Archetypal Criticism

Dr Marie Fernandes

Archetypal criticism marks the transition from New Criticism to Structuralism.

Definition:
In literature, an archetype is a typical character, an action, or a situation that seems to
represent universal patterns of human nature. An archetype, also known as
“universal symbol,” may be a character, a theme, a symbol, or even a setting. Many
literary critics are of the opinion that archetypes – which have a common and
recurring representation in a particular human culture, or entire human race – shape
the structure and function of a literary work.

Definition of Myth
Archetypal criticism can be rightly understood in the context of the study of myth.
As a story or a complex of story elements, expressing the deeper aspects of the
human experience, and as a perspective, that is, an activity of the mind that
synthesises received knowledge. In this sense, it is a mode of envisaging experience.
Myths are the reflections of a profound reality. They are said to be the greatest
falsehoods which tell us the greatest truths.

Cultural Anthropologists, Psychologists and Philosophers who influenced the

study of Archetypal Criticism.

1. James Frazer (1854-1941) Cultural Anthropologist, The Golden Bough (1890)

2. Carl Jung (1875-1961) Swiss Psychologist, Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious (1969)
3. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) Italian Philosopher, Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1725), The First New Science.
4. Ernst Cassirer (1874—1945) German philosopher, Philosophie der Symbolischen
Formen (1923-9).

The Golden Bough - James Frazer

This book of reference made a complete and comprehensive survey of the myths,
rituals, and religious practices of the different societies of the world, especially the
primitive ones. It is a remarkable encyclopaedia of the mythologies of the world.
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1969)

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Carl Jung in his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art”,
gives us a definition:

“The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be

daemon, man or process that repeats itself in the course of history
wherever creative fantasy is fully manifested. Essentially
therefore it is a mythological figure. If we subject these images to
a closer investigation, we discover them to be the formulated
resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They
are, as it were, the psychic residua of numberless experiences of
the same type.”

The crux of Jung’s statement lies in the phrase “psychic residua,” which seems to
imply the presence of inherited characteristics in the mind.

Carl Jung in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1969) has this to say. In
this search of the unconscious one will confront different aspects of the psyche that
influence our human fabric, our behaviour and reasons for those behaviours.
Beginning with the 'Shadow', Jung introduces us to the major archetypes of the
psyche that influence, often unconsciously, who we are as individuals, and
ultimately collectively, as human beings. The others include the Wise Old Man, the
Persona, the Divine Child, the Anima and Animus and the Great Mother.

The Shadow is considered to be a collection of inferiorities, undeveloped, and

regressive aspects of the personality. They are primarily of an emotional nature and
have a kind of autonomy, displaying an obsessive or more accurately a possessive
quality. These aspects are generally associated with projections.

Projection is defined as "the situation in which one unconsciously invests another

person, or object, with notions or characteristics of one's own. A clear example of
this in literature is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, in which Mr Hyde may be seen as Dr Jekyll's unconscious shadow, leading a
separate and altogether different life from the conscious part of the personality.

Stevenson intended Jekyll’s character to be pronounced Je (French word for “I”) Kill
(Je-Kill = I kill), as an indication that the doctor wanted to isolate the evil portion of
himself, appropriately named “Hyde,” meaning low and vulgar hide or flesh which
must hide from civilization. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story Dir.
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he portrayed man’s evil nature as a portion of his total makeup,
and showed that the evil portion will often express itself more forcefully and
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powerfully than do the other aspects.

Hyde commits several appalling acts throughout the novel, including mere acts like
trampling over a young girl, to gruesome acts like murdering a man. Acquiring no
respect by anyone he comes in contact with, Hyde is looked down upon in distaste:

“There was something wrong with his appearance;

something displeasing, something downright detestable. I
never saw a man I so disliked.”

Jekyll and Hyde have a strange relationship with each other. Jekyll hates Hyde for
the ascendancy that Hyde has over him. Hyde hates Jekyll because he knows that
Jekyll can destroy him by committing suicide. As Jekyll dies, Hyde regains
dominion so that the lawyer, Utterson and Poole find the body not of Jekyll, but that
of Hyde. At this point in the novel, the reader is perplexed about the literal
separation of the two components of one man, Jekyll and Hyde. The point that the
story is trying to make, is that people often have to battle between good and evil
within their own sub consciousness.

Most noteworthy practitioners of Archetypal Criticism:

1. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) Mythologist, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

(1949), Creative Mythology (1968)
2. Northrop Frye (1912-91) Canadian mythologist, scholar-critic Fearful Symmetry
(1947), Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Fables of Identity (1963)
3. Maud Bodkin (1875-1967),Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934)
4. Leslie Fiedler- (1917-2003), American literary anthropologist, Love and Death in
the American Novel (1959)
5. Francis Fergusson (1904-1986), The Idea of a Theatre (1955)
6. Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (1949)
7. Philip Wheelwright used the term ‘plurisignation’ to describe how literature
acquires multiple meanings.
8. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire

Northrop Frye (1912-91) Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

A critical tour de force, is a touchstone in archetypal criticism, and perhaps the first
attempt at erecting a grandiose theory of literary cartography. At the time of the
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publication of the work, his was the sole voice inveighing against the
uncompromising attitude of New Criticism. He was a strident believer in treating a
work of literature as part of a larger system, and not as a purely isolated
phenomenon. ‘Literature imitates the total dream of man.’ For him, the whole body
of literary works of any society constitutes what might be called a self-contained,
autonomous universe.

He also defines the place of anthropology, as exemplified by the work of Frazer, in

archetypal criticism:

"the search for archetypes is a kind of literary

anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is
informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth
and folk tale”.

And he makes it clear that such "pre-literary categories," as is also implied by Jung's
psychology, still play an important part in the overall form of many great works of
art. He attempts to see four different kinds of criticism in perspective, from his own
point of view. These include, Historical, Criticism which interprets and evaluates
symbols, Archetypal forms of imagery and narrative and Rhetorical criticism -the
treatment of the verbal surface of literature.

Frye is explicit in not rejecting any approaches to literature.

Archetypal criticism, as he describes it, studies the forms which are repeatedly
embodied in literature as patterns of imagery or narrative.
In his view, the literary structures which continually and significantly elicit our
deepest responses are best studied in the archetypal myths. These myths are present,
though seemingly "displaced," even in sophisticated literary works.

Archetypal criticism, which he recommends especially, would involve careful and

objective comparisons of literary works in all times and places in the way that
traditional ballad forms, for example, have been traced and studied.

The natural world and the human world are brought together by the human
imagination. Poetic thought is categorical, mystical, and so powerful in its impact on
the human mind that in our innermost being the natural world is assimilated to the
human world.

The term ‘archetype’ stands for a recurring pattern of experience which can be
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identified in works of literature, and human sciences. These can be identified in the
form of recurring actions, characters, images, metaphors, analogues and figurative
language. These archetypes are the reflections of primitive, universal thoughts which
are essentially poetic. They are the primordial images which reside deep in our
psyche, and which seek an outlet in works of art.

Have we not known that in the earliest stages of any culture, language was ritualistic
and pre-logical? When the archetypes are embodied in literary works, they awaken
in us our profound feelings which are socially sharable. Frye gives an example from
an Egyptian tale of ‘The Two Brothers’.

‘The Two Brothers’

An elder brother’s wife attempts to seduce an unmarried younger brother who lives
with them, and, when he resists her, accuses him of attempting to rape her. The
younger brother is then forced to run away, with the enraged elder brother in pursuit.
So far, the incidents reproduce more or less credible facts of life.

Then the younger brother prays to Ra for assistance, pleading the justice of his
cause; Ra places a large lake between him and his brother and, in a burst of divine
exuberance, fills it full of crocodiles.

This incident is no more a fictional episode than anything that has preceded it, nor is
it less logically related than any other to the plot as a whole. But it has given up the
external analogy to ‘life’: this, we say, is the kind of thing that happens only in
stories. The Egyptian tale has acquired, then, in its mythical episode, an abstractly
literary quality (135).

The incorporation of this simple myth of goddess Ra transforms an otherwise

sensational realistic short story (good enough for a tabloid newspaper) to a work of
literature. The acted part of the myth is the ritual, and the spoken part of the ritual is
the myth. The myth is the central informing power that gives significance to the
ritual. The central myth of literature is the quest myth.

Frye describes five categories of archetypal images and four categories of narrative.
The first range from "images of the highest human aspiration" and desire, to "images
of all that desire rejects." Frye's classification and description is intensely interesting,
but he admits that in a particular work the archetypal images may be only "latent "
and that this latent meaning, though "one factor," is not the " real content " of the
work.

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The archetypes are presumably of paramount importance not for the interpretation of
a literary work, but for understanding "literature as a whole," and for explaining the
appeal of particular works.

Frye illustrates this from Yorick’s soliloquy in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. The
text opens out from the literal meaning of words, to images of decay and corruption,
to psychological relationships among characters, to archetypal patterns, and so on.
Critics interpret the play based on what their assumptions happen to be.

From the other end, the deductive one, one can discover in works of literature
analogies of the recurrent rhythms of the natural cycle (of births, deaths, seasons).
Literature enacts these. Frye classifies the literary universe into four categories—he
calls them mythoi - corresponding to the four natural seasons: Comedy corresponds
to Spring, Romance to Summer, Tragedy to Autumn and Satire to Winter.

For him, educated imagination is that which is nurtured by classical mythology.

Using this as his base, he develops his brand of cultural criticism. Frye can thus
reach out to wider worlds of ethical and social criticism enshrining deep human
values. The treatment of archetypal narratives-tragic, comic, romantic, ironic-is
again impressive, and perhaps more suggestive for concrete analysis than the
descriptions of archetypal symbols.

Tragedy, is a story of the hero's alienation from his society; Comedy being a story of
his integration. Frye follows a Christian tradition in considering Adam's fall as the
archetype of tragedy. His fall led to a loss of freedom, and Frye treats this as the
characteristic theme of all tragedy.

Christian tragedy is possible, he would say, because the Christian view of life
includes the tragic, though it does not stop with it.He treats the quest-theme as
characteristic of the romance narrative, which includes, like the Christian epic, both
tragedy and comedy.

The poet, the producer of culture, is thought of principally as a master of technique,

and an important part of his product is unconscious (all technique "is a habitual, and
therefore an increasingly unconscious, skill ")

In a similar way, Frye later writes, "while the production of culture may be, like
ritual, a half-involuntary imitation of organic rhythms or processes, the response to
culture is, like myth, a revolutionary act of consciousness ". In culture the role of
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the artist is made to seem subordinate to the role of the critic.

The "true father " of the poem is not the poet but the " form of the poem itself.
a manifestation of the universal spirit of poetry " (p. 98). And it is only the critic
that determines what are works of art.

Frye thinks of literature as "an autonomous language . . . in a measure

independent of that common field of experience which we call the objective
world, or nature, or existence, or reality ". "In reading a novel we have to go from
literature as reflection of life to literature as autonomous language ". He then
develops an analogy with another "autonomous language," pure mathematics, which
has a relation to the physical world like that of literature to the world of experience.

"Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype”

In his essay, " Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype," he makes a significant
comment when he says, the work is seen as a myth which "unites ritual and dream”.
In this essay Frye treats literary convention and originality. Like Eliot he stresses the
impersonality of the artist, but he seems to go further than reason suggests in
belittling the importance of the artist's personality and experience. Poems are
made out of other poems, he would say, and the "new poem manifests some­ thing
that was already latent in the order of words ".

In his much-anthologised essay, Frye expresses his dissatisfaction with New

Criticism. What is missing from it is a coordinating principle that will place works of
art as parts of a larger whole, a larger system. And so, he would rather approach
them from two opposite ends, the inductive (centripetal) and the deductive
(centrifugal). In great works, especially, one can discover growing, emerging
patterns of significance, spreading out from the centre, like the ripples in a pond
when a stone is cast upon it.

Maud Bodkin

As early as 1934 Maud Bodkin used Jungian theories of archetypal imagery and
patterns in human experience to analyze the work of various poets, and in her
second study in 1951 she even applied such techniques in exegesis-without
over­whelmingly impressive results-to some of Yeats's work, particularly "The
Second Coming."

Other critics, frequently more thoroughly Jungian and psychoanalytic in their

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approaches than Bodkin, were quick to follow her lead. In fact, Jungian and
archetypal analyses of poetry and literature of all kinds proliferated in startling
numbers throughout the decades following publication of Jung's own works,
especially publication in translation.

That Jungian analysis and the Jungian theory of archetypes should be applied
particularly to Yeats's work was virtually inevitable, for two main reasons. For one
thing, Jung's studies brought him to recognition of the significant correlations
between many of the same diverse bodies of thought and expression that Yeats
himself found fascinating in their interrelationships: occultism and gnosticism,
primitive myths and rituals, and religious materials from the far East, especially
India.

Even more important and influential, however, was the startling similarity between
Yeats's belief in a great world-mind, called Anima Mundi or Spiritus Mundi, with its
inexhaustible supply of deeply symbolic images that might well up in the minds of
various individuals regard­ less of their station in life, cultural back­ ground, or era,
and Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, with its highly analogous primordial
ideas or forms, to which the psychologist applied the term archetypal images.

According to Walter K. Gordon, "The basic contention of archetypal criticism is that

literary ex­pression is an unconscious product of the collective experience of the
entire species. As such, literature is therefore integrally related with man's cultural
past."

Maud Bodkin, probably the most famous exponent of this critical approach, has
relied on Jung's formulations, although not slavishly, about the collective
unconscious in mankind in order to discuss the powerful attraction of poetry-"the
images are valued because they give-even though this function remains
unrecognized-ex­pression to feelings that were seeking a language to relieve their
inner urgency."

Gilbert Murray
His essay on "Hamlet and Orestes" was one of the first examples of directly
archetypal criticism. His essay is especially important because its conclusions were
apparently reached independently of any preconceived psycho­ logical theories.

Murray's perceptions and interpretations are all the more valuable for being arrived
at by way of a careful and imaginative literary analysis and comparison rather than a

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reading of Jung. His description of the archetypal situation as "a great unconscious
solidarity and continuity, lasting from age to age, among all the children of the poets,
both the makers and the callers-forth, both the artists and the audiences,'' more than
atones for a certain vagueness of language by its freedom from excessive
psychological jargon.

To sum up the Basic Premises of Archetypal Theory:

The critic is at the center of interpretive activity, and the critic functions as teacher,
interpreter, priest, seer. Criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own
right.

The critic works inductively by reading individual works and letting critical
principles shape themselves out of the literature; that is, the critic examines the
individual work to ascertain the archetypes underlying the work.

Literary taste is not relevant to literary criticism. Ethical criticism is important; that
is, the critic must be aware of art as a form of communication from the past to the
present. All literary works are considered part of tradition.

Like mathematics, literature is a language that can provide the means for expressing
truths. Verbal constructs (i.e., the works of literature) represent mythical outlines of
universal truths.

Literary critics who subscribe to Jung's archetypal theory seek to identify archetypes
and trace patterns in diverse literary works across eras and cultures.

One of the most often traced archetypal patterns is that of the quest (or search) by
the protagonist (or hero), who must leave her/his home, travel into unfamiliar
territory, meet a guide, endure dangerous situations and adventures, reach the object
of her/his quest, gain important new knowledge, and return home with that
knowledge to share with others.

Limitations of Archetypal Criticism

According to Daniel Russell Brown, Myth is one of the most muddled and abused
concepts. It has been defined as a lie, a popular delusion, as mystical fantasy, as
primitive science, as a record of historical fact, a symbol of philosophical truth, a
reflection of unconscious motivations, indeed, any unconscious assumption.
Obviously, then, since the term myth varies so greatly, the attitudes of myth critics
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will too.

A very serious charge is the danger of reductionism, or the insistence on the

archetypal analysis as the only valid interpretation. As with any dogma, this one can
quickly become unbearable. There are times when the myths in a work of art are not
especially relevant; other qualities ought to be stressed, like rhetoric or intellectual
argument. The critic thus should watch himself carefully so that he does not attempt
to mold everything into a myth at the cost of gross distortion.

Another trouble some readers find with archetypal critics is the seeming willing­
ness to change the rules of the game as the game progresses. To put it bluntly, the
critics leave in what fits and leave out what does not:

If Morgan le Fay, or if anything else for that matter, does not fit in with the
myth and the archetype, then it is denounced as a late addition or put down as
an example of the poet's failure to understand the myth involved, and so done
away with as irrelevant to the proper study of the poem.

Such a procedure is not scholarly, but it is understandable, since human beings like
to see patterns and orderliness-even in places where they do not reside.

Another charge brought by Philip Rahv against archetypal investigation is that the
enjoyment of the mythic is a fear of history. Myth is reassuring in its stability,
whereas history is that powerhouse of change which destroys custom and tradition in
producing the future - the future that at present, with the fading away of the
optimism of progress, many have learned to associate with the danger and menace
of the unknown. In our time the movement of history has been so rapid that the mind
longs for nothing so much as something permanent to steady it.

As a matter of fact, the arbitrariness of the archetypal critic may not be because of
intentional deceit, as it may be with some critics, but rather because of the enormous
confusion which exists in the material available for study. He cannot be excused for
omitting relevant parts; yet he can be sympathized with in his errors, as long as he
mentions the parts that he cannot understand or that work against the pattern he sees.

A grave mistake comes from wording conclusions more firmly than the findings
warrant. The temptation is to go from possibilities to assurances without any more
proof than the critic's audacity. One must remember that assertion does not equal
demonstration.

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Archetypal criticism falls noticeably short in the area where it is equivalent to
source hunting. Too frequently, the critic only points and says, "That's the Quest,
that's the Initiation, that's the Scapegoat," just as once the critic pointed and said,
"There's an analogue and there's an analogue and that looks like a source!" The
discovery of the presence of mythic elements is a beginning, but identification is not
the end of criticism. As Moorman notes, "the myth is not the poem”.

For archetypal critics sometimes forget that myth alone does not a poem make.
Poetic rearrangements transform the mythic elements, and hence the artistry of the
creator is probably more important in the final effects of a literary piece than the
myths themselves. Perhaps the tradition has been accentuated at the expense of the
craftsmanship so that "the inflators of myth are able to credit it with properties that
really belong to art”. In addition, archetypes might become inflexible categories:

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