The Heroine Finally Gets The Respect That’s Owed
In Hollywood, it once was an insider’s tip that to achieve success as a screenwriter, you needed a working knowledge of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces.”
That 1949 book laid out the ideas and symbols that undergird myths all over the world, including the hero’s journey, which propels the stories of Jesus, the Buddha, Moses and Odysseus.
When it came to women, though, Campbell, who died in 1987, was more limited. Women’s place in these myths, he once insisted, was “one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.” His ideas have long demanded a feminist response. Maria Tatar, the Harvard University professor who is one of the world’s leading scholars on folklore, has provided one.
Her new book, “The Heroine With 1,001 Faces,” is an answer to Campbell, though she is careful not to frame it as an assault. “Even though my title suggests that I’m writing a counternarrative, or maybe an attack on him, I think of it as more of a sequel,” she said.
Ms. Tatar is in search of the girls and women, some silenced and some forgotten, some from the Iliad and some from Netflix, who live in Campbell’s blind spot. The reader jumps from Arachne’s battle with Athena to the escape of Bluebeard’s trickster
In a ‘sequel,’ a scholar takes aim at a seminal book’s blind spots.
wife to Pippi Longstocking and Nancy Drew.
It was a book, Ms. Tatar said, that she had been writing all her life, but it took the isolating first year of the Covid-19 pandemic to provide the focus to put it all together.
She started by looking at the classic myths at the center of Western civilization. In the background of the hero’s journey were women without much agency, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus. What would it mean to see these stories from their perspectives? Suddenly, the mortal women who were “seduced” by gods appear as victims of sexual violence and not women who choose dalliances with swans and bulls.
Ms. Tatar then moved to folk tales, oral traditions firmly in the domain of women. These tales, with their lessons about how to navigate past a menacing wolf or the cruelty of fate, offered up heroines full of wile. Though they were never given the status of Greek mythology, these stories contained morals aimed at women and girls about how to live.
Ms. Tatar finally landed in modern-day culture and began teasing out the distinct qualities that made for a heroine: curiosity, empathy, a desire for justice or fairness.
The pandemic Netflix watching also made her wonder if the binary she was developing — a heroine to match the hero — might be a necessary but outdated exercise in a culture moving quickly, and happily, toward the blurring of these distinctions.
“One of the things story tells us is that things keep evolving and changing,” she said, “that the story is dead if you don’t change it. It won’t be relevant, it won’t be compelling, if you don’t keep making something new out of it.”