Maria Tatar

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out. Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. “By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

The Heroine with 1001 Faces

Laura Mei

This book could be regarded as an adjunct to Joseph Campbell's work, rather than serving as an alternative to it. I found some of the pop culture references in the book to be a bit off-putting, and at times it felt like the author was trying to sell me other authors' work rather than speaking to the topic itself. Overall, I had hoped for more depth from this book.

Dani C

I received The Heroine with 1001 Faces as an ARC for review. All opinions are my own. 

Tatar approaches 1001 Faces as what I assume was meant to be a rebuttal on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with 1000 Faces. But 1001 Faces turns out to be a delightful companion, in my opinion, to Campbell's book. While Campbell focuses on the masculine journey toward heroism, Tatar explores how women have been forgotten or pigeon-holed into a fate that doesn't allow them to be heroes themselves. Her refreshing perspective on tales from Greek and Roman mythology up to more recent authors' creating female heroes and retelling mythological stories with the women's voices provides readers with questions to ask themselves as they explore modern storytelling. Who are the women and what are their roles in this story? Do they have the ability to grow or be more than a shallow side character? What are readers told about these characters (and what are they not told)? These questions and many more lead one to better see and critique when female voices are being silenced or groomed away from being as full, complex, and detailed as male voices are - resulting in the continuation of women fighting for their rights around the world today. 

Stories have power. And Tatar does an excellent job showing just how stories have taken power away from women...and how women can gain some of that power back.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces

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