Review: The Heroine with 1001 Faces

 

The Heroine with 1001 Faces is an examination of women and their stories from antiquity to the twenty-first-century. It has an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter covers multiple, frequently overlapping topics, but the material can be divided into five broad categories: Joseph Campbell’s writings and legacy, female characters in classical texts (e.g., Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), the silencing and discrediting of women, curiosity (etymology, connotations, artistic representations, etc.), and female writers in fiction and real life. Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic Languages and Folklore and Mythology, is theoretically well-equipped to write a monograph about heroines. In actuality, her work is an mixed production that provides uneven information about its subjects.

For instance, Tatar possesses an impressive knowledge of literature and folklore; she identifies a direct reference to Homer in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (49), an allusion to The Thousand and One Nights in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (107), and draws parallels between Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (272 – 273). Her expertise extends to the biographical parts of Anglophone literature. She quotes successful authoresses who were self-deprecating or disparaging of each other's work: Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Eliot, Sylvia Townsend Warner (136) and Agatha Christie (224). Tatar's educational background also enables her to notice the shortcomings of higher institutions. Harvard courses in English and American Studies left out popular books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and L. M. Montogomery’s Anne of Green Gables (175) while the Oxford English Dictionary misidentified Raymond Chandler’s story, “Bay City Blues” (1937), as the earliest literary use of the term “private eye.” It was used previously in Carolyn Keene’s 1930 novel, Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn (207 – 208).

Tatar demonstrates less knowledge of Greek and Roman texts. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad are praised for retelling The Iliad and The Odyssey from female perspectives. Ovid’s Heroides did that centuries earlier and broached themes present in the retellings, like Penelope’s frustrations with Odysseus. Tatar doesn't mention Heroides, thus missing an opportunity for comparative analyses of all three and showcasing their unique features. Tatar also neglects to mention the “Homeric Question” – a longstanding debate about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The topic is worth considering since she expresses concern about the “unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past” (15) and it might have influenced her thinking to know that multiple bards, in different eras, shaped the texts. Additionally, she may have had thoughts about Samuel Butler’s argument that a woman composed one of Western culture’s canonical poems. 

Tatar also falters with regard to gender-nonconforming figures. Female warriors like Joan of Arc, Scáthach, Judith of Bethulia, and the Amazons are referenced (26) but assessed collectively rather than individually, resulting in errors like her assertion that Amazons are chaste and virginal, despite Queen Hippolyta marrying and having a son, Hippolytus. Other fighting women -  Mulan, Banu Goshasp, Li Chi, and Bradamante - go unmentioned even in a section titled “Warrior Women” (257 – 262). Likewise, transgender characters like Tiresias, Iphis, and Caeneus appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses, yet Tatar never mentions them despite discussing the text extensively and her admission that trans and nonbinary identities are becoming mainstream (268).  

The epilogue describes the book as an effort to "acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past" (288). From that perspective, Tatar covers an adequate number of characters and people. But the depth and breadth of Heroines is undermined by omissions that reduce it from a representative study of women's roles in various narrative genres to a mere introductory text.