Adventurous Life Research Articles

Women as Heroes

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...

On Top of the World: Five Women Explorers in Tibet

In the late 1800s, when women were bound by cumbersome clothing and strict Victorian scruples, a small band of astonishing women explorers burst forth to claim the adventurous life. Ploughing their way up the Himalaya and Karakoram or trekking for months through tropical lowlands, these five women (three British, one American and one French) conducted an unprecedented exploration of Tibet.Nina Mazuchelli, the first Western woman to see Everest, organised a small expedition from Darjeeling to explore the Eastern Himalaya. Isabella Bird Bishop, bedridden while at home, was always robust on her far-flung, international adventures and wrote nine books chronicling her travels, which brought her to Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains and across Asia into Tibet. Alexandra David-Neel at 56 trekked for eight months and more than 2,000 miles from China to Llasa disguised at a Tibetan beggar. Fanny Bullock Workman, an avowed suffragist, climbed to 21,000 feet in the Karakoram in 1899 and posed with a newspaper whose banner proclaimed 'Votes for Women'. Annie Taylor was a Christian missionary who travelled in Tibetan garb to bring the word of God to the forbidden land of Tibet.

Great Books and Frozen Pizza

to make teachers of literature acolytes of fashion as they desperately strive to keep up with the immediate and the relevant in their effort to capture a role, however slight, in the public circus that is our America. (Never before has publicity been so available to all, and so democratically distributed.) The quarrel is with our own humanity, our hunger for a more adventurous life that will testify to time well served, a public memoir of the professor as hero. To those few Leavis-ites among us, literature may still be a religion, but to students soaking in the acids of their own thing, desirous not of a rite de passage but simply of slipping through the net in any manner possible, literature is just one more academic tootsie roll, to be tasted and chewed into delicious nothingness. And where students are, professors are bound to follow. Who can blame the students? (The inevitable question when one is writing about students today.) In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold told us that literature was a criticism of life; more recently, the Marxist philosopher, Ernst Fischer, spoke of art as the triumph of reality over ideology. Nevertheless, the singularity of literature

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Book reviewed in this article:THE KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY: Early Fathers from the Philokalia. Translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber. 35s. 1954.THE MISSIONARY AND RELIGIOUS PEACE: Ruhe und Frömmigkeit. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Missions‐methode. By Thomas Ohm.A NORM FOR THE CHURCH TO COME: The Early Church and the Coming Great Church. By John Knox.THE APOCALYPSE IN THE WEST: The End of Time. By Josef Pieper.A SURVEY OF PAPAL CLAIMS: The Development of the Papacy. By H. Burn‐Murdoch.LULL AND HIS VOCATION: Raymond Lulle—Docteur des Missions. By Ramon Sugranyes de Franch.EARLY FRANCISCAN MISSIONARIES IN THE EAST: The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Translated by a Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. Edited and with an Introduction by Christopher Dawson.HAZARDS OF MISSIONARY TRAVEL: Quand l'Europe Cherchait l'Asie. Jesuites Missionnaires (1541–1785). By Félix‐Alfred Plattner.AN ADVENTUROUS AND CHALLENGING LIFE: Eighty Adventurous Years. The Autobiography of Sherwood Eddy. With an Introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr.ISLAM FROM ITS LITERARY SOURCES: Muhammad's People, A Tale by Anthology. By Eric Schroeder.AN ANTHOLOGY OF SUFISM: The Sufi Path of Love: An Anthology of Sufism. Compiled by Margaret Smith.THE SPIRITUAL ASPECT OF RACE RELATIONS: The Chosen People, or, The Bible, Christianity and Race. By Gerald W. Broomfield. London: Longmans. 4s. 1954.: The Numbered Days: South Africa and its Problems. By S. B. Jackman.ISLAM IN EAST AFRICA: Islam in East Africa. By Lyndon P. Harries.INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS IN A HYDERABAD VILLAGE: Indian Village. By C. S. Dube.WORLD CHRISTIAN BOOKS: The Christians' God. By Stephen Neill. Christian Giving. By V. S. Azariah. Mark's Witness to Jesus Christ. By Eduard Lohse. Christianity and Science. By Charles E. Raven.INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTER: The Blue Triangle. By Julian Duguid.

Gilgamesh and Agga

ROBABLY the most significant piece of creative writing in the ancient Near East is the long known Semitic epic poem commonly called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Divided over twelve tablets, its text originally consisted of more than three thousand lines written in the cuneiform script and in the Semitic language now usually designated as Accadian. It is particularly remarkable for its plot-structure; a number of episodes in the restless, adventurous life of the hero are integrated with no little skill into a relatively long and intricate epic tale, probably the first of such size apd complexity in the history of epic literature. Moreover, this Babylonian product was current all over the ancient Near East; fragments of the epic written in the Accadian, Hittite, and Hurrian languages have been excavated in Boghaz Keui, in central Anatolia. In modern days, quite a number of cuneiformists have devoted much of their time and effort to the copying, translating, and interpreting of the poem; among the better known of these are George Smith and Paul Haupt, Peter Jensen and Campbell Thompson. Now while on the whole the Epic of may be accurately described as a Semitic literary creation, not a little of its contents goes back to sources. Available at present, wholly or in part, are the texts of five epic tales concerned with the deeds and adventures of the hero Gilgamesh; an analysis of their contents reveals that, while there was no original for the Babylonian Epic of as a whole, several of the individual episodes and motifs can be traced back to prototypes.1 However, by no means all of the tales concerned with were utilized by the Semitic authors and redactors of the Epic of Gilgamesh; it is one of these tales, an epic poem of which there is not a trace in the Semitic work, that forms the basis of the present study. This poem, which for reasons that will soon become obvious may be entitled Gilgamesh and Agga, is one of the shortest of all epic tales; it consists of no more than 115 lines of text. In spite of its brevity, however, it is of unusual significance from several points of view. In the first place, its plot deals with humans only; unlike the rest of the epic tales, it introduces no mythological motifs involving any of the deities. Secondly, it is of considerable historical importance since it provides a number of hitherto unknown facts concerning the early struggle between the cities of Kish and Erech. More important still is the implication of these new bits of data for modern historical methodology, for, interestingly enough and quite unintentionally of course, they help the present-day Orientalist to evaluate more intelligently his ancient source material and recognize some of its hidden pitfalls. Thus, one of the most important documents for the reconstruction of the earlier history of Sumer is the so-called Sumerian King List.'2 According to this document, the first dynasty in Lower Mesopotamia immediately following

A Prince in Their Midst, The Adventurous Life of Achille Murat on the American Frontier

A Prince in Their Midst, The Adventurous Life of Achille Murat on the American Frontier

A Prince in Their Midst: The Adventurous Life of Achille Murat on the American Frontier

A Prince in Their Midst: The Adventurous Life of Achille Murat on the American Frontier. By A. J. Hanna. With drawings by John Rae. (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. xi + 246 pp. Drawings, bibliography, and index. $3.00.) Get access S. Walter Martin S. Walter Martin University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 33, Issue 3, December 1946, Pages 491–492, https://doi.org/10.2307/1898084 Published: 01 December 1946

Knight of the Seas: The Adventurous Life of John Paul Jones

Journal Article Knight of the Seas: The Adventurous Life of John Paul Jones. By Valentine Thomson. (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1939. 608 pp. Bibliography and illustrations. $3.50.) Get access Charles Lee Lewis Charles Lee Lewis United States Naval Academy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 27, Issue 1, June 1940, Pages 137–138, https://doi.org/10.2307/1896620 Published: 01 June 1940

Exploring with Byrd: Episodes from an Adventurous Life

Exploring with Byrd: Episodes from an Adventurous Life

LI. Middleton's Acquaintance With The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele

Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

Business Letters from the Apache Country

Extract HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button. The Society has just been presented with the business records of Bigelow, Kennard and Company, of Boston, one of the oldest jewelry firms in this country. The papers fill over sixty packing cases. A preliminary inspection of them has revealed about a dozen letters from an army officer, stationed in New Mexico in the early 1850's, shortly after it came into the possession of the United States, which give a most interesting glimpse at the isolated and sometimes adventurous life of an army post in the Apache country, and at the ways in which business reached the frontiers of the great West.

Roald Amundsen

HAD Ibsen lived to write the Saga of Roald Amundsen, he might have analysed the emotions which surged through the explorer's soul in a tempest of ambition, triumph, and tragedy. The dramatic episodes of the adventurous life seem to demand a psychological nexus more likely to be found in philosophy than in science, and only capable of full expression in poetry.

Xenophon and the Boeotian Helmet

IN his treatise known under the title of Hippike or The Art of Horsemanship, the historian Xenophon, writing towards the close of a busy and adventurous life, furnishes the Greek cavalryman with much expert advice drawn from his long experience as a professional soldier. No small part of the essay is concerned with the question of the choice of a proper mount, after which the matter of defensive armor for the knight is examined.

Reviews: Autobiographic Memoirs, The Village Labourer, 1760—1832, Criminal Man According to the Classification or Cesare Lombroso, Bergsonism: The Philosophy of Bergson, Economics, Descriptive and Theoretical, Conduct and its Disorders Biologically Considered, The Kacharis, Greek Immigration to the United States, Floor Games, Sociology Applied to Practical Politics, Syndicalism and Labour, The Purchasing Power of Money, France in the Twentieth Century, The

Reviews: Autobiographic Memoirs, The Village Labourer, 1760—1832, Criminal Man According to the Classification or Cesare Lombroso, Bergsonism: The Philosophy of Bergson, Economics, Descriptive and Theoretical, Conduct and its Disorders Biologically Considered, The Kacharis, Greek Immigration to the United States, Floor Games, Sociology Applied to Practical Politics, Syndicalism and Labour, The Purchasing Power of Money, France in the Twentieth Century, The