By way of a disclaimer, I'm going to repeat a shocking confession that I mentioned once before in this space: I've seen Mona Lisa Smile. (It wasn't my fault, I swear!) My reaction at the end was how remarkably brave the movie was to shine a light on sexism in the 1950's. (I should skip the part about how Rachel Portman is so terrible a composer, but it's hard not to at least mention it in passing.)
If you'd like, at the end of this plan, you can be shocked about how sexist literary depictions of women from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance works are. While some are more nuanced than others, putting them all together in one discussion has an ugly cumulative effect.
Last time around, I showed how the Manic Pixy Dreamgirl actually has a deep literary heritage going all the way back to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. At her essence, the MPDG rescues our hero from whatever metaphorical prison (be it an empty career or 20-something malaise) and teaches him to focus on what really matters in life. As I pointed out, The Divine Comedy and Garden State are actually much more closely related than they may seem at first glance.
But the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl's redemptive aura is only half the picture. She has a darker twin designed to take the hero's eye off the ball. For the sake of simplicity, I'll give her a name, although it won't fit exactly in most of the examples I'm going to discuss today. It will fit better when we look at the watered-down version, but it would be pretty tough to try to discuss her anonymously.
As an archetype, she goes all the way back to Eve in a sense; other examples from classical times include Calypso and Dido. The example I'd like to focus on, though, is of a real figure from Medieval Germany. (Ok, there might be some exaggeration, but the man in the legend really did exist.)
Tanhûser was a minnesinger (and possibly a knight) 13th century. As the legend goes, he did all the normal knight minstrel activities -- singing minnegesang, fighting in jousts and tournaments, and all that fun stuff. But he suddenly disappeared. A years later, he reappeared. He had been in Venusberg the whole time, serving and worshiping the goddess Venus. The Christian knight was living a life of sin, distracted from his duty to his lord and Lord. He went to Rome to beg the pope for forgiveness. The pope replied that he'd be forgiven when his staff bloomed with flowers. Days later, the pope's staff bloomed, but Tanhûser had already returned to Venusberg never to be seen again.
In this story, a good knight got tempted into darkness by a woman who existed pretty much for the sole purpose of trying to subvert his life's work. Unlike the MPDG, who is by design supposed to teach the hero about what really matters in life, the Depressive Siren Nightmare Girl takes a man away from his mission and distract him from his life.Θ
Some other notable DSNG's from literary history include Merimee's Carmen and Nabakov's Lolita from the eponymous novels. Lady Macbeth gets the best of her husband while Ophelia (though under coersion by her uncle) fails to get the best of Hamlet. And, of course, how could I fail to mention the one that ruined my life: her father for all intents and purposes dead, Criseyde's vulnerability warmed Troilus's heart. When she has the opportunity to flee to the Greeks, she does in a second, standing Troilus up at their planned meeting ten days later, and going so far as to blame him. She was the medieval image of a faithless conniving woman, at least until Robert Henryson did his best to rehabilitate her image in the Testament of Cresseid.
Interestingly enough, a legendary monster developed during the Middle Ages that turns gives the metaphor a terrifying literality.φ The succubus prayed on men at night, stealing their energy for life. While this spring out of some level of Medieval discomfort about sex,≅ it was built on the idea that the weapon of choice of a female demon would be her sexuality.
Like her counterpart of light, the DSNG appears in movies as a watered down archetype serving mainly as a plot device rather than a real character. That discussion is for another time.
ΘOne side note about terminology: it doesn't necessarily fit to apply the 20th century psychological terms manic and depressive to earlier times, but I suggest that they still fit within the context of the day. While Venus may not be depressed, her sinful life serves as an analogue; she could not be truly happy without accepting Christ, after all. It's the same way that Lady Philosophy comes across as the opposite of manic, yet still represents that to an early Medieval neoplatonist ascetic.
φ She had a male counterpart, the incubus, who fed off of women's energy, occasionally leaving behind a present, but even that was widely used as a cover for unexplained pregnancies (or bad behavior by the woman in the society of the time). ≅The Medieval discomfort about sex is overstated to a large extent. Read something like The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales and then look at the news from the past two years, and then try to tell me with a straight face that we're the enlightened ones.
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