CRISES AND CONTINGENCIES

 Though I don't follow any regular serials from "the Big Two," the TPB market makes it quite evident that both companies remain as heavily invested in "multi-feature crossovers" in 2024 as they were in 1986, when such rival serials as SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS duked it out for sales supremacy. In fact, because "multi-feature crossovers" is an unwieldy mouthful, I'm considering a new term,"clusterfubars." The whole purpose of most crisis-events since 1986 has been to fuck up the status quo beyond all recognition, even if the original status quo later reasserts itself or is replaced by some other manageable state of affairs.

I have not written a great deal about clusterfubars here, though the most involved essay is probably 2008's EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE. I argued that the commercial comics-medium's penchant for "earth shattering changes" was nothing new. In fact, though I didn't explore the topic in a more systematic manner, I quoted anthropologist Lee Drummond on the subject of crises in fiction, be they in myth or in popular fiction:

...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?

Before examining the applicability of "crises" to myth and fiction generally, though, I would be remiss not to define what would be the opposite of "crisis narratives" (especially after one of my recent essays  faulted Joseph Campbell for not providing counter-examples to a proposed term).

I duly looked up antonyms for the word "crisis," and was surprised to find "contingency" listed as a SYNONYM for the word. Every connotation in which I've heard the two words suggests the opposite. A crisis is some event that few if any participants can foresee or avoid. A contingency is some event with which forethought can cope, at least up to a point. The application of each term may also depend on a given subject's span of knowledge. For the majority of persons around the globe, the appearance of the Covid virus was a crisis. For Anthony Fauci, who coordinated the use of gain-of-function research with the Chinese lab in Wuhan, the virus' appearance would have been a contingency, something he could anticipate happening if things went south.

Drummond is broadly correct that a lot of fiction of all genres and mediums depends on "crisis narratives." The theatergoer who views OEDIPUS REX learns nothing about the day-to-day life of King Oedipus or his family. Everything in that play and its sequels is defined by an unforeseeable crisis. And comedies are no different from tragedies in a structural sense. The AMPHITRYON of Plautus centers upon the merry mix-up that ensues when the title character returns from the wars, and must be prevented from finding out that the supreme god Jupiter is schtupping Amphitryon's wife, at least until Jupiter successfully impregnates the woman with Hercules.

But what would be a "contingency narrative," which is to say, a narrative whose conflict does not hinge upon some larger-than-life crisis? There are some archaic examples of such narratives in theater and in folklore, but it's correct to stress that contingency narratives really took off with the rise of naturalistic literature, particularly in 18th century Europe. I deem Daniel Defoe's two best-known works, ROBINSON CRUSOE and MOLL FLANDERS, to be novels built around a constant flow of contingencies relating to what the main characters must do to survive and/or prosper.

And since I'm primarily concerned with the medium of comic books, where do contingency narratives appear in the history of comics? Even most of the celebrated comics-stories, as agreed-upon by elitist critics, depend largely on types of crisis, even when they may be predicated on such low-level "crises" as mistaken identity (which is a not infrequent "gotcha" in a lot of one-shot horror stories). Teen comedies like ARCHIE are probably the least "crisis-like," being usually predicated on simple formula situations that the thoughtless protagonist fails to foresee (Archie makes a date with two girls on the same night; they find out and beat him up or the like.) Most such stories are one-shots, too. Some continuing comic strips, such as GASOLINE ALLEY, presented an ensemble of characters having low-wattage adventures without any dire consequences. The first superhero to regularly exploit both narrative forms was the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, who would support himself and his ailing aunt with money (contingency) made from photographing his own heroic actions (crisis), quelling the rampages of Doctor Octopus or The Lizard.

At some point in the eighties, many superhero fans-- those that dominantly embraced the superhero genre above all other genres-- clamored for low-wattage incidents in the lives of the characters they liked. These pleas brought forth various "day in the life" contingency narratives. Arguably, in subsequent decades, this fannish preference increased the frequency of other stories in which slow-paced drama took the place of fast-paced adventure. However, the same decade, as noted above, also cemented the new business model of the clusterfubar. The Big Two sought to monetize crises by having them affect numerous features at the same time, on the theory that interested readers would purchase titles they didn't normally buy in order to keep apprised of all segments of the extended crisis narrative. I have no idea as to how well this practice works as an overall sales strategy, but it's been in place for about forty years, so someone must be making money from it.

Single features like the venerable SPIDER-MAN appear to be far more guided by crisis narratives overall, rather than by a balance of both narratives. Features with large character-ensembles-- X-MEN, TEEN TITANS-- are even more awash in constant fervid crisis narratives, so that what used to be called "soap opera" is more like "disaster opera." 

More observations on this theme to come later, possibly.

THE READING RHEUM: MOLL FLANDERS (1722)

I've devoted four posts to Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE, which I consider to be the starting-point for Western popular fiction. Until recently I had not read Defoe's second-best-known novel, MOLL FLANDERS, though I'd seen a couple of cinematic adaptations. In one 2014 essay,
however, I conjured with Defoe's Moll as an example of an early female character who was not a "damsel in distress." I said back then:

According to the summaries I have read, CRUSOE, unlike OTRANTO, has no significant female characters at all, so it neither proves nor disproves Colangelo's assertion. None of Defoe's other works fit my criteria for popular culture, though it is worth noting that Defoe was not hostile to the idea of empowered female characters, given that his second best-known novel is 1722's MOLL FLANDERS. The titular character probably is not a femme formidable, though Wikipedia notes that she "begins a career of artful thievery, which, by employing her wits, beauty, charm, and femininity, as well as hard-heartedness and wickedness, brings her the financial security she has always sought."

Now that I have read MOLL, my conjecture-- probably based  as much on film-adaptations of the Defoe novel as on the Wiki summary-- is borne out. Moll starts out life on the down side, being born to a prostitute-mother in Newgate Prison. Moll-- whose titular name is made-up, though supposedly Defoe based her on a real woman with the same first name-- is separated from her mother at an early age. However, at age eleven she's apprenticed as a maid to a well-to-do family. This circumstance eventually leads her to her first romance, when she hooks up with one of the young men of the family. However, he seduces her with promises of marriage, but has no intention of making her anything but his mistress. This character-- who goes unnamed, like most of Defoe's characters here-- becomes one of several men whom Moll beds and/or weds in her quest for security, though none of these liaisons really "take." The early mortality of men during 18th-century England spares Moll from the fate of being a black widow murderess, though Defoe gets rid of male characters so quickly one might suspect him of murderous tendencies being exorcised through fiction.

In truth, Defoe seems to have a proto-feminist concept of Moll. On occasion men come to Moll's "rescue" with greater monetary resources, but it's almost as often that she makes her own money in clever ways, particularly in the latter half of the novel, when she becomes a professional thief. The only real time a male "rescue" really counts comes near the conclusion, when she's faced with hanging, and an unnamed minister manages to get her sentence changed, so that she's transported to America. But none of the "rescues" are so structured as to make Moll seem a "damsel in distress." I suppose she wouldn't be "feminist" these days because she generally uses sexuality and trickery to get ahead in life, rather than either political action or even the forceful endeavors of a femme formidable, like some of the female knights and rulers I've discussed elsewhere.

Both of Defoe's most famous characters, Robinson and Moll, incarnate the spirit of the entrepreneur as it was being re-defined in post-Renaissance Europe, and I would say that Defoe gives both of them as much agency as was possible for their respective genders in that time-period. Moll does suffer a certain amount of mistreatment by males, but she's usually able to escape being controlled-- so that if one deems her the First Lady of Popular Fiction, she definitely escapes the status of being "a damsel in distress."

CONNECTING THE DOGMAS

At the end of ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 1, I explained my reason for considering Defoe's protagonist a representation of a mediocre nature:

I’ve often disagreed with the Mickey Marxists who want to see imperialism in every story that stars a straight white male, or fails to portray people of color as they want to see themselves. But I must admit that the CRUSOE novels exhibit a chauvinism so extreme that authors like Haggard, Doyle and Kipling look like models of liberalism by comparison. Defoe allows Crusoe a few moments of cultural relativism—he admits that the Spanish committed many atrocities against the natives of the New World—but at base, the author wants to give his audience a picture of the world as one where nothing, not even a mass slaughter, seriously challenges any preconceptions.

It's Crusoe's inability to be changed by his experience that informs my perception of him as something akin to one of Nietzsche's bugaboos in THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Zarathustra, speaking largely in a series of quasi-poetic, incantatory aphorisms, rails against all sorts of metaphorical evils that represented the mediocrity of Europeans, calling them things like "the small men," "the Ultimate Man," "the fleas," and "the tarantulas."-- COURAGE OVER FEAR.

So, even though I criticized Crusoe for his un-knightly behavior and his excessive piety, his inability to change is his least attractive aspect. Other demiheroes of the same era, such as Fielding's Tom Jones, still do not strike me as being as "flea-like" as Robinson Crusoe.

And yet, I must admit that even though there are no "free spirits," no Ubermenschen, in the world of ROBINSON CRUSOE, it's arguable that a liberal interpretation of Nietzchean philosophy might find a place where knights and fleas reinforce one another.

In my philosophical examination of the 2004 cartoon-film THE INCREDIBLES, I said:

...the question remains: why would it have been bad, to have a world in which everyone had artificial super-powers? The answer may lie in the philosophical ruminations of Nietzsche, even if Bird never read him. Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. Syndrome has no motivation beyond lionization, and so it's easy for him to restructure the world so that it reflects his own mediocrity. Once everyone has access to artificially-enhanced superpowers, will anyone feel any need to feel empathy for those weaker than themselves?

I provided an "ethic of the combative" in COURAGE OVER FEAR, which took a quasi-Hegelian view of the process by which humankind comes to judge life by the value of courage rather than that of fear. Nevertheless, the combative hero, whether he wears a knight's armor or a super-crusader's  leotards, needs the "common people." The hero's spirit is greater than that of the flea, and in many respects the hero can only be challenged by an enemy of some sort, while the flea can do nothing but seek to undermine the ideals of the hero, which is the initial setup for THE INCREDIBLES. However, in ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche adjures the "warrior" to "be proud of your enemies," for the enemy makes it possible for the warrior to exert his full strength. The "fleas" cannot be a part of such a struggle. However, they are in modern terms the "lesser selves" from which the "greater selves" are constructed, and this means that they are factors which the hero must overcome in himself. Mister Incredible, in order to show true magnanimity and truly forgive the "fleas," must continue saving the common people even when they seek to outlaw his activities.

Nietzsche's critique of "slave morality" is flawed by his attempt to reject every aspect of that morality, rather than merely its most extreme manifestations. Much of that morality is informed by self-interest, like that of the citizens who sue Mister Incredible for false damages, but self-interest appears in a more benign form, as when Bob and Helen Parr attempt to give up being superheroes to raise their children in peace. Nietzsche's ability to set down his philosophy in his leisure, rather than being forced to work for his daily bread, was only possible because he received a pension from the University of Basel, which was, like any business concern, primarily concerned with perpetuating its own existence. Thus, since even Nietzsche had a "lesser self"-- for instance, the early part of him that aspired to religious service-- his system is flawed in failing to realize how the ethics of the "fleas" supplies a challenge to the hero, even if it is not the same sort of challenge supplied by an "enemy."

The 17th and 18th centuries supplied Daniel Defoe with his intellectual formative influences, and these periods were aligned with the so-called "Age of Enlightenment." Literature had by and large turned away from stories of epic heroism, though there were hearkenings of another revolution in the late 18th century, with the development of Gothic fiction and re-interpretations of pagan fantasy, as seen in James McPherson's "Ossian" poems, which became widely popular in Europe before readers learned that the poems were not genuine Gaelic myth-tales.

Defoe's Crusoe is never able to be a "hero" in the Nietzschean sense. But I deem that his contribution to the history of the popular adventure-story is not unlike the contribution that the "lesser man" makes to the evolution of the "greater man:" a necessary step, rather than an end in itself.

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 2

Until recently, all of my remarks on ROBINSON CRUSOE have been based on summations and adaptations, for I had not read either Defoe’s famous novel or its four-months-later sequel. In July 2009 I corrected myself on the question as to whether there could be a subcombative (I used the term "noncombative" then) form of the adventure-mythos. From ADDENDA EST:

...on further consideration I did think of a type of adventure-story that could take place in a "noncombative mode:" namely, the so-called "Robinsonade," the subgenre of lost-on-a-desert-island stories that were spawned by the considerable influence of Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I also wrote that there was some "man vs. man" conflict in the first novel, which was correct, though the combat-scenes are rather niggling compared to the novel's emphasis upon Crusoe's efforts to survive and make a comfortable haven on his deserted isle. Today I would still say that it is a novel that aligns largely with the invigorative mode of the adventure-mythos, though the invigorative elements spring from the protagonist's struggles to survive rather than his fairly brief conflicts with cannibals and mutineers.

In 2013's A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIC FANTASY-ADVENTURE, I touched upon another Defoe work-- which I still have not read today-- as an example of naturalistic adventure.

Examples of such naturalistic adventures include Defoe's 1720 novel CAPTAIN SINGLETON, Walter Scott's breakthrough 1814 historical epic WAVERLY and Schiller's 1781 play THE ROBBERS.  Even some poets began to emulate these more or less naturalistic "swashbuckling" themes, discernible in some of Byron's long poems of the early 19th century, like CHILDE HAROLD (1812) and THE CORSAIR (1814).  And undoubtedly there were many forgotten novels that trod the same basic territory, particularly the anonymously written "highwayman stories" popular in the 1700s. 

In 2014's ADDRESSING DISTRESS PT. 3, I advanced this hypothesis:

....I think 1719 brings a far more credible progenitor for pop culture: Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.  In contrast to many of the novels aimed at more educated readers-- those of Swift, Fielding, and Voltaire, for three-- CRUSOE can be read for nothing more than visceral entertainment.  True, the novel has its deeper themes, but I don't think that its perennial popularity rests on them.

To date I have not found a better example of a "progenitor for pop culture" than ROBINSON CRUSOE. It's a little harder, though, to suss out its place in the history of adventure-fiction.

In SHORT HISTORY I cited a Wiki-quote to the effect that the genre of the chivalric romance had fallen out of fashion by 1600. I've heard it said that Edmund Spenser's 1590-96 poetic epic THE FAERIE QUEENE was not popular with contemporaneous reviewers, and this stands in strong contrast to the overwhelming success of Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE in 1605, a work often credited with demolishing the reputation of the chivalric romance. As I look at this list of 17th-century works of repute, I see nothing that does not shout "elite culture," even if certain works, such as the plays of Shakespeare, were apparently popular with the masses. Most of these works, IMO, would align with the other three Fryean mythoi-- drama, irony, or comedy-- but not with adventure. Even Milton's SAMSON AGONISTES, which like the Biblical story ends with Samson exacting a pyrrhic victory over the Philistines, aligns more with drama than with adventure.

 So is ROBINSON CRUSOE not only the first pop-culture novel with broad appeal to the increasingly literate masses, but also the 18th-century's first articulations of the adventure-mythos? It would seem so at present, though both the first book and its sequel are clearly subcombative works, in which some violence takes place but is not arranged to center upon the act of combat. From what I can tell, the 18th century's intellectual currents-- often represented as the "Age of Enlightenment" (1715-89)-- were still too allied to elite culture in order to allow for the invigorative mood of the fully combative adventure.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, in contrast, presents its contemporaneous readers with a picture of a European who has many lesser adventures in which he largely wins out over cannibals, mutineers, and Tartar raiders with his superior firepower, as I attempted to show in the first part of this two-part essay. Based on the way Defoe arranges his scenes of violence, I would say they are characterized more by "struggle" than by "combat." I''m not sure that any single literary work, whether of elite or popular culture, captures the attractions of the combative mode until Walter Scott makes his great breakthrough in the early 19th century with novels like ROB ROY and IVANHOE.

In the first part of CRUSADER I've detailed my problems with Crusoe's character: his priggish piety, his mental isolation from both his pets and fellow humans like Xury and Friday, and his questionable courage. But many of these traits are somewhat more forgivable in a character more defined by "persistence" than by "glory:" that is, a demihero rather than a hero.

In one of my early essays on the distinctions between these personas, I wrote this of the characters of the LOST IN SPACE series, which was perhaps only indirectly modeled on ROBINSON CRUSOE, through the later work SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON:

Despite the family's original purpose of space-exploration, the majority of the castaways-- mother Maureen Robinson, children Judy, Penny, and Will, and the cowardly stowaway Doctor Sniith-- are presented as being far from inclined to fight under most circumstances.  Only two of the male protagonists-- "alpha male" John Robinson and "beta male" Major Don West-- show much competence in the combat department, and even then, Major West only rarely shines as being more than just a "good" fighter.  John Robinson-- played by Guy Williams, the former TV "Zorro"-- is more frequently positioned as an above-average combatant, occasionally even displaying Zorro-style swordfighting skills. Though the Robinsons are portrayed as being willing to go to the wall to save persecuted or put-upon victims from aggressors, they only do so as a last resort, which makes them very different from the concept of the hero as a more active defender of right.

As discussed elsewhere, there is no reason a demihero cannot be a competent combatant, as was certainly the case with John Robinson. But this indirect namesake of Defoe's character is closer in spirit to Crusoe, in that both of them are largely concerned with day-to-day survival rather than with remaking the world.

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 1

I've finally read ROBINSON CRUSOE and its lesser-known follow-up, THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I noted in A SHORT HISTORY OF FANTASY-ADVENTURE how the days of the epic romance were followed by a dearth of adventure in fantasy literature, and that even those novels that had adventure-elements, such as Defoe's CAPTAIN SINGLETON, tended to lack fantastic elements. 

Defoe's best-known novel, ROBINSON CRUSOE, is another novel following in the cultural wake of the epic romances with their “knights of old.” Perhaps appropriately, given the way Defoe's century had turned against the ideals of the aristocracy, Defoe comes up with a protagonist who could not be further from the ideal of the knight. 

Crusoe has some dim ideas of glory when he defies the wishes of her merchant-father and goes to sea. Yet for the rest of the novels, he expresses nothing but pious regrets for his act of defiance, even though in the long run he becomes a rich man as the result of his travels. His first tour of duty at sea doesn’t exactly cover him with glory, and his captain frankly tells Crusoe that he was never meant to sail the seas. Nevertheless, he tries again. But everyone aboard his ship is taken prisoner by Ottoman pirates, and Crusoe becomes a slave. Though he’s treated reasonably well at a lord’s home in Morocco-- indeed, there are no badly-treated slaves depicted in the novels—Crusoe does show some guts by figuring out a way to escape his captors. A young boy named Xury—apparently also a slave, though Defoe does not say so outright—elects to go with Crusoe. Xury is only with the protagonist long enough to show the increase of Crusoe’s fortunes in two ways. The first is that, once Crusoe gets hold of a modern rifle, he uses it to flagrantly kill a lion minding its own business on the coast of Africa—one of many cavalier slayings by the Englishman. The second is that when Crusoe and Xury encounter a Portuguese captain, Crusoe actually sells Xury as a slave to the captain—and Xury is totally fine with it, accepting the provision that he’ll be freed in two years if he serves the captain well.

Since the captain’s port of call is Brazil, Crusoe uses his newfound wealth to buy a plantation there. Defoe doesn’t want this part of Crusoe’s life to become important, so despite being on the plantation for years, Crusoe does not marry or make any friends, and is in a sense almost as isolated as he will be following the third nautical voyage. This one, of course, goes down with all hands except for stranding Robinson Crusoe on a deserted Caribbean island.

This is of course the part of the novel that everyone knows by heart. Crusoe scavenges what he can from the wrecked ship, bewails his isolation for a time, and then slowly makes the island over into his own personal resort. The ship gives him ample firearms and ammunition, as well as a dog and some cats for minor companionship (none of whom he ever names). He soon finds that with patience, he can make by hand anything he really needs. He has any number of “Job moments,” where he wonders what he did to bring his creator’s wrath down upon him. But because he’s pious, eventually he decides to agree with Job, that the creator can do anything he likes with his creation.

Crusoe spends eighteen years on the island before he comes across the famous “footprint in the sand.” He’s freaked out by the lone footprint, surmising—correctly—that it was left by a Caribbean Indian, whose tribe is likely to practice the despicable rite of cannibalism. Some time later, some of the Indians begin landing their canoes on the island, explicitly to devour their captives, and Crusoe finds the gory remains. He entertains fantasies about using his guns to devastate their ranks, though prudence—the realization that some might get away and alert their fellow tribesmen—puts the brake on this resolve. (Again, he frames his prudence in religious terms: it’s not for him to punish the godless tribesmen if God doesn’t. etc.) But he does build up his ego by imagining his puissance—“I was a formidable fellow to look at when I went abroad”—though it’s significant that his ego depends principally on his many weapons.

Shortly before encountering the other best-known character in the novel, Crusoe presciently dreams of befriending one of the natives for a companion. He makes the dream come true days later, rescuing a native from his cannibal captors and killing them before they know what’s happening. He dubs the native Friday after the day on which he was rescued, and proceeds to instruct the willing native in the superiority of a Christian, non-cannibalistic outlook. Friday proves an easy convert, despite wondering why God doesn’t just kill the troublemaking Satan. After a short period of convivial life with Friday, Defoe gives Crusoe an almost anti-climactic out. Mutineers come to the island to get rid of the ship’s loyal sailors, but Crusoe prevents the murder of the crewmen. However, he also takes pity on the mutineers and leaves them on the island with assorted supplies, in lieu of their being hanged for mutiny. Then Cruose and Friday journey back to civilization. The rest of the novel is then devoted to sorting out Crusoe’s finances—his holdings have made him a rich man, even in his long absence—except for one last sortie with Friday.

While Crusoe is blissfully careless about wiping out any life-form that gets in his way, Defoe does play fair in showing Friday’s people to be just as anti-PETA. In the novel’s last chapter, Crusoe, Friday, and some companions have gone out into the wild, where they encounter various animals, including a bear. The bear seems willing to leave the humans alone, but Friday goes out of his way to antagonize the creature, and then shoot it through the head. Friday then justifies his actions by stating that his people killed bears in similar fashion back on their island, which would suggest that Defoe considered it a mark of manhood to slaughter animals, whether one worshipped the True God or not.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE picks up with Crusoe when he’s a comfortable sixty years old, married and settled in England. Yet he can’t let go of adventure, and leaves his wife behind to go to sea on a ship captained by his (never-named) nephew. Crusoe returns to his old island, and many chapters are devoted to conflicts between the lowlife English mutineers and industrious Spanish colonizers. There are also some more attempts at conversion, as one of the mutineers tries to explain Christianity to his Carib Indian wife. There’s a big fight when several canoes invade the island to attack the new arrivals, and the cannibals are outgunned and defeated. Crusoe then leaves the island for good.

However, the fate of the cannibals is a light one, compared to what happens to the natives of Madagascar when Crusoe’s ship makes landfall there. One of the sailors kidnaps a local woman, and while the word “rape” is never voiced, it’s fairly evident that this is what happens. The culprit is captured by the tribesmen, and Crusoe joins a party of sailors to investigate what happened to him. (FWIW, an innocent member of the crew is slain when the natives take the offender.) When the sailors find the rapist dead and mutilated, they lose all control and slaughter at least a hundred of the natives, though supposedly leaving most of the women and children unharmed. Crusoe himself does not take part in the killings, though he doesn’t endanger himself to stop them either. Back on the ship, he often voices his condemnation of the slaughter, to the extent that the sailors demand that the captain leave Crusoe behind in the port of Bengal. This is the closest Crusoe comes to being isolated again, though this time he has money and is able to link up with a trade-caravan on its way to China. The caravan suffers a few attacks by Tartar bandits, who are again vanquished by European weaponry. However, the remainder of the novel emphasizes Crusoe’s righteous scorn for the pagan Chines. There's an extremely chauvinistic chapter in which Crusoe leads a group in destroying a village idol that for some reason irritates the hell out of the pious Englishman. He again returns to England, richer than before, but resolved never to travel forth again, except for the ultimate voyage to meet his Maker.

I’ve often disagreed with the Mickey Marxists who want to see imperialism in every story that stars a straight white male, or fails to portray people of color as they want to see themselves. But I must admit that the CRUSOE novels exhibit a chauvinism so extreme that authors like Haggard, Doyle and Kipling look like models of liberalism by comparison. Defoe allows Crusoe a few moments of cultural relativism—he admits that the Spanish committed many atrocities against the natives of the New World—but at base, the author wants to give his audience a picture of the world as one where nothing, not even a mass slaughter, seriously challenges any preconceptions.

ROBINSON CRUSADE

I should expand a little on my remarks here, with regard to my speculative citation of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a contender for the "first work of popular fiction" in Western culture.

CRUSOE was not intended as a work of popular fiction in the sense that we use the term today. Though I confess that I have not read Defoe's entire novel, its deeper themes mark it as an ancestor of the form Voltaire later called the "conte philosophique," which he Voltaire coined in opposition to simple "popular tales."  This online journal includes an essay by one Peter Leithart, who asserts that "Robinson Crusoe is a novel that continually threatens to collapse into allegory." 

CRUSOE was not the first work of "elite culture" ever to become popular with the masses. We know from Ben Jonson's remarks that the audience he shared with William Shakespeare embraced the "mouldy tale" of PERICLES PRINCE OF TYRE, though the folkloric feel of the play alienated many later generations. But I perceive that CRUSOE, writing to a post-literate populace-- that is, one that had become dominantly literate and accepted all the customs of literacy-- validated the nature of the visceral and the popular in CRUSOE in a way that could not have happened with PERICLES or any similar work.

In the opening chapter of the literary survey LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL, critic Leslie Fiedler suggests some of the reasons that this may have come about.  Fiedler deems the eighteenth century to be the period of a "continuing, complex event" he calls "the Break-Through," in which many if not all of the old societal beliefs began to undergo a systematic reversal.

Whatever has been suspect, outcast and denied is postulated as the source of good... in a matter of months, Don Juan, enemy of Heaven and the family, has been transformed from villain to hero, and before the process is finished, audiences have learned to weep for Shylock rather than laugh him from the stage. The legendary rebels and outcasts, Prometheus and Cain, Judas and the Wandering Jew, Faust and Lucifer himself are one by one redeemed.

The same principle holds for that ancestor of the horror-genre, the Gothic:

..."gothic" passes from a term of contempt to one of description and then of praise...

Fiedler, although he would champion popular fiction in many of his later works, does not treat popular fiction as a separate subject in LOVE AND DEATH, as this work is concerned largely with the novels that became canonical literary works.  But I assert that, in addition to the developments Fiedler cites for the Break-Through, another such turnabout is one in which fiction aimed at the masses began to be valued.  Admittedly, the next three centuries had no shortage of highbrow critics inveighing against the merely popular, one example of which can be read here. 

ROBINSON CRUSOE, perhaps as much or more than THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, may have played a key role in fomenting the rise of "popular tales," even if neither Defoe nor Walpole intended to bring about such a revolution in literary taste.  Significantly,  CRUSOE is the first novel of the 18th century to become popular enough to generate two sequels, as well as engendering its own eponymous genre, the "robinsonade."  Predictably enough, many of the works listed as followers in this generic tradition-- particularly the best-known, the 1812 SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON-- have little of the "conte philosophique" about them.  But this was only fair, given that "elite culture" had a long tradition of borrowing from the pre-literate forms of "popular fiction"-- with the great Bard of Avon fairly well leading the pack in this respect.

ADDRESSING DISTRESS PT. 3

I observed at the end of Part 1 that a statement by Brittney-Jade Colangelo was intriguingly arguable, so in this section I will proceed to argue the point in said statement:

The “Damsel In Distress” archetype is arguably the first character type for women in popular culture.

As I also observed, Colangelo does not examine popular culture as a whole, but concentrates on the indubitably influential genre of horror, particularly in its cinematic iterations.  But if she had chosen to cast her net more widely, to take in all of popular culture-- where might she have started, given that there is no universal agreement as to when it begins?

One starting point is to observe that although popular culture has many facets in common with so-called "folk culture," the most salient difference is that the latter is predominantly pre-literate, in that its practitioners usually could not read, while the former is predominantly post-literate, even though it will eventuate in media that require little or no reading-skill, primarily that of the cinema.  Thnaks to innovations in printing-technology, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to this excerpt from Wikipedia, can boast the first true "bestsellers:"

The vast printing capacities meant that individual authors could now become true bestsellers: Of Erasmus's work, at least 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime alone (1469–1536).^[

All very well for Erasmus, but he's still "elite culture."  Where does popular literature, the literature of the masses, begin?

In this essay I asserted that I didn't think that popular fiction truly got rolling until the 19th century, but there are some noteworthy exceptions in the 18th, which is generally considered the era in which the form of the prose novel catches fire. Wikipedia cites several "genres" of novel, including the epistolary novel, the libertine novel, and-- most significantly for Colangelo's argument-- the Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 work, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO-- also the first "supernatural Gothic" in that the ghostly happenings are not disavowed at the novel's end.

So one might fairly cite OTRANTO as the progenitor of the horror genre.  But is it also the progenitor of all popular fiction? And if I were, what consequence would that have for the "damsel in distress" argument?

OTRANTO has but three female characters, all distressed by the castle's overlord Manfred.  When Manfred's only son Conrad is killed by a supernatural phenomenon, the lord plans to divorce his hapless wife Hippolita-- surely given the name of a famous Amazon in irony!-- and to marry his son's fiancée, Isabella. Isabella, with the help of Manfred's daughter Matilda, flees Manfred's influence, and both become the first distressed damsels in the Gothic subgenre, and in horror fiction generally.  Thus, if we regarded OTRANTO as the starting-point for popular culture, Colangelo would be entirely correct.

As it happens, though, I think 1719 brings a far more credible progenitor for pop culture: Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.  In contrast to many of the novels aimed at more educated readers-- those of Swift, Fielding, and Voltaire, for three-- CRUSOE can be read for nothing more than visceral entertainment.  True, the novel has its deeper themes, but I don't think that its perennial popularity rests on them. According to the summaries I have read, CRUSOE, unlike OTRANTO, has no significant female characters at all, so it neither proves nor disproves Colangelo's assertion. None of Defoe's other works fit my criteria for popular culture, though it is worth noting that Defoe was not hostile to the idea of empowered female characters, given that his second best-known novel is 1722's MOLL FLANDERS. The titular character probably is not a femme formidable, though Wikipedia notes that she "begins a career of artful thievery, which, by employing her wits, beauty, charm, and femininity, as well as hard-heartedness and wickedness, brings her the financial security she has always sought."

Lacking another nominee for the beginnings of popular fiction, then, Colangelo's assertion would seem to be correct, but with a corollary.

Femmes formidables had appeared in earlier works of "elite literature," not least Shakespeare's HENRY VI, PART 1, with its sword-swinging villainess "Joan la Pucelle," and in Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE, with its equally martial heroine Britomart, but even in poetry and prose, realistic villainesses were more standard, as with such Bard-born characters as Lady Macbeth and Tamora of TITUS ANDRONICUS.  Given that the eighteenth century became dominated by the realistic novel, it's perhaps not surprising that the more martial "femmes" were not much in evidence. But though one might hypothesize that OTRANTO may indeed give us the first "damsels in distress," two years later the same author wrote a never-produced play in which a female character, the titular MYSTERIOUS MOTHER, performs an evil act worthy of Shakespeare's Tamora, best known for inciting her two sons to rape a younger woman.

Walpole's drama on that popular yet disturbing theme oddly common in the Romantic period: incest. Walpole gives us a multiple incest scenario: the Countess knowingly seduces her son on the night of her husband's death; her son, Edmund, thinks he's having sex with one of his mother's maids, so he's pretty much guiltless. This tryst makes the Countess pregnant, and she gives birth to Adeliza, with whom Edmund, not knowing she is the Countess' daughter (let alone not knowing that she is also his own daughter and his half-sister), falls in love. They marry, and only then does the Countess, who's been laboring under a load of guilt for 16 years, reveal all. Layer onto this a plot involving the wicked and duplicitious monk Benedict, and you're in deep Gothic waters. Unlike Otranto this work is utterly devoid of supernaturalism, but with a family romance like that as the subject, who needs ghosts? Perhaps not surprisingly, the play was never performed in Walpole's lifetime.-- THE LITERARY GOTHIC.

So if Walpole gave us the first damsels in distress, he also gave us an early example of "feminine evil," one who defines the parameters of the Gothic at least as well as Manfred does.

It's my contention, then, that archetypes of women both with and without agency-- whether representing good or evil-- appear throughout the realm of popular fiction, and that many are not specifically generated by one another, as Colangelo seems to argue.  Some famed works of popular fiction are known for featuring both noble heroines and conniving villainesses in the same stories, as is seen in Dumas' THREE MUSKETEERS and Hugo's MAN WHO LAUGHS.  In fact, Colangelo indirectly references the latter:

From the earliest examples of horror films, “Damsels in Distress” (or women in peril) were the only roles that actresses would play. From the beautiful Dea in The Man Who Laughs, to the kidnapped Madeline Parker in White Zombie, these women were often the sole conflict of horror films.

Were such imperiled heroines central to the themes of many early horror stories, whether in books or films? Probably, but Wikipedia notes that Hugo's original novel contains a female character at least as perverse as the Mysterious Mother:

Gwynplaine accidentally meets Josiana, having been brought into her palace by her confidant, the intriguer Barkilphedro. At first she nearly seduces him, perversely excited by his deformity. However, she then receives a letter containing the Queen's order to marry him (as a replacement for David and the legitimate Lord Clancharie) and therefore violently rejects him as a lover, while accepting him as her (formal) husband.

The 1928 film, which I have not screened in many years, may not emphasize the perversity of the Duchess Josiana, but a cognate character is in the film.  It's also worth noting that WHITE ZOMBIE, closely patterned on the 1931 DRACULA film, contains a scene in which the zombified Madeline is not just a woman in peril; she is also briefly a threat, when the villain orders her to kill the hero.

Therefore, even though from one viewpoint the "damsel in distress" might indeed be the first feminine archetype in "popular fiction," it is hardly the only one, nor does its primacy necessarily generate its opposite number.


ADDENDA: I revised an earlier paragraph above, to make a more pertinent comparison between Shakespeare's Tamora and the titular character of Walpole's THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER.