The Importance of Context in Myth Interpretation

When I originally wrote this ISP, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. I had never written an ISP before, and trying to design a curriculum around a subject you want to explore is rife with assumptions and conjecture about what you think you will learn and how the different materials will coordinate. When I planned on writing this essay, I assumed I would have reached a point where I would have something meaningful to contribute to this subject. Instead, I find myself asking even more questions than before. I feel that instead of a traditional essay, what I really need to do here is discuss my observations and consider the context of my sources. There are themes, biases, and concepts emerging that I had not expected to see, and I find the more I think about the backgrounds and intentions of the writers, the more I am understanding the framework that is being imposed on what is actually a far more nebulous construct than we believe.

Nothing is absolute or concrete in the world of the hero/heroine. Archetypes are represented in in a myriad of characters like reflections in a shattered funhouse mirror, and steps in the journey become conflated or are missing altogether. The journey is not a check list, rather a constellation of elements that contribute to an understanding of the phenomena. Like a good recipe for stew, it is the recognizable end result that makes it stew, not a set list of ingredients. Figures like the Herald are represented in Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit (Carroll 25), but finding one in Aschenputtel (Tatar 113) requires some serious bending of the archetype to fit. To think of the journey strictly in terms of the stages prescribed by Campbell in Hero With a Thousand Faces is to impose a dogmatic structure onto something that doe not have one. What we are dealing with instead is a series of common features. These are the hallmarks of what humans tend to view as the heroic journey, and their sequence and meaning are completely open to interpretation.

Another consideration that needs to be made is the context of the interpretation. Each of the three books I have chosen come from different writers, writing from different backgrounds and even different time periods. Unlike “hard science”, mythography and analysis is admittedly steeped in cultural bias and personal interpretation. Part of the purpose of myth is that a story’s interpretation is what binds a people together. We are all like the blind men touching the elephant. We all see what we want to see based on our limited understanding of what the story is telling us. In Tarsem Singh’s film The Fall, a hospitalized American stuntman in the early 20^th century tells a very American story of bandits, escaped slaves, and Indians to a little Romanian girl. The story is visually portrayed from the little girl’s point of view, and it takes the viewer a moment to realize that the child is envisioning the tale through the filter of her Old World upbringing, imagining the “Indian” of the story to be a Hindu mystic and the endless sands of the Sahara taking the place of the sagebrush desert of the American West. This gives the viewer a unique perspective on how the same tale can evolve through not only the filter of the teller but the filter of the listener. That is the nature of myth and folklore. It is the skeleton that we all hang our own skins upon in order to see ourselves better.

Campbell’s filter comes from a place very inspired by Freud and Jung, with a dash of world religion tossed in. Campbell’s work was very influential on the New Age movement, as it provided a framework in which we could all view our own lives against the epic backdrop of the hero’s quest. The role of women in American society was decidedly different at the time this book was written, and although he attempts to interject heroine stories into the discussion, his primary focus is on the journey of what was viewed as the hero of his age: the virile, Post-War man who strives for mastery over himself and all he surveys. While these values are not necessarily contrary to the truth of a woman’s motives in her journey, in the narrative of myth and fairy tale the stories are likewise filtered through the context of their time and place. It is also critical to note that many who knew Campbell personally attested to his possessing a very bigoted and misogynistic world view outside of his academic studies (Larsen 510). Because of the deeply personal nature of myth interpretation, it is difficult to imagine that these personal opinions would not have had an influence on his writing. In spite of his reputation as being the definitive word on the subject, Campbell’s protagonists do not exist in a vacuum of white, male privilege. There are other viewpoints to be heard.

Women Who Run With the Wolves, on the other hand, is written by a woman in the latter half of the 20^th century. Estes was a Jungian therapist who specialized in victims of abuse, disaster, and war with PTSD. She herself had a difficult early life, and her female heroine clearly has a combat-ready stance (Pinkola Estés). She portrays the heroine as a woman who has found harmony with her primal nature and is unafraid to snarl. As a poet, Estes is far less interested in narrative and more fascinated with symbols and connections. Many of the tales she discusses in her book were not stories I could find referenced elsewhere, and may either be her own creations or reworkings of older stories. Estes book was written during the tail-end of the Second-Wave Feminist movement based on the experiences of a woman who had seen women transition from the strangling domesticity of Campbell’s Post-War America with only 29.6% of the workforce being women to 45.2% by 1990 (Toosi 24). Wolves came at a time when women were becoming competitors for resources in the public realm in unprecedented numbers. Her call for women to see themselves as predator rather than prey was both timely and inspiring.

The Heroine’s Journey is a horse of a different color. Murdock is a family therapist, and as such her focus is on concepts of identity and inner cohesion rather than Campbell’s metaphysical narrative and Estes’ call to arms. Murdock is contemporaneous with Estes, and the emphasis on the feminist experience is present in both, but Murdock describes a heroine whose duality is a conflict between masculine and feminine rather than beast and woman. At their core, both arguments would seem to bolster each other, but Murdock’s take has a more intimate spin. The Heroine rejects the feminine, which she associates with the perceived weakness of her mother. Instead she embraces the masculinity of her father, which she considers the key to strength and success. This practice of taking the heroine and making her little more than a man with breasts is frequently seen in many of Hollywood’s more misguided attempts at producing what has been codified as “Strong Female Characters”. Because society has come to associate masculinity with strength and heroism, we must make our heroines conform to the masculine ideal of adventure, or a pale, cliché “woman as nurturer” variant that feels safe for our sensibilities. We are given attractive young women in skin-tight catsuits, tailor-made to appeal to the male gaze (Pennell, Behm-Morawitz 212), roundhouse kicking their way through throngs of bad guys rather than anything that attempts to show what truly motivates a woman to take on the heroic journey. Murdock’s description of this process of rejecting the feminine as inherently weak came at a time in our history when women were beginning to emulate more masculine modes of dress and behavior to prove their worth. To create a vision of strength in our heroine, we have to strip her of the perceived frivolity of femininity and inject her with machismo.

When Murdock states that the heroine struggles against the weakness of the mother, one cannot help but wonder if this weakness is something innate to the mother-figure or society’s filter veiling our eyes. The film Star Wars is a prime example of how the rejection of the feminine mother-figure as weak is tightly woven into our perception of the heroine. The fact that Princess Leia is rarely mentioned as a heroine and plays a secondary role to her brother Luke Skywalker does her a disservice. Leia is a freedom fighter motivated by compassion for her people. She is tortured in the line of duty, and yet manages to maintain her composure even as she watches her entire planet obliterated by the Empire. Sadly, Leia’s fearlessness and willingness to risk her life for the good of humanity is overshadowed by memories of her in a brass bikini. She is a galactic mother bear, but we have reduced her to Jabba’s sex slave, Han’s girlfriend, and Luke’s sister. We minimize the heroine because she is often a creature that reacts rather than seeks. The hero may take on adventure for adventure’s sake, for conquest, or in defense of his people, but the heroine is seen through the scrim of what are considered “feminine drives”. When Campbell dismisses the exclusion of heroines from his book as being because “…women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories.” (Campbell 145) it is because he didn’t consider the stories that women were participating in, namely fairy tales, as being important enough to study. Because in a male-centered culture, being willing to stand up to the beast that is trying to steal the loved ones from your arms is not seen as a show of strength, hunting and slaying a dragon is.

There is a reason why we consider the Disney Princesses princesses rather than heroines, even though many of them are. We don’t see Cinderella (Tatar 113) as heroic because all she did was have a good heart and wear a pretty dress. However Cinderella survived horrible abuse, rejection, and deprivation for years and managed to come out of the situation with her good heart in tact. We view her has having no agency, no power, and as little more than arm candy. Perhaps our drive to contextualize her against the masculine expectation that one must slay the dragon rather than survive it does a disservice to the core of feminism. Empowerment is not emulating the masculine, it is finding your own strengths and using them. Cinderella is not a dragon slayer, and she knows this about herself. Rather she is as a Zen monk, patiently waiting for her kindness to pay off, coping with an untenable situation until divine intervention rewards her patience. We see her as victim because of her enslavement, but ignore her triumph in retaining her humanity and mercy in the face of oppression. Thought provoking, however this line of thought leads down the rabbit hole of questions about how we define the heroine and if the context of Campbell’s hero is even relevant to her journey.

At the end of the first half of this ISP, I find I have to ask myself new questions. How concrete are these stages of the journey? Are there actual differences between the hero and the heroine? Must a heroine always be a fighter, or can she succeed in her journey in other ways? We think that the model for the heroine has changed over the years because of feminism, but have we just slapped new packaging on the same, old product? Most importantly, how does the context of the the mythographer change the perception of the myth, and how does the context of the listener or viewer interpret this? Clearly, there is more reading needed. I have been making every effort to incorporate other sources and opinions, as I don’t feel this course of study to be complete without as broad a spectrum as possible. By the end of this course, I hope to have a better picture of how all of these elements and world views coalesce into a more unified version of the heroine.

Bibliography