Amid the nostalgia surrounding The Princess Bride, one of the odder claims is that Buttercup is not, as the plot might suggest, a cliché damsel in distress, but is actually an unfairly overlooked strong female character. Speaking as a confirmed Princess Bride superfan who can quote the movie start to finish, I want to turn a critical eye to this argument.
The argument goes that the only people who don’t like Princess Buttercup are gender-nonconforming women who hate her because she wears dresses and doesn’t stab anyone, and if it weren’t for these people’s irrational prejudice against white femininity, they would see that she’s a strong, empowered woman, because she tries to swim away from her kidnappers, pushes Westley down a hill, and so on.
There are two problems with this claim (aside from the dearth of examples of anyone who actually thinks that way). First, hardly anyone stabs anyone in The Princess Bride; it’s simply not a very stabby movie. Inigo stabs (and is stabbed by) Count Rugen, but they’re both supporting characters. At multiple points, characters win major interactions against armed opponents without fighting at all.
Second, the definition of a strong character has nothing to do with either stabbiness or gender conformity; it has to do with the character’s role in the plot. A character is strong if their actions and choices change the course of the plot. A character is weak if the plot would be the same regardless of whether they were there or not. Similarly, it also has nothing to do with whether she quips, monologues, fights with the male protagonist, or “acts feisty,” all of which are superficial traits male creators often give to female characters so they can claim the mantle of “strong character” without actually giving her a meaningful role in the plot.
There are countless examples of female characters who are strong plotwise despite not fighting and of action girls who are weak in terms of plot. An example of the former is Sarah from Labyrinth. Sarah, like Buttercup, wears gowns and never uses weapons, but she is the main driving force of the plot. Throughout the movie, she makes decisions that immediately change the direction of the plot, starting by giving away baby Toby and ending by defeating the Goblin King. Without her actions and choices, there is no story.
Conversely, the proverbial example of an action girl who’s a weak character is Anna Valerious from Van Helsing. Various blog posts have been written about how, despite telling us what a badass she is, the movie shows her constantly being kidnapped, rendered helpless, controlled and dominated by Van Helsing, and losing virtually every fight she gets.
Another mistake people often make when analyzing characters like Buttercup is to treat them as if they’re real-world people. They react to criticism of the character’s role as though it’s criticism of a real woman’s life choices and thus an insult to her and, by extension, to womankind (or rather, white femininity) as a whole. But Buttercup is not a real woman; she’s a character in a movie directed and produced by men, based on a book written by a man. Her role in the movie doesn’t reflect on women, but on the men who wrote her. Treating criticism of the character as an attack on women is, in fact, letting the male creators off the hook and failing to hold them accountable for their sexism.*
So let’s turn a critical eye to Buttercup’s actions over the course of the movie and what affect they have on the plot, as compared to the actions of other—male—characters. This analysis is not a reflection on Buttercup as a person. You can certainly appreciate her personality, her fashion, her attitude, and so on. If you like her as a character, you should want her to have a strong role in the plot.
Throughout the first act, Buttercup makes essentially no choices after initially falling in love (needless to say, her love for a man is her entire driving motivation). Westley goes to seek his fortune and gets (supposedly) killed; Prince Humperdinck gets engaged to Buttercup; Vizzini and company kidnap her. Buttercup has no say in any of this. A weak defense states that it’s not Buttercup’s fault that she has no power in a patriarchal world—but this doesn’t hold up, because, first, as anyone who’s watched Game of Thrones knows, women can still be powerful actors in a patriarchal world, and second, it was the male creators’ choice to make the world that way. They could have made their fantasy world more gender-equitable if they’d wanted; they are accountable for their choice to make a world where women are essentially powerless.
Buttercup’s first major action is jumping out of the boat while being kidnapped. She is immediately rescued by her kidnappers, and the kidnapping continues according to plan. This scene could be removed without affecting the plot at all. She’s quickly back to being carried around. Being carried around—by Fezzik, by Westley, by Humperdinck—will be a major theme for her character.
Her second major action is pushing Westley down the hill. This unmasks Westley slightly earlier than he had planned. However, he was obviously going to reveal himself to her sooner or later, and his rescue continues the same way the same way he was apparently planning to go anyway. (It’s also not a good sign that Buttercup’s moment of self-assertion is followed by her saying “What have I done?” and throwing herself down the hill. “Whenever she makes a choice, it’s a mistake that backfires” is another common theme for badly written female characters.)
Buttercup’s biggest action, and her best claim to plot agency, is when she intervenes between Prince Humperdinck and Westley. They’re about to fight, and instead she voluntarily chooses to go with Prince Humperdinck in exchange for his promise of Westley’s safety. Here, finally, something was going to happen (Westley fighting Prince Humperdinck), but, because of Buttercup’s action, something different happens (Buttercup going with Prince Humperdinck).
…Except that Prince Humperdinck’s original plan was to kill Westley and take Buttercup back to the palace, and thanks to Buttercup’s intervention, he…kills Westley and takes Buttercup back to the palace. The only thing that Buttercup manages to change is Westley’s mode of death, from a quick pincushioning to an agonizing, drawn-out death by torture.**
In the third act, Buttercup is back to mostly waiting around. She threatens and almost attempts suicide, but male characters stop her. She writes to Westley, but Humperdinck doesn’t deliver her letters. She manages to avoid getting officially married, but not through and action of hers. She gets a monologue or two, but the result is…Humperdinck locks her in a bedroom and murders Westley.
Again, it’s tempting to excuse these scenes because this is all outside of Buttercup’s control. It’s not her fault that Humperdinck doesn’t deliver the letters, after all. But the creators chose to structure the story so that Buttercup has no control. Male characters, conversely, do have control, even when they have neither physical strength nor political authority. While Buttercup’s third-act monologue to Humperdinck gets her locked in a bedroom, Westley’s third-act monologue to Humperdinck convinces him to surrender. Westley can barely stand and has (momentarily) no backup; Humperdinck could easily call his guards and finish him off. But he doesn’t. Why? Because, in The Princess Bride, only men’s actions affect the plot.
Looking at the plot of The Princess Bride, we see that, in plot terms, Buttercup has a very weak role that falls squarely within the classic “damsel in distress” character type. Time and again, her actions have no effect on the story, as male characters intervene and set the plot squarely back on their own course. Moreover, most of her actions—jumping into water that turns out to be eel-infested, pushing Westley down the hill, surrendering to Humperdinck, attempting suicide when she’s about to be rescued—turn out to be mistakes that either backfire or would have backfired if a male character hadn’t intervened. And her purported moments of strength are exactly the kind of “she’s feisty” moments that male creators have always given to female characters with weak parts.
Again, none of this means that you can’t like Buttercup as a character. If you like her, you should want her to be able to make meaningful choices that affect the story rather than being carried around like luggage by the male characters.
There are important negative consequences to defending a weakly written female character. It provides cover for the male creators’ sexist choices. Holding up her few ineffectual actions as though they’re proof that she’s a strong character provides a smokescreen for creators to claim that any action in the story proves that a female character is strong and above criticism. And defending weak female characters prevents us from demanding better-written characters whose actions and choices really do drive the plot.
There’s also an infantilizing aspect to expressing slack-jawed amazement every time a female character performs even the smallest action. We don’t act astonished when, say, Westley stabs an ROUS; we take it for granted that he, as a male character, will respond actively to what’s happening around him. The fact that one brief escape attempt is enough to make us consider Buttercup exceptional speaks to how just how passive our baseline expectation for female characters is.
To look at the question yet another way: If Buttercup is a strong, empowered character, what female character doesn’t count as strong and empowered? Even the most passive damsels in distress from the most outdated pulps had their occasional moments of feistiness. How many characters can one really name who have less plot agency than Buttercup?
At some point, it shouldn’t be surprising that a 30-year-old movie created by a virtually all-male creative team in which only one woman has more than one speaking scene isn’t a feminist masterpiece. That doesn’t mean that the movie is bad or we have to stop liking it, but it does mean that we should face up to the areas where it doesn’t hold up. We need to stop clinging to threadbare excuses about why our childhood favorites are actually empowering and progressive and instead demand new works with better-written female parts. Regardless of whether they stab anyone.
*Conversely, none of this analysis is meant to reflect badly on Robin Wright’s performance as Buttercup.
**It might be tempting to say “Yes, but if Westley had died on the Guilder frontier, Inigo and Fezzik would never have found and resurrected him, and he wouldn’t have been able to storm the castle.” But that kind of n-dimensional chess clearly wasn’t what Buttercup was trying to accomplish, and you don’t count as a strong character for accidentally affecting the plot.