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Archetypal Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term “archetype” can be traced to Plato ( arche , “original”; typos , “form”), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle’s translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido ) appeared in English one year after publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (2 vols., 1890,3d ed., 12 vols., 1911-15). Frazer’s and Jung’s texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history.

Jung most frequently used “myth” (or “mythologem”) for the narrative expression, “on the ethnological level” ( Collected 9, pt. 1: 67), of the “archetypes,” which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their “most common and most normal” manifestation in dreams (8:287). Thus criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named “archetypal” and is quite distinct from “myth” criticism.

For Jung, “archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos ” (9, pt. 1: 4), but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his “empirical” data were dreams. In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often insisting that “archetype” named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers.

At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, “archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race” ( Literary Criticism 709). Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung’s specifically named archetypes—” persona and anima and counsellor and shadow” —and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy 291), a practice subsequently followed in some hand books of literary terms and histories of literary criticism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism , essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of “Jungian” critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: “This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious—an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge” (m-12). Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of “archetype” as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention (99).

Northrope Frye/Pinterest

On a general level, Jung’s and Frye’s theorizings about archetypes, however labeled, overlap, and boundaries are elusive, but in the disciplines of literature the two schools have largely ignored each other’s work. Myth criticism grew in part as a reaction to the formalism of New Criticism , while archetypal criticism based on Jung was never linked with any academic tradition and remained organically bound to its roots in depth psychology: the individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the analytic process. Further, myth critics, aligned with writers in comparative anthropology and philosophy, are said to include Frazer, Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright, and Francis Fergusson. But Wheelwright, for example, barely mentions Jung ( The Burning Fountain , 1954), and he, Fergusson, and others often owe more to Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Oedipus Rex, and the Oedipus complex than to anything taken from Jung. Indeed, myth criticism seems singularly unaffected by any of the archetypal theorists who have remained faithful to the origins and traditions of depth, especially analytical, psychology—James Hillman, Henri Corbin, Gilbert Durand, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Evangelos Christou. This article, then, treats the only form of literary theory and criticism consistent with and derived directly from the psychological principles advanced by Jung. Other forms previously labeled “Jungian” are here subsumed under the term “archetypal” because whatever their immediate specific focus, these forms operate on a set of assumptions derived from Jung and accept the depth-psychological structure posited by Jung. Further, Jung termed his own theory “analytical psychology,” as it is still known especially in Europe, but Jungian thought is more commonly referred to today in all disciplines as “archetypal psychology.”

The first systematic application of Jung’s ideas to literature was made in 1934 by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry : “An attempt is here made to bring psychological analysis and reflection to bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our nature there find objectification” (vii). This book established the priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological.

The next significant development in archetypal theory that affected literary studies grew out of the effort made by U.S.-born, Zurich-trained analyst James Hillman (b. 1924) “to move beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy” to formulate archetypal theory as a multidisciplinary field ( Archetypal 1). Hillman invokes Henri Corbin (1903-78), French scholar, philosopher, and mystic known for his work on Islam, as the “second father” of archetypal psychology. As Hillman puts it, Corbin’s insight that Jung’s “mundus archetypalis” is also the “mundus imaginalis” that corresponds to the Islamic “alam al-mithl” (3) was an early move toward “a reappraisal of psychology itself as an activity of poesis” (24). Hillman also discovers archetypal precursors in Neoplatonism, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Proclus, Marsilio Ficino, and Giambattista Vico . In Re-Visioning Psychology , the published text of his 1972 Yale Terry Lectures (the same lecture series Jung gave in 1937), Hillman locates the archetypal neither “in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination” (xi).

Archetypal theory then took shape principally in the multidisciplinary journal refounded by Hillman in 1970 in Zurich, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought . According to Hillman, that discourse was anticipated by Evangelos Christou’s Logos of the Soul (1963) and extended in religion (David L. Miller’s New Polytheism , 1974), philosophy (Edward Casey’s Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , 1976), mythology (Rafael Lopez-Pedraza’s Hermes and His Children , 1977), psycholinguistics (Paul Kugler’s Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , 1982), and the theory of analysis (Patricia Berry’s Echo’s Subtle Body , 1982).

These archetypalists, focusing on the imaginal’and making central the concept that in English they call “soul,” assert their kinship with Semiotics and Structuralism but maintain an insistent focus on psychoid phenomena, which they characterize as meaningful. Their discourse is conducted in poetic language; that is, their notions of “soul-making” come from the Romantics , especially William Blake and John Keats. “By speaking of soul as a primary metaphor , rather than defining soul substantively and attempting to derive its ontological status from empirical demonstration or theological (metaphysical) argument, archetypal psychology recognizes that psychic reality is inextricably involved with rhetoric” (Hillman, Archetypal 19).

Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory

This burgeoning theoretical movement and the generally unsatisfying nature of so much early “Jungian literary criticism” are both linked to the problematic nature of Jung’s own writing on literature, which comprises a handful of essays: “The Type Problem in Poetry,” “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” “Psychology and Literature,” “ Ulysses : A Monologue,” and “Is There a Freudian Type of Poetry?” These essays reveal Jung’s lack of awareness as a reader despite his sense that they “may show how ideas that play a considerable role in my work can be applied to literary material” ( Collected 15:109^. They also attest to his self-confessed lack of interest in literature: “I feel not naturally drawn to what one calls literature, but I am strangely attracted by genuine fiction, i.e., fantastical invention” ( Letters 1:509). This explains his fascination with a text like Rider Haggard’s novel She: The History of an Adventure (1886-87), with its unmediated representation of the “anima.” As Jung himself noted: “Literary products of highly dubious merit are often of the greatest interest to the psychologist” ( Collected 15:87-88). Jung was also more preoccupied with dreams and fantasies, because he saw them as exclusively (purely) products of the unconscious, in contrast to literature, which he oddly believed, citing Joyce’s Ulysses as an example, was created “in the full light of consciousness” (15:123).

Issues of genre, period, and language were ignored or subjected to gross generalization as Jung searched for universals in texts as disparate as the fourth-century Shepherd of Hermas, the Divine Comedy, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), E. T. A. Hoffman’s tales, Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide (1919-20), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” as well as works by Carl Spitteler and William Blake. But the great literary text for Jung’s life and work was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust , not because of its literary qualities but because he sensed that the drama expressed his own personal myth ( Letters 1:309-10). Further, the text offered confirmation (and poetic representation) of the only direct contribution Jung made to literary theory: a distinction between “psychological” and “visionary” texts ( Collected 15:89-90). This heuristic distinction was formed, however, solely on psychobiographical grounds: Did the text originate in, and remain principally shaped by, the author’s experience of consciousness and the personal unconscious or his or her experience at the level of the archetypal collective unconscious? And concomitantly, on which of these levels was the reader affected? Confirmation of this theory was Jung’s reading of Faust: part 1 was “psychological”; part 2, “visionary.”

Thus Jungian theory provided no clear avenue of access for those outside of psychology, and orthodox Jungians were left with little in the way of models for the psychological analysis of literature. Many fell prey to Jung’s idiosyncrasies as a reader, ranging widely and naively over genres, periods, and languages in search of the universal archetypes, while sweeping aside cultureand text-specific problems, ignoring their own role in the act of reading and basing critical evaluation solely on a text’s contribution to the advancement of the reader’s individuation process, a kind of literature-astherapy standard. This way of proceeding had the effect of putting, and keeping, archetypal criticism on the margins of academic discourse and outside the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines and departments.

Bettina Knapp’s 1984 effort at an authoritative demonstration of archetypal literary criticism exemplified this pattern. Her Jungian Approach to Literature attempts to cover the Finnish epic The Kalevala , the Persian Atar’s The Conference of the Birds , and texts by Euripides, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Corneille, Goethe, Novalis, Rabbi ben Simhah Nachman, and W. B. Yeats. And despite frequently perceptive readings, the work is marred by the characteristic limitless expansionism and psychological utilitarianism of her interpretive scheme.

Given this background, it is not surprising to find in a 1976 essay entitled “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems” the statement that “no purely Jungian criticism of literature has yet appeared” (Baird 22). But Jos van Meurs’s critically annotated 1988 bibliography, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980, effectively challenges this claim. Despite his deliberately selective focus on critical works written in English on literary texts that are, for the most part, also written in English, van Meurs, with the early assistance of John Kidd, has collected 902 entries, of which he identifies slightly over 80 as valid and valuable literary criticism.

While acknowledging the grave weaknesses of much Jungian writing on literature as “unsubtle and rigid application of preconceived psychological notions and schemes” resulting in “particularly ill-judged or distorted readings,” van Meurs still finds that “sensitively, flexibly and cautiously used, Jungian psychological theory may stimulate illuminating literary interpretations” (14-15). The critical annotations are astute and, given their brevity, surprisingly thorough and suggestive. Van Meurs also does a service by resurrecting successful but neglected early studies, such as Elizabeth Drew’s of T. S. Eliot (1949), and discovering value even in reductionist and impressionistic studies, such as June Singer’s of Blake. He notes that Singer’s Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake (1970), though oversimplified in its psychobiographical approach and its treatment of characters as psychological projections of the author, does make original use in a literary context of such Jungian techniques of dream interpretation as “amplification” and of such fantasy-evoking procedures as “active imagination.”

Van Meurs’s bibliography conveys the great variety of Jungian writings on literature even within one language, the increasingly recognized potential for further development and use of Jung’s ideas, and the growth in numbers of literary scholars falling under the influence of Jung. A few names form a core of writers in English (including many Canadians)—Martin Bickman, Albert Gelpi, Elliott Gose, Evelyn Hinz, Henry Murray, Barton L. St. Armand, Harold Schechter, and William Stein— though no single figure has attracted the attention of academic literary specialists, and no persistent commonalities fuse into a recognizable school critics who draw on Jung’s theories. To date, the British Journal of Analytical Psychology and the retitled American Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture are the best resources for archetypal criticism of literature and the arts even though only a small percentage of their published articles treat such topics.

Thus, with the archetypal theorists multiplying across disciplines on the one hand and the clinically practicing followers serving as (generally inadequate) critics on the other, archetypal literary theory and criticism flourished in two independent streams in the 1960s and 1970s. From the theorists, dissertations, articles, and books, often traditionally academic in orientation, appeared; the productions of the practitioners are chronicled and critiqued in van Meurs’s bibliography. And the 1980s saw a new, suggestive, and controversial direction in archetypal studies of literature: the feminist. With some of its advocates supported through early publication of their work in the journal Spring , feminist archetypal theory and criticism of literature and the arts emerged fullblown in three texts: Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981), which self-consciously evoked and critiqued Maud Bodkin’s 1934 text; Estella Lauter’s Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (1984); and Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht’s Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985). This last text explicitly named the movement and demonstrated its appropriation of archetypal theory for feminist ends in aesthetics, analysis, art, and religion, as well as in literature.

Feminist archetypal theory, proceeding inductively, restored Jung’s original emphasis on the fluid, dynamic nature of the archetype, drawing on earlier feminist theory as well as the work of Jungian Erich Neumann to reject absolutist, ahistorical, essentialist, and transcendentalist misinterpretations. Thus “archetype” is recognized as the “tendency to form and reform images in relation to certain kinds of repeated experience,” which may vary in individual cultures, authors, and readers (Lauter and Rupprecht 13-14). Considered according to this definition, the concept becomes a useful tool for literary analysis that explores the synthesis of the universal and the particular, seeks to define the parameters of social construction of gender, and attempts to construct theories of language, of the imaginal, and of meaning that take gender into account.

Ironically, as in the feminist revisioning of explicitly male-biased Jungian theory, the rise in the 1980s of Reader-response theory and criticism and the impetus for canon revision have begun to contribute to a revaluation of Jung as a source of literary study. New theoretical approaches appear to legitimize orthodox Jungian ways of reading, sanction Jung’s range of literary preferences from She to Faust , and support his highly affective reaction to Ulysses , which he himself identified (positively) as a “subjective confession” (i5:io9n). And new theories increasingly give credence to the requirement, historically asserted by Jungian readers, that each text elicit a personal, affective, and not “merely intellectual” response. Even French feminist Julia Kristeva has been brought to praise a Jungian contribution to feminist discourse on the maternal: recognition that the Catholic church’s change of signification in the assumption of the Virgin Mary to include her human body represented a major shift in attitude toward female corporaiity (113). In addition, many powerfully heuristic Jungian concepts, such as “synchronicity,” have yet to be tested in literary contexts.

Archetypal criticism, then, construed as that derived from Jung’s theory and practice of archetypal (analytical) psychology, is a fledgling and much misconstrued field of inquiry with significant but still unrealized potential for the study of literature and of aesthetics in general. Two publishing events at the beginning of the 1990s in the United States may signal the coming of age of this kind of archetypal criticism through its convergence with postmodern critical thought, along with a commensurate insistence on its roots in the depth psychology of Jung: the reissue of Morris Philipson’s 1963 Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic and the appearance of Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino’s multidisciplinary, multicultural collection of essays, C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture.

Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye

Bibliography James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983), Re-Visioning Psychology (1975); C. G. Jung, Collected Works (ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 20 vois., 1953-79), Letters (trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2 vois., 1973-75). James Baird, “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems,” Literary Criticism and Psychology (ed. Joseph P. Strelka, 1976); Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino, eds., C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (1990); Martin Bickman, The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism (1980); Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies in Imagination (1934); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975); Naomi Goldenberg, “Archetypal Theory after Jung,” Spring (1975); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” (1977, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Léon S. Roudiez, 1986); Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985); Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1974); Morris Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic (1963, reprint, 1991); Annis Pratt et al., Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981); Jos van Meurs and John Kidd, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Works in English (with a Selection of Titles after 1980) (1988); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Categories: Archetypal Criticism , Myth Criticism

Tags: Achetypes , Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , Anatomy of Criticism , Archetypal Criticism , Archetypal feminist criticism , Archetypal Patterns in Poetry , Archetypal Psychology , Archetypal Theory , Archetypal Theory and Criticism , Archetypal Theory Criticism , Claude Levi-Strauss , Ernst Cassirer , Evangelos Christou , Francis Fergusson , Frazer , Gilbert Durand , Henri Corbin , Hermes and His Children , Hillman , Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , J. G. Frazer , J. G. Frazer The Golden Bough , James Hillman , Jessie Weston , Joseph Campbell , Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture. , Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious , Jungian Approach to Literature , Leslie Fiedler , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Logos of the Soul , Maud Bodkin , Myth , Myth theory and crticism , New Polytheism , Northrop Frye , Philip Wheelwright , Psychoanalysis , Rafael Lopez-Pedraza , Richard Chase , Spring Journal , Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture , Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought , The Golden Bough , The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

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History and Development

Archetypal criticism , also referred to as  mythological criticism , focuses on recurrent, universal patterns in literature that reveal our common humanity. The school developed from the psychological theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a student of Freud. Jung, like Freud, believed in the power of the unconscious to influence behavior. Also like Freud, Jung proposed that the human psyche has three main components, but Jung's components were markedly different: the  personal conscious , the  personal unconscious , and the  collective unconscious . He broke from his mentor's insistence on the individuality of each human's unconscious mind in his Psychology of the Unconscious (1912). He determined that we share elements of this part of our psyche with each other, a characteristic he called the collective unconscious.

The personal conscious is aware of the present world, but when the present becomes the past, the memory is then stored in the personal unconscious. On a deeper level the collective unconscious contains universal, ancestral human memories. Jung explains in his essay "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1959) that "in contrast to the personal psyche, [the collective unconscious] has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals" (pp. 3–4).

These collective memories take the form of  archetypes  (recurring patterns and figures) and  myths  that are passed down through generations. These patterns, figures, and stories become recognizable symbols in the subconscious mind. For example, darkness is often perceived as a symbol of evil, most likely because we are diurnal animals who see very poorly at night. The woods are classically seen as evil for much the same reason—the lions, tigers, and bears that live in those woods are capable of killing us. There are also universal characters that appear in the human story, such as the hero, the princess, the warrior, the temptress, the innocent, and the nightmare creature.

Jung recognized that these archetypes inevitably appear in literature. In his essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" (1922) he argues, "The archetype is a figure—be it a demon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed" (80).

Jung determined that the most powerful archetypes that reside in our psyche, and that also are represented in literature, are the  shadow , the  anima , and the  persona .

The shadow represents our darker side, which we fear and try to repress. This element of our personality becomes the main focus of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), as it depicts the devastating effects of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizers. The shadow is transformed into one part of a split personality in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a supernatural tale of a man who drinks a potion that transforms him temporarily into a devilish creature.

The anima is our life-force or soul, which contains both masculine and feminine qualities. Shakespeare illustrated this duality in his play As You Like It (1623) through one of the main characters, Rosalind, who spends much of the play disguised as a young man with a masculine appearance yet, on occasion, feminine displays of emotion. Virginia Woolf also created a character with both masculine and feminine qualities in her novel Orlando (1928): its title character transforms inexplicably from a man into a woman.

The final part, the persona, is the face we display to the world. This "face" can sometimes be a mask that hides our true self. Masks become an important element of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) when, during a carnival, the main character's outward display hides his murderous intentions.

All three parts have both collective and personal elements. For example, often a man's feminine qualities are not acknowledged by his conscious mind, and we don't always recognize how we present ourselves to others. Like Freud, Jung insisted that to maintain a healthy mental state, all the parts of the psyche must be balanced, a state Jung called individuation.

Jung's theories on archetypes were later promoted and expanded by the preeminent literary critic Northrup Frye (1912–1991) and cultural scholar Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), whose writings helped endorse archetypal criticism as an important literary school. In his famous study Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye insists that all literature contains the archetypes of human experiences and desires. In The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971), Frye defines a literary archetype as "the recurring use of certain images or image clusters" (23). He claims that archetypical criticism helps readers see the underlying structure of a literary work, as archetypes form organizing patterns that lead to theme and meaning. These patterns resonate with readers because they reflect universal human concerns.

Joseph Campbell took the idea of archetypes one step further with his theory of the monomyth, or "one myth"—the hero's journey. After testing Jung's theories on archetypes by exploring numerous cultures and their myths and literatures, Campbell discovered that similar stories with similar structures are handed down within every culture and so contain fundamental truths about human nature and experience. Among these stories are the creation and the flood myths, but the most prominent is the journey of the hero, also called "the epic hero." In the introduction to his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell writes, "a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man" (30). A cinematic example of this hero is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977). Here, Luke travels on a magic flight using only the Force to attack the Death Star and achieves victory when he destroys it, but needs rescue from without (Han Solo flying in at the last minute to drive off Darth Vader). Luke gains control over the Force, which he previously failed to do, achieving his "ultimate boon."

Sometimes the boon is knowledge gained by the hero and then passed on to others. For example, Arthur, in the film Excalibur (1981), accomplishes a boon by recognizing the Christian God's power over mankind. Dorothy's boon in The Wizard of Oz (1939) is her recognition of the importance of home. Most often men become epic heroes, although there are some exceptions, such as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

KeyComponents of Archetypal Criticism

• The archetypal critic will pay close attention to any recurring patterns or figures  in a story or poem and will determine if they represent archetypes.
• The archetypal critic will then examine how these archetypes help create the story or poem's structure.
• The relationship between archetypal elements and universal themes  will be explored.

An Archetypal Toolbox

Archetypal applications work best with literature that contains substantive character development or conflict between characters. They can also be used with poems that contain archetypal symbols.

The first step in applying archetypal theory is to carefully read the text. Then, during a second reading, begin to ask questions about its structure and plot development:

• Are there any patterns and figures that recur in the text?
• Can these elements be linked to character and plot archetypes?
• How do these elements contribute to the structure of the work?
• Does the main character display individuation? If not, what part of his/her psyche is out of balance?
• What figurative language is used that can be considered archetypal?
• How do these archetypal elements produce universal themes?

Terms for Archetypal/Mythological Criticism

•   anima —the life-force or soul, which contains both masculine and feminine qualities
• archetypes —recurring patterns and figures that help create the structure of a literary work
• collective unconscious —the component of the psyche that contains universal, ancestral human memories that take the form of archetypes and myths passed down through generations
• individuation —a healthy mental state in which all the parts of the psyche are balanced
• monomyth —the hero's journey
• myths —another term for archetype that refers more specifically to universal stories
• persona —the face we display to the world
• personal conscious —the component of the psyche that is aware of the present world
• personal unconscious —the component of the psyche that stores personal memories
• shadow —our darker side, which we fear and try to repress

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hero's Journey — Odyssey Archetype Analysis

Odyssey Archetype Analysis

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Published: Mar 25, 2024

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Table of contents

I. introduction, ii. archetypes in characterization, iii. archetypes in plot.

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THIRD ESSAY. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths

From the book anatomy of criticism.

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Home Essay Samples Psychology

Archetype Essay Examples

An archetype essay explores the universal symbols and patterns that repeat across different cultures and time periods. In literature, these archetypes often manifest as characters or plot points that represent common human experiences and emotions. When deciding how to write an archetype essay, it’s essential to first identify the archetypes at play and then analyze how they contribute to the meaning of the work as a whole.

One example of an archetype is the “hero’s journey,” in which a protagonist undergoes a transformative journey or quest, facing challenges and obstacles before emerging victorious. Another example is the “wise mentor,” a character who imparts knowledge and guidance to the hero along their journey.

To write an archetype essay, begin by selecting a work of literature that contains prominent archetypes. Then, identify the specific archetypes present in the text and consider how they contribute to the meaning of the work. For example, in the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the archetype of the “innocent” is embodied by the character of Scout, who navigates the complexities of racial injustice in her small town. This archetype reinforces the novel’s themes of prejudice, justice, and moral courage.

Overall, a successful archetype essay should demonstrate a deep understanding of the archetypes at play and how they contribute to the work’s meaning. To find a perfect archetype essay example, be sure to check this section on WritingBros.

Archetypal Analysis Of Jon Krakauer's Novel Into Thin Air

After the conclusion of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, it is somewhat difficult to say which literary theory provides the most insight into the text. Initially, the novel was analyzed from potentially four different perspectives: reader response theory, archetypal theory, feminist theory, and post-colonial theory....

The Archetypes in Young Goodman Brown

The psychological archetypes within Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown emulate how one’s social relationships can crumble as culture is imbued with judgement. The Puritan society, portrayed by the causes of goodness at its core, spurns its members to cast discernment on others, yet not on...

• Young Goodman Brown Symbolism

Archetypes of Mother and Crone in the Novel Everyday Use by Alice Walker, A Worn Path' by Eudora Welty, and Mothers Tongue by Amy Tan

In the texts 'Everyday use' by Alice Walker, 'A Worn Path' by Eudora Welty, and 'Mothers Tongue' by Amy Tan, You see the at least two different Archetypes occur. The two archetypes are the mother and crone. 'Everyday use' by Alice Walker is about a...

• Everyday Use
• Mother Tongue

The Depth Psychology of Carl Jung and the Complexity of Carl Jung's Archetypes

When I was eight years old, I had this reoccurring dream about being in an open playing field with friends. We were in the center of the field in a bright sunny day. The weather is pleasant with an enjoyable breeze. The color of the...

• Social Psychology

Analysis of The Archetypal Villain in The Odyssey

Introduction Thesis: The archetypal villain is crucial for the story to continue because the villain guides the hero to the next part of their story, the villain reveals the hero’s weaknesses and faults, and without the villain, the hero wouldn’t be a hero. The Archetypal...

• The Odyssey

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The Tragic Downfall of Heroes: Aristotelian Tragic Hero Archetypes in The Illiad and Million Dollar Baby

Homer’s “The Iliad“ is in general a story about a war and the confusion that caused the war. The plot focuses on the development of a young man named Achilles and his journey of anger and seeking revenge after he learns of the death of...

• Tragic Hero

Implementation of Business Strategies and Archetypes by Brands

Nowadays, every company in the market tries to be different than the others. According to Houraghan S. (2018) The Ultimate Guide To Brand Archetypes: Hack the Mind of Your Customers article, all of the brands can be divided into 12 archetypes, based on how they...

• Marketing Strategy

Literary Hero Archetypes in Brown's Prose

Archetypes are found both covertly and overtly in most of the characters one come across in Brown’s novels. They either strongly adhere to or staunchly deviate from certain archetypes, the identification of which helps one to gain a better psychological insight and efficient character analysis....

The Darker Aspects of the Human in British Literature

British literature has long explored the complexities of the human experience, and one of its recurring themes is the archetype of evil. This archetype takes various forms, from monsters to tyrants, and serves to represent a force of chaos that threatens the stability of society....

How To Read Literature Like A Professor By Thomas C. Foster: Archetype Symbols

In Chapter 9 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster discusses an archetype theme of “It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow”. Foster describes the symbolism of snow as clean, stark, severe, warm, inhospitable, inviting, playful, suffocating, and filthy. The meaning...

• Reading Books

Best topics on Archetype

1. Archetypal Analysis Of Jon Krakauer’s Novel Into Thin Air

2. The Archetypes in Young Goodman Brown

3. Archetypes of Mother and Crone in the Novel Everyday Use by Alice Walker, A Worn Path’ by Eudora Welty, and Mothers Tongue by Amy Tan

4. The Depth Psychology of Carl Jung and the Complexity of Carl Jung’s Archetypes

5. Analysis of The Archetypal Villain in The Odyssey

6. The Tragic Downfall of Heroes: Aristotelian Tragic Hero Archetypes in The Illiad and Million Dollar Baby

7. Implementation of Business Strategies and Archetypes by Brands

8. Literary Hero Archetypes in Brown’s Prose

9. The Darker Aspects of the Human in British Literature

10. How To Read Literature Like A Professor By Thomas C. Foster: Archetype Symbols

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• Mythological Archetypal Criticism

Mythological Archetypal Criticism - Essay Example

• Subject: English
• Type: Essay
• Level: Masters
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 4
• Author: kihnnelson

Extract of sample "Mythological Archetypal Criticism"

21 July “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” – Mythological/Archetypal Criticism The novel by D.H. Lawrence that was assigned to us for mythological/archetypal criticism and analysis represents one of the expressions of that author’s grim and misogynic outlook that had already been manifested in his short treatise on the relationship between masculine and feminine principles, published under the title of “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter”. In “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter”, Lawrence’s misogyny has an impact on the presentation of the characters of Ferguson and Mabel, which is done in the manner reminiscent of his interpretation of Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”.

In “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter”, the use of the third-person point of view is generally predicated on the author’s sense of detachment; Lawrence seems to have decided that it is far better to allow the readers themselves to interpret the vicissitudes of the storyline, rather than pass some judgments or at least to provide a characters’ background. This in itself makes the narration rather complicated, yet, at the same time enables the reader to better understand the motivations and aspirations of the characters in question.

Mabel’s brothers are depicted in the way that might be familiar to the readers of Lawrence’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter”. They are superficially strong and confident, looking disdainfully upon their apparently uncomely and awkward sister. Nonetheless, in the course of further narration it is revealed that they are indeed weak and, in the words of the author himself, ‘ineffectual’. Despite their boisterous appearance and haughtiness, they are in fact insecure and cannot even conceive how their situation may be ameliorated.

Their supposed association with ‘regal horses’ is a false one, as they are in fact closer to the dogs that try to snatch the food out of their table. The animal imagery, in general, plays a great role in the narrative. Just in the beginning of the story, the appearance of great draught-horses, with their servile readiness to follow their masters’ orders, is a direct parallel to the characters’ meek acceptance of their fate. The image of the dog (a ‘bull-dog’, in Mabel’s case) may, in its turn, be construed as a symbol for fear before the unknown fate.

It is characteristic that it is no longer associated with Mabel, as she is depicted to be more resolute in the late parts of the story. Nevertheless, it is the rebirth/resurrection mythological archetype that is most significant here. Mabel and Ferguson are spiritually reborn through their submersion into the mud waters that play the role of their new baptizing place. The attempt at suicide committed by Mabel is an expression of frequent archetype of divine sacrifice/suicide that is often found in numerous mythological tales across the world.

By saving Mabel from her fate, Ferguson unwittingly breaks this ritualistic event, which may serve as a metaphysical explanation for further unfolding of the plot. The water and earth archetypes that are used by Lawrence in his musing on the nature of women’s involvement with men (Lawrence 65) are, likewise, of potent mythological significance. Finally, it is necessary to draw some conclusions for the interpretation of Lawrence’s work in comparison with his earlier reflections on Hawthorne’s work.

Mabel is an archetypical seductress that dominates a spiritually pure but weak-willed man (in this case, that role is played by Ferguson). Her power is derived more from blood-knowledge than from mind-knowledge that is personified by the character of Ferguson. It is due to the latter’s spiritual weakness that, according to Lawrence, he is predestined to follow the character of Mabel. In total, ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” is a typical work by Lawrence, as it draws the readers’ attention to the issue of complex interplay between the feminine and masculine, rational and irrational.

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An Appraisal

John Barth, a Novelist Who Found Possibility in a ‘Used-Up’ Form

By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

By Dave Kim

Dave Kim is an editor at the Book Review.

Nobody likes the comic who explains his own material, but the writer John Barth, who died on Tuesday, had a way of making explanations — of gags, of stories, of the whole creative enterprise — sing louder and funnier and truer than punchlines. The maxim “Show, don’t tell” had little purchase with him. In novels, short stories and essays, through an astoundingly prolific six-decade career, he ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them.

He was styled a postmodernist, an awkwardly fitting title that only just managed to cover his essential attributes, like a swimsuit left too long in the dryer. But it meant that much of what Barth was doing — cheekily recycling dusty forms, shining klieg lights on the artificiality of art, turning the tyranny of plot against itself — had a name, a movement.

For many years, starting in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard of this movement, alongside writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. He declared that all paths for the novel had already been taken, and then blazed new ones for generations of awe-struck followers. He showed us how writing works by letting us peer into its machinery, and reminded us that our experience of the world will always be dictated by the instruments we have to observe and record it. While never abandoning narrative, he found endless joy in picking apart its elements, and in the process helped define a postwar American style.

Were Barth the author of this article, for example, he might pause here to point out that the lines above constitute what journalists like to call the nut graf , an early paragraph that provides larger context for the topic at hand and tries to establish its importance — and is sometimes wedged in last-minute by a harried writer or editor ordered to “elevate” a story or “give it sweep.” Then Barth might explain why this one is lousy, why the whole business of nut grafs is more or less absurd.

The constructive disruption, the literary public service announcement: It became something of a signature for Barth, and it’s best expressed in his story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). The title piece, a masterwork of metafiction, follows a teenage boy lurching about the revolving discs and mirrored walls of an amusement-park fun house, where he realizes, dolefully, that he is better suited to construct such contrivances than experience them.

Throughout, a comically pedantic narrator critiques the very tale he’s telling by identifying the flashy tricks of the “funhouse” that is fiction: symbolism, theme, sensory detail, resolution. The story is simultaneously a rigorous analysis, vivid example and ruthless dismantling of how literature operates.

“Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?” the narrator asks, in his fiction about a sensitive adolescent. “And it’s all too long and rambling.”

David Foster Wallace called the collection a “sacred text,” even drafting one of his stories in the margins of his copy. Although he later, in an act of literary parricide, denounced his hero as a stagnant has-been, Barth’s influence is unmistakable in Wallace’s work, as it is in that of so many others, including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders and David Mitchell — writers who hauled postmodernism off its ivory tower, who integrated Barth’s fourth-wall breaches, parodic masquerades or typographical pyrotechnics into more accessible, more sincere and, fine, more marketable narratives.

Barth himself was a writer who wore his influences on his sleeve, though he was careful to make his tributes his own, often with an awl-sharp irony. “You do not mistake your navigation stars for your destination,” he said in a 2001 interview with the critic Michael Silverblatt. “These are compass points that you steer by, but you’re not trying to be Joyce or Beckett or Nabokov or Calvino or Borges just because you steer by those stars. They help you fix your own position.”

In 1967, he wrote an essay called “ The Literature of Exhaustion ,” a state-of-the-union address for Western letters that would come to be known, to Barth’s befuddlement, as a manifesto for postmodernism. It is one of those loosely read, perennially misinterpreted early-career works that both forge their writers’ reputations and drive them nuts for the rest of their lives.

In it, he points to the “used-upness” of literary forms, the exhaustion of creative possibilities, as a rousing opportunity for new methods based on pastiche and revival — “by no means necessarily a cause for despair,” he insisted. But many readers still took it as a death knell for the novel. Barth had to write a follow-up years later to set the record straight.

Much of his raw material actually came from writers of classic texts, not the modern and postmodern navigation stars he steered by. He was Dante reworking the “Aeneid” into “The Divine Comedy” — if Dante were a shiny-pated, bespectacled Marylander with a police-detective mustache. “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960) is an epic imitation of the 18th-century bildungsroman, something A.I. bots might aspire to if the prompt were, say, “‘Tom Jones’ plus ‘Tristram Shandy,’ but hornier.” (It’s great.) His 2004 story collection, “The Book of Ten Nights and a Night,” is a “Decameron” set in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Scheherazade, whom Barth called his “literary patron saint,” is a regular presence in his work.

And, of course, there’s Barth’s opus “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), a bonkers Cold War allegory that draws from the Bible, “Oedipus Rex,” “Don Quixote” and “Ulysses,” among other works. I tried to summarize its many forking paths for a curious bartender once and started to feel dizzy midway through. A bitterly divided college campus is overrun by a tyrannical computer system called WESCAC, and the only one who can save humanity is a boy named George Giles, who was raised as a goat and somehow turns out to be the offspring of WESCAC and a virgin named Lady Creamhair. (It’s great.)

Giles tries his best to live up to the mythic hero archetype, but soon learns, over and over, that simply being human is complicated enough. For all of Barth’s outrageous experiments, he always seemed to find his way back to the basic moral question that every great fiction writer has tried to wrangle: How should one be?

His second novel, “The End of the Road” (1958), is a profound deliberation on the dominant Western philosophy of its time, existentialism, which Barth, in a Camus-like story of a marital affair, first seems to value and then exposes as obscenely inadequate. Anchoring even his most arcane metafictions are recognizable characters who try to commit to a principle or an identity — and often fail spectacularly.

In this way, Barth was closer to the comforts of traditional fiction than he was given credit for. A true postmodernist, he wrote in 1980, keeps “one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality.” His books are long — the novels tend to gallivant far past the 500-page mark — and laborious. But like an abstract painter proving he still has some realist portraiture left in him, he could sometimes play it straight and write fiction that, as he put it, “just tells itself without ever-forever reminding us that it’s words on paper.” Take a peek at “Ambrose His Mark” (from “Lost in the Funhouse”) and “Toga Party” (from his 2008 collection “The Development”) for superb examples.

But Barth’s most memorable writing remains the stuff that works on both levels: the gently rising and falling slopes of narrative and the zany mirror maze of self-reflexivity. You get the sense that he found the latter a wearying realm to read in, let alone write in, but couldn’t help veering into it, that the phoniness of the whole endeavor, including his own persona as the artist, had to be accounted for. “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character,” he wrote, “but that the fiction one’s in — the fiction one is — is quite the sort one least prefers.”

Reading Barth is like taking a cross-country flight while sitting in the cockpit with the pilot, a journey made more thrilling by our observation of the mechanisms that make it possible: We can stare in awe at the instrument panels, or just look out the window. But, through it all, his impossible desire to be his own reader, a naïve experiencer of his own narrative, never waned. One imagines the maestro himself snapping his fingers impatiently at the text. “Enough with the diversions,” he might say. “On with the story!”