The Heroine with 1001 Faces - Paperback

by Maria Tatar (Author)

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women's work--spinning, mending, and weaving--is carried out.

Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell's archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office.

In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their "mischief making" evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard's wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a "hero's journey," but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.

"By turns dazzling and chilling" (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

Back Jacket

"A profound and heartfelt offering from Maria Tatar. . . . Her work suggests that the threads of the Greek fates, and of Penelope's handiwork, so trickily woven by day and unraveled at night, are of the same clever substance as that from which the spider Charlotte weaves words into her miraculous web. This book, like Charlotte's final web publication, is, simply stated: radiant."
--Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and The Brides of Maracoor

"In Greek mythology, Philomela's rapist cut out her tongue so that she wouldn't expose him. Today's assaulters rely on nondisclosure agreements, but their goal is the same: to silence women. . . . The Heroine with 1,001 Faces traces sources ancient and contemporary--from ancient mythology and The Thousand and One Nights to Charlotte's Web and #MeToo--to demonstrate both the revolutionary power of women's speech and the shocking ways in which its suppression is embedded in the very foundations of our culture."
--Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

"This erudite and lively work mixes inventive reading of classic tales with a survey of modern heroines in books and movies. . . . Going forward, everyone from kindergarten teachers to movie moguls will have to have The Heroine with 1,001 Faces at hand before they begin their work."
--Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World

"Finally. We had to wait far too long for this book! And of course, Maria Tatar wrote it. . . . The Heroine with 1,001 Faces brings life, but she also weaves the yarns of fate and delivers death. Tatar knows where to find her behind all her masks."
--Cornelia Funke, author of Inkheart

"In this volume, Maria Tatar draws on her decades of scholarship in mythology and folklore to reevaluate our notions of the concept of heroism to transcend gendered divisions. . . . A deeply personal and lively investigation."
--Henry Louis Gates Jr.