The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  10.Rebecca Solnit, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends,” Literary Hub, April 23, 2020.

  11.Campbell, Goddesses, xiii.

  12.“Have Hundred Stories: Natalie Portman on Sexual Harassment,” News 18, November 21, 2017.

  CHAPTER 1: “SING, O MUSE”

  1.Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1949), 1, 92.

  2.Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), 104–15.

  3.Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2001), 100. See also Theodora Goss, The Fairytale Heroine’s Journey (blog), https://fairytaleheroinesjourney.com/into-the-dark-forest-the-fairy-tale-heroines-journey/.

  4.Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 16.

  5.Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 543.

  6.Stephen Fry, Heroes (London: Michael Joseph, 2018), 1. In a study of women in fairy tales, Jonathan Gottschall determined that female protagonists are “far less likely” to be defined as physically heroic or possessing courage. “The finding,” he concludes, “leaves open the possibility that female characters expressed heroism in ways not entailing physical hardihood or risk.” See his “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale Protagonists,” Evolutionary Psychology 3, no. 1 (2005): 85–103.

  7.For Arendt, the polis, or public realm of appearances, is constituted directly from “the sharing of words and deeds.” “Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere.” See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198.

  8.Muhsin Mahdi, ed., The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 16.

  9.Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004), 145.

  10.Joseph Jacobs, “Mr. Fox,” in English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1890), 148–51.

  11.“Within the literary context, mythologies are ongoing and developing, even evolving,” as Kathryn Hume puts it in The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 6.

  12.Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen, Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002), 310.

  13.“Podcast: Joseph Campbell and ‘The Message of the Myth,’” Moyers on Democracy.

  14.Wolfgang Saxon, “Joseph Campbell, Writer Known for His Scholarship on Mythology,” New York Times, November 2, 1987.

  15.Larsen and Larsen, Joseph Campbell, 327.

  16.Otto Rank, “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” in In Quest of the Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3.

  17.Alan Dundes, “Madness in Method, Plus a Plea for Projective Inversion in Myth,” in Myth and Method, ed. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 147–59.

  18.Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 20.

  19.Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese, 1998), xiii.

  20.Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (New York: Dell, 1984), 161.

  21.Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese, 2005), 119.

  22.“Myth, Magic, and the Mind of Neil Gaiman,” interview with Tim E. Ogline, Wild River Review, April 13, 2007, https://www.wildriverreview.com/columns/pen-world-voices/myth-magic-and-the-mind-of-neil-gaiman/(site discontinued).

  23.Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30.

  24.As Mary G. Mason puts it, “The dramatic structure of conversion . . . where the self is presented as the stage for a battle of opposing forces and where a climactic victory for one force—spirit defeating flesh—completes the drama of the self, simply does not accord with the deepest realities of women’s experience and so is inappropriate as a model of women’s life-writing.” See “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 210.

  25.Maureen Murdock, “The Heroine’s Journey,” Maureen Murdock (website), https://www.maureenmurdock.com/articles/articles-the-heroines-journey/.

  26.Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 101.

  27.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011), 305.

  28.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Complete Short Stories and Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 2004), II:1176.

  29.Leslie Jamison, “Cult of the Literary Sad Woman,” New York Times, November 7, 2019. On that contrast from the perspective of a psychologist, see Mary M. Gergen, “Life Stories: Pieces of a Dream,” in Toward a New Psychology of Gender, ed. Mary M. Gergen and Sara N. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), 203.

  30.Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), 118.

  31.The Amazons were more than an invention of the Greek imagination, and Adrienne Mayor explores the reality of warrior women behind the stories told in ancient cultures. See The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  32.On the cult of the hero and hero worship, see especially Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 11.

  33.Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), 204–5.

  34.I am indebted to Gregory Nagy’s textual elucidations in The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. He refers to “deeds meant to arouse a sense of wonder or marvel” (9).

  35.Margaret Atwood, “The Myth Series and Me: Rewriting a Classic Is Its Own Epic Journey,” Publishers Weekly, November 28, 2005.

  36.In a landmark essay of 1957 entitled “What Was Penelope Unweaving?” the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun describes Penelope as a woman without a plot, without a narrative to guide her. She weaves and unweaves, day after day, year after year, biding her time until it is time to enact a new story. See her Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 103–11. That new story came first in the form of poems like Hilda Doolittle’s “At Ithaca,” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “An Ancient Gesture,” and Louise Glück’s “Penelope’s Song,” then in novels like Odysseus and Penelope: An Ordinary Marriage (2000) by the Austrian writer Inge Merkel and Ithaka by the American author Adèle Geras (2007). For more on those poems, see Emily Hauser, “‘There Is Another Story’: Writing after the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad,” Classical Receptions Journal 10 (2018): 109–26.

  37.Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005), 82. Additional quotations are from pages 39, 1, 2–3.

  38.Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, Motherself: A Mythic Analysis of Motherhood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 12.

  39.Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockterman, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, “The Silence Breakers: The Voices That Launched a Movement,” Time, December 18, 2017, https://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/.

  40.“Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness and chastity, to be contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife; but ‘hero’ has no feminine gender in the age of heroes,” M. I. Finley tells us in The World of Odysseus (1954; New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2002), 25.

  41.Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, 159.

  42.Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 96.

  43.K. F. Stein, “Talking Back to Bluebeard: Atwood’s Fictional Storytellers,” in Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction, ed. S. R. Wilson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 158. See also Kiley Kapu
scinski, “Ways of Sentencing: Female Violence and Narrative Justice in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad,” http://projects.essex.ac.uk/ehrr/V4N2/kapuscinski.pdf.

  44.Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as a Man of Letters,” in Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899), 154.

  45.As Linda Hutcheon points out, there is always the risk that you cannot “privilege the margin without acknowledging the power of the center.” See Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press Canada, 1991), 12.

  46.Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” Politics (November 1945), 321–31; Euripides, The Trojan Women, trans. Alan Shapiro (New York: Oxford, 2009), 40, 58.

  47.Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 4. Additional quotations are from pages 238, 227, 239, 26, 239.

  48.Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships (London: Pan Macmillan, 2019), 339. Additional quotations are from pages 241, 185, 255, 109.

  49.Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (New York: Mariner, 2008), 4.

  50.“Ursula K. Le Guin Film Reveals Her Struggle to Write Women into Fantasy,” Guardian, May 30, 2018.

  51.Ursula K. Le Guin, “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove, 1989), 147–60.

  52.Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (New York: Doubleday, 2018), 3. Additional quotations are from pages 291, 49, 266, 97.

  53.Darragh McManus, “Feminist Retelling of Homer’s Classic Breaks the Silence of Troy’s Women,” Independent.ie, September 2, 2018.

  54.Madeline Miller, Circe (New York: Back Bay Books, 2018), 341, 384.

  55.E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 1. Additional quotations are from pages 177, 186.

  CHAPTER 2: SILENCE AND SPEECH

  1.Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942; New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1976), 113.

  2.Mary Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth, 2nd ed. (1986; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 64.

  3.Hamilton, Mythology, 100, 103.

  4.Charles FitzRoy, The Rape of Europa: The Intriguing History of Titian’s Masterpiece (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 49.

  5.Rembrandt van Rijn, The Abduction of Europa, J. Paul Getty Museum, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/882/rembrandt-harmensz-van-rijn-the-abduction-of-europa-dutch-1632/.

  6.A compelling example of attention paid to brushstrokes, surfaces, and textures can be found in Nathaniel Silver’s “The Rape of Europa,” in Titian: Love, Desire, Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 167–78.

  7.Titian, The Rape of Europa, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/10978.

  8.Jean François de Troy, The Abduction of Europa, National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.154233.html.

  9.Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth, 54.

  10.Tim Chamberlain, “The Elusive Urn,” British Museum Magazine, no. 52 (Summer 2005).

  11.Benita Ferrero-Waldner, “EU Foreign Policy: Myth or Reality?” (lecture, Sydney Institute, Sydney, SPEECH/07/422, June 26, 2007), https://www.europa-nu.nl/id/vhlxfod2pxzx/nieuws/toespraak_benita_ferrero_waldner_eu.

  12.Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto (New York: Liveright, 2017), 4.

  13.James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1844), 205–6.

  14.Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65.

  15.Hamilton, Mythology, 197.

  16.Luba Freedman, “Danaë,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 250.

  17.Cited by Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 141.

  18.Madlyn Millner Kahr, “Danaë: Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman,” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 44.

  19.Johanna King-Slutzky, “After Philomela: A History of Women Whose Tongues Have Been Ripped Out,” Hairpin (blog), Medium, March 10, 2014.

  20.Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 212.

  21.Helen Morales points out that “ancient myth dramatizes sexual assault again and again.” You can even look up at the night sky and see Jupiter’s moons, named for his victims: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. See her Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020), 66. Patricia Klindienst, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” August 1996, http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/klindienst.html.

  22.Sara R. Horowitz, “The Wounded Tongue: Engendering Jewish Memory,” in Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, ed. Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 110.

  23.Edith Hamilton, Mythology, 395–96.

  24.Karen E. Rowe writes: “Philomela’s trick reflects the ‘trickiness’ of weaving, its uncanny ability to make meaning out of inarticulate matter, to make silent material speak.” See “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 56.

  25.In an extraordinary study of the “softer stuff” that drove technological development, Virginia Postrel tells us that “the ancient Greeks worshiped Athena as the goddess of techne: craft and productive knowledge, the artifice of civilization.” See The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 5.

  26.“How the Spider Came to Be,” as told to Tèmakamoxkomëhèt by his friend Michelle Little Cat Singing, Native American Embassy, accessed October 10, 2020, http://www.nativeamericanembassy.net/www.lenni-lenape.com/www/html/LenapeArchives/LenapeSet-01/spider.html.

  27.“Alice Walker,” Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York: Continuum, 1983), 176.

  28.Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 1.

  29.Walker, The Color Purple, 192.

  30.Walker, 206, 284, 137.

  31.Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 6.

  32.Martha J. Cutter, “Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker’s Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple,” MELUS 25 (2000): 161–80.

  33.Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1–34.

  34.Paulo Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3.

  35.In 1838, British publisher Charles Knight placed an advertisement for a new translation of the Arabian Nights, promising that the stories, which had previously been oriented to the young, would deliver authentic adult entertainment. “It is one of the chief objects of the translator to render these enchanting fictions as interesting to persons of mature age and education as they have hitherto been for the young,” Knight declared. See Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons, trans., The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, ed. Robert Irwin, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 2008), I:4. Edward Lane, the chosen translator of the tales, was less coy than his publisher about delivering on the promise of sexual titillation. He also insisted that the stories, graphic content and all, were not just made up but mirrored the social mores and values of the Orient: “Some of the stories of the intrigues of women in The Thousand and One Nights presented faithful pictures of occurrences not infrequent in the modern metropolis of Egypt.” Women and intrigue—that was a winning combination for Lane, who lavished attention in his notes on the “wickedness” of women, noting that “the stronger sex among the Arabs” outdid men when it came to the libido. See Horta, Marvellous Thieves, 177.

  36.John Updike, “Fiabe Italiane,
” in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1983), 662.

  37.Lyons and Lyons, The Arabian Nights, I:4.

  38.Horta, Marvellous Thieves, 177.

  39.Marilyn Jurich makes this point in Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), xvi.

  40.Lyons and Lyons, The Arabian Nights, I:6. I have edited the translation for clarity.

  41.Lyons and Lyons, I:7.

  42.Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (New York: Random House, 2017), 130.

  43.Orhan Pamuk, “Love, Death and Storytelling,” New Statesman, December 18, 2006, 34–36.

  44.Paulo Horta has shown how translators violated the spirit of The Thousand and One Nights, rewriting the stories in ways that gave added weight to female cunning and women’s moral weaknesses, all the while minimizing male sexual mischief and justifying violence against women. As important, he shows how Edward Lane, who published a three-volume translation of The Thousand and One Nights in 1840, abridged Scheherazade’s role, often omitting her repeated appearances as storyteller in successive tales, and also reducing the number of female characters who are, like Scheherazade, courageous, educated, and clever.

  45.I borrow the phrases from Deldon Anne McNeely, Mercury Rising: Women, Evil, and the Trickster Gods (Sheridan, WY: Fisher King Press, 2011), 125.

  46.As James Hillman has pointed out, in an age of “Hermes hypertrophy,” with “modems, CD-Roms, cellular phones, satellites, 300 cable channels, call-waiting, virtual realities,” we need “the centering circular force of Hestia” more than ever. Cited by McNeely, Mercury Rising, 116.

  47.Marjorie Bard uses the term “idionarration.” See her Organizational and Community Responses to Domestic Abuse and Homelessness (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis, 2016).

  48.“The Goose Girl,” in The Annotated Brothers Grimm, trans. and ed. Maria Tatar, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 320.

  49.Giambattista Basile, “The Young Slave,” in Classic Fairy Tales, 2nd ed., ed. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 92–95.