Female Archetypes Research Articles

The Myth of the Messianic Mother in Jewish and Christian Traditions: Psychoanalytic and Gender Perspectives

In this article, I argue that the “Mother of the Messiah” occupies a prominent place in Jewish myth and embodies a female archetype whose qualities are rooted in biblical narratives about the Davidic dynasty. While tracing the continuous development of this figure from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, I discuss the similarities and differences between Mary the mother of Jesus and the Mothers of the House of David. By using gender and psychoanalytical perspectives, my analysis revolves around issues concerning sexuality, virginity, and motherhood in Jewish and Christian messianic sources.

Moralising female identity in Cameroon in the 1990s: female prostitution and the song “you gu cry”

Between the 1970s and early 1980s, when Cameroon was still at the juncture of promising social plenitude, popular music genres like Makossa were a mere auditory art instead of a profit-making activity as we have in Cameroon today. Popular music at that time was simply “music for the ears”, meant to produce emotional sounds, pleasant to listen to. Bars, night clubs and streets were common environs where dancing took place as the physical expression of pleasure from music. The explosion of early music such as Makossa did not match the precarious marketable opportunities at that time. As a result, music appeared as a hobby, and not because singers derived income from its production. The themes focused on varying social experiences and problems, from love and emotional pathos to (im)morality. As such, one is tempted to assert that singers hardly expressed demur or outright lampoonery against public transgressions such as corruption, prostitution or swindling, as is the case nowadays. The themes were far less what we find in contemporary Cameroonian literate culture, namely cinema, media and popular music. This paper focuses on Misse Ngoh's popular song titled “you gu cry” as a medium of social reform through the beguiling fantasies of a female archetype, Mary, in Cameroon in the nineties. The paper contends that though this song produces laughter, rendering it a humorous piece with potential enough to entertain, the same humour turns out serious, handling prostitution and women involved in this activity in a very negative way. This is achieved when Misse Ngoh, using his female archetype Mary, constructs a problematic image of females in the Cameroon urban sphere. Taking these into consideration, Cameroon popular music as seen from Misse Ngoh's “you gu cry” takes on a different significance. Finally, in the iconography of Mary, this paper sets out to explore the agency of females who were baffled within the intricacies of urban life and modernity in the nineties. It examines the challenges of the new urban spaces (as notorious corners of prostitution) that such women chose.

Escaping from Rama: Portraits of Indian women

This study examines visual, post-colonial portraits of the Indian women of the Sanskrit epics, in order to show the sociocultural, historical-ideological roots of this aesthetic. After independence, Hindu movements found in the epics a female archetype, who stands for the Hindu community. Post-colonial visual representations maintained this idealistic characterisation within a binary system, according to which women can be angelic guarantors of the social order or devilish, sexually uncontrolled creatures. This ambiguity derives from the double nature of the female principle of the world, shakti, and the visual storytelling tradition or chitrakatha. Using the same Indian storytelling tradition, female points of view have begun to criticise this nationalistic, ‘male gaze’. In the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana, Rama and male activities, particularly war, are secularised and criticised as selfish by female characters, foremost of whom is Sita, a model of the devoted and pure bride or pativrata.

Neon Nightz

Abstract: Neon Nightz examines paradoxical notions of worship and intimacy in the sacred yet profane places in which we explore the ideologically linked emotions of desire and shame. It asks the question, is the strip club so different from the holy confession? When oppression, rather than necessity, is viewed as the mother of invention, what do people invent to subvert its tyranny? It brings together female archetypes that are simultaneously revered and reviled and exposes the myths used to typecast women and the modern applications of religious allegory. It reveals what happens when The Virgin meets The Whore without interference of the masculine saviours who both contrive and condemn them. What happens when the whore speaks for herself, refuting what Louis Althusser would deem the imaginary relationships forced on the real conditions of her existence? If we took this concept, and refused to present it through coy symbolism but insisted on an application where “whored” bodies were also front and centre, we would have to see these spaces for all their complexities.

Icelandic Nationalism, Difference Feminism, and Björk’s Maternal Aesthetic

Since the late 1980s, when her band the Sugarcubes became known internationally, singer-songwriter Bjork, the most famous Icelander since Leif Eriksson, has been met with both praise and criticism, almost always directed at her difference from Westerners, pop musicians, adults, and even humans. Biographer Mark Pytlik recalls the press around her 1993 album Debut: Nearly every new story paraded her otherness, lionized her differences, and positioned her as an outsider operating as a slave to her ever-changing emotional state. (1) This persona was not entirely a figment of non-Icelandic journalists' imaginations: Bjork had circulated select facets of Iceland's nationalist image/tourist imagery to contextualize her innovative blend of punk, pop, avant-garde, and electronic dance music with its themes of nature, sensuality, emotional intensity, and quirky curiosity. However, journalists turned her creative inspirations into essentialist metaphors, describing her emotions as volcanic and her appearance as elfish and including ice among her Viking compositional tools. (2) Against her intentions, Bjork was set up as the ultimate other--nonhuman, childish, hysterical, and someone even men wanted to mother. (3) Bjork is indeed one of the most imaginative and unusual popular musicians of her time, but labeling her as an outsider and her music as fancifully but meaninglessly quirky misses one of her tantalizing projects: Bjork musically defamiliarizes Western cultural archetypes from within. She compels listeners to experience the whimsical performativity or infuriating constructedness of roles and situations that we may take for granted. In a famous early song, she plays a (seemingly child, alien, or animal) who studies behavior, singing, If you ever get close to a human and human behavior ... be ready to get confused (my emphasis). (4) Journalist Alex Ross explains the irony of the song: It was a career-defining move: Bjork positioned herself as a figure outside convention--as a member of another species, even--while using the second person to implicate the listener in the conspiracy. (5) By involving listeners in the critique, she invites her audience to identify with her denaturalizing performances rather than see her artistic persona(e) as other. Understanding this aesthetic helps contextualize her gender performances, which resist normative sexualized feminine stereotypes yet also thoughtfully embody select female archetypes, playing on feminist perspectives ranging from equality to difference and occasionally even essentialism. Femininity and motherhood have proven awkward territory for academic feminism and queer theory, which have focused (for at least the last thirty years) on the social construction and performance of gender and sex, centering on antinormativity. Contemporary theorists typically critique mainstream depictions of motherhood for essentialism, heteronormativity, and biased assumptions that motherhood and particularly pregnancy are central to all women's identities. However, as feminist literary scholar Susan Fraiman argues, queer theories that reject femininity and motherhood outright while prizing masculinity and androgyny as cool and progressive replicate centuries-old sexism. (6) Bjork's alien anthropologist interpretations of femininity and motherhood provide productive working examples of critically navigating these issues personally, artistically, and politically. This article addresses the interconnections between Bjork's explorations of both essentialism and identity performance as she conveyed Icelandic nationalism and then later invoked its icons in metaphors of world unity and peace; (7) simultaneously represented female sensuality and motherly nurturing, thus challenging the Western asexual mother stereotype; and combined these interests in feminist critique of the patriarchal culture of by examining terrorism and the war on terror through frames of motherhood. …

Les Écrivaines contemporaines et les mythes. Le remembrement au féminin by Metka Zupančič (review)

Reviewed by: Les Écrivaines contemporaines et les mythes. Le remembrement au féminin by Metka Zupančič Anna Rocca Zupančič, Metka. Les Écrivaines contemporaines et les mythes. Le remembrement au féminin. Paris : Karthala, 2013. Pp 342. ISBN 9782811108304. 29€ (Paper). Metka Zupančič examines how references to and interpretations of myths and mythological female figures factor into ten women writers’ treatment of the process of remembering. Zupančič’s theories are based on the belief that there are mental structures in the human psyche that refer to and rely upon universal archetypes and ancient myths. At the heart of Zupančič’s work lies the concept of remembrement. Traditionally used in agriculture to denote the regrouping of lands, here the word plays a symbolic role and is understood as a process of reassembling fragments of life and of remembering. Zupančič demonstrates how, in their maturity, all of the examined women writers utilize female archetypes and mythical memory to reconcile, reunify, and reconstruct what absence, defeat, hurt, and separation once dismembered. The writers’ reinterpretation of female myths, Zupančič argues, allows them to reclaim and recast human interdependence, thus stressing remembrement over démembrement or sparagmos, the latter a term used in ancient Greek mythology that literally stands for the tearing apart of a victim’s body. Their overarching [End Page 108] objective, according to Zupančič, is a better understanding of both human connectedness and inner connection with the origins of life, the mother’s body. In order to demonstrate the ethical contribution of female literary creativity and wisdom, Zupančič explores how Love, interpreted as the quintessential cohesive force of the cosmos, operates in the writers’ work. By openly declaring that their objective is to find healing and catharsis, the author sustains that these writers have participated in the creation of a new utopic genre that engages with society in order to stir the conscience; their narratives also suggest new ways of interacting, particularly between men and women. The study is presented in thirteen chapters. The three introductory sections focus on memory and remembrement and each of the following is dedicated to the analysis of a specific writer. Zupančič contextualizes the writers in a very special way by including personal reflections, excerpts from correspondences, and a remarkable number of literary references that demonstrate the resonance of common archetypes across geographical areas and time periods. All of which come together to render the study more captivating, substantive, and unique. In chapter four, Zupančič proposes that the goal of the characters Myriam/Persephone and Mary-Ann/Eurydice in Tunisian writer Souâd Guellouz’s novel Myriam ou le rendez-vous de Beyrouth is to surpass the ego’s barriers and to connect with the inner sacred self. In chapter five, Zupančič reads Fabienne Pasquet’s reinterpretation of the Mary Magdalene archetype in Le récit de Madeleine as a way of questioning, comparing, and contrasting the female and male understanding of both love and fear. In chapter six, according to Zupančič, Quebecois writer France Théoret redefines Athena’s archetype in Une belle éducation by stripping it of its male legacy–Zeus–and by showing Evelyne to be a self-made woman who, in spite of traditional conventions, chooses to educate herself. Chapter seven focuses on Francine d’Amour’s Le retour d’Afrique and the reversal of the Charlotte/Eurydice and Julien/Orpheus paradigm. The references to Egyptian female myths, the author explains, inspire Charlotte to integrate loss into her life. In chapter eight, Louise Dupré’s Ariadne is interpreted as a symbolic entity that accompanies women into the darkest corners of their psyches to help them to confront their fears and to find their most authentic selves. In chapter nine, the bird-woman in Andrée Christensen’s La mémoire de l’aile embodies a variety of mythical concepts and stands as the symbol of women’s liberation and the female yearning for the infinite. Chapter ten honors Belgian Claire Lejeune’s engagement with Québécois feminists as well as her notion of both sorority and the “third woman,” the latter centered on the capacity of inner strength to...

Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi as political bodies: representations of female sexuality in idealised culture

For 40 years, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics have been synonymous with the Indian comic book industry, and as such have garnered critical attention, including three books and numerous articles. In contrast, other English comics, especially those published since ACK stopped releasing new books in 1990, are the subjects of significantly less discussion. New publishers are now continuing and expanding the ACK tradition in significant ways. One major contribution to the industry is new comics based on the Ramayana, which has spawned six series/graphic novels in the last 5 years. In this essay, I will focus on Liquid (previously Virgin) Comic’s series, Ramayan 3392 AD, as one of the heirs to the ACK tradition, specifically one which maintains a perspective sympathetic to Rama. I will discuss how 3392 AD perpetuates ACK’s use of the feminine Vedic ideal while expanding into diasporic and non-Indian audiences. This expansion allows the series to capitalise on the fear of cultural loss to proscribe gendered normative behaviour. 3392 AD creates a new female archetype, the prodigal woman, and uses this category along with existing archetypes to embody a strict feminine social code and to proscribe bodily consequences for women who reject or transgress this code.

La semántica de la imagen de “la virgen celestial” en la novela “Doctor Zhivago” de B. L. Pasternak

The paper is devoted to the female archetypes that are immediately connected with the basic concepts of the Silver Age. The semantics of turning, which was historically significant for a boundary of the XIX-XX-th centuries and played a key role in the hero’s destiny, in Pasternak’s novel «Doctor Zhivago» reveals through a chain of various events and the system of images. These images have mythological character and finally go back to the archetype of White Lady. From this point of view the symbolism of the myth becomes an artistic way of expression of the central ideas in the novel.

El principio del <i>Eterno Femenino</i> en <i>La Italiana en Argel</i> de Rossini: Isabella como la super-mujer italiana

La expresión Eterno Femenino (Eternal-Feminine, o Das Ewig-Weibliche), apareció por primera vez en los últimos versos de la segunda parte del Fausto de Goethe (acabado en 1832). Posteriormente, se convirtió en tema de especulación, y en un enigma que los estudiosos han estado intentando resolver desde entonces. La expresión vino a identificar, con el paso del tiempo, un principio cultural relacionado con la imagen de la feminidad y alcanzó su extremo romántico, en el siglo XIX, cuando diversos arquetipos femeninos se fundieron en una sola heroína. El presente artículo pretende explorar el personaje de Isabella en La italianaen Argel de Rossini, a la luz del principio del Eterno Femenino. Aunque Goethe se encontraba todavía escribiendo la segunda parte de su Fausto cuando se estrenó La italiana (1813) en Italia, el principio cultural del Eterno Femenino puede utilizarse retrospectivamente en el análisis de Isabella como protagonista femenino central de la ópera. La lectura minuciosa de su personaje sugiere una aproximación estética que hace uso de ciertos aspectos románticos del principio del Eterno Femenino. El presente artículo se centra específicamente en la escena del Cruda sorte! Amor tiranno! y se refiere brevemente, también, a otras escenas.

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

Romance and Exemplarity in Post-War Spanish Women's Narratives (review)

KEBADZE, nino. Romance and Exemplarity in Post-War Spanish Women 's Narratives. Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2009. 187 pp.In her first book-length work, Nino Kebadze offers a refreshing and insightful critical examination of narratives written by Luisa- Maria Linares, Concha LinaresBecerra, Carmen de Icaza, and Maria Mercedes Ortoll, all female novelists of the tumultuous period following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Kebadze contextualizes her readings of these writers' works within the historical and ideological framework that informed the period, and she draws special attention to the way in which these writers carefully cultivated the novela rosa, a popular genre typically directed to certain facets of the Spanish female population. Kebadze not only foregrounds how the novela rosa of the post-war period seemed to triumphantly inculcate the values of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) as well as the tenets expounded by the women at the forefront of the Secabn Femenina, but she also shows how Linares, Linares-Becerra, Icaza, and Ortoll each made use of the genre's limitations to successfully undermine notions of feminine through their model protagonists. If the desired result of these novels was to encourage women's blind absorption into the (Franco's Nationalist movement) while also inciting women to participate in that self-same movement through their participation in the Seccion Femenina, Kebadze argues that another result was quite subversive. Specifically, these authors' models of feminine exemplarity often seemed to use the rhetoric of the Secaon Femenina to inspire independent agency and feminine authority rather than blind submission and compliance with dictatorial codes of conduct.Kebadze divides her book into two parts. In the first half, Part I: Towards Female Exemplarity: Setting the Norm, she explores the signifying practices of the Nationalist regime by emphasizing the concept of exemplarity within Spanish culture. The author traces the genealogy of the ideal female archetype back to Fray Luis de Leon whose La (1583) served as an instructional manual aimed at shaping the behavior of bourgeois women. Using the biblical book of Proverbs as a basis for this vernacular writing, Leon commented on the role of a woman in her home, simultaneously emphasizing her subordinate role within the family. Fray Luis's perfecta casada not only allowed her spouse to govern her actions within matrimony, but she ultimately accepted his role as sovereign over any children and shared possessions. While this Renaissance model offers an excellent embodiment of feminine comportment, Kebadze equally acknowledges the importance of the 19th century's angel del hogar and the 20th century's nueva de la Falange. The author suggests that, much like the perfecta casada, the realm of the angel del hogar was the domestic sphere, and as such, model Spanish women were not to transgress the boundaries of their homes. In going beyond these limits, a woman would not only bring dishonor to her family, but would incur public shame and spectacle since it would jeopardize the already well demarcated lines that divided the masculine domain - the world of labor, politics, and law - from the feminine, private sphere. In her investigation of the nueva de la Falange, Kebadze suggests some evolution of the model of feminine exemplarity since the ideal woman of this period still mainly inhabited the private sphere and, if at all possible, functioned as a maternal figure. Nonetheless, Kebadze notes a curious, paradoxical shift in the iconic domestic woman since the nueva mujer of the Seccion Femenina stipulated that women not only accept the challenge of being wives and mothers, but also accept the challenge of nation-building (hacer patria), thus participating in the disciplined edification process of remaking a state which had been undone by the Civil War.In the second half of her book, Part II: Reading Romance: Questioning the Norm, Kebadze investigates different iterations of idealized feminine models - the perfecta casada, the angel del hogar, and the nueva de la Falange - as she performs close readings of Linares's Un marido a precio fijo, Linares-Becerra's Como los hombres nos quieren, Icaza's Sonar la vida, and Ortoll's En pos de la ilusion. …

LILITH OR BEATRICE: WOMAN IN THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. FEMALE DANNUZIAN ARCHETYPES AND THEIR DIFFUSION IN MODERNISM

Gabriele D’Annunzio was a well-known Italian writer and politician who introduced into Italian literature the character of femme fatale, a woman who represents beauty and sensuality, qualities that she uses to dominate men. In front of this term we find the femme fragile, characterized by its dedication and submission. This article aims to analyze these two female archetypes in D’Annunzio's work and their importance in later literature.

‘A tunnel full of mirrors’: Some perspectives on Christa Wolf'sMedea.Stimmen

ABSTRACT The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself. Medea's role within feminist literary reception and women's literature cannot be overlooked because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be ...

She lures, she guides, she quits : Femile characters in Tim Winton's "The Riders"

Tim Winton is an Australian writer whose male characters often defy the traditional concept of masculinity. As for the notion of femininity, however, this kind of defiance is not displayed. In this essay, I study the presentation of the female protagonists in The Riders in order to illustrate this point, bearing in mind the Australian social and cultural context that surrounds them. Winton’s fictional women, no matter whether they are strong or weak, are normally depicted according to female archetypes. This leads to their negative portrayal as ambivalent beings, thus making them unreliable and even dangerous, as is the case of Jennifer and Irma. In contrast, Billie is a positive female character. She, who is also significantly a child, combines both feminine and masculine qualities. It is precisely this characteristic that enables her to be her father’s protector.

The Siren Alps: Text-setting and Gender

This article considers the use of female archetypes in recent text-settings. The author notes the use of gendered analogies for discussing interdisciplinary work, comments on the depiction of women in opera, and focuses on recent works by Heiner Goebbels and Dominique le Gendre. He assesses the importance of the mute role in Gerald Barry's opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005), considers the recreation of the Diana myth in The Assassin Tree (2004), and comments on Judith Weir's setting of Emily Dickinson.

On Medea/Mothers’ Clothes: a ‘Foreigner’ Re-Figuring Medea and Motherhood

Medea/Mothers' Clothes is a thirty minute long solo performance, developed as a part of a practice as research PhD entitled `(Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art' at Lancaster University. Medea/Mothers' Clothes was supported by the Arts Council England and the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, where it was first presented in the spring of 2004. 1 In my performance, I bring Medea, as the archetypal anti-mother figure, into dialogue with a group of contemporary Liverpool mothers drawn from two toddler groups. The performance is an artistic and feminist response to social and cultural constrictions that I have experienced as a foreigner (a Croatian, resident in Britain) and as a mother of three British children. Medea/Mothers' Clothes stages an intervention into cultural mythmaking about Medea by drawing on my daily experiences of 'foreign motherhood' and my place within a community of Liverpool mothers. The performance draws on the figure of Medea as a means of critiquing, trans-coding and rebelling against prescribed maternal ideals.

Прояв індивідуальної міфології у вигляді архетипних змістів у несвідомому жінки

In this article is resulted a number of female archetypes in concepts of some authors (D.-S. Bolen, К. P. Estes, V. V. Kozlov, E. Nojmann, K. G. Jung); laws of realisation of these archetypical maintenances are designated, also some kinds of female archetypes typologies are offered.Considered in article archetypical maintenances are structural units of such phenomenon as individual mythology (set of the collective and individual unconscious maintenances reflecting archetypes dominating in mentality); influencing a real life of the woman by formation of certain strategy and behaviour stereotypes.

The Archetypal Female in Mythology and Religion: The Anima and the Mother of the Earth and Sky

For decades, Carl Gustav Jung treated many thousands of patients and explored many of the world’s mythologies and religions. His empirical and scholarly research led him to conclude that all humanity shares an instinct to produce images and concepts based on universal themes. These themes he termed archetypes, and the commonly shared instinct he called the Collective Unconscious. Of these many themes, two female archetypes, the anima and the mother, are explored in this two-part discussion. Part 1 (Relke, 2007) appeared in the last issue of Europe’s Journal of Psychology, and Part 2 appears below.

Tell Me About Your Mother: Oedipus, Female Archetypes, and Parallel Versions of The Phoenician Women

Tell Me About Your Mother: Oedipus, Female Archetypes, and Parallel Versions of The Phoenician Women

Aquatic spaces and women’s places: a comparative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamantis’s H φόνισσα

This article will attempt a comparative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Alexandros Papadiamantis’s H φόνισσα (1903), aiming to illustrate how both texts are preoccupied with the problem of inventing spaces for their deviant and superfluous female characters. Although enmeshed in the dominant ideologies of their time, such as the evolutionary pattern of life as a sign of progress, and women’s marginalisation and domestication within this model, these novels simultaneously reject these ideologies. Interestingly, both Eliot’s and Papadiamantis’s problematic heroines are associated with water and experience a cathartic death by water. As a deus ex machina, the overflowing waters of the river in the first case, and the rising waves of the sea in the latter, provide a sanctuary, an intermediate space, where the two exiled heroines escape from traditional definitions of women as homeless containers or empty receptacles. George Eliot’s Maggie and Papadiamantis’s Frangoyannou discover an alternative geography in water, as the Darwinian aquatic space, a site of contestation, is reappropriated and transformed into a nursing space. This return to an intrauterine bliss, however, apart from its revolutionary potential, signifies also a return to essentialism and suggests the impossibility of ascribing any space to women except for that of endless metaphoricity. In the open-endedness of these two texts, women are floating signifiers, both promoting and transcending female archetypes.