Borrowed from the ideas of Carl Jung and developed by Joseph Campbell and Northrup Frye, an archetype is a pattern of characteristics that can be deployed in many different ways without losing its coherence. Both character and plot can draw on archetypes, as can the more abstract devices of imagery and symbolism.

Jung, an early student and protégé of Freud, expanded the concept of the unconscious mind and applied it to the entire human species. After all, if an individual can have hidden memories and desires that influence behavior without rising to the level of conscious recognition, then perhaps the species as a whole also possesses a kind of collective unconscious (sometimes referred to as “racial memory,” meaning the shared memory of the entire species). Indirect support for this notion came from the work of 19th-century myth scholars such as James G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890). Frazer noted that patterns of mythic stories recurred worldwide, and he cataloged numerous examples of related stories in the multiple volumes of The Golden Bough. The gods and heroes serving as the characters of the stories might differ, but the adventures they faced would be similar, as would many symbolic images used to describe those adventures and to endow them with special significance.

Carl Jung

Joseph Campbell outlines one of these major archetypal character patterns in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, noting the many heroes of myths around the world who share several features: the extraordinary circumstances of the hero’s birth; the early sign of the adult role the hero will undertake; the hero’s summons to adventure; his acquisition of a guide, mentor, or helper; his journey into the underworld; the winning of some gift or boon for mankind, usually through great sacrifice or privation by the hero; and the return to the ordinary world with the prize. Campbell’s ideas were a strong influence on George Lucas as he developed the story for Star Wars, and the phenomenal success of that film made it a pattern for many others.

Northrup Frye’s key contribution to the theory of the archetype occurs in The Anatomy of Criticism. He creates a system for categorizing literary works based on the cycle of the seasons that so strongly dominated human survival through thousands of years. Thus, there are four major genres: comedy (spring), romance/adventure (summer), tragedy (autumn), and satire (winter).

The cycle of human life is also encompassed in this system through birth, youth, and education (spring); maturity, adulthood, and parenthood (summer); and old age, loss of power, and death (autumn). Wintry satire is a kind of subversion of the other genres and can occur in all the stages of life. Frye articulates the characteristics of these genres, citing numerous examples. Our ability to recognize these archetypes is partly the result of simply growing up and living our lives.

Writers can exploit the characteristic features in a straightforward manner, but variations on the archetypal patterns are enriched by the recognition of the underlying archetype. For example, Shakespeare achieves a powerful effect by taking a comic story of young love in Romeo and Juliet and converting it into a deeply moving tragedy of young death by mixing two of the archetypal patterns.

The strongest and most common criticism of the archetypal theory is that it is a reductionist approach, oversimplifying a complex human activity—the creation of literature, or, more broadly, art—in favor of a systematic explanation. Critics of archetypal theory claim that Frye’s approach lops off subtleties or smoothes over discrepancies in the vast field of literature to divide it all into predetermined categories, like Procrustes, who trimmed or stretched his guests to fit the one bed he already had.

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz. A Jungian Approach to Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature

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