During my research I have struggled to access ‘adult’ conversations about what the myth of the hero and the descent into the underworld means for women. I am aware of the myth of Persephone and have even painted myself as that character, however I find most female versions of the hero archetype completely unsatisfactory. All they do is perpetuate a model that has been around since the early Greeks, keeping the feminine trapped, submissive and eternally waiting for some strong brute to emancipate her. Well it isn't too hard to guess what I think about that.
Therefore, perhaps I should be grateful, instead of angered, that even Joseph Campbell admits that there is a ‘paucity of scholarly analysis of the accepted feminine archetypes’ (Powers, 2000: 3) But if a giant of a scholar like Campbell has ‘missed it’, and upon being pinged for it continues to ignore the issue and doesn't do the research, then there seems to be little hope. In his ‘definitive study of heroism’ (Hero with a Thousand Faces), Powers thinks that the ‘subliminal implication is that heroism….is possibly only for men’. (Powers, 2000: 3) Unfortuantely my own research backs this up. Grrrr.......
But something even more sinister lurks beneath this particular piece of 'accepted' wisdom. Powers also says and I agree with her, that there is a disturbing absence of a ‘discernibly autonomous heroine’ and that this absence can be attributed to the long established tradition of equating divinity with heroism, and therefore masculinity. As a female of the species I have intuited this and it is difficult not to feel insulted by the lack of effort by scholars to tackle this subject, especially when the female psyche makes up slightly more than half of the world's population. Powers goes even further to suggest that because the task of finding a way to divinity occurs through the archetype of the hero, it is ‘theoretically impossible’ for a woman to realise the divine. It would seem therefore that the theory needs some serious adjustment, is long overdue and I am about to do it in my thesis.
It is not difficult to understand that these omissions have come about because it is men who have done most of the theorising. It appears that even men who are trained to think beyond gender find it difficult. Sorry boys, I remain unsympathetic, and, in truth, very disappointed. Powers suggests that ‘the process of manipulating archetypes in the service of the goals of patriarchy is much older than Jung’. (Powers, 2000: 6) We all know that it goes way back into early Greek culture.
If it is true as Campbell tells us that ‘the great task of the hero is to come to the knowledge of the divinity within’ then there should be no issue of gender bias and women are free to take this journey through the particular polarity of their own psyches, just as men do. But if ‘the manifest world of Western culture….has utterly obliterated the feminine divinity’ then woman’s overwhelming compulsion must be to first ‘overcome her culture’s denial of the feminine divine’. (Powers, 2000: 11) This is an enormous task and makes the journey even more difficult.
The Heroine in Western Literature: The Archetype and Her Reemergence in Modern Prose, By Meredith A. Powers McFarland & Company (July 2000)
Image: my own version of the Vengeful Goddess.
