Heroines in History

A Thousand Faces

Katie Pickles

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000620283
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Les femmes dans l'histoire

Heroines in History: A Thousand Faces moves beyond stories of individual heroines, taking a thematic, synthesising and global in scope approach to challenge previous understandings of heroines in history.

Responding to Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Katie Pickles explores the idea of a transcultural heroine archetype that recurs through time. Each chapter addresses an archetypal theme important for heroines in history. The volume offers a new consideration of the often-awkward position of women in history and embeds heroines in the context of their times, as well as interpreting and analysing how their stories are told, re-told and represented at different moments. To do so it recovers and compares some women now forgotten, along with well-known recent heroines and brings together a diversity of women from around the world. Pickles looks at the interplay of gender, race, heredity status, class and politics in different ways and chronicles the emergence of heroines as historical subjects valued for their substance and achievements, rather than as objects valued for their image and celebrity.

In an accessible and original way, the book builds upon developments in women's and gender history and is essential reading for anyone interested in this field.

1

Introduction

The heroine with a thousand faces?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023210-1

There are many stories about extraordinary, remarkable, inspiring, amazing women from all parts of the globe who have rebelled, rocked, shaken and changed the world. And this is a good thing.¹ But I want to take these stories further and think about their meaning. In this book I move beyond viewing heroines as women with a singular story whose appearance is random, seeming isolated and out in the cold as individuals. Instead, I am interested in gathering up and making broad connections between heroines across time and cultures. Collectively, what have these women, for all their differences, represented? What are their features as heroines in history? This book moves beyond unfettered celebration to critically look at how heroines’ stories might add up to a dynamic modern archetype of a heroine in history. Significantly, shedding light on what it means to be a heroine in history cuts to the heart of women’s changing place in society through examining how stories of heroines have been ‘instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities and social differences.’²

There is much written about heroes, both around the world and through the ages. These men are portrayed as possessing bravery, courage, physical prowess and mental talent underwritten by their essential masculinity. Their heroic deeds took place in public and were part of asserting confident patriarchal systems of male dominance.³ For example, it was men’s place to fight for and protect women and children. In contrast, as women were largely, and ideologically, located out of view in the home, their lives involved private subservience. They were most commonly cast in a supporting role as the opposite and inferior sex. Their feminine and maternal domain was rarely deemed heroic or noteworthy.⁴

No wonder, then, that women who have managed heroic lives along male lines are known by the grammatical feminine suffix ‘ines’ added to hero. Heroines, as we shall see, were often cast as ‘honorary men’ and were celebrated for emulating male heroic deeds. These were women who became heroes like men, but because of beliefs in essential differences between women and men they remained tagged as the other or second sex. For example, Louise Edwards has examined Chinese women warriors and wartime spies through history. She argues that ‘stories about women’s involvement in wartime action attract instant popular attention all around the world. The vision of a woman killing another human being confronts long-held views about women as life-givers rather than harbingers of death.’⁵ Alternatively, heroines were occasionally heralded as ‘super-womanly,’ elevated to heroic status through their feminine nurturing and caregiving qualities. Such dichotomies and debates over biological difference versus the social construction of gender and sexuality are central to women’s place in the world and are grappled with by heroines throughout this book. I consider whether heroines were able to construct their own sexuality, how they invented a ‘masculine side’ in order to succeed and on what terms they were able to enter previously men-only occupations.

This book focuses on heroines in modern world history during the past 200 years. It chronicles the emergence of women as historical subjects valued for their substance and achievements, rather than as objects valued for their image and celebrity. I consider stories of heroines from around the world since the end of the 18th century when a broad wave of feminism, mostly in western countries, ushered in two centuries of important, if uneven, advances for women.⁶ Liberal demands for women to become equal with men occurred alongside calls for democracy, the end of slavery, class consciousness and a new humanism. As we’d say today, feminism emerged as part of an intersectional context. Of course, in drawing upon individual examples, this book will itself reveal, as Alison Booth argued in her work on women’s collective biographies, ‘comparative bias.’⁷ It grows out of my previous work that argues for the centrality of British imperial heroines in constructing race, whiteness and hegemony.⁸ The intention is that the broad themes identified in each chapter warrant transcultural consideration in modern world history, with constructions of race and ethnicity necessarily always central.

An important argument through this book is that when it comes to heroines in history, there is not a clear cut line between the old and the new. As Joseph Campbell argued in The Hero With a Thousand Faces there is a continuance in the modern world of heroic mythology from the past.⁹ Responding to Joseph Campbell I structure the book around and investigate the presence and importance of recurring patterns for heroines in history that permeate into and receive new meaning in the modern era. Some heroines such as Mulan and Joan of Arc transcend their era, with their stories picked up and reimagined through the centuries. I also critically build upon Carl Jung’s work on archetypes as images, patterns and symbols that arise out of the collective unconscious.¹⁰ At the end of the 20th century the social sciences and humanities largely abandoned essentialist, binary understandings of gender and sexuality in favour of social construction and performativity. For example, influenced by post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, the work of Judith Butler gained prominence.¹¹ Jung had argued that

the mind of the individual is not only divided into the conscious and unconscious, but the unconscious is further split into the collective and the personal. The collective unconscious, which is shared by everyone, consists of innate memories and historical experience, beginning in the womb.¹²

Such theories cast Jung as a biological determinist, understandably out of fashion with feminist scholars seeking choice and complexity in understanding women’s lives. Maverick academic Camille Paglia stood out as continuing Jung’s ideas.¹³

Figure 1.1 Late 19th century portrayal of Joan of Arc at the stake by Lenepveu at Panthéon monument, Paris, France.

Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID KNC365: https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-joan-at-the-stake-in-rouen-lenepveu-1886-1890-panthon-neoclassical-168067037.html

When it comes to understanding heroines in history, Jung offers insights into how ‘The inherited memory, or collective unconscious, expresses itself in a series of symbols of instinctive patterns called archetypes, which become conscious through dreams, images and words, as well as expectations associated with particular people.’¹⁴ Jung, himself an empiricist, was building upon Plato’s idea of archetypes. A close reading of Jung reveals while he did argue for innate sex roles, he also made allowance for context and the possibility of social construction. As he wrote of archetypes,

In principle, it can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning – but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation. In the same way, the specific appearance of the mother-image at any given time cannot be deduced from the mother archetype alone, but depends on innumerable other factors.¹⁵

This book investigates whether there is a deep, flowing and transcultural essence surrounding heroines in history. I both extend and question Campbell’s and Jung’s ideas on women as maternal, goddesses, temptresses and life-givers. I want to explore the heroine with a thousand faces and women and her symbols. Each chapter focuses on a shared archetypal theme in the stories of modern heroines that recurs through time and across cultures. While recognising that there is always local difference and individual agency, in this book I prioritise the big picture of commonalities and patterns in the appearance and lives of heroines. Chapters seek to draw upon wide-ranging examples for support. The themes important for the modern heroines that I advance in each chapter are: Mothers, Warriors, Callings, Cross-dressers, Death and Disability, Feminist Activism and Glamour. My intention is that the framework will be widely applicable to heroines through modern time and place beyond those explicitly mentioned here and that many more examples will spring to mind for readers, across cultural and racial boundaries, as they consider stories of heroines.

If the distinction between historical eras can be blurred in the study of heroines, so too can the concrete lines between fact and fiction. Roland Barthes’s semiotics approach to mythology is extremely helpful here to examine how stories about heroines are usually subject to multiple symbolic, imaginative and changing versions.¹⁶ This dynamic complexity is supported in the work of historians. For example, in their study of Canadian heroine Laura Secord, Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan found that the distinction between ‘flesh and blood actors’ and creative allegories and artistic inventions can become indistinct.¹⁷ Dominic Alessio found that places could be personified as heroically female, and Hugh Cunningham recognised that in the story of British heroine Grace Darling fact and fiction ‘interweave themselves.’¹⁸

This book builds upon Marina Warner’s work on the allegorical uses of the female form and historical heroines, especially in her detailed work on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc.¹⁹ Warner draws upon a diverse range of sources from court records to statues to understand women’s place and status in the past. Her work stands out as spiritual, transcultural and sweeping in scope. She examines how mythologies and memories of heroines are constantly recast and operate across a complex network of public and private, local, national and international scales. In their creation and circulation, the stories of heroines are constantly restructured to reflect or reject the societal values and aspirations of changing eras.

Through these pages I seek to reinvigorate the place of the spiritual, the imaginative and the mythological in history. For example, I examine the saintly qualities of heroines, interrogating the motivations and callings behind heroic deeds, so often faith-based, and juxtapose them with secular and deemed selfish pursuits. Investigation reveals that the appearance of heroines was often collectively and spiritually, rather than individually, motivated. Rather than disappear in modern times, on the contrary, I follow Lisa M Bitel’s suggestion that modern technology has enabled a global audience for spiritual apparitions, enabling the continuation of pre-modern Christian behaviour in modern times.²⁰

I am fascinated by the difference between the construction of heroines as icons and role models. Recently the term icon has emerged to co-exist with and sometimes replace that of role model. As a term, icon has a long history and one that lent itself well to a heroine archetype. Years ago an icon was simply an image, most usually associated with worship. This then developed into something to be placed on a pedestal, to be looked up to, and definitely worshipped and obeyed. It is worth emphasising that until recently icons were firmly and deliberately out of the reach of the masses. By the end of the 20th century, however, icons had become ordinary people and, merging with role models, considered successful and accessible trail-blazers. Icon language had popularised, and distinctions between high and low culture diminished. And we...