Stock character

A stock character is a type of character whom audiences recognize "across many narratives or as part of a storytelling tradition or convention," in any medium from the novel and the play to television and film, with a range running across ages, social classes and demeanors: the damsel in distress and Prince Charming, the knight-errant and the witch. Against the archetype, the article draws the difference in grain rather than kind: it opens by offering character archetype as another name for the type, then insists the terms are not synonyms, and its examples show why, since the basic archetype names the broad role (the hero, the father figure) while the stock character names the specific figure a tradition has fixed (the damsel in distress, the wise fool). Both are raw source material authors build on to make fleshed-out, interesting characters; the stereotype and the cliché are the degraded versions the article files under bad writing or shallow thinking. The history the article gives is a parade of traditions rather than one line from antiquity: the alazon, impostor and self-deceiving braggart, against the eiron, self-deprecating and understating; the weeping woman of The Troublesome Reign; the schoolma'am of the colonial frontier, a stock character of Australian and American literature and film, an ideal foil for an uncivilized hero beside the Boston spinster, the prostitute with a heart of gold and the long-suffering farmer's wife; and American film recasting its types by the decade, cigarette girls and ice vendors giving way to bag ladies, with television's fast schedules borrowing film's types whole.

For novelists the stock character is recognition banked in advance: a particular array of them identifies a genre, so knight-errant plus witch reads as fairy tale or fantasy, and because the audience already understands the figure and their motivations, the story moves without introduction. Dwight V. Swain's rule, as the article reports it, is that all characters begin as stock characters and are fleshed out only as far as the plot needs; the craft is choosing how far to flesh and when to subvert, because expectations built on the type can be turned into suspense, irony or a plot twist, the way 2000s screenwriters made seemingly stock characters act against type, while a figure left all stock tips into the stereotype. This glossary is stocked with them: the everyman, the femme fatale and the mad scientist introduce themselves as stock characters outright, and the trickster's entry calls its modern form a character archetype, both words pointing at the same shelf. The type itself is free to reuse: US courts held, in Nichols v. Universal Pictures (1930), that copyright cannot be extended to the characteristics of stock characters. The recognition is the given; the flesh is the work.