20th Century Feminism: A Jungian Exploration of The Feminine Self by Christopher Alan Snellgrove A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama August 4, 2012 Keywords: Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Archetypes Copyright 2012 by Christopher Alan Snellgrove Approved by Jonathan Bolton, Chair, Associate Professor of English Dan Latimer, Professor Emeritus of English Susana Morris, Assistant Professor of English Abstract The following work uses the theories and methods provided by Carl Jung as a way of analyzing works by three women authors: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The primary Jungian notion featured is that of self-actualization—the process by which a person has achieved a sense of wholeness uniting their body and mind to the greater world. Specifically, I examine how the protagonists and antagonists of these texts either complete their Jungian journey towards actualized wholeness. In order to do this, I focus greatly on Jung’s notion of archetypes, and how they either help or hinder the journey that these women are on. A large part of the analysis centers on how actualization might be defined in feminine terms, by women living in a world of patriarchal control. As such, this work continues the endeavors of other Post-Jungians to “rescue” Jung from his own patriarchal leanings, using his otherwise egalitarian theories as a way of critiquing patriarchy and envisioning sexual equality. Jung, then, becomes an interesting bridge between first, second, and third-wave feminism, as well as a bridge between modernism and post-modernism. By analyzing these disparate female authors (divided by time, nationality, and race), it is my hope to provide a framework by which future feminist fiction and scholarship can be better understood within the context of eternal feminine archetypes. Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of those who helped make this work possible. This includes my beautiful wife Laura, my amazing son James, my supporting parents Jim and Susan, my caring sister Heather, and my fuzzy companions during late night work, Tulip and Lola. I would also like to thank my amazing dissertation committee: Jonathan Bolton, Dan Latimer, and Susana Morris. They have provided keen insight and amazing guidance, for which I will be eternally grateful. Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................ iii Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................................. 136 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 190 References ............................................................................................................................... 200 Introduction The use of Carl Jung’s philosophy and texts to conduct feminist analysis may seem an odd choice to the charitable outside observer. To the less charitable observer, it may seem impossible: Jung is often considered outdated, and his compelling philosophy is often tinged with a patriarchal bias. Feministic critics such as Naomi Goldenberg have often said as much. In her brief “A Feminist Critique of Jung”, Goldenberg focuses on how Jung’s use of archetypes, which are intended to be part of a liberating mythology, arguably confine women instead: “It is true that Jung genuinely values woman for her remarkable and all too often overlooked Eros, but it is equally true that he confines her to this sphere. Once she moves into a Logos arena, she is not only at a great disadvantage but is behaving unnaturally as well.” (p. 445). She further claims that Jung’s focus on contrasexuality as part of a process of self-actualization (in which men are encouraged to embrace the feminine anima and women are encouraged to embrace the masculine animus) favored men over women--“The anima-animus model is clearly more beneficial to men than to women”—and that Jung’s creation (and subsequent lack of development) of the animus is an indication of being clouded by his own masculine perception, because “Jung never developed the idea of the animus to the same extent as the anima; in my view he was forcing a mirror image where there was none.” (p. 447). However, the use of Jungian thought as a feminist tool is something that has been building in recent years. In the excellent Jung: A Feminist Revision, Susan Rowland essentially reclaims Jung for feminist analysis by clarifying and modifying the contentious Jungian claim regarding archetypes being inherited—a claim that, if true, would certainly lend credence to the criticism from Goldenberg and other critics regarding his confinement of gender (if access to archetypes is inherited, after all, then it becomes part of the material world in which women are Snellgrove 1 marginalized and, thus, inherit less than men)—by writing that “An archetype is an inborn potential for a certain sort of image. What the actual mental image will look like will not only depend upon the collective unconscious. Archetypal images also reflect the conscious experiences of the person as a subject in history, culture and time” (29). This serves as a very important bridge connecting Jung’s works to feminist theory, as it allows for writers to rather explicitly tackle how the historical and cultural marginalization of women by patriarchal force has psychologically affected the women and, indeed, evens the men clumsily wielding such power. Jung’s archetypes, then, take on special importance as a way of not only articulating such issues, but beginning to formulate a kind of solution that is peaceful, rather than destructive. Jungian scholar Irene Claremont de Castillejo (who honed her psychoanalytical and Jungian skills under Emma Jung in Zurich) touches on this in her 1973 book Knowing Woman, her exploration of divisions between masculinity and femininity within society. In this text, she writes that the deeply buried feminine in us whose concern is the unbroken connection of all growing things is in passionate revolt against the stultifying, life-destroying, anonymous machine of the civilization we have built. She is consumed by an inner rage which is buried in a layer of the unconscious often too deep for us to recognize…With more consciousness, feminine anger could be harnessed to a creative end. (42) In Castillejo’s view, Jungian philosophy serves as a vital tool for studying both individuals and collective groups. Patriarchal repression, then, can be understood as a kind of collective shadow of patriarchal society, one it refuses to acknowledge or accept. Jung’s notions of self- actualization—specifically, allowing someone to access their heretofore hidden unconscious— Snellgrove 2 can be utilized as a tool for expressing feminine (self)discovery on the individual level, and recovering feminism/feminist culture from the margins on the collective level. One of the more interesting features of Jungian literary analysis (and arguably the feature which I find most compelling) is that it allows a critical connection of very disparate authors. Karen Elias alludes to this in her Jungian analysis of Grimm’s “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” claiming that In addition, the new feminist narratives encourage a woman-centered perspective. This point of view requires a redefinition of the feminine, one that, in Virginia Woolf‟s words, asks women to “think back through [their] mothers”… in order to discover in their collective survival a legacy of female strength. Construction of this new paradigm has the power to move women away from a ‘home’ that has become increasingly inadequate and detrimental, to a ‘strange new country’: a journey that can be compared to an evolutionary leap. (8) It is with this in mind that I have focused my own Jungian analysis on three very disparate authors: Virginia Woolf and her novel Orlando, Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved, and Margaret Atwood and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In Woolf’s text, the gender-bending protagonist is able to successfully navigate the seemingly-paradoxical course laid out by Woolf in her seminal A Room of One’s Own: the ability to become a man or woman at will helps Orlando (and, by extension, Woolf) to achieve the androgynous ideal that Woolf speaks of, while Orlando’s final decision to embrace femininity and womanhood allows Woolf to think back through the lens of feminine thought, transforming a celebratory “biography” of Vita Sackville- West into a celebration of feminine assertion and self-actualization. Woolf understandably becomes an icon of early feminism, yet Toni Morrison’s Beloved offers a blunt counterpoint, Snellgrove 3 offering a rather literal presentation