The Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar

Author:Maria Tatar [Tatar, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Literature as the spouse who will always remain “fond and faithful”! And what else is the “little family” that has issued forth but literary progeny? Louisa May Alcott is more than likely the real-life old maid described in “Happy Women.” She is, in any case, one of that number, a spinster par excellence, who gives birth to Little Women, a work marked by many literary forebears. With a touch of regret, Alcott once wrote that her stories were like offspring: “I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as Anna’s do” (Anna was the author’s older sister and the inspiration for Meg of Little Women). But through her literary issue, Alcott was able to “cherish” the talent she possessed, “using it faithfully for the good of others,” and turning her life story into a “beautiful success.” Writing came to rhyme with doing good.

In 1979, during the high tide of second-wave feminism, with its harsh critique of male-centered ideologies, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published a volume of literary criticism with a title alluding to Bertha Mason, the captive “monster” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Madwoman in the Attic documented in detail the degree to which Western culture defines the Author as “a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power.” Everything that happens in the stories that constitute the literary canon can be seen as Athena is to Zeus, a brainchild of a male writer. The “man of letters” becomes not just authoritative and influential but also heroic, a spiritual trailblazer and patriarchal leader.31

If Western religion installs a male God as the creator of all things, and the culture surrounding it assimilates that model for all creative efforts, where does that leave women? That is the question Gilbert and Gubar spend several hundred pages answering. Can women also produce brainchildren or are they limited to biological procreation? Louisa May Alcott charted one path for the female writer, giving us the unprecedented story of the birth of the artist as a young woman, setting her tale in a time that is hostile to the notion of women making a living from writing. Strong-willed Josephine March becomes not just a woman who asserts her right to self-expression and professional self-actualization but also a role model for the real-life readers who come after her (just like her author, Louisa May Alcott).

To measure Jo’s impact on girl readers, we can turn to another literary success story: the British Harry Potter series. Its author, J. K. Rowling, tells us: “My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.” Or listen to Ursula Le Guin, who writes: “I know that Jo March must have had real influence upon me when I was a young scribbler. . . . She is as close as a sister and common as grass.

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