In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Women as Heroes
  • Susan R. Gannon (bio)
Pearson, Carol and Katherine Pope . The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1981.

Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, authors of The Female Hero in American and British Literature, contend that "on the archetypal level the journey to self-discovery is the same for both the male and female hero," but stories embodying male and female experiences differ in important particulars because of the roles and opportunities afforded each sex in western society. The first section of their book considers the nature of the heroic ideal embodied by female heroes, and deals with the reasons why such figures have been neglected by literary critics and students of popular culture. Pearson and Pope also attempt to identify the particular obstacles to individual self-fulfillment customarily encountered as part of the female hero's quest. They suggest that "because negative myths about women are internalized through the socialization process, the first task of the female hero is to slay the dragons within." The important psychological journey in which the female hero goes forth to slay the inner dragon and thus to win the treasure—"the liberation of her true, vital,and powerful self"—is explored in the second part of the book. The final section deals with the hero's return to the kingdom. It describes "the various forms of community she discovers or creates, and describes her confrontation with the external dragons of patriarchal society."

Among the works Pearson and Pope introduce in exemplification of archetypal patterns are many from children's literature. They cite "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Rapunzel" as imaging in various ways the difficulties facing the female hero in departing from the role prescribed for her by patriarchal society and in finding an "exit from the garden." Each of these traditional stories presents a protagonist menaced by a captor parent who wishes to keep the daughter paralyzed or spellbound. In contrast, Pearson and Pope observe that in L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time there are positive, affirming parent figures, and a hero who learns not to define herself in a helpless, dependent role. They see The Wizard of Oz as presenting an allegorical version of the heroic journey. The flight or expulsion from the garden is the cyclone which carries the hero to Oz, where "the landscape suggests the promise of a rich, full, adventurous life." The treasure the hero claims at the completion of her journey is, Pearson and Pope suggest, herself. Discovering herself—her whole and authentic self—she finds that her entire world is transformed. Therefore Jo March's marriage, her coming into an inheritance, and her creation of a new family and a school at the end of Little Women are seen as imaging the fertility and wholeness found in her transformed world.

The bulk of The Female Hero is given over to exemplification of the various ways in which archetypal patterns are embodied in specific fictions. The authors seem to have made a conscious effort to include in their discussion works which have been ignored by traditional literary scholarship. Not only children's literature, but a good deal of speculative fiction—not all of it of much intrinsic merit—is included here. The range of citation in this book is generous, but such massive exemplification and intensive summary inevitably result in a certain distortion. Subtle and complex works of art are reduced to simplest terms and suffer in the process. In Wuthering Heights, we are confidently told, "the cruel, passionate foundling Heathcliff," represents "vital 'evil'." And there are the inevitable inaccuracies: Wycherley's Mistress Pinchwife is named Margery, not Margaret; Dorothy Parker's Hazel Morse doesn't manage to commit suicide, however hard she tries.

The greatest strength of the book, I think, lies in its theoretical introduction. For The Female Hero in American and British Literature offers an interesting corrective to the traditional bias with which the quest has been handled in literary criticism—a perhaps unconsciously patriarchal view which has tended to see the male as subject, the female as object. Pearson and Pope offer a useful critique of the traditional view of "mastery" as...

pdf

Share