num_pages: 368
description: The Heroine with 1001 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 womens workspinning mending and weavingis carried out.Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbells 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 Campbells 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 Bluebeards 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 heros journey but they reveal the value of courage defiance and above all care.By turns dazzling and chilling (Ruth Franklin) The Heroine with 1001 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.
language: English
title: The Heroine with 1001 Faces
publisher: Liveright