The 'Coy' and 'Quaint'

Today in class I got thinking about a segment from the film Adaptation when "sparagmos" and dismemberment by dogs came up.

Donald Kaufman: Anyway, listen, I meant to ask you, I need a cool way to kill people. Don't worry, for my script.
Charlie Kaufman: I don't write that kind of stuff.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, come on, man, please? You're the genius.
Charlie Kaufman: Here you go. The killer's a literature professor. He cuts off little chunks from his victims' bodies until they die. He calls himself "the deconstructionist".

This is the stuff that men, the rapists and pillagers, come up with since the times of Ovid. Even the nice, pious guys like Saint John lose control over themselves, and who's fault is it? In John's case, he thinks it's his fault after the deed is done because he punishes himself by becoming bestial, which is the nature of raping and pillaging, and walking on all fours. On the flip side Frye might say it's the woman's fault in that "her policy of lying is advantageous to the author...craft and fraud is the animating spirit of the comic form" (74) and prolong the current adventure or creates another challenging adventure which the characters are "threatened by disaster" and yet they get away. By Frye calling this misadventures 'comic' this makes me think that the nature of 'Romance' is assembled by an accumulation of comedic happenings. With this said in "A Pagan Hero and A Christian Saint" the first sexual act happens before the end which Frye says should be postponed "at least, until after the birth mystery in the plot has been solved." (72-73) In this case what would we call "A Pagan Hero and A Christian Saint"? I surely didn't find it romantic nor comedic. More allegorical or dramatic.

With all this said I'll point out one last passage from Frye, page 77, who shows Rosalind's character from Shakespeare's As You Like It; "Her remark at the end of the fourth act might be a motto for such heroines: 'I shall devise something: but, I pray you, commend my counterfeiting to him.'" This points shows true in APH&ACS in that there's an apparent death and the violated woman after having been shoved off a cliff was saved by God who "'bore me up, so that I came to no harm." (59) That makes Frye's contention fit in a bit better.