noun, [ahr-tist]
Simon De Vos, Apollo and The Nine Muses, Oil on Copper, 1630-1676
Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers in Black Swan, 2010
The Artist as a sub-archetype of the Maiden is somewhat of an unusual one as her creativity, wit and skill for a trade is one of her definitive characteristics that set her apart from her counterparts. However, she still falls under The Maiden trope as many artists are either used as a beautiful muse to inspire men, or has to use their skills to help them break free from a damsel in distress situation. The Nine Muses in the Ancient Greek pantheon are goddesses personified as creative practices, appearing before heroes to inspire them in the form of a beautiful woman.1 Scheherazade from A Thousand and One Nights, in order to stave off execution, ends her stories she tells the Sultan in cliffhangers, so that he is hooked enough to let her live another day.2
Miguel Carbonell I Selva, Safo Oil on Canvas, 1881
Poster for Camille Claudel, featuring Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel, 1988
The exploration of The Artist in modern media has diverged into many routes.
Although not confined to female characters, one framing of The Artist has
become much more focused on the character’s relationship with the artistic
skill that they possess. Many of these characters strive to be the absolute
best in their field, pushing for perfection even when they have
reached it to outside eyes. This ambition tends to alienate these characters
to others who unjustly think they are arrogant or are intimidated by them.
This leads to isolation of the character, and they are further consumed by their
craft which quickly turns into an unhealthy obsession.
Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan explores this idea of the obsessed artist
through a dark and grim lens. The protagonist, Nina Sayers is a ballet dancer,
and is cast to play the White and Black Swan in Tchaivosky’s Swan Lake.
She is not as confident in her portrayal as the Black Swan however, and the
limits she pushes herself to to portray the Black Swan leads her
into a descent of psychosis, and her eventual death. Her final performance
is deemed perfect by her rival (and imagined lover) Lily, however she is not alive to
bask in her glory because her obsession had overcome her.1
There are of course exceptions to The Artist characters that use their skills and
creativity outside of a male realm. The greek poet Sappho is famous for using
her skill to compose poems that express romantic and sexual desires toward both
men and women, having agency over her own sexuality.3 Although the gender of the
speaker is never explicitly stated in her lyric, Ode to Aphrodite, it is likely
that Sappho herself has these thoughts of yearning toward the female Goddess of
Love and Beauty, and Sappho is entranced by her beauty and struck by her desire
for her:
Very swift they came; and thou, gracious Vision,
Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty, Leaned to me and asked,
“What misfortune threatened? Why I had called thee?”4
Emma Watson as Pauline Fossil in Ballet Shoes, 2007
Further examples of The Artist that follow in similar vein to Sappho is Japan’s Shinto Goddess of the Dawn, Mirth, Reverly and the Arts, Ame-no-Uzume no Mikoto. She is known for her bravery, joviality and creativity, and according to Shinto scripture, helped save the world from eternal darkness when she performed a funny dance in order to coax her mistress, Goddess of the Sun Amaterasu, out of the cave where she had secluded herself in shame.5 Ame-no-Uzume, like Sappho, is a maiden that uses her creative skills outside of a man’s relation to her, instead using her skills in dance and song to save the whole whole world herself.
Noémie Merlant (left) and Adèle Haenel (right) as Marianne and Héloïse in Portrait of A Lady On Fire, 2019
“Rabin defined the manic pixie dream girl as a muse whose primary role is to teach and transform a young man. As contemporary a trope as it feels, it’s as old as Dante with his vision of being guided through paradise by his saintly Beatrice. Bettina was my guide, and as much as my adolescent self thought it adored her, I thought less about her and more about how it was she made me feel. Though I questioned whether I was good enough for her, and I felt lucky that she’d chosen me, I didn’t question her role as change agent in my life. It was a one-sided relationship not because I was any more selfish than your average teen boy, but because I took it for granted that this brilliant young woman knew the world better than I did.”2
Another route of exploration The Artist has gone through in modern media
is the emergence into The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The MPDG, simply put,
“is a type of female character often depicted as a whimsical, quirky,
sometimes eccentric, fantasy woman who saves the male protagonist from
himself. She usually aides in his transformation without ever showing
any real agency of her own.”3 Significantly, they are also creatives
of some kind, to align with their quirky and different personalities.
The MPDG aligns with a few histroic examples of The Artist,
such as The Nine Muses, as they are used as a tool in the form of an unusual,
beautiful woman to inspire or save the male protagonist from himself.
There has been a recent backlash to this trope however. Clementine
Kruczyinski in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind outwardly
fits this trope, however the movie actively rejects the notion that
she is a character that will ‘save’ the male hero, and further highlighting
the very real and harmful notions this trope projects onto young women,
such as the romanticisation of mental illness.4 It is interesting,
therefore, that The Artist has gone through many progressions, some still aligning
with how they were viewed in the past, and others growing from these roots
into something more complex.
Totoya Hokkei, No. 3 (Sono san): Ame no Uzume, from the series The Cave Door of Spring (Haru no iwato), Ukiyo-e, 1870
Kate Winslet as Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, 2004
noun, plural [beau·ties] adjective
Francois Boucher, The Judgement of Paris, Oil on Canvas, 1754
Douglas Kirkland, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, 1962
The Beauty is a sub-archetype of The Maiden that spans all cultures and highlights
the extent of how humans universally value physical beauty, especially in women.1
Almost all religions and folklore have deities and characters that personify this
trait, and depending on the characters’ personalities and actions, reflect the many
paradoxical ways in which female beauty is viewed. Examples that fit the typical
maiden-like beauty can be seen in Psyche2 or Andromeda,3
who are beautiful but not dangerous as they are youthful, naive and submissive girls.
Aphrodite4 and Oshun,5
the Greek and Yoruba Goddesses of Love and Beauty however represent the other side
of the coin, wherein female beauty is seen as something dangerous, both deities
possessing capricious, mercurial and sexually assertive natures, fully
aware of the power they hold and using their beauty and looks to achieve their own
ends.
The Beauty is therefore seen, through the male gaze, as a woman of undeniable
value due to her looks, and either something to be conquered or feared.
Characters that fall under the first category tend to be one dimensional
in folklore - the only quality mentioned is her
beauty, and she is either in need of rescuing from some sort of evil and is
only deemed worthy of rescuing precisely because she is beautiful. Her
submissive nature and state of virginity further add to her allure, creating
one speicific standard of female beauty and worth from her looks and lack of
personality and sexual agency.6
Fortunino Matania, Cupid And Psyche, Oil On Canvas, c. 1881-1963
Xiao Qiao as Lin Chi-Ling in Red Cliff, 2008
In a large part due to colonisation and the consequent spread of eurocentric beauty standards, The Beauty in mainstream, popular media in the west now categorises their most beautiful women as women who were born with these traits.1 Furthermore, Hollywood as an institution has had a monopoly in the global entertainment industry since the turn of the 20th century, and with the second world war exerting America’s soft power through its culture, only further spread these standards internationally.2 Marilyn Monroe, for example, was a white-american woman with blonde hair and blue eyes (which, significantly, wasn’t her natural hair colour) and many people believed she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, her allure and what she represented still having a major hold on society today.3
Esmerelda in Walt Disney’s animated The Hunchback of Notredame, 1996
In comparison, examples that fall under the second category, of female beauty as something to be feared, are figures that are fully aware of their value due to their looks, and utilise this to their own advantage. Aphrodite is a significant example, and she further highlights how society degradingly views women who utilise her beauty in this way, as she at times can be extremely jealous, mean spitrited and volatile.7 It is important to note that The Beauty is very paradoxical, reflecting the conflicting views many societies seem to have on female beauty and the power it holds, and how it seems to look down upon women who use the power society has given them to achieve their goals.
Beyoncé in Black Is King, 2020
Old Hollywood did acknowledge that people of other races were objectively beautiful
and cast them in films - Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong had an extremely successful
career - however it is important to note that many people of color were cast to play villains
no matter how beautiful they were, who either attempted to seduce the
heroic and and noble white actor / actress,4 or ‘exotic’ novelties who were far more
sexualised than their white counterparts who needed to be conquered by the white man
and ‘civilised.’ This mindset can still be seen in the popular Disney princess films
released in the late 90s / early 2000s, wherein characters like Esmerelda, Jasmine
and Pocahontas wore far more revealing clothes and were designed to be more curvaceous
than Belle, Aurora or Cinderella.5
Of course, fighting against the Eurocentric beauty standard has become more prevalent -
African-American artists like Beyoncé have used their influence to inspire women
who look like her to have pride in their origins and stand against this harmful standard,6
and diversity in Hollywood has been put under a much more critical lens by the public,
which may be a positive sign for more heterogeneity in mainstream media.7
“People of colour make up the majority of the world, yet somehow, from Beijing to Bahia, women aspire to whiteness. I would learn later, of course, that this is no surprise: that to be white is, as American sociologist Michael S Kimmel puts it, “to be simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air.” 8
noun(s) plural [muh-don-uh] [hawr]
Johann Ladenspelder, Adam and Eve, Copper engraving, 1550
Winona Ryder (left) and Sadie Frost (right) as Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992
“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.”1
To understand why The Madonna & The Whore work in relation to each other as sub-archetypes and what they represent, one must first define The Madonna-Whore complex. The Madonna-Whore complex was a term coined by psychologist Sigmund Freud, wherein (usually) a man cannot feel sexual arousal for his wife or someone who he respects and is in a loving relationship with (The Madonna), however can feel sexual desire for a woman who he views as degraded or debased (The Whore).2 This complex is obviously harmful, as it enforces the idea that women are simply seen as degraded sexual objects and sexually desirable by a man until the man gets to know them personally and realise they are a human-being worthy of respect, which consequently makes them sexually undesirable.3
Brigitte Helm as The Maschinenmensch in Metropolis, 1927
The Madonna & The Whore as sub-archetypes have been a popular trope to explore in contemporary literature, and many authors have taken to subverting it. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the two women Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray juxtapose each other as Madonna and Whore, however the two have elements of both. Lucy entertains three suitors, but is kind, pure-hearted and dies as a virgin. Mina, while not exactly a whore, is empowered and provocative, and as she was a married woman, she was not a virgin and played a significant role in defeating Dracula.1 Interestingly, in the movie adaptation in 1992, this subversion is erased, Lucy acting as Whore and Mina as Madonna, meaning there may be a regression toward the biblical thinking in more recent media.2
Frances Purnell Dehlsen, illustration of the “Jungle Witch” (the Xtabay) from Idella Purnell’s The Wishing Owl: A Maya Story Book, 1931
Debroah Francois as Laura in Student Services, 2010
As one can tell from the etymology, The Bible has had a large hand in the foundations of this sub-archetype, with The Madonna referring to the Virgin Mary, who is celebrated for becoming a mother to Jesus without losing her virginity, and The Whore referring, perhaps, to Mary Magdalene or The Whore of Babylon, who ‘tempted’ the Kings of Earth with her sexuality to commit adultery and bring forth the end of the world. It is significant to note that in this tale the blame lies entirely on the woman, and the men are viewed as helpless victims to their desires and not as an active participant.4 Both are weighed on the scale of morality due to their sexual status, and that is all that they are defined by.
The Madonna-Whore Complex, also existed within cultures and religions before Christianity, and the patriarchal dictatorship and double standard when it came to the state of a woman’s sexuality has been a popular point of discussion since what seems to be from the beginning of time. However, some cultures had slightly more complex and nuanced view besides virgin = good, whore = bad.
Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov, The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene, Oil on Canvas, c. 1834-1835
Natalie Dyer and Shannon Purser as Nancy Wheeler and Barbara ‘Barb’ Holland in Stranger Things, 2016-?
This regression to the biblical ideations of The Madonna & The Whore in 20th/21st century mainstream
media can be seen in the Netflix series Stranger Things, released in 2016. In the first season, one of
the protagonists, Nancy Wheeler, is introduced as a sweet, pure, bookish girl who has caught the
interest of the popular bad boy, Steve Harrington. In the third episode, Nancy loses her virginity
to Steve, however while she and Steve sleep together, Nancy’s best friend Barb is killed by the
Demogorgon.3 From Nancy losing her virginity in a room that is just upstairs from where Barb
was sitting moments before her death, an interpretation could be made that this is Nancy’s punishment
for losing her virginity and for her transition from Madonna to Whore.4 Of course, the opposite
could be assumed as this subverts the stereotypical horror trope that the promiscuous girl dies
and the virgin lives.5 However, it is still a visual representation of the belief that one girl deserves to
live over the other due to their sexual status.
Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver further delves into this regression, however the regression is
from the view point of Travis, the male protagonist, and the film criticises the narrow minded
and delusional way he (as well as the rest of the world) views women as Madonna and Whore. Travis was infatuated with
Betty and saw her as a beacon of purity (madonnna), however after she rejects him, he instantly changes his mind
and sees her as “just like all the others” (whore). On the other hand, he starts off seeing Iris,
a child prostitute, as whore, however he soon becomes obsessed with becoming her white night and ‘saving’ her, largely
due to how young she is - and when he dies, she appears to him as a figure in white, as if she was an angel.6
“People with this psychological complex see a change in personality in their female partner and don’t
wish to — and sometimes can’t — ‘degrade’ her by having sex, leading to frustration and anger on both
sides of the relationship.
This moment was captured well in an episode of Sex and the City between Charlotte (played by
Kristin Davis) and Trey (played by Kyle MacLachlan). Followng their wedding, Trey is unable to
perform as he sees Charlotte as the virginal character who he wed. To switch this perception,
Charlotte plays with herself in front of him to show she is, in fact, a woman with desires.” 7
A popular Mayan legend about The Xtabay (The Jungle Witch) tells a story about two sisters, Xkeban and Utz-colel. They were both beautiful, however Xkeban was far more promiscuous than Utz-colel, who was a virgin. One was treated badly by her community because of this and the other celebrated, however what is different about this tale is that The Whore was kind and giving to her community, whereas the The Madonna was cruel, cold-hearted and thought she was superior to everyone. When Xkeban died, to the surprise of everyone she metamorphosed into a beautiful and fragrant smelling flower, and Utz-Colel arrogantly and jealously thought she would morph into an even prettier flower when her time came. However when her time came her dead body had an unbearable smell, and flowers disappeared around it. Utz-colel eventually became The Xtabay, a demon, as she was so consumed in her jealousy and rage toward her sister even after death.5 It is significant to see a very different moral take on the Madonna-Whore archetype from such an ancient culture, however this highlights how the current understanding of The Madonna-Whore complex is rooted in inaccurate, sexist and toxic prejudices.
noun [prin-sis, -ses, prin-ses]
John Collier, Queen Guinevere’s Maying, Oil on Canvas, 1900
Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, 2011-2019
The Princess is a specific figure from folklore from all around the world - a popular sub-archetype that captured the imaginations and minds of many from archaic and present societies. The Princess is often mistaken for The Beauty - A princess cannot be a princess without being beautiful. However what separates the two is that The Beauty can include figures that use their looks for their own purposes, and aren’t deemed ‘virtuous.’ The Princess however is almost always sweet, kind, morally righteous and most importantly ‘pure,’ her role in life set as a damsel in distress needing to be saved from a knight, a prince, a king, etc.1 All princess characters are furthermore not necessarily high-born, some, like Rapunzel or Cinderella, born from normal families,2 however they fall under this category as they are, again, normally rescued by a man of noble-birth, making her a princess through marriage.
Unknown, Prince Climbs Up Rapunzel’s Golden Hair, Wood Engraving, 1890
Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in The Star Wars Trilogy, 1977-1983
The fascination with The Princess has continued into current popculture. Disney animation studios have released a widely popular line of movies since the 1930s, starting with Snow White, centred around princess characters. These stories are usually always romantic, the princess character paired with a young, good-looking man who is usually a noble or a son of someone of fiscal power.1 As the conversation around 3rd-wave feminism and subsequent interest in more diverse, stronger female characters arose2 and when Disney animation was at its ‘renaissance,’3 Disney princesses evolved into more empowered characters who have storylines outside of their romantic interests. Mulan saves China with her skills and competence as a warrior, her romance with General Li-Shang a secondary plot,4 and in Pixar’s Brave, there is no romantic element at all, the movie instead focusing on a tom-boy princess, Meredith, and her strained relationship with her mother.5
"It is well," said Merlin, "that thou shouldst take a wife,
for no man of bounteous and noble nature should live without one; but is there any lady
whom thou lovest better than another?"
"Yea," said King Arthur, "I love Guinevere, the daughter of King Leodegrance, of Camelgard,
who also holdeth in his house the Round Table that he had from my father Uther; and as I
think, that damsel is the gentlest and the fairest lady living." 3
Letitia Wright as Princess Shuri in Black Panther, 2019
From looking at The Princess archetype in many folktales, the common message is that that ideally,
women were not to be beings of agency and they should simply sit around waiting to be rescued by a handsome
prince, who will whisk them off to a better life. This theme reflects and gives a glimpse into how women
were treated in patriarchal societies and why they were displayed in this way in folklore
predominantly native to the west.4
There were certainly exceptions to this rule - not all cultures championed this mindset, and certain communities
like the Mossi people in Burkina Faso celebrated their Princess Yennenga for being a warrior and a
fighter.5 However much of western mainstream pop-culture have only begun to view ‘strong’ female
characters as a figure of interest, and have followed the mould of The
Princess as a damsel in distress figure until the turn of the 20th and 21st century.
Raji Rava Varma. Painting depicting Princess Usha, Date Unknown
Anne Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries, 2001
Further empowered examples of The Princess can be seen in Star Wars’s Leia Organa, wherein she leads a rebel army to fight the tyrannical rule of the Empire,7 or Black Panther’s Princess Shuri who is considered to be the smartest character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, building very advanced weapons and technology that the world outside of Wakanda has yet to catch up to.8 Sansa Stark from HBO’s Game of Thrones series shows an in-depth character exploration on how a Princess character can develop from the archaic stereotype - a damsel in distress - to a brutal and hardened ruler shaped by numerous tragedies, focusing on the leadership and sovereign role of being a princess instead of the princess being a figure made solely as a romantic interest for a male lead, as well as a helpless victim with no agency.9
Tiana in Walt Disney’s animated The Princess and the Frog, 2009
noun [sad gurl]
Edward Poynter, Orpheus and Eurydice, Oil on Canvas, 1862
Unknown, Poster for Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958
The correlation between women and sadness may be a surprising one at first glance, but it has existed since the archaic times. Many deities that personified depression, sadness and melancholia from all religions have been women, the Roman Goddess Miseria (born from her Grecian counterpart Oziys) the foundation to the etymology of the word ‘misery.’1 There is no straight answer as to why there is such a link between women and sadness - is it perhaps how women, unlike men, had the ability to feel their depression with less societal shame,2 therefore cementing in people’s minds that sadness was more of a feminine trait? The exact reasoning is unknown, however it is significant to see that women and melancholia have been inextricably tied together in all corners of the world.
Edward Burns Jones, Night, depicting who is though to be Oizys, 1870
Nicole Kidman as Satine in Moulin Rouge!, 2001
The allure of The Sad Girl has only heightened in media after Ophelia set the precedent in Hamlet. The romanticisation of a beautiful, skinny and almost always white girl and her depression / mental turmoil has become a common theme to see in many films, evolving beyond seeing her as just an aesthetic dead victim, but a target of romantic desire of a male protagonist, wherein male ‘heroes’ are consumed with the desire to save her, sometimes from herself, terminal illness, or some other tragedy. The first example can be seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, wherein Scottie, a detective, becomes obsessed with a woman he is hired to follow, Madeline, after she commits suicide by falling to her death on his watch. He dresses another woman as her, and is consumed with thoughts on how he could have saved her, the root of her sadness, and his suppossed ‘love’ for her.1
(From Left) Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall and Leslie Hayman as Lux, Mary, Cecilia and Therese Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, 1999
Evolving from religious spaces, sad women (or girls), became a figure of interest in early literature.
Hamlet’s Ophelia is the original Sad Girl, and Fabiola
from Nicholas Patricks Stephen Wiseman’s 1898 novel explores in further depth how a girl who seems to
have everything - wealth, beauty, etc - could still feel so sad and unsatisfied.3
Furthermore, Ophelia’s set another precedent for Sad Girls in literature and works of media,
which is the aestheticization and romanticisation of female misery. In Hamlet, her suicide is
romanticised, even idealised,4 and this theme carries through to visual representations of her in various
works of art. In John Everett Millais painting, she is depicted as a beautiful maiden, deathly pale,
lying in a still body of water surrounded by flowers with her hair fanned out around her. She does not
look like a corpse - instead, she is a romantic, dreamy figure, a beautiful tragedy.5 This fascination
with female sadness, madness and tragedy, is something that has only grown in pop-culture, and
perhaps, at least during Ophelia’s time, reflects the belief that only women were prone to such
fits of ''irrational' misery ot ‘hysteria’ (what we know now as mental illness)6 and if they happen
to be beautiful, thin and white, they are seen as romantic tragedies worth mourning and be morbidly fascinated by.
F. Fontana, Engraving for Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman’s novel Fabiola, 1898
Kaori Miyazono in Japanese anime Your Lie In April, 2016
The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola in 1999, also sees a male character look back on an
unattainable yet tragic group of sisters they knew as teenagers who committed suicide in their
adolescence due to their zealously religious parents’ abuse and overbearing behaviour.2 These sisters
are conventionally attractive and happen to be virgins, thus acting as tragic / innocently beautiful
dreamy enigmas to the men who reminisce about them, Coppola’s trademark pastel colours and fantastical
cinematography3 highlighting the romanticised way in which the men see the girls and their suicides.
The Sad Girl who is ridden with a terminal illness who becomes the doomed romantic interest of
the male protagonist is a popular character in a many Japanese anime series and movies. Your Lie In April4
and the movie I Want To Eat Your Pancreas5 tell the story of high school boys who
fall in love with a girl who tragically die at the end of the story, and like with The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,
these girls are both vibrant and full of life, bringing excitement and ‘saving’ the male protagonist in a spiritual sense,
however because they die, they become a tragic footnote in the men’s story that is sadly yet fondly
remembered. The girls’ tragedies have somehow become appropriated by the men in these stories, and
how their deaths helped these men grow as people.
“And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck’d the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth, Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” 6
“Postwar Hollywood liberally used the Sexy Doomed Sad Girl in films like Vertigo and Lilith, where a woman's allure was equal to her grim predestined fate. "The twist is, she's beautiful," explains Bechdelcast co-host Jamie Loftus when asked about this archetype. "She's so sad, but she's beautiful. Any time a mentally ill character is not attractive, when is that character saved? When is that character given the correct amount of attention in the plot, or by anyone in the movie?" These films are more about the men who love a Sad Girl, and less about real mental illness.”6
noun [sel-fish gurl]
Nicolas Poussin, Birth of Venus, c. 1635-1636
Rachel McAdams (middle) as Regina George in Mean Girls, 2004
The Selfish Girl is a sub-archetype that is split between two different types of personalities - one defined as a maiden that is intentionally mean spirited and self-serving, and the other not outwardly so, however her careless and sometimes selfish actions have drastic consequences on the people and communities around her. The second example can be seen in infamous figures from Greek myth - Pandora and her curiosity which unleashed horrors from the box,1 and Helen of Troy igniting the Trojan War when she ran off with Paris.2 Of course, these two women weren’t entirely at fault, Helen least of all as it is widely debated that Paris abducted her against her will,3 however these women are solely remembered as the cause, their actions alone triggering catastrophic events even if they were tested or taken against their will, and none of the other (male) instigators are blamed.
Ashley Tisdale as Sharpay Evans inthe High School Musical Trilogy, 2006-2008
The other personality of The Selfish Girl shows a maiden who is usually beautiful, yet, like
some characters who fall under The Beauty sub-archetype, tend to use their beauty to achieve their own ends.
Furthermore, they are intentionally mean-spirited and antagonistic, and their beauty / personalities acts as a
reflection to who they are inside - a rose with thorns.
An obvious example from folklore are Cinderella’s wicked step-sisters, who abuse Cinderella,
degrading her and forcing her to do brutal chores.4 Aphrodite, again, also falls under this
archetype, as she is easily quick to anger, jealous of other women who she deems as competition in physical looks, and
wishes them harm because of it. She sends her son, Cupid, to harm Psyche when people start to worship her
in favor of the goddess, deserting Aphrodite’s temple.5 This element of competition over
physical beauty is a significant characteristic when looking at The Selfish Girl in historical context,
and one that has carried over to mainstream pop-culture in modern and contemporary literature and media.
The Selfish Girl in the 21st century is know more commonly known as The Mean Girl - the foundations of their earlier counterparts are there, however they have evolved in accordance to the setting they find themselves placed, which is a middle / high school, or even college. The introduction of films revolving around teenagers, such as teen romantic comedies (or rom-coms) or teen dramas, have made The Mean Girl a staple, perhaps the most well-known example of the original Mean Girl being Heather Chandler in the 1980 film Heathers.5 The Mean Girl is almost always rich, promiscuous, beautiful and aware of it - using her looks and wealth to rise up in the social ladder at school - and extremely popular. Regina George in the 2009 movie Mean Girls embodies these traits as she is nasty to everyone, but people ‘still want to be her,’6 showcasing how The Mean Girl reflects the absurdity of peer pressure that can be found in school enviroments as well as the value societies place on physical beauty (as it may let immoral people get away with immoral behaviour). Nevertheless, The Mean Girl is also usually multi-dimensional, showing how the perpetrators themselves are also a victim of their circumstances - at the end of the day, they are just playing the ‘game’ society has placed them in, and using what they have to survive and stay at the top of the social food chain (see Claire Standish from The Breakfast Club)7
"Stesikhoros says that while sacrificing to the gods Tyndareus forgot Aphrodite and that the goddess was angry and made his daughters twice and thrice wed and deserters of their husbands . . . And Hesiod also says: ‘And laughter-loving Aphrodite felt jealous when she looked on them and cast them into evil report.”6
Jacques-Louis David, The Loves of Paris and Helen, 1788
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions, 1999
John William Waterhouse, Pandora, 1896
Vivien Leigh (left) and Clark Gable (right) as Scarlett O’hara and Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind, 1939
One of the most notorious examples of The Selfish Girl that came out of contemporary times and simultaneously changed the way women were portrayed in media is Scarlett O’Hara from the 1936 novel (and later the movie adaptation) Gone With The Wind. Scarlett is a southern belle who struggles with acting as she is expected to - prettily and refined. Her determination to get what she wants paired with her intelligence dominates, and reveals selfish and narcissistic parts of her personality. She is therefore far from perfect, easily manipulating the people around her and even killing a man to achieve her goals, and is blinded / stubborn to what she thinks is right, which, coupled with her selfishness, causes her to lose her love interest, Rhett Butler.1 Scarlett as a female protagonist is thus complex and flawed, which was highly unusual at the time, and perhaps set the precedent of imperfect (and even unlikable) female characters which fall under The Selfish Girl in pop-culture today.2
“The Mean Girl’s dominance over other girls, the subterfuge, and psychological evisceration she performed to uphold her dominance, became a hyper-ostentatious parody of womanhood itself — to exist as a woman was to constantly compare against and compete with other women. The Mean Girl trope had us all believe that the dark side to womanhood is catty, conniving competitiveness.” 4
Kim Walker as Heather Chandler in Heathers, 1989