If you dislike stories about damsels-in-distress, you might automatically reject the Maiden archetype.
But in fact, the Maiden has more depths than you might assume.
The Maiden archetype is often found within stories featuring powerful heroines and strong female characters. They represent innocence and potential and often have a lack of real-life experiences.
Read on to learn more about the maiden archetype, including characteristics, popular examples, and writing tips.
What is the Maiden Archetype?
If you’re unsure about character archetypes, and what they actually are, have a read of this article on the differences between archetypes and stereotypes.
The Maiden archetype often stars at the beginning of coming-of-age stories.
The Maiden is an archetype of potential: she contains as-of-yet unrealised strength, power and individuality. It’s just that, at the start of the story, she’s yet to reach her full potential.
Because youth is an inherent characteristic of this archetype, many of the stories featuring Maidens are found in young adult novels.
However, you can still find plenty of examples of this archetype-protagonist in adult stories. In these cases, the character’s youth may be more psychological than physical, featuring an adult character who has failed to mature into their potential.
The power of stories featuring Maiden-protagonists often lies in understanding how a young girl grows into a Heroine, or, in a tragic character arc, how the world prevents her from growing into herself. If a Maiden retains all the same archetypal characteristics at the end of her story as she possesses at the start, then by remaining a Maiden, she will have failed to grow into the Hero/ Heroine archetype.
The Maiden is a traditional feminine archetype, but she doesn’t always have to be female. Male characters can also fall into this archetype, when they remain stuck in immaturity or passive submission to authority, and have yet to fulfil their heroic potential. Peter Pan provides an example.
In this article, I’ll focus on writing female characters, but be aware these characteristics can translate into male characters.
Characteristics of the Maiden Female Archetype
The best way to gain a clear perspective of this archetype is to examine her traditional characteristics. These include:
Youth
As mentioned earlier, youth can be in terms of her actual age, or in terms of her psychological maturity, or both.
Passivity
The Maiden tends to be submissive to authority, in a way that leads her into passivity. This passivity is a core feature of her immaturity, and not an integral part of her personality.
She must learn to be active in order to grow into her individuality and out of her archetypal patterns.
This switch from passivity to proactivity makes the Maiden a great protagonist for coming-of-age stories, in which case she will often starts to become proactive at the story’s Middle.
But beware: if your Maiden is your story’s protagonist, and she stays reactive in all matters right until the story’s Middle, you may struggle to create a bond between your reader and your protagonist – a potentially fatal flaw to any story.
I’ll discuss how to avoid this trap in the later sections of this article.
Innocence
There’s usually a sweetness to the Maiden’s youthful naivety. As a result, she’s often terrifyingly unaware of the dangers of the world, believing her own innate goodness to be reflected in the world at large.
If this is the case, she’s likely in for a harsh awakening as the story develop, but her belief in the inherent goodness of people will remain, for as long as she stays a Maiden.
However, particularly in modern stories, a Maiden may have greater awareness of the evils of the outside world, maintaining her belief in goodness despite this.
In these cases, she’ll have to learn the importance of using her power proactively to make the world a better place for other innocents.
Protected/ Protectiveness
The Maiden may have been over-protected in her childhood, especially by parents wishing to preserve her innocence, in which case she may find herself dangerously unprepared for the world at large, where she’ll need to learn to protect herself.
Or, she may have been under-protected, and instead learned to spend her energies protecting herself. In these cases, she’ll often need to learn to lower her defensive walls in order to discover her true individuality, alongside her power to affect change on the world.
Altruism
The Maiden tends to be sensitive, empathetic, and ready to feel the pain of others. Her inherent goodness and innocence drives her to help others around her, to seek to do the right thing.
Easily Exploitable
The Maiden easily falls prey to the Predator or Manipulator, because she’s yet to step up into her proactive individuality and maturity.
The combination of her passive submission to authority, along with her desire to rescue others, means she’s often highly vulnerable to the victim role until she grows into her strength.
Potential for Strength
The inherent goodness of the Maiden and her positive qualities, such as empathy and sensitivity, mean she has the potential to grow into an incredible heroine.
To do this, she’ll usually need to learn to proactively define herself according to her own individual characteristics, and to stand up against those who’d trap her for their own purposes.
Examples of the Maiden Feminine Archetype
Bella Swan, in Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer
Bella Swan’s a great example of an archetypal Maiden protagonist in a YA paranormal romance. She meets the archetype so perfectly that I‘ll examine her characteristics in detail here.
Bella begins the Twilight trilogy as:
- Young: Bella’s 17 when Twilight opens.
- Altruistic: Bella’s ready to move to rainy Forks, Washington, leaving behind sunny California, so her mother can live the high life and Bella can keep her father company instead. Bella isn’t moving to Forks because she wants to. She’s doing it for the convenience of her parents. She’s always prioritising others’ wishes and hasn’t fully developed her own wants and goals yet.
- Passive: Bella spends much of the early part of the trilogy being rescued by Edward, and waiting for him to fall in love with her and show up for her.
- Innocent: At the start of the story, Bella’s blissfully ignorant of the existence of vampires. And once she learns that Edward is a vampire, her conviction in his inner goodness and his love for her, makes her refuse to accept that she’s in danger around him.
- Potential strength: Her conviction in Edward’s goodness is part of her strength, alongside her determination to make sacrifices to protect others. The potential for heroism in Bella is evident from the start, because she has no problem surrendering her own wishes in order to achieve a greater goal (the happiness of her parents), and this shows us she possesses a steely inner core of conviction. By the trilogy’s end, Bella’s strong core develops into the greatest superpower of any vampire: the ability to create an impenetrable shield of defence around all those she loves.
- Protectiveness: By the end of the trilogy, Bella’s protective love for her family has made her one of the strongest vampires in the world.
Jane Eyre, in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre is young and altruistic throughout her story.
Despite suffering from a lack of protection throughout childhood, she remains firm in her belief that there’s good in people.
She’s resolute in her quest to overcome her loneliness by seeking out other decent people.
Jane’s passivity is forced upon her by social expectations of her gender, nevertheless, she’s fairly active for a Maiden of her time. This proactivity is partially a natural result of her circumstances and partially down to her strength of character.
As the story progresses, Jane’s able to overcome the social restraints of Victorian England, which would keep women childlike for as long as possible, and become an active agent of her own destiny.
She comes into her true individuality when she leaves Rochester upon discovering his wife in the attic. At this point, Jane trusts in her own ability to decide right from wrong, and in her own ability to keep herself safe and secure, rather than succumbing to his manipulations and eroding her own morality in the process.
As a result of Jane’s actions, Rochester then forges his own redemptive arc, enabling the conclusion of their happy romantic ending together.
Like Bella, Jane’s character arc is one of positive transformation, from passive Maiden into a strong romantic heroine.
Other Examples of the Maiden archetype include:
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- Lily Bloom, in It Ends with With Us, by Colleen Hoover
- Rapunzel, in Disney’s Tangled
- Laia, in Ember in the Ashes, by Sabaa Tahir
Tips for Writing the Maiden Archetype
Tip 1: Prevent your Maiden from Being too Passive
This can be a tough nut to crack. Passivity is a core trait of the archetype, the characteristic she must overcome in order to grow into a heroine. But the problem is, readers often don’t connect with passive characters.
If you’re familiar with story structure, you’ll know the protagonist must, at the Story Middle, shift from reactively chasing their story goal to proactively chasing it.
However, your Maiden protagonist will need to engage your readers’ interest right from the story’s start, or the reader probably won’t make it to the Story Middle. And readers struggle to connect to overly-passive protagonists.
So, how to overcome this conundrum?
There’s no one answer. However, we can look at successful examples of Maiden protagonists to see how some writers handle this problem.
Elle Woods in Legally Blond provides a great example. Elle begins her story proactively chasing the wrong story goal: marriage to a boy who’s rejected her. At the Story Middle, she shifts, and starts proactively chasing her true story goal: that of self-determination, finding herself through exploring her own capabilities.
Elle’s always proactive, yet in the first half of the story she proactively chases a passive life (becoming a trophy wife), whereas in the second half, she proactively seeks her own power.
Let’s also look again at Bella Swan. Many present-day critics argue Bella is indeed too passive; that she’s a character of her times from the mid-2000s, and not engaging to modern teenage readers. However, given the massive success of the trilogy, it’s arguable this criticism of Bella misses the mark.
Meyer’s target readers, teenagers, will be able to relate to much of Bella’s passivity, which is situation rather than personal. Many teenagers feel they lack agency over their life, being subject to the authority of parents, school, and societal expectations.
Moreover, Bella’s readiness to support others wholeheartedly means that she is not always as passive as she appears at first glance. Whilst she carries a normal degree of teenage angst about herself, she’s nevertheless relatively proactive in terms of taking agency over her decision to move to Forks.
Arguably, Bella’s actions at the novel’s start show an unusual degree of proactivity, given her age and circumstances.
If your Maiden starts the story passive, therefore, try to bring out some proactive elements of her character and ensure that there are relatable reasons for why she’s passive at the story’s start.
Tip Two: Give Your Maiden Complexity and Depth
Try to avoid letting your archetypal Maiden fall into a stereotype (such as the damsel-in-distress). As her story unfolds, look at her mistakes, the false paths she takes along her learning journey. Might she, for example, in her desire to find her power, fall into unhelpful manipulative tactics?
One way to add complexity is to include aspects of the archetype’s shadow sides.
To prevent falling into stereotypes, it can be helpful to ensure you’ve fully developed your Maiden’s backstory. Which aspects of her character are deep, integral personality traits? And which aspects have been formed as a result of her upbringing?
Conclusion
Whether or not your story features a Maiden-protagonist, this is a useful archetype to understand, for you may see aspects of the archetype within your other characters. The Maiden carries great potential for strength and learning on her journey, and by engaging with her potential you can prevent her from becoming an overly-static character within your story.
Whilst the damsel-in-distress stereotype can grate upon the modern reader, the Maiden, with her huge potential for heroism and strength, can present a force to be reckoned with in your story.