Archetypal Essays

  • Cold Mountain: Frasiers Archetypal Journey

    1230 Words  | 3 Pages

    eventually finds the willpower to hoist himself out of the grave to once again take up the road. Finally, he gets to the house and restores order to his metaphysical kingdom, coming to terms with many of his thoughts. Ada goes through a more mental archetypal journey. She has to find manageable independence, an aspect of development of which she had always been deprived. Her low point was at the beginning of the book when she realized that she no longer had the money that once had enabled a work-free

  • Beowulf as the Archetypal Germanic Hero

    2093 Words  | 5 Pages

    The epic and oral poem Beowulf illustrates a loss of community, cultural values, and tradition. Beowulf, the main character, is an ideal king and archetypal warrior. History is relevant to Beowulf; this Germanic society was being taken over by Christian missionaries who were seeking to convert this culture. The character of Beowulf is a reflection of the Germanic culture's virtues; heroism is emphasized in the text's multiple references and constant focus on heroes and what it is to be a hero. Beowulf

  • Archetypal Characters and Symbols in The Phantom of the Opera

    1724 Words  | 4 Pages

    Archetypal Characters and Symbols in The Phantom of the Opera The story of The Phantom of the Opera appeals to many types of personalities and people of all ages because of its archetypal characters and patterns.  Carl Jung theorized that we are born with innate tendencies to perceive things a certain way:  "a kind of readiness to reproduce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas . . ."1.  These repeated ideas are archetypes.  The basic legend of The Phantom takes place in 19th

  • tragoed Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex) - The Archetypal Tragic Man

    612 Words  | 2 Pages

    Free Oedipus the King Essays: The Archetypal Tragic Man According to Greek mythology, the Sphinx, a creature that is part woman, part bird, and part lion, caused famine and disease in Thebes that could be ended only when someone solved her riddle.  Oedipus traveled to Thebes and answered the riddle correctly.  The citizens of Thebes consider him a hero because he restored harmony to their kingdom.  Sophocles alludes to the riddle of the Sphinx several times in his play, Oedipus Rex.  Since the

  • Archetypal Literary Criticism

    1611 Words  | 4 Pages

    literature. Everything in literature has a meaning, and many different people came up with strategies to evaluate and interpret it. The use of Archetypes in Literary Criticism helped critics to interpret a text, and find its hidden meaning. In Archetypal Literary Criticism, archetypes hold the idea that cultures, folk- tales, and common mythical beings all play a role in a text’s significance. Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst, came up with the idea of archetypes while studying the human psyche, and interpreting

  • Comparing the Bible and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel: An Examination of Archetypal Referenc

    2039 Words  | 5 Pages

    Comparing the Bible and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel: An Examination of Archetypal References Often times great novels and plays allude to religion, to mythology, or to other literary works for dramatic purposes. Shakespearean plays are perfect examples. Allusions help the reader or spectator better understand, through visualization, a character or an event in a novel. In some cases, the characters, the events, or a series of events are structured according to the people and the action

  • Anatomy of Criticism

    1252 Words  | 3 Pages

    give literature coherence and structure are derived from the myths of ancient Greece and the archetypal imagery found in the Bible. In his Third Essay, Frye suggests that all literature is based on displacements of these myths. In postulating this, however, Frye denies the individual identity of a work of literature: it becomes merely another abstraction of an axial symbol, an embellished copy of an archetypal myth. This tenet essentially annexes the identity of the writer as well, for every work of

  • A Comparison Of The Catcher In The Rye And The Adventures Of Huck Finn

    1360 Words  | 3 Pages

    travels from Pencey Prep to New York City struggling with his own neurotic problems. These two novels can be compared using the Cosmogonic Cycle with both literal and symbolic interpretations. The Cosmogonic Cycle is a name for a universal and archetypal situation. There are six parts that make up the cycle: the call to adventure, the threshold crossing, the road of trials, the supreme test, a flight or a flee, and finally a return. There are more parts they do not necessarily fall into the

  • A Journey to Adulthood

    2150 Words  | 5 Pages

    Journey To Adulthood In A Wizard of Earthsea an archetypal pattern of death and rebirth highlights Ged’s journey from adolescence to adulthood. In “Myth and Archetypal Criticism” we read, “Images of death and rebirth […] usually suggest some kind of emotional, moral, or spiritual rebirth”(Young 70). We see one or more of these aspects in each of Ged’s rebirths, especially in his last rebirth in this book. Ged’s coming of age process in this novel is also illuminated by the use of binary oppositions

  • The Reagen and Bush Presidencies

    3033 Words  | 7 Pages

    given that Bush was a dutiful Vice President to Reagan for eight years and sought on gaining office only to take over where he left off. Bush did not set out to ring the changes between Reagan and himself; quite the opposite. He purported to be the archetypal guardian president; consolidating Reagan's good work and continuing to steer America on the same path. So why then did they turn out to be such almost polar opposites? This essay explores the realms of domestic politics, vision and leadership

  • A Jungian Reading of Beowulf

    1635 Words  | 4 Pages

    mythological, and poetic elements that make up the whole of Beowulf.  Jeffrey Helterman, in a 1968 essay, “Beowulf: The Archetype Enters History,” first recognized Grendel as a representation of the Shadow archetype and identified Grendel’s mother as an archetypal Anima image; I wish to extend the scope of the reading by suggesting that the dragon, too, represents an archetype: the archetype of the Self.  John Miles Foley, in his landmark 1977 essay “Beowulf and the Psychohistory of Anglo-Saxon Culture,”

  • Archetypes In The Lion King

    544 Words  | 2 Pages

    death & rebirth of the hero, and the symbolism and associations of water vs. desert. These archetypes can be noticed easily and help things come together. The Lion King has a very evident hero, Simba. Simba meets many of the characteristics of an archetypal hero. Among these is the way that he is taken away from his home, the Pridelands, and grows up with Timon and Pumbaa. After Simba arrives with Timon and Pumbaa, we see very little of his life until he is fully grown. When the film returns to Simba

  • Symbols and Subversion in 13 Happiness Street

    2163 Words  | 5 Pages

    couched in the language of metaphors and symbols. It is here that the author constructs a narrative using conventional symbols which play upon and also against the reader's expectations. Before we examine the means by which the author subverts the archetypal notions of symbols, it is first imperative to understand how these symbols stand in relation to the narrative and the reader. Symbols find their place within a narrative through a conscious desire of the author to create a pattern of meaning

  • John Dourley and God

    1476 Words  | 3 Pages

    John Dourley and God It is my understanding that Dourley does not explain god as a creation of the human mind. Rather, the point that Dourley makes is that notions of god as existing outside the psyche are the result of archetypal expression of which the individual is unaware. This in no way eclipses the existence of god. Rather, it defies the orthodox notion of a transpsychic being by arguing that god is wholly contained in the psyche, albeit the limitless nature of the unconscious. Dourley

  • Essay on Picture of Dorian Gray: Discovering Wilde

    912 Words  | 2 Pages

    Discovering Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray can be defined as a symbolic representation of a dialectic between two aspects of Wilde's personality. Dorian is an archetypal image by which both aspects are fascinated. This suggests that his behaviour symbolizes Wilde's unconscious (i.e. unacknowledged) attitudes. Dorian is characterized by his evasiveness and his obsession with objets d'art. For example, when Basil comes to console him about Sibyl's death, he is unwilling

  • The Role of the Great Mother in Beowulf

    1989 Words  | 4 Pages

    death. Her son, Grendel, is also not so easily defined as a monster-demon, for he is a manifestation of her male properties (though neither Grendel or his dam are purely male or female). Both 'creatures' are aspects of the one Great Mother, the archetypal female symbol, as Destroyer, or 'Terrible Mother'(147). Her Terribleness springs not from her monstrousness, but from her ability to live outside of patriarchy. Her presence in the text, Beowulf, depicts the battle over authority between patriarchal

  • Comparing Suffering in Plath's Ariel, Stings, Lady Lazarus, Wintering, and Fever 103°

    1354 Words  | 3 Pages

    symptomatic of the times and the culture; but more of them seem to stem from the always-too-easy identification between troubled poet and what might be the tone of imagery and rhythm of the poem considered. Because Plath worked so intensively in archetypal imagery (water, air, fire as bases for image patterns, for example), many of her poems could be read as either "dark" wasteland kinds of expressions, or as the reverse, as death-by-water, salvation poems--destruction implied, but also survived,

  • Tori Amos

    2823 Words  | 6 Pages

    interviews, she has admitted to being much influenced by numerous books of symbology and others of Jungian psychology and their archetypal insights. "I don't fall in love much. I mean, I fall in love every five seconds with something but I don't go from boy to boy. I go from archetype to archetype" (Rogers 33). Most dominantly, her lyrics rely on concept of the archetypal woman in all of her aspects. Motifs of creation and destruction are also represented in her work. Her ideals of balance

  • Comparing Fuentes’ Aura and Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin

    2158 Words  | 5 Pages

    Mythological and Archetypal Reading of Fuentes’ Aura and Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin Mythological and archetypal techniques coupled with the interpretation of symbolism found within a piece of literature tells the reader something about the mind and character of a people or culture. Not only does it allow you to delve deeper into this collective mind and speculate about the meaning of a particular work, it can give you something more. I believe that by using these techniques you also

  • Sita as the Hidden Hero of Ramayana

    2226 Words  | 5 Pages

    Sita's role. By this process, I will demonstrate how they correlate, differ and combine to form the Ramayana. Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, is a god known as Vishnu who has been reincarnated and sent to earth in mortal form. Rama must take an archetypal journey known as the "quest." During the quest, a hero must conquer obstacles to save the kingdom (Guerin et.al.154). Rama's obstacle is Ravana, an evil monster who is slowly taking over heaven and earth. Because Ravana never asked for protection