Summary of Maria Tatar's The Heroine with 1001 Faces

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Maria Tatar's The Heroine with 1001 Faces in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669341567

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Maria Tatar's The Heroine with 1001 Faces

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The author wants to avoid reducing the thousand and one heroines in this book to a model that only resembles the traditional hero archetypes found in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

#2

The first step towards becoming a hero, which is also the title of the first chapter in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is to leave home.

#3

The hero’s journey is often applied to male characters, but the same basic principles apply to female characters as well.

#4

The Search for the Lost Husband tale type is about a princess who is in some way wronged by her husband, and in order to get revenge, she transforms herself into an animal or a plant and waits for her husband to seek her out.

#5

We constantly ask ourselves what makes a hero. It is impossible to imagine the addition of or occasionally a man to the definition of a hero.

#6

We need to be careful not to overgeneralize about the roles of hero and heroine in our culture, as these are not universal traits, but rather traits that are specific to each story.

#7

Women today are using storytelling not just to divert and instruct, but to condemn social injustices. They are using real life stories to fight against the kinds of wrongs that Scheherazade fought against in The Thousand and One Nights.

#8

Fairy tales are another example of women’s voices being heard. In Mr. Fox, a woman named Lady Mary hides behind a wine cask and witnesses the chopping off of a hand with a ring on it. She uses the evidence she gathered to bring her fiancé, Mr. Fox, to justice.

#9

In this tale, the protagonist, Lady Mary, is worried about her upcoming wedding to a man she hardly knows. She goes to his castle to investigate,