Source of book: I own this
Fairly often, my wife comes home with interesting books. She is as much of a reader as I am, and indeed married me in part because I am a reader. This book was one of them. This book is also my selection for Women's History Month this year.
A quick glance at the title reveals two things about the book. First, it is a response to Joseph Campbell’s influential book on mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Second is a reference to the Arabian Nights, specifically the framing story of Scheherazade, the female storyteller, who uses her gift to save the young women terrorized and murdered by the jealous monarch.
Although it has been over a decade since I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it has really stuck with me. The references in this book were familiar enough. I should also mention another book I read last year on stories that makes another part of the conversation, The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. Consider these three as connected, different perspectives on stories and their meaning.
One more bit of trivia I might add is that the author’s name is an indication of her ancestry: she is indeed a descendent of the Tatars, the Turkic speaking nomadic people who you can find referenced in history and literature whenever the eastern edge of Europe or the Asian steppes are mentioned. That fact has nothing to do with the book, per se, but I found it interesting.
For anyone who has read Campbell and Booker, it is already apparent that both of them write from a male-centered perspective. As establishment men, who lived in a patriarchal culture, and indeed a patriarchal cultural tradition, this is no surprise.
Tatar, in contrast, brings a female perspective to the discussion, examining how women understand and tell stories. The book was published in 2021, so it is quite recent, and thus tackles contemporary movements like #metoo and MAGA.
There are a lot of great passages in the book, which I will try to highlight. First, though, I want to give a bit of an overview of the ground covered.
Do not expect a sweeping examination of mythology or stories like in Campbell or Booker. This is a significantly shorter book. Instead, expect a specific conversation - and rebuttal - of some of their claims.
The first chapter looks at heroes, and the way that they have tended to be exalted while heroines have been marginalized. That’s an oversimplification, but the author does have a good point that heroines have always existed - they just haven’t gotten the attention.
The second looks at the silencing of female voices, from the endemic sexual assault to the myths about silenced women.
The third examines fairy tales - and not the Disneyfied versions, but the originals, told by women, and often containing cautions about violent and abusive men.
The fourth looks at two areas where heroines started to become mainstream: stories about female writers (Little Women was the OG) and female detectives. Through these stories, women found voices in ways that were previously denied them.
The fifth continues the idea, looking at Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman, and the 20th Century’s explosion in strong female characters.
Finally, the sixth chapter examines the trickster character - traditionally male, but now open to female versions as well.
Again, not exactly a systematic examination of the topic, but a look at specific issues.
Before I dive into my favorite lines, I want to mention that I have always loved female protagonists.
As a child, I identified more with Wendy than Peter Pan, preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys (although I read both), loved Anne of Green Gables and Harriet the Spy and a whole bunch of other female-driven books.
So, I would say that I was on the one hand a bit unusual for a boy, but also that my own life was enriched by my identification across the gender lines. I am cishet, to be clear, and don’t identify as a woman or non-binary. Instead, I see the common humanity in female characters, and see my resemblance to them as human beings. My personality is definitely more Anne than Gilbert - that’s probably the best way to explain it.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I read a lot of female authors, and a lot of books with female protagonists. This is intentional, but also a natural outgrowth of my love of the female perspective and my embrace of the feminine side of my nature.
The book opens with a few quotes. I want to highlight two of them, in conversation.
“Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes.” ~ Bertold Brecht
“Pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.” ~ Rebecca Solnit
Solnit is one of the badass prophets of our time - I have greatly enjoyed her writing the last several years. You can read my post about A Paradise Built in Hell, or her latest essay on the nature of power if you want an introduction.
She is right, though. Heroes are all around us, every day. They just don’t look like chest-beating masculine sorts. They are health workers like my wife, teachers, protesters, everyday people making the world a better place.
“What about the women?” This book tries to answer the question posed by Campbell’s student in a different way, by showing that the women in the mythological and literary imagination have been more than mothers and protectors. They too have been on quests, but they have also flown under the radar, performing stealth operations and quietly seeking justice, righting wrongs, repairing the fraying edges of the social fabric, or simply struggling to survive rather than returning back home with what Campbell calls boons and elixirs. They wear curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and we shall see how women’s connections to knowledge, linked to sin and transgression and often censured as prying, is in fact often symptomatic of empathy, care, and concern.
This idea that female curiosity is a virtue, rather than a vice, runs throughout the book. (And I very much have to agree with that.)
Later in the book, there is a Stephen Fry quote that I love, and I think exemplifies why fundamentalism, which is anti-intellectualism and anti-curiosity, is such an evil way of living.
“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know.
They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there
is.”
The author expands on this a bit further:
What will emerge in the pages that follow is an understanding of heroism that is driven less by empathy than by attentive care, an affect that is triggered by openness to the world, followed by curiosity and concern about those who inhabit it. Lack of curiosity becomes, then, the greatest sin, a failure to acknowledge the presence of others and to care about the circumstances and conditions of their lives. Is it possible that our new attentiveness to the value of empathy has been fueled by the heroism of women from times past, women who had themselves been marginalized and disenfranchised but still cared deeply about those who had been crushed and enslaved, beaten down and brought to heel?
In our era of MAGA with its “empathy is a sin” and “violence solves everything” and “blame those people for our own problems,” this female curiosity and care is a powerful antidote. In particular, the use of words rather than weapons is the way that those of us with less power fight for justice. As a writer, not a fighter, this is my way of being.
As I was writing this book, it only gradually dawned on me that heroines were habitually bent on social missions, trying to rescue, restore, or fix things, with words as their only weapons.
As an example of this use of words, Tatar examines the British version of the Bluebeard tale, “Mr. Fox.” In that one, the heroine, having discovered the brutality of her fiancĂ©, uses her skill with words (and a carefully purloined severed hand…) to bring Mr. Fox to justice.
(Coincidentally, I recently read a book that makes use of the Mr. Fox legend in a striking and imaginative way, But Not Too Bold.)
This is just one of many fairy tales - again, stories told by women - with a theme of domestic violence and a female escape using her wits and words.
Another fascinating passage in this chapter is one that notes that much of what the old heroes go through seems to be family dysfunction and toxic masculinity. (My older two kids, when they were in high school, pretty much eviscerated Odysseus and the rest of the Greek heroes for this very reason.) A book from the 1930s on the hero is mentioned as:
[E]mphasizing once again less heroic struggles than family conflict (we are back in the domain of ordeals rather than adventures), always based on a troubled and troubling male developmental model, one that can quickly become emblematic of what today, in a stroke of deep irony, we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity. Myths have been said to enact repressed wishes and have a profoundly antisocial dimension; hence the deep paradox of enshrining as cultural heroes men who have living embodiments of social pathologies.
I also noted this interesting passage about how the shift from an oral tradition to a written one allowed more subtlety in storytelling.
Shining Achilles, clever Odysseus - let us remember that these heroes, almost always described with ennobling epithets, emerged from story and song at a time when the spoken word was the only means of transmission. Heroes had to be larger than life, with stereotypical traits that made it easier to learn their stories by heart. Superhuman beings solved a problem in a sense, for they were not just larger than life, but also all action, in ways that allowed their stories to circulate with ease, to replicate, and to endure in oral-aural cultures. With the introduction of writing and printing, characters began to lead more complex, subtle, and nuanced lives in psychological terms, and interiority became the hallmark of great fiction.
In the chapter about the silencing of female voices, some of the more horrifying myths are examined: Philomena the most familiar perhaps. But even she finds a way of telling her truth: through textiles.
How strange and yet also how logical it is that so many of our metaphors for storytelling are drawn from the discursive field of textile production. We weave plots, spin stories, fabricate tales, or tell yarns - a reminder of how the work of our hands produced social spaces that promoted the exchange of stories, first perhaps in the form of chitchat, gossip, and news, then in the shape of narratives and other dense golden nuggets of entertaining wisdom passed down from one generation to the next.
It is no surprise that the story of Scheherazade is featured in the book. She is in many ways the most classic and complete version of the female storyteller, the one who counters the brutality and stupidity of toxic masculinity with words.
What is less well known is that what most of us have read is nowhere near the complete Arabian Nights. The original has a lot of sex to go with its violence, and it was banned as obscene at various times.
The collection’s frame narrative is anything but child friendly and stands as a stark reminder that what we think of as fairy tales for the young were in fact what John Updike correctly called “the television and pornography of any earlier age.”
The discussion of Wonder Woman is a good contrast. Rather than the relative passivity of female characters, she is as active as any man. Here, Campbell doesn’t come off that well, as his idea of how females are or should be is as passive being.
“Look at the images of the male. They are always doing something, they’re always representing something: they are in action,” Joseph Campbell remarked when talking about the art of the Paleolithic era. By contrast the female figures of the era are “simply standing female nudes.” “Their power is in their body,” he added, and “their being and their presence.” He worried about the “very important problems” that emerge when women believe their value lies in achievement rather than simply “being.”
Yuck. (That’s from an interview, by the way, not his book.) In another interview, with Bill Moyers (who I am not a fan of, for reasons illustrated in this conversation), he made some pretty offensive and retrogressive claims.
Both Campbell and Moyers believed that women could become true heroes by giving birth. Childbirth was the equivalent of the hero’s ordeal. “What is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of live…Woman is what it is all about - the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.” Boys, by contrast, deprived of the opportunity to give birth, turn into “servants of something greater” once they grow up.
William Marston, who created Wonder Woman, had a better perspective:
“Not even girls want to be girls,” Marston complained, “so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.”
You think?
This reflects a number of conversations I have had with antifeminist family and acquaintances, who bristled at the idea that women might have the right to adventures, to action, to achievement. Rather, their value resided (as Campbell claimed) in their bodies, their ability to reproduce the species, their “being.” This is, of course, not how women are, or how they have lived their lives through most of history. It is a misogynist myth. No wonder young girls want better. (See also: The Second Sex for more on this idea that women exist to make babies while only males get to transcend and become fully human.)
It should be no surprise that Hitler’s “put da wimmins back in da home” program, Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche comes into this discussion - it is the recurrent idea of all authoritarians (including MAGA) that women need to “know their place” which is in the home cranking out babies.
Wonder Woman, interestingly enough, did a lot of her best work, not through violence, but through stuff that is dismissed as “woke” these days:
Wonder Woman fights evil and injustice at all levels by organizing strikes, boycotting products, and leading political rallies. She ends the excesses of profiteering on the part of a milk trust that has been raising the price of its products and starving American children. She becomes a labor activist who works to double the salaries of underpaid clerks at Bullfinch’s Department Stores.
In other words, the kind of fighting for justice women have always done.
There is also a great discussion of the way that the story of Eve has been corrupted into a way to blame women for everything evil in the world. (This is one of my biggest beefs with Evangelical theology. It is fundamentally bigoted and dishonest.) See also: Pandora.
The book references Stephen Greenblatt’s excellent book on the Adam and Eve myth, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, which I wrote about a couple years ago. Tatar points out the way that the actual story has been twisted to mean something different from what it says. Recall that the forbidden fruit is knowledge. In light of our evolutionary history, this is a parable of humans developing sentience before we had the moral capability of managing our powers.
Recall, however, that the serpent tempts Eve with nothing but knowledge: “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve has done little more than accept the invitation to become a sentient being endowed with moral awareness and wisdom, and yet she is likened to the serpent, indeed in some cases she is the real serpent.
In contrast to the misogynistic interpretation, an open-minded reading of Genesis reveals that it is in fact the men who follow up their fall with ever-escalating violence and homicide until God finally has enough and causes the Flood. It isn’t curious women, but toxic men, who choose to use sentience and moral awareness to do evil to each other.
The author also notes the obvious: just as in the Bluebeard story, God creates an obvious setup, where humans will inevitably be curious. And is that actually a bad thing? Or was it just unfortunate that humans got ahead of their ability to act in accordance with their knowledge.
It is more than likely to the credit of all humans that we have an incorrigible urge to defy orders and prohibitions issued without any explanatory context, especially when there is the added temptation of a key dangling right before our eyes.
Do not forget either that it is Bluebeard’s wife’s curiosity that ends up saving her in the end.
Next up is the cultural change that occurred during the 19th Century.
Louisa May Alcott’s books marked a shift in children’s literature, away from moral instruction on behalf of adults, and toward a view of literature as being for children.
Alcott was conspiring with children against adults, as Roald Dahl once claimed he had done while writing books for children. Alcott turned her back on a robust literary tradition that had made as its goal the spiritual uplift of children and the taming of their unruly instincts. Children’s literature, with many strokes of Alcott’s pen, turned into something for children rather than for their own good.
I previously mentioned my love of Nancy Drew as a kid. There is an extended discussion of her, and why she became incredibly popular. One thing I did not know was that the books were banned at libraries back in the day. Not my local libraries, though - I checked a bunch out! Apparently, even the New York Public Library refused to carry them until the mid-1970s. By the time I was reading, in the 80s, things had loosened up.
Moral panics are nothing new, I guess…
Agatha Christie was another author I read a lot of as a kid. So the discussion of Miss Marple and other old lady detectives was fun. I also thought the quote by Christie herself was interesting, as an example of how even one of the best-selling authors of all time still dealt with gendered expectations.
“The best time to plan a book is while you are doing the dishes.”
Female tricksters are the subject of another great discussion. Like the straight-up heroines like Wonder Woman, they too are obsessed with justice. But they are also more ambiguous in gender expression, particularly in light of culture.
Thus, as the author puts it, female tricksters reject “victimization, physical weakness, and household drudgery.” They act more “masculine,” so to speak.
Interestingly, the traditional male trickster - guys like Loki - also blurred gender lines. (In one episode, Loki finds himself pregnant - it’s an interesting story.) The common thread in male and female tricksters is a certain androgyny.
I’ll end with a couple of ideas to ponder.
Once we begin to look at the classic stories told and retold in our culture and experience them from the perspective of figures on the sidelines - slaves, concubines, sacrificial lambs, misfits, all those on the losing side of history - we are suddenly cut loose from the obligation to admire, worship, and venerate. Instead, we become radically inventive, seeing things differently and finding new ways of reading the stories and histories in which they appear.
Related to this is that I discovered a few myth retellings by women that I have added to my reading list. Stay tuned…
The book includes at the end an extended discussion of the ways in which real-life women have found their outlets. Historically, nursing has been one of them. (I am married to a nurse, so I know.)
There is a quote by Florence Nightingale that is interesting. She believed that a lack of an outlet for women would lead to madness. And, if the 1950s were any indication, this very much happens.
Instead, Nightingale believed that it was crucial for women to have a calling in which they could exercise “passion, intellect, and moral activity.”
This, perhaps, is at the crux of the issue, isn’t it?
Men are not the only humans who need this. Women do too. They need the opportunity to be the heroines, to have their quests, their ordeals, their chance to do good in the world using their passion, their intellect, and their moral fiber.
That’s what feminism is about, and why I support it. We are all human, and should have the opportunities to live as fully human.
Give this book a read. I think it is helpful to have read Campbell, but not necessary. And celebrate the heroines we all have in our lives.
