ROSALINE, GODOT, AND ALL THE OTHERS

So I am listening to Grimm Reading Podcast's Christmas Special 2021, just because it features "the decidedly Dickensian tale The Story of a Cat by Mary De Morgan." (as said by the podcasters themselves). I am always eager to listen to some old unsung Victorian literary fairytale, especially if it has been forgotten because of its author's gender and/or sexuality (in this case, it is only the former). As I listened, I found it hard to connect with the tale's leading gentleman because of his gender, old age, and insufferably misanthropic personality... "The Story of a Cat" failed to pique my interest until a secondary character, a male so-called "acquaintance," mentions an upcoming Cat Show and another character who is sure to make an appearance:

"...for the new Princess is quite crazy about cats, and she is coming to it (the Show), and it is said she doesn't mind what she gets for a cat if she sees one she likes."

So I waited with bated breath all story long for the Show... ever since the acquaintance said "the new Princess" and every "she" in that sentence he uttered thereafter. Here was a young female character I could relate to, as young and female and crazy about cats as I was! But there was no Cat Show and no Princess in the story except for that mention made by the acquaintance; everything was confined to the leading gentleman's townhouse, to my utter disappointment.

I was not the only one. Apparently the podcasters were disappointed too. I quote them: "We were promised the Princess at a Cat Show... and I was like WHOA! I wish we'd gone there, but ..." It was as if the podcasters had been reading my mind.

Nevertheless, "the new Princess" in "The Story of a Cat" by Mary de Morgan did something else aside from only being mentioned and never appearing in person/in the flesh; that disappointment did send me down a pretty interesting rabbit hole about fictional characters who share that distinction. The proper term, in narratology, is UNSEEN CHARACTER. And our one-sentence royal du jour is not the only one.

Anyone familiar with Romeo and Juliet knows that, before Mercutio spurred Romeo on to sneak into the Capulets' masquerade ball, the Montague scion was pining for a certain unrequited Rosaline, of whom we neither get to see hide nor hair, in spite of Romeo's praises of her. Rosaline is maybe one of the first unseen characters that come to mind and one of the most famous in the Western canon, maybe because she was the Bard's creation.

In Waiting for Godot, a series of characters while away the hours waiting for, well, whom else? Yet Godot never shows up; he is only mentioned by the rest of the cast, making him another classic unseen character. 

How old are unseen characters as a plot device? According to Wikipedia, already the Ancient Greeks wrote unseen characters. In Oedipus Rex, King Laius and the Corinthian royals Polybos and Periboea are prime examples. So is Jason's new wife (Creusa or Glauke, depending on whom you ask) in Medea. All of these characters are only mentioned, never make an appearance, yet they are crucially relevant to the plot of the Greek tragedies in which they are named.

A more recent example of unseen character in 20th-century mass media would be Mrs. Columbo. Lieutenant Columbo mentions his wife constantly, yet we never get to see her in the flesh throughout the TV series.

In French, unseen characters are referred to by the eponym ARLÉSIENNE, referring to the title character and love interest in a popular French play, who, just like Godot, happens to be an unseen character. The term has even trascended narratology into common everyday life: "jouer l'arlésienne," literally "to play the Arlésienne/the unseen character," means to be on everyone's lips/the subject of everyone's conversations without showing up in society. "Une arlésienne" is also an idiom for an event that is very expected to come, but that never occurs.

There are unseen characters and unseen characters, depending on their degrees of plot relevance: from tertiary or quaternary characters (Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet, or the new Princess in "The Story of a Cat") to titular roles (Godot or the Arlésienne) via hinge characters, ie vital secondary roles that cannot be disposed of (Jason's new wife, Laius, Polybos and Periboea): one can see them, just like the seen characters in their respective stories, as planets orbiting nearer or further away from the suns that are the stories' leading men and/or ladies.

According to Wikipedia, "Unseen characters are causal figures included in dramatic works to motivate the onstage characters to a certain course of action and advance the plot, but their presence is unnecessary. Indeed, their absence makes them appear more powerful because they are only known by inference. The use of an unseen character takes advantage of one of the simplest but most powerful theatrical devices: the manner in which verbal references can make an offstage character extraordinarily real [...] to an audience, exploiting the audience's tendency to create visual images of imaginary characters in their mind."