The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes,
revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our
collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on
fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword
and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they
have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and
using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and
rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the
fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins
the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the
misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing
fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women's
work--spinning, mending, and weaving--is carried out.
Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on
achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his
account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for
Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around
the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and
charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or
Harry Potter, Campbell's archetypical hero has dominated more than the
box office.
In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the
global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as
a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their "mischief
making" evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard's wife to Nancy
Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted
stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls,
too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione
Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures
enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not
take the traditional form of a "hero's journey," but they reveal the
value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.
"By turns dazzling and chilling" (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with
1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to
the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and
thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of
genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This,
then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound
investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent
cultural history.
