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 book broadly covers Joseph Campbell’s writings and legacy, female characters in classical texts, 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 an excellent monograph about heroines. In actuality, her work is of uneven quality.
On the positive side, Tatar possesses an impressive knowledge of literature and folklore. She found a 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 parallels between Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (272 – 273). Her expertise is so thorough that she can correct authoritative works like the Oxford English Dictionary, which misidentified Raymond Chandler’s “Bay City Blues” (1937), as the earliest literary use of the term “private eye,” when Carolyn Keene used it in her 1930 novel, Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn (207 – 208). She even went so far as to confess that her colleagues in Harvard's English and American Studies departments excluded popular books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and L. M. Montogomery’s Anne of Green Gables (175). Between that and highlighting successful authoresses who were self-deprecating or disparaging of each other – Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Eliot, Sylvia Townsend Warner (136) and Agatha Christie (224) – Tatar fulfilled her objective to "acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past" (288).
On the negative side, the book suffered from omissions that would've nuanced some of its points. Tatar mentioned the #GamerGate controversy of the 2010s, which involved debates about whether video games were sexist, but no video game characters were discussed. Moreover, Tatar expressed concern about the “unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past” (15) but neglected to address the “Homeric Question” – a longstanding debate about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey – and Samuel Butler’s argument that a woman composed one of Western culture’s canonical poems. She also praised Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad for retelling The Iliad and The Odyssey from female perspectives, but didn't acknowledge how Ovid’s Heroides did that centuries earlier. And despite her admission that trans and nonbinary identities were becoming mainstream (268) and her extensive analyses of Ovid's Metamorphoses, sex-shifting characters like Tiresias, Iphis, and Caeneus went unmentioned. She even included a section titled “Warrior Women” (257 – 262) which examined Disney characters like Queen Elsa and Moana, but strangely excluded Mulan and non-Disney fighting women such as Banu Goshasp, Li Chi, or Bradamante.
Another problem was Tatar's outdated sociopolitical biases. She mentioned that women were only 15 of the 116 Nobel prize winners for literature (136), citing that as proof of women's marginalization as writers, but in that same year, women comprised 74% of the American publishing industry. Tatar also demonstrated an uncritical attitude towards the #MeToo movement - a stance that would be difficult to maintain following the controversial Depp vs. Heard trial and the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in trafficking girls to Jeffrey Epstein's island. Both events occurred a few years after the book's release.
It's worth noting that the book was written during the COVID-19 lockdowns and published a year later, so some of the issues it has may be a consequence of a stressful environment coupled with a rushed publication. However, those circumstances don't fix Heroines many flaws and it's hard to recommend it.
