The Heroine with 1001 Faces

An essential for all library fairy tales and folk lore collections. As always, the writing here is imminently readable. I learned a great deal.

Maria Tatar is excellent at unravelling threads and themes of myth and fairytale, of contextualising them historically and looking, too, through a cultural and psychological lens. Here she takes on the giant figure of Joseph Campbell - not unkindly, and not, I think, without fondness - and looks at the places his vision didn’t go and where his theory stopped short: the female hero. As she points out, these exist in the history of folktale and myth, and always have; but their journeys are different from those of the classic Campbell male hero. They are the stories which drop out of the fairytale canon, which are there even in Grimm but haven’t stuck fast. I was familiar with most of these tales - Fincher’s Egg, Bluebeard, Mr Fox, et cetera - but this was still delightful for the way it shook Campbell’s thinking up and turned it out. But then Tatar pushes it further, looking at contemporary female heroes and how their journeys match - or don’t - the arc of historical fairytale female heroes. This is something that could feel forced or tacked on, an attempt to position the book in the present, but it doesn’t: Tatar builds up her argument and critical apparatus and runs stories like The Hunger Games through it. It works.

Re: the gentle, rueful examination of Campbell - this is paired with a similar glance at Tatar herself as a student, and reflects on the way she dismissed the young Elaine Showalter’s scholarship at the time. It’s a generous work, not sparing herself either, and showing how the arc of history and criticism moves.