She Enjoyed Her “Fate Worse Than Death”
Thursday, August 20th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
The phrase “a fate worse than death” seems to have enjoyed a sort of curious semantic shift on its way to quaint historical irrelevancy. At one time — in melodramatic fiction at least — it was a euphemism for rape, specifically. But melodrama has a logic all its own, and one doesn’t have to scratch Victorian fiction very hard to find instances of the term referring to sex in general, or perhaps only to a young woman’s first sexual experience. All this at a time when the fashion — for polite ladies of fiction anyway — was to acknowledge no hint of pleasure in association with one’s “family duties”. Over time, the usage seems to have become more generally ironic, acknowledging its inherent melodrama. I hereby nominate this cartoon from 1959 as the apotheosis of the ironic usage:
Since 1959, of course, the phrase has pretty much fallen into a pretty complete disuse. Which is fine with me. It’s just another part of the sex-negative cultural background noise that this blog was founded to oppose.
Cartoon is from the November 1959 issue of Adam.
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