Wizards vs. Muggles by Christopher E. Bell

Author:Christopher E. Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

Heroic Paradigms

That Freud’s family romance and corresponding Oedipal structures were heavily masculine in norm and form was noticed by feminist criticism as soon as there was any. In literary theory, a major feminist interest has been in tracing how attention to the girl’s experience rather than the boy’s, as character, writer, and reader, may alter the paradigms of narrative. Can the girl character take on a role more active than imprisonment in towers like Rapunzel, or swooning into a coma like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White? Can she pursue, as Freud said she could not, both erotics and ambition? To see that girl’s don’t get to go on adventures all you need to do is read the classic stories: what Anne Sexton calls “the glass Snow White” and Sleeping Beauty “a catatonic stuck in a time machine” (1981, pp. 228, 292). What would happen to the whole structure and its values, not least heroism, if she ventured forth?

When family romance is enacted as narrative, the result has been called Quest Romance. Family romance appoints a constellation of characters: orphan, ideal parents, step-parents, villain adversaries who represent rivalries, the lady-prize figure. When put into action, the narrative takes shape as quest. The orphan (boy) departs from the step-parents, acts out his rivalries on antagonists whom he defeats, identifies with the ideal father by becoming one himself or achieving some other status showing maturity, self-possession, and elevation, signaled by marrying the ideal mother-substitute prize. The arc is from dispossessed orphan to possessive individual hero. In doing so, he is able to integrate his own opposing impulses and aspects, the aggressive drives expressed in rivalry but also, in sequence, the desire embodied in identification with the ideal. Aggression and idealization that split into the good and bad parents also represent a split in the self, the aggression projected from the self onto the father and onto all the other opponents he overcomes, the identification realized as he pursues his goal, the attainment of which also means admitting and accepting both impulses in the mature hero, healing his self-division.

As to female characters, in the Quest Romance they are figures for the mother who is the object of the Oedipal rivalry between father and son. In Quest Romance she is idealized in her good aspect as the Lady whom the prince rescues and marries, and, in her bad aspect, as the step-mother or other female monsters and dragons he encounters and defeats. Identification with the father is accomplished by attaining a Lady who substitutes for the mother (or some other goal such as the Grail which stands in for her), at once satisfying but also displacing his rivalrous desire in a socially and psychologically acceptable outcome.

The narrative Quest structure thus sets the family romance characters in motion towards resolving the conflict between aggression and desire, rivalry and identification, defeating the rivals who represent the first and expressing identification through claiming the Lady-prize and a status that represents the self as an integrated person. Northrop Frye

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