Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

by Annis Pratt

Archetypal patterns endure because they give expression to perennial dilemmas submerged in the collective unconscious. Having examined more than 300 novels by both major and minor women writers over three centuries, Annis Pratt perceives in women's fiction distinctive elements of plot, characterization, image, and tone. She argues that women's fiction should be read as a mutually illuminative or interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes that are signals of a repressed tradition in conflict with patriarchal culture. Pratt suggests that the archetypal patterns in women's fiction provide a ritual expression containing the potential for the reader's personal transformation and that women's novels constitute literary variations on preliterary folk practices that are available in the realm of imagination even when they have long been absent from day-to-day life.

Genres: Feminism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Psychology

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

I have always longed for a world where people are more interested in each other's good than their own. I have always lived in a world where people are more interested in competing for profit and status than in each other's good.

Do you live in a world of greed and long for a world of good?

What human evils endanger our beloved planet?

Can we do anything about it?

My Infinite Games Series - The Marshlanders, Fly Out of the Darkness, The Road to Beaver Mill (all available on amazon.com); and the Battle for the Black Fen, forthcoming with Moon Willow Press in summer 2017 - are my way of asking those questions and suggesting answers to them.

I taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for many years, but I eventually threw my full professorship out of the window to engage in community activism and novel writing.

I chose speculative fiction with a real world (non-fantasy) flavor to tell the story about how environmental degradation began in the early modern era, based on the historical conflict between "Merchant Adventurers" and self-sustaining Fen dwellers. My novel series fits nicely into the new genre of Eco-Fiction.

During research trips to East Anglia, I discovered that the Fen people revolted against the Bishops at Ely as early as the eleventh century, rose up against unjust landlords in the thirteenth century, and, as the Fen Tigers, conducted such successful guerrilla skirmishes against the drainage schemes of the Earls of Bedford that it took 300 years for their completion.

My Marshlanders seek harmony with nature and each other. Their enemies want to drain their wetlands for exploitation and profit.

I believe my invented world makes for more compelling page-turners than if I wrote strictly historical ficton. My Infinite Games series is suitable for young adult readers as well as for adults.

Reviews

[Annis Pratt]

A book I wrote quite a long time ago but which still seems to be read in libraries and academic courses

[Vasiliki]

An engaging study. Annis Pratt uses and expands the Jungian theory on archetypes and explores their uses in fiction written by women. She focuses mainly on six types of novels: Novels of development, marriage, social protest, eros, singleness and novels of rebirth and transformation. She draws her material from novels writen from the late 18th century untill the seventies of 2oth century. She mentions and examines works of both major and minor novelists creating an interesting catlogue of books and authors especially for the 20th century. I would have liked her to apply her method on more books of the 18th century and not just focus on gothic fiction but I do not know how many other 18th century novels were availiable for reading during the time she wrote her study. It definetely helped me understand how women authors viewed and depicted women within the patriarchal society. How they grow up, how they relate to and form relationships with others, how they deal with their dreams, desires, choises, sexualities and identities in a world of prescribed gender roles and what solutions the authors propose for their escape and achievement of a quest for athentic selfhood.

[Steven]

First read this in a comparative literature course of study and have returned to it a few times since because it has an intense bibliography and I love that kind of rabbit hole. The Jungian approach, as opposed to the Lacanian that was so prevalent at the time, makes this more enjoyable because it isn't so terminology driven, and the focus stays on literature as a form of self-determination. Plenty of mythology, too, if you are into that.

[Zora]

Ok lowkey loved this one