DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 128 831 CS 202 947

AUTHOR Pratt, Annis

TITLE Archetypal Theory and Women's Fiction: 1688-1975.
PUB DATE 75
NOTE 37p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
Modern Language Association (San Francisco, Deceuber
26-29, 1975)

EDRS PRICE MF-$0.83 HC-$2.06 Plus Postage.

DESCRIPTORS American literature; *Characterization (Literature);
English Literature; *Feminism; *Fiction; Higher
Education; Literary Criticism; *Literary History;
*Sex Role; Sex Stereotypes; *Symbolism
IDENTIFIERS *Archetypes (Literature)

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to trace a descriptive
history of woman's psyche as manifested in English and American
literature by and about women during the period from 1688 through
1975. The application of archetypal theory (the description of
recurrent patterns in symbolic and narrative structures within a wide
and complex field of material) to the works of women authors reveals
a logical schema of "matrilinear patterns" which reflects the unique
nature of female behavior and experience. (KS)

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 Archetypal Theory and Women's Fiction: 1688-1975

In an article entitled "It's All Dixie.Cups to Me" Rita Mae

Brown asserts that "Only by telling who we were and where we

came from can another woman know the4truth of our journey. Only

then can she trust us for we've given her a roadmap. Feminism,

the root self, isn't one magic moment of understanding then life

becomes easy. Feminism begins a process that brings us closer

and closer to yciu/our goal. You'll come home. Home tO your root

self. Home to the self before social consciousness and conscious-

1 .-,-
It.;44as in quest of this root self and out of the
ness of self."

conviction that women's fiction embodied its conflict with social

consciousness that I set out five years ago to explore the road-

maps laid down by women for each other in their fiction in England

and America during the past two hundred and eighty-seven years.

Since volumes had been devoted to tracing the history of the male

psyche in its anthropological, mythological and literary manifesta-

tions could one not, I postulated, undertake a descriptive history

3
of woman's psyche as it is manifested in a significant body of

her literature? In order to answer such a question two critical

methodologies in particular seemed appropriate: literary history,

needed because we did not have a thorough, coherent history of

our fiction; and archetypal theory, the description of recurrent

patterns in symbolic and narrative structures appearing in a

significantly wide and complex field of material.

At the time that Ifirstproposéd such an.undertaking, at one

of the first workshops in Feminist Criticism sponsored by the MLA

Commission on the Status of Women in December, 1970, there was

considerable objection to my assumption that archetypal criti,-;_sm

could be of use to feminism, since in its Jungian mode it seemed

mired down in stereotypical assumptions about Tbe Masculine and

2
The Feminine. It was also suggested that the history of woman's

psyche was meaningless except as a manifestation of social conscious-

ness; indeed that the two were one and the same thi-Ag, the implication

being that internal patterns in psychic consciousness have no value

of their own and can only be assessed as reflections of external,

supra-individual phenomena. Criticism based on analysis of mythological

patterns of the unconscious, in this analysis, would be useless

since such a world has no intrinsic being except as a secondary

response to materiality.

4
 From the fiction that I had already considered at the time that

I posed the archetypal hypothesis, however, it seemed evident that

there was both an interior, psychic landscape traversed by the

individual woman hero and an external, material landscape impinging

upon her, and that these heroes were simultaneously pursuing

. ..

journeys into their unconscious and battling those forces which,

from birth, attempted to strip them of their autonomy and process

them into passive zombieism according to accepted social norms

for female behaviour. The result of this dual engagement was

that the literature was characterized by a tension between the

"root self" or authenticity of the hero and social roles proposed

for her, a tension which accounted for the constant tone of irony

and desperation in the entire body of material. No matter how

deeply a hero might plunge into the world of her unconscious

she always came up against society at the end: since the pragmatic

field of literary material that I intended to study was thus

characterized by both internal or psychological and external or

societal forces I was willing to approach it on its awn terms

using both contextual or historical.and archetypal methods of

analysis.

I had not, at the time, reached a coherent understanding of

the relationship between the world of the interior mind and the

5
world of social and political activity: I had forged no connection

for my own personal use between my experience2as an activist in

the woman's movement and my previous researches into the unconscious

world of Dylan Thomas. Most feminists and woman writers with whom

I was acquainted were caught up either in politics or in creating

art, and those like myself with involl7ement in both were operating

as if in two disconnected universes. During the period that I

immured myself in order to delve into these questions, however,

feminists in the country as a whole were moving to close the gap

between politics and what, for want of a better word to describe

this new space, they were calling the "spiritual" dimension of

feminism. Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad of The New Women's

Sourcebook were amazed, while travelling around the United States

gathering material in 1974, to find that "Women, feminists, are

becoming sensitized and receptive to the psychic potential inherent

in human naturethat they are realizing that women in particular

are repositories of powers and capabilities that have been surpressed.

. . It is as if feminists have recognized an even deeper source

of female alienation and fragmentation than the sex role polarization

n3 The "entirely
which had so effectively limited women's minds.

new dimension" which feminists were now exploring, I was delighted

to discover, was 'precisely the dimension of women's literature

opened up by the archetypal method of analysis--the study of our

root selves as a repository of forgotten images, energies, powers,

and rituals. What we had been finding in the field of women's

literature were, in this new light, encoded messages delivered

covertly by women to each other since they gained power to write.

was able thus to come out of my academic closet into the light

of the new feMinist day, my efforts suddenly seeming less to one

side of my political desires and of value to all of us in bringing

us to terms with our history, perhaps even with that deepest

collective past which is the memory of all women since the first

lemur decided to swing along the ground with her legs to see if

it was as much fun as swinging through the trees with her arms.

In spite of my primary interest in the archetypal patterns

which women's fiction might yield, the actual time that I have

spent in archetypal analysis is far smaller than that spent with

my three co-authors--Patricia Jewell McAlexander, Barbara White,

and Andrea Loewenstein--during the four years that it took us

to read, describe, and analyze the materials examined. Although

there were two or three excellent literary histories available

(such as Hazel Mews' Frail Vessels, B.G. MacCarthy's Women Writers,,

and Helen Papishvily's All The Happy Endings) there was no single

work which had described the field of British and American material
that I felt constituted a significant sample for archetypal analysis.

Thus, with the help of colleagues in the Midwest Modern Language

Association, in the MLA, and of a number of graduate and under-

graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, we set out to

provide an historical survey of the field, an endeavour which

took from 1971 until the spring of 1975 and which produced the bulk

of my forthcoming volume, Feminism and Fiction.

In describing the history of women's fiction we found it

useful to deal in separate chapters with sexual politics in the

novel in general and with a theme that I felt to be of especial

importance in the development of women, that of erotic autonomy

or initiative. From the outset I had felt that the quest for love,

the quest to assert Eros in an equitable and amicable relationship

to men or women, was central to women's fiction not for purposes

of brainwashing them into submission as Millett at that time and

Ti-Grace Atkinson since has asserted as the function of Romantic

---
.Dyve, but as a basic human need. This need seemed as important

for the growth of the woman hero and as destructive when thwarted

as the need for significant employment or civil liberty. Under

the broad categories of sexual politics and erotic intitiative we

surveyed novels by various modes, genres, and subgenres, finding

that they fell into categories consonant and analogous from century

8
 to century under similar subheadings. We found that there was

more in common, that is, between Jane Eyre and Jane Grey (hero

of Drabble's The Waterfall) than between Charlotte Bronte and

Thackeray, Drabble and Joyce; and that the denouements of a

Doris Lessing and a George Eliot novel were more likely to be

similar than those of Lessing and Burgess, Eliot and Dickens.

We did not spend any time, however, in pursuing male/fenale com-

parisons, but, rather, focused entirely on women's fiction for

reasons of limiting our scope to a manageable body of material.

The analogues that we found between women's novels of various

centuries led to a further hypothesis namely that women's fiction

comprises an organic body of material inter-related by cross-century

analogues, an hypothesis which led in turn to the fact that the

development of woman's psyche since 1688 had not so much evolved

or progressed as remained staLic. Although social expectations

fer males might have changed drastically since Emmeline was Orphan

of the Castle and Emily St. Aubert was immured in the fastness

of Udolpho, the Cult of Virility still held prisoner the heroes

of such recent novelists as Christina Stead and Fay Weldon. Other

discoveries we made in the process of the historical survey were

that women writers who had risen to an isolated token prominence

were not "freaks" to one side of the women's novel but part of
 8

an entire galaxy of similar works dealing with much the same themes

in much the same way; that we should not be put off by the "drowning

effect" by which so many woman novelists disguised feminist critiques

of the patriarchy by feints, ploys, and punishing denouements;

and, finally, that although the triple handicap of being black,

poor, and female made the situation of black proletarian heroes

one of especial jeopardy, there was a striking consonance in

sexual deprivation and discrimination making novels by blacks,

poor whites, and middle class women recognizeable products of the

same caste. Similarly, within the category of Erotic initiative,

we found similar horrors suffered by lesbians, heterosexual lovers,

4
and single women.

The discovery made during the historical survey of greatest

importance to my conclusions is related to this organic unity

and cross-class, cross-race alerity. I had thought that the

most significant differences in women's novels would occur along

a horizontal scale from the conservative Novel of Manners, at

the right end, and reformist and radical Novels of Marital Rebellion

and Novels of Erotic Assertion, at the left end. From the eighteenth

to the twentieth century, however, and from some of the most

purportedly Cultish woman novelists to the most recent Neo-Feminists,

there were far more outcries against the patriarchy at the right

10
 9

end of the scale and far more accommodations to it at the left end

and than one would have imagined. This lack of progression or

.evolution in the novel as a whole either at any given period of

its history or during its entire development matched up with the

cyclical repetition of modes and genres to suggest that it was a

unique literary genre standing to one side of British and American

literary history because of the constant and ineradicable alerity

to which its authors and the women they wrote about were subjected.

The novel, that is to say, was embodying a disjunction between

woman and her society that was radical and constant.

The social function of the novel, which can be traced to the

classical theories of comedy and tragedy, was not performing in

the same way for women as it had been set up to do for men. The

purpose of classical comedy and tragedy,is that of a social Atual,

Ly which the "abnormal" or anti-social tendencies in the audience

are purged through laughter or pity in order to restore them to

a sense of normalcy as members of the society promulgating these

norms. This process of purgation and restoration, however, assumes

that those purged and restored are all members of society as known,
--
society as defined by given norms and mores. The problem for the

woman in the audience, however, is that she is not and never has

been a full fledged member of a society or culture, the knowers

11
 1.0

and members of which have in western civilization always been assumed

to be men. "Woman, in the picture language of mythology," remarks

Joseph Caulphall, "represents the totality of what can be known.

The hero is the one who comes to know . . . and if he can match

her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released

from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme

n5 ThisGalatea-like function is not one

of spiritual adventure.

of authentic being, of choice-making transcendence, but one of

serving as a means or auxilliary to somebody else's development.

It is this state of affairs, in which women are objects of value

in a system of barter and exchange, which Levi-Strauss sees as

definitional of human society: although he coyly cautions femivists

not to worry about being symbols in man's language because "words

do not speak, while women do," he insists that no society has ever

existed in which women exchange men, while on the other hand, the

core of human civilization is based upon the exchange of words

6
and women by men.

But what, I found myself asking, would the anthropologists

and myth critics do if they came upon Galatea alive and well

and carving a statue of Pygmalion (or, for that matter, of Sappho)?

Is is precisely because the mythological patterns informing the

structure of so many metaphysical systems in western thought are

12
male that it is assumed that women never have, never will, and

shouldn't ever manipulate mythological materials. If a woman were

to set oat to seize upon the power of word and narrative and form

an account of her own growth and development from them she would

in that very act be sabotaging the culture which defines her as

an element of'use. If she has ever described the world of her

unconscious this fact must be surpressed from academic and cultural

studies: it is as if in entering the world of myth history in her

own right she were penetrating male lodges where for centuries

men have enacted rituals of reassurance to enable each other

to come to terms with what they consider the unconscious of

everybody, namely their own repressed ("female") depths; it is as

if entering these clubs where men have been constructing masks

of power to scare women and grotesquely exaggerated goddesses to

titillate each-other into transcending their gynophobia, women

should seize upon the tools herself to construct representations

of the energies and Rowers not for male use but for that of herself

and of her sisters.

There is no question whatsoever that women have, not only

since they began to write fiction in the late seventeenth century

but throughout thousands of years of oral and craft traditions,

performed for each other precisely this mythic function. A few

13
 12

pioneering woman anthropologists and myth critics, such as Jane

Harrison, Maud Bodkin, and Jessie Weston, were able during the

early decades of this century to begin to look at these patterns

and to try to come to terms with their relationship to male culture.

Many feminist scholars and theoreticians in recent years have

refused to undertake such a systematic study, however, being wary

of archetypes which have historically been used to validate rather

than to challenge sex roles and of an archetypal method which they

suspect of reinforcing a gynophobic social mythos. A phenomenon

particularly disheartening to woman scholars, moreover, is the

constant encoding or swallowing of patriarchal norms by hero

and author alike: woman authors seem to become addicted to "the

drowning effect" because they veer unsteadily between a desire

to shatter sex stereotypes and a terror of violating such deeply

encoded taboos.

Thus, not only within women's literature taken as a whole

but within the head of the individual woman author also, a battle

goes on between male myths and a counter-myth of gender-free

possibilities, a clash between two contrary mythoi which often

-

strikes sparks in our darkness from the very impact of their

meeting. "We shall have to understand the way mythic forces arise,

14
 13

grow, and operate," writes Elizabeth Janewair, "I do not believe

we shall ever get rid of them and, in fact, I do not believe that

we could get on without them: they are the product of profound

emotional drives, drives that are basic to life . . . sometimes

(and.particularly when they are thwarted) they substitute for

action a will to believe that what they desire exists--or should

exist. This is mythic thinking."7 It is mythic thinking as the

postulation of woman's desire.: for full humanity in this under-

ground and dwarted sense that underlies her fiction, and it is

only by understanding the mythic processes as they work themselves

out in this material that we can appropriate for our own purposes

the energies perennially brewing in the crucible of our desires.

Archetypal patterns are recurrent motifs made up of symbols,

often patterned into narratives describing a process of the indi-

vidual towards the greatest possible realization of her selfhood.

As the individual quests for this goal she is met and forwarded

by guides and set back by obstacles, just as in our dreaming state

we come up against nightmares as well as visions of delight. The

world of Cle myth follows the same principles of organization as

that of the dream, deriving on the one hand from waking life

and on the other hand from the depths of both the individual and

the collective psyche of her sisters. The author bears the same

15
 14

relationship to her unconscious materials as the dreaming self to

the dreamer, organizing (and, frequently, censoring) them according

to what she intends as the greatest enhancement of the reader.

is at this level that women's fiction provides a connection between

the world of the individual consciousness and that of the history

of her sex, mediated by the author's ability to make effective

use of her materials and thwarted by the author's difficulties

with her encoded patriarchal censor.

As I began to understand the fluid processes of mythological

dynamics underlying women's fiction I applied my understanding

of them to the material that we had surveyed, and I found that

the emergent liattern in the material as a whole was one of a series

of head onclashes between patriarchal "society as known" and

the desire of woman heroes for full selfhood. Although narrative

patterns in women's novels seemed set up to move the heroes towards

personal development these quests rarely "got anywhere," the elements

which would be progressive stages (..Z. itiation into society in

the male bildungsrnman being jumbled and inconclusive in the

female genre. Even when woman heroes like Lillian in Anais Nin's

Seduction of the Minotaur, Anna Wulf in Lessing's The Golden NoteLook,

and the narrator of Margaret Atwood's Fryean Surfacine undertook

rebirth journeys deep into the labyrinthes of their unconscious

16
 15

minds, the elixir of new selfhood that they achieved could not

emerge into a society which was not constituted to receive them

and their boon. The fiction of women from 1688-1975, at the

risk of extreme simplification, took a pattern like this:

(See Figure 1 here)

The phenomena in the left hand column emerged from recurrent

moments of epiphanic vision uniting a woman hero's consciousness

with the world of nature, in a relationship that had characteristics

unique from that of male heroes as they experience both nature and
8
woman. Young adolescent women, in particular, engage in fantasies

of having a powerful place in the Green World and in nightmares

of losing it, along with powers sometimes specifically herbal or

agricultural; older women, after repeated backlashings from the

patriarchy, frequently find themselves like H.D:s Julia in Cornwall

coming later in life to the same epiphanies: "This was real.

She sat down on a rock. She unknotted her handkerchief and laid

the stalk with the bulbous underwater leaves beside the leaves

of the curled parsley-like plant. . . . She was Medea of some

blessed incarnation, a witch with power. A wise-woman. She was

seer, see-er. *She was at home in this land of subtle psychic

9 Not only in self-
reverbations, as she was at home in a book."

consciously mythological novelists like H.D., Mary Webb, Naomi

17
 16

Nitchison, Anais Nin, and Margaret Atwood, but in a broad range

of authors including the most rational of eighteenth century

proponents of classical moderation and the toughest of social

realists such as Agnes Smedley and Doris Lessing, women have a

unique relation with the Green World.

A specie kind of lover emerges for such women, non-"civiliza-

tional" but hardly an overbearing Laurentian gamekeeper and in

no way a figure before whom heroes are abject. The Corn God who

appears in Cather and Mitchison, the "magnanimous hero" fantasized

by Katharine Hilberry in Night and Day, the Whileawyain lovers in

Joanna Russ' The Female/Nan and Three in June Arnold's The Cook

and the Carpenter, all represent a special kind of lover in opposition

to what is available from the patriarchy. The hero's relationship

to these is one of free choice, of a Diannic questing for the

exercise of freely initiated Eros rather than of submission to

rape and trauma. The propotypical example of such an a-patriarchal

lover is Catherine's Heathcliff, whom Maud Bodkin rightly sees

as the equivalent to Dante's Beatrice. Like all such lovers he

is the deadly enemy of the Edgar Lintons whom one must marry, of

the Edgar Lintons one must conceive by, the Edgar Lintons whose

child will kill one so that one can merge in an erotic immortal

epiphany with the Heath and Heathcliff, Green World and Green World

lover become interchangeable.

18
 17

Should a woman hero survive forced immurement in a marriage

and the loss of power over the Green World and of Erotic initiative

that it entails, she has one more choice in her quest for selfhood,

and that is to turn back into herself, into her psyche, to under-

take the journey inwards. But where the "night sea journey"

described by Frobenius and adapted by Jung for the male hero at

middle life takes him to the bottom of his psyche, through recon-

ciliation with his'anima, and back to rebirth into society as an

integrated personality; the very spectre of the inmgrated or

androgynous woman hero is considered placeless or a-cultural by

definition, abnormal in Freud's view and "viriloid" o "masculinate"

10
by Jung and his followers. Thus the denouements of even the

profoundest inward journey novels involve the return of the woman

hero, having achieved the androgynous elixir beyond male and female,

to a social world which has no place for her and which initiates

at the mere sight of her a backlash in direct proportion to the

degree of selfhood which she has achieved.

This unresolved or unsynthesized dialectic between feminism

and the patriarchy is a fictional reflection of the fact that in

spite of various political reforms (and perhaps oecanse of the

rising expectations engendered by them) the desire of women for

human liberty has met at its every rising the downclard, stultifying

19
 18

backlash of gynophobia. The clash or deadlock in novelistic

structures derives from a head on collision of male mythoi and a

-

counter-mythos is woman's unconscious surging up to combat it.

Every culture enslaved by an alien and dominant superculture dreams

of a Golden World, a Jerusalem or West Africa of lost collective

liberty,-and the recent wave of activity described by Rennie and

Grimstad includes renewed speculation concerning the existence of

those ancient repositoriesof women's hopes and desires, stdries

of a Golden World of Women, of Green World Collectives, and of

Amazons which have been passed down through the centuries. It

was especially because I had not ever lent much credence to the

historical existence of a Matriarchy that I was startled to discover

that three traditions fuse in a series of inter-related analogues

to the archetypal patterns we had uncovered in women's fiction:

the matrilinear cultures described by such anthropological scholars

as Evelyn Reed; the Grail legends sponsored originally by Eleanor

of Acquitaine and researched by Jessie Weston and (of all people)

Emma Jung in this century; and recent discoveries following Margaret

Alice Murray concerning the survival to the present day of the

.Crafte of the Wise, or of the Wiccan.

It is extremely difficult for the woman scholar whose training

is wholly in western patriarchal.thought patterns to penetrate the

glittering mirror of "civilization's" view of women to find her

own face in the zinc beneath. It is fascinating to note that the

20
 19

the early woman researchers to penetrate what Mary Daly calls the

"Male Maya" and to discover mythological materials concer*ting

women quite often did so in spite of a predisposition to sit at

the feet of male myth critics who came to radically different

conclusions. The findings of several such scholars are all too

briefly summarized on the accompanying table:

(See Figure 2 here)

The ramifications of the analogues between the anthropological,

archetypal, and occult materials concerning the history of women

are extraordinarily exciting and complex, and should form the basis

for further research and critical study. I intend, for example,

to use the patterns rendered by the analogues as a hypothetical

structure to describe the history of women's poetry in England

and America, a history that has its roots in women's folklore,

folk music, and art. There are several points which it seems

valuable to isolate in summarizing the significance of archetypal

theory to feminist criticism at this time:

1) Firstly, it seems important to take note of the centricity

of Rape narratives to the material as a whole and to a traumatic

recounting of such an event to the history of western literature.

Joseph Campbell who, as we have seen, set out with a phallocentric

view of cultural history, came to the conclusion after reading

21
 20

Jane Harrison on the subject that the Goddesses of myth history

were more likely to represent real, historically powerful women

than images in the minds of men, and that the cultures governed

by such mythoi of women might even be superior to those which

superceded them. Campbell thus comes to describe the existence

of a matrilinear culture on a world wide basis and considers

the political equity and artistic civilization achieved by pre-

Aryan Crete, Greece, and Ireland as.models far superior to the

11
."phallic moral order" which overthrew them. This overthrowing,

moreover, he sees as a core event underlying the rape narratives

of such legends as the rape of Leda, Europa, and Persephone by

Zeus and Plato. Evelyn Reed, similarly, notes that the tragic

stories of Cleopatra and Medea rise from the situation of a

matrilinear-culture leader falling in love with a member of a

patriarchy, and sacrificing her own life and her own relatives

for him. Much of male literature, in Reed's and Campbell's

understanding, thus derives from the recurrent horror of raping

or being raped by the other half of the human race.

2) Secondly, we find that the memory of the Rape Trauma

is a perennial one, recurring at adolescence in the mind of

each individual girl as she grows up only to be snuffed out,

a situation reflected in the jumbled stages of the female

22
bildungsroman (consider Martha Quest backing like a zombie into

the wringer of a "proper marriage") and in the preoccupation of

so many novelists of female alolescence with grotesques, freaks,

and madness.

3) Our inheritance from the prehisto4c and historical past

of women is not one-sidedly negative, howevr: the sense of loss

which engenders the Rape Trauma implies something that is lost,

and the recurrent images of a Diannic self-dependency, Erotic

initiative, significant role in the Green-World, and naturistic

power in women's literature attest to the depth and continuity

of women's desires. It does not particularly matter whether a

world actually ever existed in which these desires were fulfilled,

it seems to me: the important thing is the psychological patterning

encoded in women's minds and literature suggesting the need for

full exercise of these human powers. This positive inheritance

of symbols, rituals, and stories of energy and power is not

totally lost, then, but hieroglyphically encoded in the materials

which were salvaged from the gynocide of the early modern period.

It can hardly be a coincidence that it.was precisely at the

moment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

when the witch burnings ceased that women emerged as prolific

writers of the novels. Or, as Monique Wittig has put it, "There

23
 22

was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked

alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you

have lost all recollection of it, remember.... You say there

are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist.

But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing Chat,

12
invent."

4) Finally, it cannot be a coincidence that the entire

tradition--anthropological, mythical, and literary--comes

together in the figure of Eleanor of Acquitaine, the very woman

who attempted to build up a code of anti-marital love in the

hostile world of the crusades. Surely, in her sponsorship of

the translation and continuation of the Grail material, she

must have been aware of the woman-centered elements encoded

in it, and perhaps even of the matrilinear cultures from which

it derived.

The Grail's secret must be concealed

And never by any man revealed

For as soon as this tale is told,

It could happen to one so bold,

If the teller should have a wife,

Evil will follow him all his life

24
 23

goes one warning, and no wonder! "Radical feminism," Mary Daly

has remarked, "means saying 'Yes' to our original birth, the

original movement-surge toward life. This is both a remembering

13
and a rediscovering."

At the end of the Grail quest and at the turning point of

the Rebirth or Inward journey lies the "secret" of human life,

and that "secret" is the achievement of androgyny matched with

the ability to enhance the social collective through it. At a

Modern Language Association Forum on androgyny in December, 1973,

however, woman scholars raised severe questions as to the value

of the concept of androgyny. What is the point, several asked,

of talking about the splendid energies released in the androgynous

personality when there is no way that such personalities can be

incorporated into society as we know it? To Barbara Gelpi,

for example, the term "androgyne" "conjures up the image of a

person devoid of social.context, or more likely the image of a

man and woman, perfectly balanced, but devoid of context.

In contrast, an Amazon, or a Witch, is a woman, a member of a

group like herself, who in addition to private identities

14
have collective power in the public realm." In the modern

novel, precisely as Gelpi suggests, it is the women who dwell in

25
 24

a new space who are likely to be Amazons or Witches rather than

coupled, extra-societal or eccentric beings in the root sense.

Only a few human beings in any given society can escape

interaction with the collective, however, and the novel being

an ineradicably social genre many women novelists find themselves

wrestling with this question of how their heroes can relate to

their social contexts. Doris Lessing sees the relationship

between the individual and s/his culture as intricately balanced

but organically essential to the life of both, a continual

juggling act between the responsible individual and s/his societY.

Lessing also postulates a "FourGated City" as the ideal collec-

tive, one to which the individual can will submission without

loss of liberty, an archetypal city which is at one and the same

time a social possibility and a figure from the world of the

unconscious. In Lessing's vision of the journey of various heroes

to such an ideal city, Jean Pickering notes, "the outer life is

parallel to the inner life; in the last analysis, Martha's

experience seems to tell us, they are the same thing, for the

further one goes into one's own rooms, the more one discovers
15
that they are inhabited by all humanity." The journey of the

hero into her unconscious is thus primary in enabling her to

comprehend what an ideal collective would be like: only the

26
 25

self-collected person who has come to terms with the warfare

within her mind may achieve the archetypal city. But over and

against every ideal city that she postulales, Lessing places

its opposite, in a dialectic reflected frequently in other

such novels as in the opposition of the Arkansas town and the

women's collective in The Cook and the Carpenter, between the

present day village and historical women's collective in Sarton's

Kinds of Love, between the utopian view of the May of Tec club

and its reality in The Girls of Slender Means, between the hetero-

sexual hell of Phil and Jackson's pad and the women's house in

Small Changes, etc., etc. It is this same thematic interplay,

moreover, between images of authentic companionship and social

disintegration that determines the structure of Woolf's Mrs.

Dalloway, The Waves, The Years, To The Lighthouse, and Between

the Acts.

The archetype of the ideal collective, then, just as the

archetype of the androgynous personality who inhabits it, seems

to appear in women's fiction only as embodying its opposite,

the tension between the two an inexorable presence as if every

golden vision of a better world had to come trailing its shadow,

the two locked in .conflict. Where, the weary reader may well

come to wonder, dwells the synthesis of these contraries? Are

27
 26

the woman writer and her audience stuck forever in the unenviable

posture of Chaucer's Crock striving with the wall, with nothing

to show for their energies but the shards of shattered psyches?

It is all very well for Northrop Frye to take note of the

alteration in western visionary literature of "apocalyptic"

and "demonic" symbologies, and for Lukacs to call upon us to ex-

amine the dialectics of hl3tory as embodied in literary structure;

but if the dialectic never moves towards synthesis, if for every

rock candy mountain there are a heap of drunks in a gutter and

for every dream of a Martin Luther King a Memphis, the new

"formalist anti-formalism" is nothing more than a literaxy critic's

version of detente.

It seems possible, fortunately, to postulate a more hopeful

way of looking at the relationship between novel and society,

of comprehending the function of the novel for its reading audience

that gives us an understanding of the landscape of women's fiction

as more than a mirror of Chinese water torture. If we under-

stand the final synthesis of the fictional dialectic as taking

place not within the work itself but in the relationship between

the work and society, then it can be seen as movirm. towards a

synthesis of the contraries of which it is composed. Such a

relationship between fiction and its audience, or between the

28
 27

novel and the individual reader, is comparable to that between

the dream and its dreawer. In waking life, that is to say, we

derive benefits from those long hours of the night spent in the

world of the inner mind, where we flex our muscles in the experience

of utopia and nightmare alike. Fiction, in my definition, can be

comprehended as a construction of the Imagination by which psychic

strengths are exercised both in relation to the negative aspects

of the patriarchy and to the positive aspects of our true

capabilities.

Women novelists have, in this definition, been gathering

us around a two-hundred-and eighty-sevenyear campfire in order

both to stir us by "spooking" and to provide us with adventures

for emulation. We have been provided maps of the sexual battle-

field and of the landscape of our encoded alerity, as well as

visions of individual and collective possibilities which transcend

battles and landscapes alike. We have been strengthened by moments

of epiphany when we feel, in experiencing what woman heroes

experience, a quality rising from the depths of our being which

altogether transcends the polarity of male and female, individual

and collective polarities imposed upon us by modes of thinking

alien to us. What women's fiction has provided for us, as

Carolyn Heilbrun notes for both male and female genres, are

29
 28

"undreamed of complexities" by which it "becomes symbolic in a

16
universe unknown to its author and his [sic] intentions."

What may be unclear or hieroglyphic to the individual author

can be made comprehensible by the feminist critic when she places

the symbols and narrative structures of one literary work next

to others. When archetypal patterns in women's fiction are

considered side by side with the findings of such scholars

as Millett, Reed, Elaine Morgan, Jessie Weston, Maud Bodkin, and

Emma Jung we are able to emerge from the dark forest where we

have barely been able to discern the outline of each other's

faces into the full sunlight of mutual recognition. This is

what scholarship is about, and this is the heady and delightful

task to which, I feel, archetypal theory can contribute. Not

only in the field of feminist literary criticism, but also in

the interdisciplinary exchange of the women's studies classroom,

we have seen, as Robin Morgan recently noted, the "welcome end

of anti-intellectual trends.... We are daring to demand and

explore the delights of hard intellectual work, both as personal

challenge and as shared necessity... we are daring to research

17
our own cleverly buried herstorical past."

Although scholarly objectivity and the inductive method to

which I have adhered throughout my career can be frightening in

30
 29

their results, I have been grateful to them for jogging me out

of preconceptions which do not hold true to women's history.

have come full circle, for example, from a disbelief in the

significance of Amazon legends and Matriarchal materials to a

realization of the centricity of these stories to the desire

of women for full human development. Although concepts of

women as special rather than equitable with men have been per-,_

verted in the doctrines of the Courtly, Renaissance, and

Victorian Cult of True Womanhood, I have had to reject my initial

distaste for the concept of a special nature of women because of

the results of my research. The fact that such perversions of

an originally woman-enhancing world view have occurred must not

turn us aside from the consideration of those elements encoded

upon our psyches as the residue of thousands of years of trauma,

submission, and resistance. The fact that men mythologize us

as earth mothers to play out childish fantasies upon or as

landscapes to wander over should not turn us aside, similarly,

_
from the examination of our long tradition of stories of power

shared with animals, plants, the sky and the universe itself,

which are all part of what Morgan "lovingly name(s) metaphysical

feminism," ready for ecstatic reclamation. Seeking these things,

31
 30

suspending our prejudgements, we will find ourselves engaged

in scholarly inquiries that become one among other pathways to

the root self, to the healing waters of our innermost being.

32
 Footnotes

1. Rita Mae Brown, "It's All Dixie Cups o Me," Quest vol. 1

no. 3, p. 49.

2. See Lillian Robinson, "Dwelling in Decencies," College

English (May 1971) and Annis Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches to the

New Feminist Criticism," Bucknell Review (Spring 1973).

3. Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad, "Spiritual Explorations

Cross-Country," Quest vol. 1 no. 4, pp. 49-50.

4. This thesis is posited by Barbara White in "Growing up

Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Literature," University

of Wisconsin-Madison dissertation, 1974.

5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 116.

6. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans.

Claire Jacobson and Brooke Gundfest Schoepf, (London: the Penguin

Press, 1968), pp. 61-2 as quoted by Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis

and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 371.

7. Elizabeth Janeway, Man's World, Woman's Place (New York:

Delta, 1971), p. 27.

33
 32

8. See Annis Pratt, "Women and Nature in Fiction," Contemporary

Literature (Fall 1972).

9. Hilda Doolittle, Bid Me To Live (gew York: Grove Press,

1960), p. 146.

10. Annis Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches to the New Feminist

Criticism."

11. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology (New York: The Viking

Press, 1968), p. 62.

12. Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleures as quoted by Morgan

McFarland, "Witchcraft: The Art of Remembering," Quest vol. I

no. 4, p. 41.

13. Jessie Weston, quoted from Elucidation in From Ritual

to Romance (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), p. 136 and Mary Daly,

"The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal Religion," Quest vol. 1

no. 4, p. 26.

14. Cynthia Secor, "Androgyny: An Early Reappraisal,"

Women's Studies vol. 2, no. 2 (1974), p. 163.

15. Jean Pickering, "The Connection Between the 'Politics

of the Left' and 'The Politics of Madness' in the Work of Doris

LessinglIMLA Doris Lessing Seminar Paper, 1973, pp. 13-14.

34
 33

16. Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny

(New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 51.

17. Robin Morgan, "Rights of Passage," Ms (September 1975),

pp. 78, 101.

35
 ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS IN WOMEN'S FICTION

Matrilinear Patterns 4 Patriarchal Patterns and Responses

The Green World Remembered as "femininity" imposed; enclosure,

unity with animal and plant lack of motion, airlessness

herbal lore, healing /Z.

cooking, nursing

wise old women as advisors ) policing mothers, sisters, aunts

The Trauma of Rape

------
The Green World Lover
:4 Enclosure within the Patriarchy
--chastity for wives

THE INNER JOURNEY UNDERTAKEN Accomodation

SOCIETY AS KNOWN
1. splitting from husbands, lovers backlash a ainst Andro ens
2. the green world guide
3. green lover remembered
4. confrontation with parents
5. agon leading to

to 6. Androgynous Elixir
41-7t-

EXPLANATION
(for examples and further analysis, see Chapter VII, Feminism and Fiction)
fashion, most
This schema differs from similar schema for male heroes in a drastic
chronological place-
importantly in the fact that its elements cannot be given numbers or
initiated into
ment within a sequence of phases. This occurs because woman is not being
Her deepest images
society as a whole, society as a whole considering her'as a non-member.
a-cultural, precisely because she.is defined (by
and symbols. are "pre-civilizational,"
Levi-Strauss, inter alia) by male culture as a token or subpart of it. For every aspect
there is an immediate and strong counteraspect, thus the arraws.with double ends
of women's
suggesting continual deadlock, a deadlock that is reflected in the structure
invariably
fiction. Most pointedly, the deep plunge into the Inner Journey is almost
downward
concluded with a return to society as known resulting in an even stronger
of threats to
thrust or backlash than usual, the elixir of androgyny being the direst
"civilization." and burst
Correspondingly, such traditional genres as comedy and tragedy are swollen
female characteristicspuffed up and exploded without
within women's fiction, male and
androgynous qualities are indeed
social alternatives suggested, although characters with
the herpes.
36
 ANTHROPOWOICAL PATTERNS MYTH CRITICISM: GRAIL PATIUIS hR, WM: 1iatgaraCMnrrnY1
,

Evelyn Reed, WomanIn Evolution: Jessie Wvston, From Rjtual. to The Cod of the Witches (1931)
\RCHETYPAL PATTERN:I IN WOMEN'S
From Mattlarchal Clan to Pair* Rowanco (1919); 6nwa jun anTi :17)11,priaar., materiaf
WW-Fr-ahx, Crall 1.2.1.4,Lnd. (70)
,:ICTION, 168S-1975, Annis Pratt
archal_ Family (1975)
I. Stories of pow.:rful groups
I. The Green World Culture (my I. Stories of a lost culture with of women, linked to the I. The Green World Remembered
"fairy" and elf people of as unity with and power to
term)--Cross-cultural analysis women in a prbminent position in
Arthurian legend (e.g. the utilize animals and plants,
of primitive cultures reveals the Mati(lre de Bretagne, which
matrilincar societies in which suddenly became popular at tilt Witches of Glouchester, e.g. Indian women in Mary
Morgan la Fee) who are versed Austin; Julia in H.D.'s Bid
women have developed a culture Courts of Eleanor of Acquitaine
in balance with but quite dif- and Maria de France in the 12th in green world lore, the Ma to Live (60) feeling her-
ferent from that of men. Women century. In both stories and healing arts and propitiatory self to be "Medea of some
methods of "bringing prosper- blessed incarnation, a witch
are primarily occupied with Mithraic rituals which Weston .

cooperative activities (agri- ity to the land and people." with power"; green world
sees as their source women are lore of regionalist women,
culture, pottery, etc.) males Their lore transmitted in
crucial. "sacred colleges" on "women's Cather, etc.
with hunting and fighting.1
islands."5
II. Erotic Freedom for Women II. The Green World Lover.
II. Rites centering around
--Living patterns.are separ- II. In Mithraic rituals of the Cather's Corn God in 0 Pioneers!
Old Hornie, or Cernunnos or
ate as are eating habits green (vegetable) world under- Woolf's green world orgasm/epi-
"Pan," corresponding to the
(women vegetarian, men eat lying the Grail material the phany in Voyage Out and
lament of the death of Adonis is
Minotaur of Crete. This fi-
,meat) and sex takes place in Katherine's "magnanimous hero"
between. Freedom to come and central, with woman tearing their gure is not worshipped for
his phallic maleness but as in Night and Day; Bronte's
go for women; biological hair over his death and a woman Ileathcliff as one with the
an activator of the Erotic
paternity not being understood always the key to his rebirth. heath; sexuality as visionary
power of the followers of the
however, she conceives her Pratt: the lament for lost erotic between Lessing's Martha and
Virgin Huntress Diana.4
children, they remain with her freedom seems implicit.4 Thomas, Jack.
or her male relatives.2
III. Mother's Brother--This III. Query: is there brother
relative.hcips the family or iII. According to Wolfram von mecerial in witch cults, III. Abandonment by one's uncles
group in times of warfare, Eschenbach's Parzival version of related to the Egyptian pat- and brothers to the mill of the
descent being reckoned in the grail legends the Fisher tern of having a ruling woman patriarchy: e.g. M..ggie and Tom
mother's line. Women share King was Perceval's Mother's in partnership with her own in Mill on the Flos,
governance, female elders Brother brother?
help elect leaders.
IV. The Rape Trauma--Gradual
seizure of women's powers over IV. The Rape of the Pays de 117.. The Loss'of the Lore in IV. The rape trauma embodied in
agriculture, etc., by men, the Gynocide of 1300-1900. women's.fiction: Dianic heroes
Logres. A land of beneficent
primarily involving the sup- Estimated:30 million women subdued (Eliot's Maggie,
women, who could give a traveler
planting of rights over women and girls drawn, burned, Eronte's Shirley, Schreiner's
anything he wanted from a- golden
and offspring by husband's quartered, hung, tortured, Lyndell, Phelps' Avis, etc.);
bowl, was laid waste after one
family. Trauma of shift leads wIth the result that "those actual rapes Lu Small Changes,
of the maidens was raped by a
to bloody propitiation rites, king named Amangon and her 'bowl who were herbalists let their Webb's Gone to Earth, etc.
.
including child sacrifice gardems go to seed....Those followed by ENCLOSURE /N THE
stolen. Logres parallels women's
(partitioning and dramatic who kept the ancient matri- PATRIARCHY which leads to a
islands "to the west" such as
enactments (e.g. Medea) even- Avalon; Ireland under the focal law did so within the splitting from.husbands and
tually mitigated by private confines of their homas."5 lovers and the --
matrilinear Danaans.
property and lump sum rather
INNER JOURNEY UNDERTAKEN
than lifetime offerings.3
V. The Quest of the Grail as a V. The centricity of the 1. The green world remembered
V. Drama, Rites, and eventual-
search for true personhood or "mother pot" or Cauldron, through a guide or token.
ly, Literature and the Arts
maturity via Androgyny. According which in some grail stories .2. The Green World Lover
enact the trauma, propitiate
the mother's brother's ghost, to Emma Jung Perceval must recon- is a stone (such as primitive recalled or met.
women grind corn in) ought to 3. Confrontation.with parents
purge both men and women's cile his silly excessive maseulin-
ity to his anima. ba par.elleled to the Grail or within the mind.
guilt over the transactions.
Golden Bowl figure. 4. Final agon leading to
5. Elixir of androgyny and
1,2,3. For parallels in primate and prehistorical social patterns sec Jane Gondall, In the
in Woman's 6. Return to patriarchy,
Shadow of Man (71) and Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (72). 4. Esther Harding,
backlash
Mysteries (71), defines Virginity in the ancient world as the quality of a woman who belonged t
herself, either giving of herself where ohe pleases or practicing celibacy mit of choice.'
5. "Witchcraft: The Art of Remembering," Quest (Spring, 1975) pp. 41-48.