The Depressive Nightmare Siren Girl

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.

The Manic Pixie Dreamgirl

I'd like to visit the theme of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in a couple of posts, because the more I think about her, the more she fascinates me. (That's right: I guess I'm announcing to the world that I have a crush on a disembodied abstract concept. At least she doesn't have a boyfriend.) She actually has been an important figure in my life: I've had big crushes on my fair share, even dated one or two, am friends with others, and created a whole line-up of them back in the day when I fancied myself a writer. As I dig deep, it's hard to escape the MPDG her two relatives (I'll introduce you a little later) in any aspect of my life.

The Onion piece in question provided a decent overview of how she's been presented in film in the past 70 years, but the army of critics don't go back any deeper, ignoring her long literary pedigree. Let's take a step back and review the essentials: the MPDG "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." She appears as if by magic, forever changing the way the the dour hero will look at the world. While her favorite tool today is whimsy, her forbears didn't always have that option in their arsenals, and thus took very different tacks.

The earliest MPDG that I am aware of happens to be one of the most important literary figures of the Middle Ages. She arrives at just the right time, as our hero's life is in shambles; he finds himself locked in prison as a political prisoner, unable to make peace with the world.

I who once wrote songs with Keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.

So begins Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae, written in the early 6th century. His salvation comes in the form of Lady Philosophy, who uses Socratic dialogue to make him reconsider what matters in the world (early Medieval Christian asceticism) and what doesn't.

It may seem like a long road from The Consolation of Philosophy to "Elizabethtown," but the essential story is the same: a man is rescued from his (literal or metaphorical prison) by a woman who teaches him not to be so serious and reconsider what's really important in life, be it through silly dancing or neoplatonist asceticism. Having made that intellectual leap, we can trace the MPDG's subsequent incarnations as Beatrice in Dante's Paradiso, Shahrazad from Alf Layla Wa Layla, Reason in La Roman de la Rose, Lucy Manette (A Tale of Two Cities), Eppie from Silas Marner, and even Olivia in "Twelfth Night." Shaw put his own satiric stamp on it time after time, perhaps most memorably in Man and Superman, when Ann Whitefield rescues John Tanner from his life of socialistic bachelorhood.

Opera has no shortage: while Donna Elvira and Marie (Wozzeck) can't quite finish the job, Elsa (Der Fliegende Hollander), Marie (Der Frieschutz), Magdalena (Die Meistersinger), Brunhilde, and even Mimi with her consumptive little heart all offer some sort of redemption.

Even though the MPDG may seem like empty fun, there for the sole purpose of redeeming the male, as I've shown, she actually has a long heritage and is capable of quite a bit of depth. If she represents lightness and redemption, though, she does have a mischievous twin sister, lurking in darkness to bring destruction to men. Next time I'll introduce this figure (in one way or another). As this series continues, it will explore both the literary heritage of this darker figure and the way she appears in movies today; a look at their interactions in the work of Woody Allen; the influence these figures have had on my life; and their rare and devastating child.