In Search of Cupid and Psyche: Myth and Legend in Children's Literature
In order to make use of A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 3d. ed., edited by Wilfred L. Guerin, Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reesman, John R. Willingham. New York. Oxford UP, 1992, I have typewritten a few relevant passages (typewritten) from various chapters, and scanned the larger portion of chapter 4, Mythological and Archetypal Approaches. (As an unintended effect of scanning a bound book, some of the portions of the scanned pages appear grey rather than black. These are parts of sentences closest to the gutter, and obviously aren't of less importance than the black.)
They are protected by copyright; they cannot be reproduced, and their use is restricted to Professor Joseph's "In Search of Cupid and Psyche: Myth and Legend in Children's Literature" course.
NOTE
To move from page-image to page-image you must use your 'back' button: the page-images do not have hypertext links to enable continuous forward movement.
For an HTML version (not scanned images), see Keyed in Handbook
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.
---page 200.
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 . . ..
--page 205-207
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.
--page
244-245
