How to Befriend a Dragon: Depiction of Female Characters in Damsel

GAŠPAROVIČOVÁ, Alena. How to Befriend a Dragon: Depiction of Female Characters in Damsel. In 3rd Nitra Postgraduate Conference in English Studies. 2024.

Basic information

• Original name: How to Befriend a Dragon: Depiction of Female Characters in Damsel
• Authors: GAŠPAROVIČOVÁ, Alena.
• Edition: 3rd Nitra Postgraduate Conference in English Studies, 2024.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60206 Specific literatures
• Country of publisher: Slovakia
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Keywords (in Czech): Mladá dáma; film; kniha; feminismus; pohádky; fantasy
• Keywords in English: Damsel; movie; novel; feminism; fairy tales; fantasy
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, active and passive. These and other binaries have held a significant place in the study of fairy tales for decades. Although the depiction of female characters in fairy tales is a complex topic, the archetypes that Marcia Lieberman presented in the article “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale” can be found in a number of fairy tales, especially in the best-known ones. Female protagonists are good, beautiful and passive, so they can be saved by a prince; the antagonists bad, active, and frequently ugly. Naturally, with the rise of feminism, a requirement for stronger female characters led to a surge in adaptations of these stories with more assertive protagonists, or, in some cases, even to the creation of new stories. This presentation will look at an example of the latter – a recent Netflix dark fantasy movie Damsel and the novel of the same name by Evelyn Skye to discuss how the main female characters are portrayed in comparison to the fairy-tale archetypes. It will primarily focus on the female characters, namely the main character Elodie, her sister Floria, her stepmother, Lady Bayford, mother-in-law Queen Isabelle and the dragon. Utilising a combination of close reading analysis and feminist fairy tale criticism, this presentation aims to compare and contrast the depiction of these characters in the movie and in the novel to ascertain how they embody or subvert the aforementioned archetypes.