Pitting his scalpel-sharp wits and his protean powers of disguise against the forces of mass-murdering fanaticism, Sir Percy Blakeney has swashbuckled his way across novels, radio, screen, and stage for well more than a century.
Hiding behind his nom de guerre of a flower, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Blakeney defied all odds to rescue doomed aristocrats from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror that followed the start of the French Revolution.
The character, created by Baroness Emma Orczy in 1903, established the fictional tradition of the hero who operates through a secret identity.
Orczy’s premise of a daring hero who cultivates a secret identity disguised by a meek or ineffectual manner proved enduring. Zorro, Doctor Syn, the Shadow, the Spider, the Phantom, Superman, and Batman followed within a few decades,” noted Wikipedia.
Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, who loved Orczy’s novels as a boy, called the Scarlet Pimpernel “the first character who could be called a superhero.”
Masks, secret identities — these are forms of what might be termed practical invisibility. They’re essentially a superpower achieved by plausible means.
“Percy is, in effect, Zorro without the mask,” wrote Brian Taves in The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Action Movies. “Percy Blakeney as the Pimpernel is concerned with saving the defenseless, a universal trait of the adventurer… Through daring and organization, Percy epitomizes the admirable adventure hero defeating his cruel enemies with the minimal possible violence.”
“The members of the aristocracy are presented sympathetically, not because they belong to a social elite but because they are faced with arbitrary and ruthless extermination at the guillotine.
“The emphasis is not on the ethics of the French Revolution, but whether Percy and his friends will escape the Revolutionary agent Chauvelin. To Chauvelin, Percy is an outlaw whose exploits have made him a rebel fighting for the status quo in France.
“Frustrating the forces behind the guillotine with his cunning and a small band of followers, Percy must also keep his identity secret even from his aristocratic French wife, by the same foppish, supercilious act.”
And in so doing, the Scarlet Pimpernel thereby founded the odd but persistent tradition of superheroes hiding their identities even from those they love, a custom Zorro, Superman, Spider-Man, and others continued.
The possibilities for melodramatic angst inherent in such a situation, however unlikely, are simply too rich for writers to resist.
“The Pimpernel is not so much a mask as an attitude and a series of disguises,” observed Danny Fingeroth in his book Superman on the Couch. “When at last discovered by his French nemesis — and his wife, from whom he conceals his secret life — his carriage is suddenly more serious and dangerous.”
“What fantasy does the double identity appeal to? Perhaps, as in the case of the Pimpernel, it is to allow us to believe that, deep down, we are or could be so much more than we appear. ‘If they only knew how special I am,’ we think. Don’t we all have secret identities, those sides of ourselves we feel we dare not risk revealing?”
Matthew David Surridge wrote, “Melodrama is unconcerned with psychological realism, and tends to pull character toward abstraction; the secret identity is the ultimate end of that abstraction, a character without mother or father, without family or background. It isa pure idea.
“The Pimpernel is unusual, I think, in that there’s an eminently practical reason for his adopting the secret identity. He has to infiltrate an enemy country, where the authorities would arrest and execute him if they could. Most later heroes, operating in the here-and-now, didn’t have that iron-clad rationale, and were forced to find increasingly baroque explanations for the adoption of another identity.”
“As far as I’m concerned, Percy is the original superhero of the theater,” said Michael Dubois, who played the hero on stage in Utah in 2013.
And indeed, the Scarlet Pimpernel was born on stage, in Orczy’s failed play in Nottingham in 1903. But two years later, with a rewritten last act, The Scarlet Pimpernel opened to popular acclaim at London’s New Theatre, running 122 performances and enjoying many revivals.
Immediately adapting the story into a novel, Orczy spread her hero’s fame around the world. A dozen sequels followed.
The character has frequently been parodied, notably in a 1950 Warner Bros. cartoon short featuring Daffy Duck as the Scarlet Pumpernickel and in a 1960 Hanna-Barbera cartoon that gave us Huckleberry Hound as the Purple Pumpernickel.
Ever the cheeky hero, Sir Percy even immortalized himself in doggerel:
They seek him here,
they seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere,
Is he in heaven, is he in hell
that demmed elusive Pimpernel…
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