The Heroine with 1001 Faces Read online

  Over the centuries, fairy tale and myth have shown remarkable resilience, surviving censorship, expulsion, bans, and myriad forms of colonization to enter a cultural archive that is constantly renewed and reinvigorated even as it preserves stories from the past. Chapter 3 will explore how fairy tales, associated with women’s speech—chitchat, gossip, and rumor—were discredited even as the mythology of the Greeks and Romans was enshrined as “sacred” and seen as the repository of timeless and universal truths. Rebecca Solnit reminds us of the stakes in disparaging fairy tales. What we have done, as a culture, is enshrine stories about heroes and power (which often translates into the power to injure) and dismiss stories about ordeals that require resilience, persistence, and the forging of alliances. “Underneath all the trappings of talking animals and magical objects and fairy godmothers,” Solnit writes, “are tough stories about people who are marginal, neglected, impoverished, undervalued, and isolated, and their struggle to find their place and their people.”10 Stories that come to us through oral traditions reveal how silenced women carried out impossible tasks or recruited helpers as they climbed glass mountains, sorted piles of grain, or turned straw into gold. What strategies did women use to talk back, create solidarity, survive, and triumph? A look at some of the fairy tales that did not make it into the contemporary canon will be revealing. As always, it is paradoxically the iconoclasts who preserve our cultural stories, destroying them yet also reinventing them for the next generation. The chapter concludes by considering how Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison reclaimed the fairy-tale canon, demystifying, demythifying, and repurposing the stories in it.

  The history of the English word “curiosity” is full of surprises, with unexpected shifts in meaning over the centuries. Curiosity has attached itself to a certain type of female character (not necessarily a heroine in the traditional sense of the term). Chapter 4 will explore the multiple meanings of curiosity, especially since they bifurcate into two channels, the one, now obsolete, signifying “bestowing care or pains,” the other, as used today, defined as “desirous of seeing or knowing; eager to learn; inquisitive.” Women’s curiosity and the spirit of passionate inquiry found shelter at many sites, but with two that are deeply symptomatic of gender trouble. First there was the novel of adultery (usually written by men), for infidelity was one of the few forms of freedom available to women in earlier centuries. Second, there was the genre invented by Louisa May Alcott, which showed girls—and girls alone—as bold, daring, and adventurous, at least in their imaginative worlds, if not always in real life.

  All the desires, passions, and appetites that turn grown women into monsters can safely be experienced and expressed in childhood. The protective cloak of childhood innocence enabled women to self-actualize by writing about girls and also to develop forms of care and concern through their writing. Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March set the stage for a host of other aspiring artists and writers, a cast of characters stretching from Anne of Green Gables all the way to Carrie Bradshaw in HBO’s Sex and the City and Hannah Horvath in HBO’s Girls. The cult of the girl as author leads almost directly from Little Women through fiction for girls to screen fantasies about writing as professional work.

  Chapter 5 moves from curious writers to girl detectives and sleuthing spinsters to show how these figures, driven by investigative energy, also become agents of social justice, taking on all the allegorical qualities of Nemesis. Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew, driving her blue roadster; Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, knitting in her rocking chair. These seem to be the two dominant types of the female detective, one brash, eager, well funded, and attractive, the other marginalized, isolated, superfluous, and almost invisible. A look at William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman will show how—Praise Aphrodite!—women are forever to double duty bound, managing to survive assaults on their identity as women yet also protecting the innocent from evil.

  A final chapter takes us to Hollywood to see how films today recycle mythical tropes and stories of heroism from times past. Are we watching nothing but nostalgic re-creations of the old (Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella) or are critical adaptations (David Slade’s Hard Candy and Joe Wright’s Hanna, to cite just two examples) part of the new cinematic calculus? Hollywood has worked hard to invent a new heroine, a female version of the mythical trickster. She is carrying out her own surreptitious operations, functioning in furtive ways as an antisocial hacker or a crazed undercover operative, and covering her tracks to ensure that her powers remain undetected. From Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, these female tricksters do more than flex muscles and outmaneuver the authorities. They also function as part of an extrajudicial system designed to counteract and repair the flaws in the legal system. They form a sharp contrast to the threatening new Eves and duplicitous schemers featured in cinematic culture today, with films like Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. As heroines emerge with new faces and features, and as they begin to put themselves on display, they inevitably provoke a backlash in the form of antiheroines, specters that haunt us and become a palpable and present feature of the cultural landscape, reminding us that fashioning new heroines is always shadowed by the project of inventing new villains.

  IT HAS BECOME something of a commonplace for authors to claim that they have been writing a book all their life. This volume is one that takes stock of a reading experience spanning many decades, from the 1950s to the present. It took a global pandemic, a vow to limit streaming to one hour a day, and the folly of the so-called golden years to summon the courage to take up a subject that required me to reinstate the voraciousness with which I read as a child. The project began as a reckoning with what disturbed me when I started reading my first chapter books (Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), unsettled me as a teenager (William March’s The Bad Seed and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies), rattled me as a student (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front), and inspired me in my years of teaching at Harvard University (too much there to tally).

  I started teaching in the 1970s, a time when, as Campbell himself conceded, women were moving into arenas once dominated almost completely by men and for which there are “no female mythological models.”11 “Unsex me here!”—that’s what Campbell believed to be the rallying cry of many a new combatant in the “masculine jungle,” something that was, to my mind, nothing more than a repulsive projection uttered in a fraught era of social change. Still, I was observant of how, at faculty meetings, my colleagues spoke about “the best man for the job” and how, for years, invitations to Harvard’s faculty meetings, coming straight from the President’s Office, began with the words “Dear Sir.” It was then that I began to pay attention, not just to women authors, but to how women were represented in the texts I was teaching. And my students kept after me, year after year, urging me to think more and think harder about gender, whether reading Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” watching Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, or turning the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

  As graduate students studying literature at Princeton University, we were all aware that the wife of a faculty member had a study space near the seminar room where our classes were held. She was working on a book about women writers, and her name was Elaine Showalter. How odd, we all thought, and wondered whether she was a real academic or just a “faculty wife” (that was the common designation in those days for the spouses of our all-male professors). She was, after all, working on a topic that was not of any real interest to the rest of us, knee deep as we were in Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Kafka. We read The Genealogy of Morals without considering how our own perspectives were limited and biased, pondered Anna Karenina without worrying about women and suicide, and entered the labyrinth of The Metamorphosis without noticing the odd way in which women were margin
alized yet also symbolically central.

  My most vivid memory of graduate school, however, remains my dissertation defense, that final sprint in a four-year marathon to the PhD. Some time ago, the actress Natalie Portman described just how much she had taken for granted in interactions with powerful men in Hollywood. “I went from thinking I don’t have a story to thinking, ‘Oh wait, I have a hundred stories.’”12 And she began rattling off incidents, not so much of sexual assault but of predatory behaviors. Her words led me to realize that we all had stockpiles of stories, stories that had not, at the time they happened, cried out to be told. Like many others, I silenced myself.

  When my dissertation defense was delayed by an hour while faculty members conferred in our seminar room, I began to get nervous, but not excessively so. Still I grew increasingly wary during the defense, sensing that something was not quite right. Only after the event, when my adviser, Theodore Ziolkowski, forever a hero in my book, asked to meet with me after the dissertation had been provisionally accepted did I learn about the determined efforts of a faculty member in the department to block my degree. A year earlier, I had fled his office when he tried to corner me, and I can still hear him declaring his passion for red-headed eastern European women as I grabbed the handle of his office door, relieved to discover that it was not locked.

  I cite these two incidents—disregarding the work done by a woman and suppressing a story of predatory behavior—because they might have ended differently had I fully understood the value of curiosity and care as well as the importance of speaking up and telling your story. That is the takeaway of this book. There I was, sharing research space with a woman who was working on a dissertation that would become A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977). Elaine Showalter’s book would go on to transform the field of literary studies by opening up an entirely new line of inquiry, but her work, not to mention her persona, was marginalized back then in ways that mystify me now. Why didn’t I take more interest in her work and her presence? And, then too, why did I not have the words to talk about what had happened to me in the professor’s office? When my dissertation adviser asked whether there was some history between the faculty member and me, all I could blurt out was: “Wouldn’t it be unethical and unprofessional to talk about personal relationships?” Unethical? Unprofessional? Why did I find it impossible to speak up and tell the story of the embarrassing encounter (“traumatic” was not part of our vocabulary in those days) in his office? As an immigrant to the United States and the recipient of a scholarship from an institution I revered, the thought of challenging and standing up to authority was unthinkable.

  The Heroine with 1,001 Faces is a deeply personal look at a lifetime of reading, misreading, and rereading myths, epics, fairy tales, fiction, and film. At a time when we are moving beyond gendered divisions of heroism, our past continues to weigh on us, haunt us, and invite us to reflect on the evolution of values embedded in the stories we tell, write, and reenvision. What has it taken to be a hero or a heroine, and what does it take to make one today? This volume may not be exactly the right resource for that student of Joseph Campbell’s who insisted that she wanted to be the heroine, but my hope is that it will serve as a point of orientation and mark the beginning of journeys toward self-understanding and empowerment through the stories that we tell and that our ancestors once told.

  At times, I felt as if I was flying blind over territory that I had thought to be utterly familiar. Didn’t I practically know The Odyssey by heart, after reading it in high school, in college classes, during graduate school, and with my children? And didn’t I understand exactly what was at stake in fairy tales after teaching them for decades? Hadn’t I fallen asleep as a child with The Diary of a Young Girl under my pillow, revered Thomas Mann and James Joyce as a college student, overdosed on Proust and Camus in graduate school, and reveled in the pleasures of teaching great books to my students? Familiarity never bred contempt, but it closed my eyes to much that became self-evident when I started tracking women with the hero’s journey in mind. My hope is that The Heroine with 1,001 Faces will reveal the value of remaining open and curious about who inhabits our world and also standing up and using our voices even when those who came before us were silenced. With women now better represented in the workplace—as doctors, pilots, firefighters, preachers, and judges—it is almost impossible to mourn the world we have lost. Women now provide models (imaginary and real) in abundance, changing the myths we live by, and remaking the human world in ways that promise to make the world more humane.

  THE

  HEROINE

  with

  1,001

  FACES

  CHAPTER 1

  “SING, O MUSE”

  The Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Mission

  I do not want to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. . . . More interesting is what makes intellectual domination possible; how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice.

  —TONI MORRISON, Playing in the Dark

  There are no heroes of action, only heroes of renunciation and suffering.

  —ALBERT SCHWEITZER, Out of My Life and Thought

  THE CONCEPT of a heroine with a thousand and one faces risks sounding less like an answer to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) than an effort to do him one better. But the thousand and one heroines of this volume are, in their various guises, not at all in competition with Campbell’s thousand heroes. The Arabic 1,001 designates a vast measure, and the final digit of “one” in that number goes beyond a thousand to suggest a swerve into something without limits. The number in my title is meant to capture the boundless possibilities as well as the bravura magnitude of heroic behavior.

  In many ways, heroes and heroines gleefully resist definition and classification, and it has not been easy to avoid falling into the trap of reducing heroines to a model that does little more than mimic Campbell’s archetype with its twelve stages of the hero’s journey. Both critiques and sequels run the risk of repeating and reinforcing the models they seek to challenge. But as Campbell emphasizes, heroes are forever surprising us with their spirited unpredictability and unnerving defiance of rules, norms, and regulations. Never mind the actual grotesqueries of heroic behavior. The Winnebago figure Wakdjunkaga eats his own intestines; the Greek warrior Achilles defiles Hector’s corpse by dragging it around the city of Troy; the Irish Cú Chulainn is subject to seizures that turn him into a vicious monster.

  Some heroes may act like thugs, but that does not keep them from becoming our cultural role models, and we continue to revere them by emphasizing their courage, valor, and wisdom. They return from battle, as well as from solitary quests, covered with “glory.” They keep us in thrall, when we are young and as we age. We continue to hold them in awe, celebrating their “journeys” and “quests,” as Campbell puts it, and overlooking their flaws, tragic and comic.

  Joseph Campbell set out to tell one “marvelously constant” story about heroes. To his credit, he cast a wide net, exploring many corners of our symbolic universes, from Native American lore to Greek myths, and boldly venturing into religious traditions from both East and West. His manifest goal was to identify the distinguishing features of the hero archetype and to chart the stations of a journey that takes the hero from what is often a humble abode across a threshold into adventures writ large, followed by a triumphant return home with a healing elixir. Campbell’s confidence about what it takes to be a hero is daunting, matched only by his conviction that women have no place in his pantheon of heroes.

  In the grammar of mythology, Campbell argued, women represent “the totality of what can be known.” He correctly intuited that the mythical imagination links women with knowledge, often in insidious ways. The hero, he added, somewhat craftily and cryptically, is “the one who comes to know.” In other words, women never need to leave the house. They are “paragons of beauty” and “the reply to all d
esire.” As “mother, sister, mistress, bride,” they are the “bliss-bestowing goal” of the hero’s quest. And to drive home the point that women are at their best when lifeless and inert, Campbell enshrined Sleeping Beauty as the fairest of them all. She is the “incarnation of the promise of perfection.”1

  Why does Campbell introduce The Hero with a Thousand Faces with a fairy tale, with a story about a rebel princess? An analysis of “The Frog King,” the first entry in the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales (1812), takes up a good part of Campbell’s first chapter. The title of that chapter? “Departure,” and it is there to signify the first steps in the hero’s adventure. Campbell retells the Grimms’ story about a princess who loses her golden ball in the deep waters of a well and then makes a grudging bargain with a frog, who is willing to retrieve her plaything in exchange for a set of demands that turn on providing him with companionship. One small blunder—failing to catch a ball after tossing it in the air—and an entire universe opens up, bringing with it the illuminating power of adventure, transformation, and redemption. In this case, both lowly frog and high-born princess are implicated in the golden myth of rebirth.