Maria Tatar - The Heroine with 1001 Faces

Contents

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 doesnt 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

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

J OSEPH C AMPBELL 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-womens 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, youve been talking about the hero. But what about the women? The startled professor raised his eyebrows and replied, The womans the mother of the hero; shes the goal of the heros achieving; shes the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want? I want to be the hero, she announced.

What about the women? This book tries to answer the question posed by Campbells 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 womens 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 Campbells work at film schools and to publish the bestselling The Writers 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 Campbells 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 Campbells 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 Campbells 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.