Northrop Frye Goes to the Movies Mark Hamilton
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2003 Northrop Frye Goes to the Movies Mark Hamilton Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES NORTHROP FRYE GOES TO THE MOVIES By MARK HAMILTON A Dissertation Submitted to the Program in the Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2003 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Mark A. Hamilton defended on October 13th, 2003. __________________________ Eugene Crook Professor Directing Dissertation _________________________ Leon Golden Outside Committee Member _________________________ William Cloonan Committee Member ________________________ Caroline Picart Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, Roger and Grace Hamilton, who have always been spiritual guides, Mary Raymo, and the late Gordon Raymo, who taught me to somehow love writing. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank God and my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Secondly, I would like to thank my parents, Kent and Janice Hamilton, for everything. They have always loved me intensely. Third, I would like to thank Dr. Eugene Crook--a very kind and generous man, who has had the kindness to overlook my faults and encourage me in my strengths--and Dr. Leon Golden, to whom I am grateful for originally accepting me into the P.H.D. program in Humanities. Fourth, I would like to thank my brothers, Jonathan, Jason, my sister Mari, and my nephew Christian Kent Hamilton and tell them how much I love them. Fifth, I would like to thank all my friends at First Christian Church and Christian Campus Fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank Linda Hensley, who has been incredibly helpful in allowing me to check out what must have seemed like thousands of films from the FSU Film School library. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables v List of Figures vi Abstract ix 1. METHODOLOGY AND FRYE'S ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM 1 2. MOVIES ILLUSTRATING FRYE'S COMEDY PHASES AND THEIR ANALOGUES 15 3. MOVIES ILLUSTRATING FRYE'S ROMANCE PHASES AND THEIR ANALOGUES 81 4. MOVIES ILLUSTRATING FRYE'S TRAGEDY PHASES AND THEIR ANALOGUES 140 5. MOVIES ILLUSTRATING FRYE'S IRONY/SATIRE PHASES AND THEIR ANALOGUES 212 6. SUMMARY 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 309 v LIST OF FIGURES 1. Circle Illustrating Phases 13 2. Comedy and Irony/Satire First Phase 17 3. Comedy and Irony/Satire Second Phase 23 4. Comedy and Irony/Satire Third Phase 30 5. Comedy and Romance Fourth Phase 35 6. Comedy and Romance Fifth Phase 40 7. Comedy and Romance Sixth Phase 45 8. Comedy and Irony/Satire Second Phase 49 9. Comedy and Romance Fifth Phase 55 10. Comedy and Romance Fifth Phase 59 11. Comedy and Irony/Satire Second Phase 63 12. Comedy and Irony/Satire Second Phase 70 13. Comedy and Romance Fourth Phase 75 14. Romance and Tragedy First Phase 86 15. Romance and Tragedy Second Phase 90 16. Romance and Tragedy Third Phase 95 17. Romance and Comedy Fourth Phase 99 18. Romance and Comedy Fifth Phase 106 19. Romance and Comedy Sixth Phase 111 20. Romance and Comedy Sixth Phase 115 vi 21. Romance and Tragedy Third Phase 119 22. Romance and Tragedy Second Phase 125 23. Romance and Comedy Third Phase 128 24. Romance and Comedy Sixth Phase 132 25. Romance and Tragedy Third Phase 135 26. Tragedy and Romance First Phase 144 27. Tragedy and Romance Second Phase 152 28 Tragedy and Romance Third Phase 157 29. Tragedy and Irony/Satire Fourth Phase 163 30. Tragedy and Irony/Satire Fifth Phase 170 31. Tragedy and Irony/Satire Sixth Phase 175 32. Tragedy and Romance First Phase 179 33. Tragedy and Romance Second Phase 184 34. Tragedy and Romance Second Phase 189 35. Tragedy and Romance Third Phase 194 36. Tragedy and Romance Third Phase 203 37. Tragedy and Irony/Satire Fifth Phase 208 38. Irony/Satire and Comedy First Phase 220 39. Irony/Satire and Comedy Second Phase 227 40. Irony/Satire and Comedy Third Phase 233 41. Irony/Satire and Tragedy Fourth Phase 239 42. Irony/Satire and Tragedy Fifth Phase 244 43. Irony/Satire and Tragedy Sixth Phase 249 vii 44. Irony/Satire and Tragedy Fifth Phase 253 45. Irony/Satire and Tragedy Fourth Phase 258 46. Irony/Satire and Comedy First Phase 264 47. Irony/Satire and Comedy First Phase 270 48. Irony/Satire and Comedy First Phase 274 49. Irony/Satire and Comedy First Phase 281 viii ABSTRACT Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, identified four main myths: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Irony/Satire. These were essentially genres, each of which move through six phases. Frye believed a critic could simply organize literature into these phases to show that literature formed "an ideal order" (Anatomy of Criticism 18). For each of these phases, Frye identified typical narrative structures and characteristics-- primal myths with which humanity was and is consistently concerned. Comedy is the reconciliation of the protagonist with his community at the end, Romance chronicles what seems like a knight's quest, Tragedy shows us a hero's separation from his society, and Irony/Satire gives us the everyday difficulties and dissembling of life. Frye refers mostly to literature in Anatomy of Criticism and only a few times to film. Yet as Frye himself recognized in interviews in A World in a Grain of Sand (collected by Robert Denham), film "is a literary art in itself, and it has a power of expressing symbolism that … is unmatched by any other form in the history of mankind" (47) in its "extraordinary immediacy" (202). This dissertation has shown that the Anatomy of Criticism could categorize not only written literature but also 20th century film. Specifically, these Western films were matched to Frye's Romance phases, War films to Frye's Tragedy phases, Film Noir films to Frye's Irony/Satire phases, as well as Comedy films to Frye's Comedy phases. ix CHAPTER ONE METHODOLOGY AND FRYE'S ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM Framework/Background Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, identified four main myths. These were essentially genres, each of which moves through six phases. For each of these phases, Frye identified typical narrative structures and characteristics. Frye believed a critic could simply organize literature into these phases to show that literature formed “an ideal order” (Anatomy of Criticism 18). Frye attempted to organize this ideal order through archetypal criticism—a type of criticism attempting to identify the primal myths with which humanity was and is consistently concerned. These are life patterns one’s ancestors experienced: “birth, death, love, family life, struggle” (Scott 21). Archetypal critics merely agree that there are certain patterns and symbols cultures share, regardless of how they came to share them. Dissertation Question and Goal In this dissertation, I will attempt to identify whether Frye’s four myths divided into twenty-four phases are applicable to Twentieth Century American and European film. Using the mythic approach, I will make no assumptions about whether the films are good or bad (Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism, called such value judgments “an illusion in the history of taste” (20)). The goal will be to show how each film could serve as one of Frye's phases of myth by drawing on past mythic plot lines. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye used mostly examples from written literature to give examples of these phases. I intend to show how film literature can also easily illustrate and fit into each of the six phases of each of Frye’s four mythoi. As Frye himself recognized in interviews in A World in a Grain of Sand (collected by Robert Denham), film “is a literary art in itself, and it has a power of expressing symbolism that . is unmatched by any other form in the history of mankind” (47) in its “extraordinary immediacy” (202). This is the importance of showing that Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is applicable not simply to 1 Medieval, Renaissance, Restoration, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern literature (as Frye has shown) but also to Twentieth Century Film. Jim Kitses calls for just such a study as this when he writes in his Horizons West: "What are the archetypal elements we sense within the genre and how do they function? As Northrop Frye has shown in his monumental The Anatomy of Criticism, for centuries this immensely tangled ground has remained almost wholly unexplored in literature itself. The primitive state of film criticism inevitably reveals a yawning abyss in this direction" (14). In other words, as Andrew Tudor would call it, this will be "an abstract exploration of the cyclical recurrence of certain themes" (134) in Twentieth Century Western film. This dissertation, written primarily for scholars of film and literature, will be the first book-length study which examines film solely through the lens of Frye’s Anatomy. There have been numerous articles and books written on myth structure in movies, like James Clauss’s “Descent into Hell: Mythic Paradigms in The Searchers” (which shows how The Searchers follows archetypal patterns like that found in The Divine Comedy etc.) and Stuart Kaminsky’s American Film Genres, which analyzes movies as part of an ‘ideal order’ but which uses eight genres (Frye used only four). Recently, William K. Ferrell’s Literature and Film as Modern Mythology categorizes literature and the films based on it according to classical myths (not Frye’s phases), like the Prometheus myth, for instance, or the Creation narrative of the Hebrew Bible.