Messages In This Digest (2 Messages)

1.: Earth's Children Series From: Caroline Tully

2.: From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend From: Caroline Tully

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1.: Earth's Children Series

Posted by: "Caroline Tully" heliade@bigpond.com willowitch2001

Wed Sep 7, 2011 7:36 am (PDT)

Giday,

Who likes Jean M. Auel's [highly romantic but essentially good] Earth's
Children series?

I've just written a big fat blog piece on how the six books in the series -
the final one which I've just finished reading - accompanied me though
life...

Check it out at Necropolis Now Blog http://necropolisnow.blogspot.com/

~Caroline.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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2.: From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend

Posted by: "Caroline Tully" heliade@bigpond.com willowitch2001

Wed Sep 7, 2011 5:22 pm (PDT)

Forwarded Review...

Subject: [JFRR] From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and
Legend (Frankel, Valerie Estelle)

From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend.
By Valerie Estelle Frankel. 2010. London: McFarland. 376 pages. ISBN:
978-0-7864-4831-9 (soft cover).

Reviewed by Robert A. Segal, University of Aberdeen
(r.segal@abdn.ac.uk).

[Word count: 817 words]

Of all the books on female heroes that I have read, this one is the
worst. The book presumes to offer stories of female figures as not
merely a corrective but an alternative to Joseph Campbell's
supposedly exclusively male heroes in his Hero with a Thousand Faces
(1949 first ed.). That is, Frankel intends to be providing the female
version of Campbell's Hero.

What is wrong with this goal? To begin with, Campbell, unlike almost
all others who offer heroic patterns, hardly ignores female heroes.
He may even have as many female heroes as male. His initial hero is
the princess in the Grimms' "The Princess and the Frog." Bizarrely,
Frankel herself uses Campbell's pattern, including his substages, for
the first two-thirds of the supposedly distinctive female heroic
journey, yet then stops at Campbell's third and final stage: return.

Now in truth, Campbell's pattern is one-sided. For once the heroic
journey moves from the stage of departure to the stage of initiation,
Campbell abruptly narrows his focus to almost exclusively male
heroes. While he does include female heroes in the first subsection
of the stage of initiation, or the "road of trials," once he gets to
the encounter with the god and the goddess -- the heart of initiation
-- all of his heroes are male. More precisely, most are, for Campbell
still cites some female examples, even though they clearly are not
"meeting with the goddess," facing "woman as the temptress," or
achieving "atonement with the father." In fact, it is because
encounters with the god and the goddess are undertaken by male heroes
only that the pattern has been misread as Freudian.

Yet nothing in the overall journey at either the manifest or the
latent level actually demands exclusively male initiation. The
encounter is with the masculine and feminine, or father-like and
mother-like, sides of the personality, which both sexes harbor.
Campbell could effortlessly have widened his pattern to encompass
female initates. But he does not. Still, it is unsettling to be told
by Frankel that for Campbell the hero is always a "man" (1).

Understandably, others have offered a female counterpart to what they
take to be Campbell's exclusively male brand of heroism. In The
Female Hero in American and British Literature (Bowker, 1981) Carol
Pearson and Katherine Pope lament that "The great works on the hero
-- such as Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces... --
all begin with the assumption that the hero is male" (vii). In The
Hero Within (Harper, 1989) the same Pearson complains that "The great
books on the hero, such as Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, assumed either that the hero was male or that male heroism and
female heroism were essentially the same" (xx). Frankel, who
continually congratulates herself for her exhaustive reading, has
apparently yet to come upon Pearson and Pope.

Nor does Frankel seem familiar with the secondary literature on
Campbell, including my own Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (1990).
From her endless bibliography, which is supposed to demonstrate her
mastery of the field, one would never learn of the academic, not
merely pop, Campbell industry that arose following the exceptional
popularity of the PBS series on "The Power of Myth." No biographies,
no interviews, no guides, and no scholarly collections on Campbell
get mentioned.

Worse, Frankel cites no other approaches to heroism. For all her
purported independence, she sticks to Campbell's equation of heroism
with a journey. Her professed originality rests on the
differentiation of the female from the male quest. Male heroes, she
tells us, fight, and fight for kingship. Even the male hero's
encountering "the feminine" supposedly takes the form of rescuing a
princess. Would that Frankel had read tales of male heroes. By
contrast, the "true role" of the female hero "is to be neither [male]
hero nor his prize" (3) but instead "to become this archetypal,
all-powerful mother" (4), thereby restoring what Frankel
unhesitatingly considers primordial matriarchy. The female goal thus
turns out to be the same as the male one.

Oblivious to basic distinctions in Campbell and in Jung, Frankel
conflates the human with the divine -- a distinction necessary to
keep ordinary consciousness distinct from the unconscious. But then,
contrary to Campbell and to Jung, heroism for her is mainly
conscious, yet also sometimes unconscious. She conflates the Freudian
father and mother with the Jungian father and mother archetypes. In
starting the heroic journey in childhood rather than adulthood, she
conflates heroism of the Jungian first half of life with heroism of
the second half, to which Campbell, despite some of his examples,
restricts himself. The one virtue of her book, the stories, are
continually overrun by banal remarks about the sexes that make Dr.
Phil seem deep.

Finally, the stereotypes by which Frankel distinguishes the genders
-- "the heroine's journey is a path of cleverness and intuition"
(10), the male's that of reason and logic -- would make even high
school students blush.

---------

Read this review on-line at:

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1217

(All JFR Reviews are permanently stored on-line at

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/reviews.php)

*********

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