, "I have not deserved this." Has any female movie hostage EVER said that to a bad guy?

Imagine an action film with a Jane Austen heroine—Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennett—knocked out and slung around and the story becomes ludicrous.  Ditto with Hedda Gabler, Lady Bracknell, Jane Eyre and scores of other strong females. 

The great authors did not demean their female characters; why do the lesser lights of fantasy/action continue to do so?

I tried to answer my own question when I wrote the serialized horror/romance novel A Girl in Cemetery, where I took a Victorian female, a character with numerous potential faints in her, and made her the forceful but vulnerable destroyer of evil. I concede that I began her in a state of innocence, swooning with the best of them, because the sensibility of the times (ours as well as Victoria's) makes it a behavior she has to grow out of. 

But she does, and she proves a great deal more resourceful than I first imagined her to be, without losing a trace of feminine sensibilities.

I'd challenge any author or screenwriter to try the same, especially in the pulp realm.

The next time a female character of yours is shrieking away at the sight of some ghastly monster while a stalwart hero prepares to dispatch the thing, have HIM faint instead. Make HIM the excess baggage in the beastie's tentacles. See what SHE does about it.

You might be surprised what a woman can accomplish.

To have a look at A Girl in Cemetery, check out the free chapters and comment on them!  

(Yes, the book’s finished; tell MStrat1106@gmail.com if you want a copy)