Archetypal/Myth Criticism

Introduction to Modern Literary Theory
Archetypal/Myth Criticism

A form of criticism based largely on the works of C. G. Jung (YOONG) and Joseph Campbell (and myth itself). Some of the school's major figures include Robert Graves, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, Maud Bodkin, and G. Wilson Knight. These critics view the genres and individual plot patterns of literature, including highly sophisticated and realistic works, as recurrences of certain archetypes and essential mythic formulae. Archetypes, according to Jung, are "primordial images"; the "psychic residue" of repeated types of experience in the lives of very ancient ancestors which are inherited in the "collective unconscious" of the human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and private fantasies, as well as in the works of literature (Abrams, p. 10, 112). Some common examples of archetypes include water, sun, moon, colors, circles, the Great Mother, Wise Old Man, etc. In terms of archetypal criticism, the color white might be associated with innocence or could signify death or the supernatural.

Key Terms:

Anima - feminine aspect - the inner feminine part of the male personality or a man's image of a woman.

Animus - male aspect - an inner masculine part of the female personality or a woman's image of a man.

Archetype - (from Makaryk - see General Resources below) - "a typical or recurring image, character, narrative design, theme, or other literary phenomenon that has been in literature from the beginning and regularly reappears" (508). Note - Frye sees archetypes as recurring patterns in literature; in contrast, Jung views archetypes as primal, ancient images/experience that we have inherited.

Collective Unconscious - "a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person's conscious mind" (Jung)

Persona - the image we present to the world

Shadow - darker, sometimes hidden (deliberately or unconsciously), elements of a person's psyche


Excerpts about myth criticism and feminism

French feminists who follow [Jacques] lacan, particularly Helene Cixous, often propose a utopian place, a primeval female space free of symbolic order, sex roles, otherness, and the Law of the Father in which the self is still linked with what Cixous calls the voice of the Mother. This place, with its Voice, is the source of all feminine writing. Cixous contends: to gain access to it is to find a source of immeasurable feminine power. Luce Iragary also describes this utopian feminine space, but Julia Kristeva is most explicit about the distinction between it and the "real" world. Kristeva calls this Mother--centered feminine realm the semiotic as opposed to the symbolic.


Before we end this section, we must mention one other type of psychological feminism, myth criticism. Though myth criticsm has its own history and methodology (see chapter 4), several feminist writers have adopted its perspectives and transformed them for the purposes of feminist criticism. Notable among these is Annis Pratt, who, although she criticizes Jung for his lack of treatment of the female developing psyche, offers intriguing connections between feminism and Jungian archetypal criticism. Pratt attempts to construct archetypes of power that are useful to practicing women critics as a means of avoiding the patriarchal tradition. (Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction [Brighton: Harvester, 1982], and "The New Feminist Criticisms: Exploring the History of the New Space," in Beyond Intellectual Sexism: A New Woman, A New Reality, ed. Joan I. Roberts [New York: David McKay, 1976]: 175-95). Feminist myth critics tend to center their discussions on the Great Mother and other early female images and goddesses, viewing these figures as the radical others that can offer hope and wholeness as against the patriarchal repression of women. Especially popular are figures of the Medusa, Cassandra, Arachne, and Isis.

In The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (ed. Cathy M. Davidson and E.M. Broner [New York: Ungar, 1980]), prominent feminist myth critics, including Annis Pratt and Adrienne Rich, define myth as the key critical genre for women. Criticizing male myth critics of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Northrop Frye, for ignoring gender in their scientific classifications of myths and archetypes, these writers direct our attention to gender as well as to the actual practices of diverse ethnic groups. Since most myths are constructed and studied by men, there are some very difficult issues concerning women's representation in myths; thus the need is even greater for women's creation of their own myths. Many of these new feminist myth critics reject the Greco-Roman tradition as hegemonous and instead seek pre-Greek myths, such as those of Isis, and diverse, lesser known cultural myths in different parts of the world, such as those of Native American legend. Rich conforms to these general strategies, but focuses on the ways mothers are portrayed in mythology and literature. Although some early feminists seem to have felt that motherhood and feminism do not go comfortably together, Rich argues through myth that motherhood is the feminine status. She distinguishes between the fact of motherhood and the institution a patriarchal culture makes of it, finding that society's oppression of women comes precisely from its need to romanticize (and in a certain sense avoid facing) the terrible and wonderful powers of the mother.

Myth can teach women how to live, and it can help ethnic groups, especially oppressed minorities, reorganize and reorient themselves within a dominant culture. Myth manages to bring together private and public experiences in forms that can be as direct or as masked as the situation demands. It especially appeals to women in their identification with nature, as in the vegetation-goddess archetypes such as Ceres, and it can connect the individual woman with the totality of the cosmos, as with a goddess such as the three-faced goddess of the crossways, Diana-Selene-Hecate. Even the most destructive women in mythology, such as Medea, can be analyzed to show their attraction for modern women; it is well-documented that in many cultures, when matriarchal societies were replaced with patriarchal ones, the previously veneerated goddesses are turned by the new culture into witches, seductresses, or fools. studying these transformations reveals the powers of the goddess all over again, enriching the lives of men as well as women. Yet myth criticism in general and feminist myth criticsim in particular have been attacked as too homogenizing, promoting a false universality of identity . . ..

Levi-Strauss . . .

Levi-Strauss and his disciples determined that the adaptation of Saussure's lingistic model to problems of human science was sound because Saussure had followed a rigorous, objective scientific method, which identifies and defines constituent parts, studies relationships within a system, and accepts mathematical analysis. Lanugage and culture are alike because they are composed of "oppositions, correlations, and logical relations" (Claire Jackson, "Translator's Preface," in Levi-Strauss, Structural Antropology, Vol. 1 [New York: Basic, 1963]: xii). To Levi-Strauss, the structures of the human mind common to all people--that is, to the way all human beings think (cf. our discussion in chapter 4 of the universality of myth). Myth thus becomes a language--a universal narrative mode that transcends cultural or temporal barriers and speaks to all people, in the process tapping deep reservoirs of feeling and experience and often invested with divine origins. To Levi-Strauss, even though we have no knowledge of any entire mythology, such myths as we do uncover reveal the existence within any culture of a system of abstractions by which that culture structures its life. In his study of the Oedipus myth, Levi-Strauss found a set of mythemes--units of myth analogous to linguistic terms like morphemes, phonemes, or tagmemes, and like those linguistic counterparts based in binary oppositions--whose structural patterns invest the myth with meaning. For example, Oedipus kills his father (a sign of the undervaluation of kinship) and marries his mother, Jocasta (an overvaluation of kinship). In either case, Oedipus has choices, although a pitying reader may not think so: what he does plus what he does not do are significant binary oppositions within the myth (as they are in Sophocles tragedy). Although Levi-Strauss was not interested in the literariness of myths, some of his contemporaries saw his work promising implications for purely literary studies, particularly studies of narratives.


Further references:

* Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: OUP, 1934.
* Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Boos, 1949.
* Frazer, J. G.The Golden Bough.
* Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism and Fables of Identity.
* Graves, Robert. Greek Myths and The White Goddess.
* Jung, Carl Gustav. Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature and various other works
* Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy.
* Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 1.
* Pratt, Anais. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
* Seboek, Thomas A., ed. Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.
* See also the works of Derek Brewer, Shirley Lowry, June Singer, and Laurens Van der Post