Archetypal Journey Essay

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The archetypal stages in books have been used since the works and discoveries of psychologist, like Carl Jung. Carl Jung saw archetypal stages as recurring images or patterns of situations that come from the unconscious mind. Whereas, Joseph Campbell, a mythologist who wrote a book The Hero of a Thousand Faces, a book about hero’s journeys, demonstrated how characters in books go through a series of stages in order to get to their final destination. In the novels, Jane Eyre and Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main characters all went through their own archetypal stages to get to their final journey to realize or discover their true destiny. Both of the main characters in these novels went through the four stages of the archetypal journey. …show more content…

During this stage there is minimal suffering. In both of these novels it is difficult to see Jane and Janie’s innocence since they both started off with some sort of hardship. In the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God, it was early given off that innocence was not easily present. Although a symbol of innocence in this novel was nature, the trees and flowers represented the imagery of innocence. Even if innocence was not fully present, Janie did have a quest early off in the book. Her quest was the quest to becoming a women. As for the second novel, Jane Eyre, her innocence was lost earlier than Janie. Jane Eyre went through certain hardships, in spite of that, she still always maintained a sense of innocence in the way she behaved and viewed things. For example, when Jane would get mistreated by her cousins she was always the bigger person. Through all the mistreatment that Jane went through she always kept the ways she viewed things and her innocence. There was a slight evidence of Jane’s innocence in chapter 14, when Rochester mentions how he envies Jane’s …show more content…

After Jane’s initiation stage of dealing with death and abuse she went on to deal with it and coped with her differences. After years of Helen’s death Jane went on to teaching and became a teacher for two years at Lowood. Once she got tired of teaching she went on to become a governess and highered her social class and met an older wiser man, Rochester. Rochester fell in love with jane almost immediately and always tried to win her over. He always tried to buy Jane expensive gifts but she would always refuse showing that she was independent and did not have to rely on others. Jane dealt with her suffering by overcoming her obstacles from before and proved to those who doubted her that she was the bigger person and was capable of more than everyone thought. Instead of Jane moving backward and trying to return back to innocence, she kept moving forward to learn from her initiation

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