Archetypes: You know ’em, you may even love ’em, Frye and Joseph Campbell wrote about ’em. The Mentor. The Threshold Guardian. The Shapeshifter. The Trickster.
The mythic patterns of personality that Homer (the Greek dude, not Simpson) loved to write about, personalities that aid, hinder, and call to adventure, are they really something rooted in the unconscious as Jung theorised?
Stereotypes: The Temptress. The Earth Mother. The Evil Stepmother. The Cougar.
Who thinks up these names for ’em and are they nothing more than bad monikers drawn from opinions of a handful of people who feel that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch?
I know I’m the Conan O’Brien of blogs, that I have an audience of two and I’m likely to be replaced a few months into my first season, but I’m gonna mull this over for a while and I invite you two Biteyites to as well. You can get back to me on it, let me know your thoughts.
Respond. Please.
Do it, if not for your old pal Old, then for academic scholarship. Do it for the journey that leads to cool robes.
alas poor Yorick
There are others, and most people believe they stem out of the myths and tales that we used to tell each other around cave fires as lessons to be learned. Misogyny is deep in our collective Western unconscious, but not in other cultures: the Amazon, the Wise Woman, the Healer.
I wonder if there are romances written in other languages that aren’t sold in English that deal with older women in a very different way?
Also, when it comes to arch/stereotypes, I think you may need to remark on the fact that ours is the newest generation, the one where life is prolonged to such a time that secondary (and third!) romances are possible. Propogation of the species came first. Now – and only now – are we able to think of things like relationships and happiness in love.
That being said, we often tout romances as being ahead of their time in terms of feminism and representation of women. In this case, have we slipped?
Just a thought from one of your biteyites 😉