The Heroine with 1001 Faces Read online

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1874

  THE

  HEROINE

  with

  1,001

  FACES

  MARIA TATAR

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For some of the 1,001 heroes and heroines in my life—

  Elizabeth Demeter Tatar

  Joseph Tatar

  Julius Martinez

  Nick Tatar

  Liza Tatar

  Laura T. Courtney

  Rebecca Tatar

  Steven Tatar

  Lauren Blum

  Daniel Schuker

  Jason Blum

  Giselle Barcia

  Roxy Blum

  Booker T. Blum

  Isabel Barcia-Schuker

  Bette Sue Blum

  Lucas Adrian Barcia-Schuker

  Anna, John, and Steve

  Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

  BERTOLT BRECHT, Life of Galileo

  Pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.

  REBECCA SOLNIT, Whose Story Is This?

  But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

  GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1“SING, O MUSE”

  The Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Mission

  2SILENCE AND SPEECH

  From Myth to #MeToo

  3RESISTANCE AND REVELATION

  Storytelling and the Unsung Heroines of Fairy Tales

  4WONDER GIRLS

  Curious Writers and Caring Detectives

  5DETECTIVE WORK

  From Nancy Drew to Wonder Woman

  6TO DOUBLE DUTY BOUND

  Tricksters and Other Girls on Fire

  EPILOGUE

  Lift-Off

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Begin this journey with caring and patience and love and laughter and passionate curiosity.

  —Madam Secretary

  Power is actualized . . . where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.

  —HANNAH ARENDT, The Human Condition

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces while teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His classes on comparative mythology at the then all-women’s school were in such high demand that he was soon obliged to limit enrollment to seniors. During his last year of teaching there, one of those seniors walked into his office, sat down, and said: “Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the hero. But what about the women?” The startled professor raised his eyebrows and replied, “The woman’s the mother of the hero; she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?” “I want to be the hero,” she announced.1

  “What about the women?” This book tries to answer the question posed by Campbell’s student in a different way, by showing that the women in the mythological and literary imagination have been more than mothers and protectors. They too have been on quests, but they have also flown under the radar, performing stealth operations and quietly seeking justice, righting wrongs, repairing the fraying edges of the social fabric, or simply struggling to survive rather than returning back home with what Campbell calls boons and elixirs. They wear curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and we shall see how women’s connection to knowledge, linked to sin and transgression and often censured as prying, is in fact often symptomatic of empathy, care, and concern. Ever since Eve and Pandora, our culture has positioned curious women as wayward curiosities, investing their desire to know more with dark, forbidden cravings.

  Even before Bill Moyers introduced Joseph Campbell to a broader public through the PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth in 1988, catapulting the professor to celebrity status, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was making the rounds in Hollywood and soon became required reading among studio executives. They did not have to work their way through the entire hefty volume with its excursions into sacred writings from East and West. Instead they could refer to a conveniently abbreviated version of the book: a seven-page memo, widely distributed as “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Drafted by Christopher Vogler, who went on to teach Campbell’s work at film schools and to publish the bestselling The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (1992), the practical guide became an important cheat sheet for those in the film industry. Here at last was the secret sauce that had led to the blockbuster success of films ranging from Spartacus to Star Wars. Joseph Campbell became not just an erudite guide to the mythological universe, but also a serious adviser to the managers of the Hollywood Dream Factory. Never mind that he had also become, through the display of avuncular charm and broad learning, the guru to whom Americans looked for personal and spiritual growth.

  Campbell was never more than mildly irritated by the fact that the academic world failed to take his writings seriously. In my many years on the faculty of the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, I never saw Campbell’s name on a syllabus. It was clear that Campbell was persona non grata, not just because “Follow your bliss” seemed corny and banal, a remnant of 1970s hippie culture with its faith in flower power, but because the Jungian philosophy and study of archetypes to which Campbell subscribed had long been derided and dismissed. Gone were the timeless universals, and the academic world scrapped eternal truths in favor of cultural constructs and post-structural indeterminacy.

  Joseph Campbell Courtesy of Photofest

  Nowhere does the rigidity of archetypal thinking emerge more clearly than in the binary model of the male and female principle as it surfaced in Campbell’s study of world mythologies. The biological function of women is “to bring forth life and nourishment,” Campbell intoned in one work after another. What do women represent in mythology? The answer is simple: the “nature principle,” for “we are born from her physically.” The male, on the other hand, represents “the social principle and social roles,” we are told in Campbell’s meditation on goddesses. “The father is the initiator into society and the meaning of life, whereas the mother represents the principle of life itself.” In other words, anatomy is destiny. But all the talk about women as the source of life and nourishment is quickly taken back, for Woman is also the “mother of death” and the “night sleep” to which we return.2

  Reading about Campbell’s goddesses and women was revelatory, for lurking beneath their fruitful beneficence was nothing more than the face of death. Suddenly, in the dark nights of a global pandemic, I understood the rage of one of my undergraduate students, who described her journey into the world of folklore and mythology as a crusade against Campbell, for whom the role of women in every culture was grounded in cults of fertility and death. At the time of the student’s outburst, it had seemed to me that Campbell was doing little more than capturing the symbolic worlds of our ancestors and revealing their gendered divisions of labor rather than solidifying outworn cultural beliefs.

  It was only when I noticed that Campbell considered goddesses (and women) not just as fertility deities but also as muses that I began to wonder about his reading of mythologies far and
near. “She’s the inspirer of poetry,” Campbell observed about women. This muse has three functions: “one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.”3 Our: when I read that word, I knew exactly what was meant by it. Self-actualization through language is reserved for men. Women, like the muses of Homer, Dante, and Yeats, were there to do little but inspire. Why could women not raise their voices as well or share the creative impulse so revered by Campbell? These concerns about Campbell’s messaging coincided with my reading of “The Laugh of the Medusa,” an essay by the French critic Hélène Cixous about how women must begin to free themselves from the trap of silence and resist accepting a place at the margins, or “in the harem,” as she put it. Writing, and creativity in general, had been the domain of “great men” and would stay there until women stormed the arena, using words as their weapons.4

  Madeline Miller is one of many contemporary authors who responded belatedly to Cixous’s manifesto and to the call of other women writers, not just by writing, but also by endowing women from times past with voices. In Circe, a novel narrated by the Greek enchantress who famously turned men into swine, we hear the voice of the goddess and listen to her side of a familiar story, discovering that she had good reason to resort to magic.5 We also learn about how Circe processes the tales told to her by Odysseus—vivid first-person accounts of what Homer had described in The Odyssey. Something strange happens when she retells those stories to her son Telegonus: “Their brutalities shone through,” and “what I had thought of as adventure now seemed blood-soaked and ugly.”6 Even Odysseus is transformed in her accounts of his adventures, turning from a man of courage and cunning into someone “callous” and less than admirable. Suddenly we are given a different perspective, and we discover that stories operate with kaleidoscopic dynamism, changing dramatically when given one small twist. What we will see in the pages that follow is that, when women begin to write, the story changes.

  In this volume, I will look at how stories, particularly those set in times of war, conflict, crisis, and suffering, shift in meaning over time, depending on who tells them. And I will also look at new narratives that have emerged over the past centuries, listening first to the voices of the old wives who told nursery tales, then to what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the damned mob of scribbling women” and what V. S. Naipaul more recently referred to as “feminine tosh.”7 Once women took up the pen, how did they redefine the archetypes Joseph Campbell identified in world mythology? How did they reinvent heroism and what new forms of heroism emerged as they sat at their desks and scribbled?

  There is a clear arc that takes us from the #MeToo movement back to ancient times and even to the old wives’ tales that we now dismiss as fairy tales. What did Philomela do after being brutally raped and having her tongue cut out but weave a tapestry revealing the crimes of her brother-in-law, Tereus? Arachne bravely worked the sexual assaults of Zeus and other gods into the tapestry she wove in competition with Athena. And in the old wives’ tales from times past, women in witness stories—the British “Mr. Fox,” the Armenian “Nourie Hadig,” and the German “The Robber Bridegroom” come to mind—rescue themselves by exposing, often at a wedding feast, misdeeds and injuries. They escape domestic abuse and violence through storytelling. Rarely wielding the sword and often deprived of the pen, women have relied on the domestic crafts and their verbal analogues—spinning tales, weaving plots, and telling yarns—to make things right, not just getting even but also securing social justice.

  Nearly two decades ago, Clarissa Pinkola Estés encouraged readers of Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype to embrace the archetype in her subtitle and discover the hidden depths of the female soul.8 This study, too, explores a range of heroic possibilities, but it is less invested in finding therapeutic tools in lore from times past than in understanding how those who were socially marginalized, economically exploited, and sexually subjugated found ways not just to survive but also to endow their lives with meaning.

  Today we are reframing many stories and histories from times past, recognizing that women were also able to carry out superhuman deeds, often without ever leaving (or being able to leave) the house. Their quests may not have taken the form of journeys, but they required acts of courage and defiance. Like Penelope in The Odyssey or Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights, they used their homespun storytelling craft or drew on arts related to textile production to mend things, offer instructions, and broadcast offenses, all in the service of changing the culture in which they lived. They are rising up now to take their places in a new pantheon that is reshaping our notion of what constitutes heroism. It requires not just intelligence and courage, but also care and compassion: all the things it takes to be a true heroine.

  We live in what the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has called an age of empathy, with dozens of books on why empathy matters, on the neuroscience of empathy, on the empathy gap, and so on. Search Amazon’s website and you will discover hundreds of books—among them psychological studies, self-help guides, and parenting manuals—with “empathy” in their titles or subtitles. Curiously, “empathy” was not part of our shared lexicon until the early twentieth century, and the frequency of its usage did not spike until the first two decades of the twenty-first century, when it turned into one of our most cherished cultural values. The sharp rise in the use of the word coincides, not surprisingly, with the rapid entry of women into the labor force over the past decades, and some psychologists, most notably the British Simon Baron-Cohen, tell us that empathy is tuned especially high in women’s brains, while hypersystemizing, the trait that drives invention, is more likely to be found in the male brain. But Baron-Cohen concedes (condescendingly, perhaps) that “empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world,” and he worries that empathy is “rarely, if ever” on the agenda in education, politics, business, or the courts. Since 2011, the date when Baron-Cohen published The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, empathy has become something of a national obsession, figuring importantly in all the domains enumerated.

  Barack Obama famously taught us about a major failing in our social world, and what is it but an “empathy deficit”? Economist Jeremy Rifkin urged us, in a book called The Empathic Civilization, to make the leap to “global empathetic consciousness.” In a book called Far from the Tree, psychologist Andrew Solomon wrote about children who are dramatically different from their parents and about how they manage during times marked by a “crisis of empathy.” To be sure, there has been some pushback. In a psychological study with the provocative title Against Empathy, Paul Bloom validates “cognitive empathy” (by which he means the ability to understand the pain of others) even as he worries about “emotional empathy,” an instinct that spotlights one injury at the expense of many and often leads us to focus on those who are like us.

  “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person,” Walt Whitman famously wrote in Leaves of Grass. Pondering those words leads us to wonder if there is not something inherently problematic at the root of “emotional empathy,” or what I prefer to call empathetic identification. What will emerge in the pages that follow is an understanding of heroism that is driven less by empathy than by attentive care, an affect that is triggered by openness to the world, followed by curiosity and concern about those who inhabit it. Lack of curiosity becomes, then, the greatest sin, a failure to acknowledge the presence of others and to care about the circumstances and conditions of their lives. Is it possible that our new attentiveness to the value of empathy has been fueled by the heroism of women from times past, women who had themselves been marginalized and disenfranchised but still cared deeply about those who had been crushed and enslaved, beaten down and brought to heel?

  How do we define heroes today and why are heroines in such short supply? The first chapter of this work will explore the association of heroic f
igures with military conflict and action and interrogate our cultural understanding of what it means to be a hero. Heroes are often warriors, but they can also be saints and saviors, men who draw on reserves of spiritual strength to defeat monsters.9 Joseph Campbell observed that women had “too damn much to do” to waste their time on story (an extraordinary statement from someone with the deepest reverence for the culture-building power of storytelling). He acknowledged the existence of “female heroes” and a “different perspective” in fairy tales, the old wives’ tales that circulated in times past. Those tales featured intrepid women who rose to countless challenges. But during the great migration of fairy tales from the fireside to the nursery, they were for the most part lost, in large part because they took up taboo subjects about family dynamics, courtship rituals, and marriage customs. When those tales vanished from the repertoire, many models of heroic behavior went missing.

  Few will doubt that the hero with a thousand faces has dominated the Western imagination, and my first chapter will explore Campbell’s work and its implications for reading epics like The Odyssey. Women may appear in the triumphant stories of a hero’s deeds and accomplishments, but all too often they are strangely invisible, lacking agency, voices, and a presence in public life. We see Odysseus in action, revel in his victories, feel his sorrow, and rejoice when he finds his way back home. Penelope, by contrast, like her many cousins in epic and myth, is confined to the domestic arena, with little to say for herself. But she too, like her mythical cousins, is on a mission, and today we are finally paying attention to more than just her patience and fidelity.

  Chapter 2 will explore tales of “abduction,” beginning with Persephone and Europa, and will consider how weavers like Philomela and Arachne become artisans and artists on a social mission. It will also investigate mutilation—the cutting out of tongues—and examine how that form of torture was used in fiction and in real life to silence women, to make examples of them, and to deprive them of the one weapon they possessed. A related set of stories, tales about the Persian Stone of Patience, is revealing in its emphasis on the value of testimony, of telling your story (sometimes in the form of complaints against backstabbing rivals) even when your interlocutor is nothing but an inanimate object. That Stone, which can be found in fairy tales from many cultures, becomes a patient listener, so moved by an account of abuse that, unable to burst into tears, it explodes in an act of empathetic identification.