THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH IN
NORTHROP FRYE:
Toward a Revision of the “Silent Beatrice”
Troni Y. Grande
The fact that the dying and reviving character is usually female strengthens the feeling that there is something maternal about the green world, in which the new order of the comic resolution is nourished and brought to birth.
— Frye, “The Argument of Comedy” 69
A GROWING number of feminist critics are finding their own new directions from the critical path forged by Northrop Frye.1 While his outline of literature as a “systematic structure of knowledge” (AC 19) has certainly been useful to feminists, Frye’s myth-making, aimed at creating an integrated community, has been judged a failure insofar as it ignores the problem of gender difference—specifically, the subjugation and exclusion of the embodied woman. Yet if Frye himself showed no focused interest in the way gender inflects the reading of literature and the practice of criticism, the woman (both as a figure and an embodied being) is an insistently interrupting presence within his work. In the first chapter of A Natural Perspective, Frye memorably calls himself “an Odyssean critic … attracted to comedy and romance” (2), genres that end by showing a renewed world in which every member of society can take his or her place. Frye’s central myth throughout his oeuvre is indeed comic, but his vision of a united community struggles to incorporate and acknowledge the woman as a fully participating member. Though he recognizes that the woman holds a central and sacred place, Frye questions at times the power of the woman and the difference women make. Feminist critics have not attended to the ways in which the woman in Frye time and again becomes a crucial vehicle of divine inspiration and resurrection, moving society toward a new order.
Deanne Bogdan, who has provided the most comprehensive attempt to reconcile Frye’s theory with feminist theory and pedagogy, argues that Frye has become “complicit with the disincarnation of women” because he has been “seduced by the breadth of his own vision” (“Re[Educated]” 93).2 Bogdan calls for a re-examination of the embodied woman, the “excluded initiative of the educated imagination,” exemplified by the “silent Beatrice” that Frye points to in Words With Power as existing behind and beyond the supreme anagogic vision (“Re[Educated]” 92). In her compelling account of her changing relationship with Frye (a quest myth involving “initiation, separation, and return”), Bogdan moves from being a fervent disciple of Frye to one who resists what she comes to see as his “hierarchical and androcentric” ordering of literary response (85, 88). Bogdan implies that in Frye’s system Beatrice is denied subjectivity, remaining silenced and hence subjugated.
My paper takes up the challenge to re-examine the “silent Beatrice” in Frye’s analysis, which Bogdan only touches upon.3 In pointing out that the image of the silent Beatrice “might be examined within its broader context—the gendered hierarchy between subject and object” (92), Bogdan treats Beatrice as the objectified, hence disembodied woman both Dante and Frye build their mythological visions on, through, and over. However, in Frye’s myth-making, Beatrice appears neither silent nor invisible as she leads Dante out of Purgatory toward the enlightenment and salvation of Paradise in The Divine Comedy. In the range of Frye’s personal and academic writings, Beatrice occupies a central site of embodiment rather than remaining an “excluded initiative” as Bogdan has suggested. First, Frye’s analyses of Beatrice give her a louder, more substantial subject position than Bogdan realizes, as well as an archetypal significance connecting her to the all-powerful dying and reviving female Frye has done so much to illuminate. Moreover, Frye’s personal relation to women and the feminine bears closer examination in his Notebooks, Correspondence, and Diaries—all those “egodocuments”4 that reveal Frye’s private wrestling with issues of gender. While on several occasions Frye attempts to dismiss the difference generated by women, he also experiences discomfort and puzzlement over women as material beings, and falters toward an account of the difference made by women in his mythologizing of Western literature. Finally, Frye’s Late Notebooks bear witness to his moving private attempts to refashion the figure of Beatrice while working through his grief over his wife Helen’s death. Frye’s ultimate rendering of Helen as Beatrice shows with poignant force how the female archetype collides with the inexorable embodiment and situatedness of human knowledge and experience. On all these levels, Beatrice is a guide to enlightenment and regeneration, a metaphor that reveals how deeply Frye’s vision of an integrated and renewed community relies on the woman as other.
Bogdan suggests that in order to effect a re-vision of the educated imagination, “one must be both inside and outside anagogy at the same time, while seeing from below” (91). Bogdan is building on the work of Donna Haraway, who argues that the “view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god trick” (582), and that “seeing from below,” from “the vantage points of the subjugated,” is the most trustworthy means of situating and embodying knowledge (583). Yet Haraway’s description of “seeing from above” does not always accurately describe the Frye of the Diaries and Notebooks. Though Frye’s conceptual framework may at times give the appearance of transcendentalizing, or speaking from an unlocatable position, his writings in their broader context do not reveal him to be one of “the dominators … self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again” (Haraway 586). Rather, Frye’s writings lay bare what Haraway calls “[t]he split and contradictory self, the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history” (586). As Frye reaches for a view of infinite vision, his private and public writings show him wrestling, like Jacob with the angel, to incorporate the woman as other.
The invaluable Collected Works of Northrop Frye series provides much more context for a re-examination of the ways in which the woman interrupts and informs Frye’s myth-making. The Collected Works open Frye up to feminist criticism by mixing his private reflections (in the Diaries and Notebooks) with his critical books and public addresses.5 In Frye’s Diaries, Notebooks, and Correspondence, we gain a more open view of him that dismantles the false dichotomy between public and private, reason and feeling, mind and body, as we get the theorizing of the seasoned academic and self-declared genius alongside his most personal jottings and fretful questions. This other view of Frye—Frye “unbuttoned,” as Robert D. Denham aptly puts it—opens Frye up to a consideration of the difference the woman makes in his conceptual system.
In exploring Frye’s relation to the fictional construct of Woman, and to historically situated women, I hope to bring into the foreground the subject of feminist criticism, as Teresa de Lauretis has memorably formulated it: “the discrepancy, the tension, and the constant slippage between Woman as representation, as the object and the very condition of representation, and, on the other hand, women as historical beings, subjects of ‘real relations’” (10). Despite his various attempts to efface the difference of gender and turn woman into an abstraction, Frye’s myth inscribes the woman as an embodied being, embedded and situated in material reality. The dying and reviving woman in Frye’s mythology— she who is paradoxically archetypal and crucially embodied—is a founding presence of the community that is such a central focus of his oeuvre. Frye’s personal and academic writing reveals how woman functions as an interruption of myth, both within mythos itself and within what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “myth of myth,” that is, in the impulse toward and process of myth-making. The very function of myth, as Nancy has shown, is to found a community: “myth reveals the community to itself and founds it” (51). If, as Nancy points out, myth “is always the myth of community, that is to say, it is always the myth of a communion—the unique voice of the many—capable of inventing and sharing the myth” (51), then that myth of community is never fully or unproblematically unified. As Frye interrupts his own attempts at creating a unified mythology throughout his personal writings in the Notebooks and Diaries, he confronts with some honesty and ethical force the extent to which women as other interrupt or interrogate his efforts at articulating an open mythological system. Frye’s work suggests that, as Nancy argues, ethical community building is only possible if we allow for the interruption of community through the difference of its members; that is, myth is only possible with the interruption of myth (Nancy 57).
For Frye, Beatrice is a type of maternal power, first of all in its beatific aspects. Far from constituting a simply “excluded initiative” that has no part in the higher vision Dante and Frye privilege, Beatrice provides a vital means of helping Dante achieve ultimate enlightenment. She is the divinely appointed agent of Dante’s ascent, for within his Christian vision Dante must surrender his own power to that which is higher. Frye’s analyses of Beatrice recognize her elevated, salvific power in La Vita Nuova, Dante’s famous commentary and poetic sequence, and in the last two books of The Divine Comedy. At the end of the Purgatorio, Beatrice meets Dante and leads him up toward Paradise, for Virgil, Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, is pagan and cannot approach Paradise:
When Dante wanted to experience states of being beyond life in thirteenth-century Italy the poet Virgil appeared as his guide. Virgil represents literature in its Arnoldian function as a ‘criticism of life,’ the vision of existence, detached but not withdrawn from it, that is at its most inclusive in the imaginative mode. Beyond Virgil there is Beatrice, who represents among other things a criticism or higher awareness of the limits of the Virgilian vision. (WP 28)
Here Frye grants Beatrice a great deal of generative power: “Dante’s ascent is not directed by his own will, but by the divine grace manifested in Beatrice” (160). If there is any view from below here, it is Dante’s, not Beatrice’s. Indeed, Frye reflects on this view from below in the Late Notebooks when he makes an analogy between Virgil’s inadequate vision and the Old Testament, which “is really a vision of how God looks from the human hell” (LN 673). Without Beatrice, Dante would be stuck in the hellish, inadequate vision.
Beatrice the heavenly guide is the site of man’s primal desire. Frye notes that when Virgil leaves Dante and Beatrice enters, Dante regresses into an infant for the second time. Frye calls Dante “the greatest of Eros poets” (TBN 105). In the Purgatorio, “Eros is primarily a reversal in time, a movement toward reversal of … childhood, … its ultimate goal a lost Paradise” (LN 344). Thus “the first movement is toward the mother, or more accurately the virgin or inaccessible mother” (LN 344). Beatrice as paradisal mother is typologically linked to the courtly love mistress. Indeed, as Frye points out in the “Third Book” Notebooks, “[t]he Courtly Love tradition is based on the maternalizing of the mistress,” for “[t]he simplest and most direct object of Eros is the mother” (105). In fact, Frye calls Beatrice “the Virgin Mother” (TBN 105).
In Frye’s open-ended treatment of Beatrice, on one level the site of desire is the archetypal mother; on another level, however, she is significantly embodied. Frye subtly echoes Dante’s own ambiguous character- ization of Beatrice not just as a type of the Virgin Mary but also as a stern, more realistic mother figure. For example, in the Purgatorio, Dante describes himself as a small boy overwhelmed by his mother’s scolding: “And even as a little boy may think / His mother formidable, I thought her so: / Stern pity is a bitter-tasting drink” (canto 30, lines 79–81). To Dante, as Frye points out, “Beatrice first appears as a scolding mamma” (LN 345). As she berates Dante for his faithlessness, evidenced by his many past sins, not only does Beatrice represent a higher authority that shows the limits of the Classical vision, but she is also anything but silent. Significantly, Frye’s response to this event is neither theologically dogmatic nor staunchly committed to a single androcentric view; rather, it is split, contradictory, and open, seeking to incorporate the complexity of the woman into his reading: “I used to find the entrance of Beatrice rather contemptible, a selling out to the masochism of piety, but maybe it’ll bear more thinking about” (LN 673). Frye is not alone in struggling with Dante’s initial characterization of Beatrice, “who nags & scolds away like a typical Italian mother” (TBN 105). Maud Bodkin (whose work on archetypal patterns Frye cites)6 is also bothered by the particular shape Beatrice takes on here. Bodkin voices “a moment of recoil” and “a feeling of revulsion” (182–183) regarding the hold that Beatrice as mother-imago appears to have over Dante. Bodkin resolves the problem by viewing Beatrice as the means by which Dante achieves a “transition from personal desire to ideal aspiration” (189). Beatrice’s archetypal function aligns her with Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche in Faust, a type of the Eternal Feminine that draws us onward or upward.7
Yet Bodkin’s ultimate effacement of the bodied, individual woman here, in favour of the sacred archetype, skews Dante’s text, as Dorothy L. Sayers brilliantly points out in her introduction to the Purgatorio. Beatrice cannot be seen solely as a type of the Ewig-Weibliche, Sayers argues (38), for “she is, first of all, a person” (49). Bodkin is guilty of a “flight from the concrete, individualized, historical, and mystical into the abstract, generalized, mythical, and magical” (Sayers 39). It is precisely because Christianity is characterized by the great “scandal” of “particularity” that “Dante’s encounter with an individual living woman can be made the image of the soul’s encounter with a personal living God” (37). The point is that the concrete individual, in this case the very body of Beatrice as woman, is the crucial vehicle of the divine.
Dante’s dependence on Beatrice for salvation involves a realization of the self in and through the other: the not-self of the woman and the divine Other, surpassing human understanding. Sayers illuminates Beatrice’s duality as a woman and a type of the eternal. Frye’s reading of Beatrice, though not in this kind of depth, also negotiates between the personal and the archetypal. Even when Frye stresses the archetypal significance of Beatrice, his remarks lead back to a consideration of her crucial embodiment as a woman. For example, in the Late Notebooks, after having emphasized Beatrice’s power as a primal mother, Frye reminds himself, “Buber says (I must check) there is something maternal about his Thou” (345; cf. TBN 105). Frye is recalling Buber’s statement that “[e]very child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form” (25). Buber sets up the metaphor of the womb here by making clear that it represents spiritual oneness: “the yearning is for the cosmic connexion, and its true Thou, of this life that has burst forth into spirit” (25). But Buber also describes a man’s relation to the womb of the biological mother in masculinist terms: “From her, too, we are separated, and enter into personal life, slipping free only in the dark hours to be close to her again: night by night this happens to the healthy man” (25). The description of how “the healthy man” returns to the womb is ultimately ambiguous: “night by night,” this return may involve sexual union with a mother substitute, or, on another level, spiritual union, as the man connects through his dreams with the unconscious, also figured as “the womb of the great mother.”
In Frye, as in Buber, we can trace a connection between the sacred and the feminine, figured both as the generalized archetype of Woman and the individualized body of the woman. Though admittedly sketchy and intermittent, Frye’s attention to female sacrality anticipates feminist re-visions of the sacred and indeed current trends in thealogy (the study of goddess religion).8 Unlike feminist critics, Frye refuses to cordon off a separate sphere of supreme feminine power, but he nonetheless places considerable importance on the mother archetype.9 As late as The Great Code, Frye retraces his interest in the “very frequent mythical formulation” of the “earth-mother” as a paradoxical figure of beneficent, destructive, and supremely powerful nature “from whom everything is born and to whom everything returns at death. Such an earth mother is the most easily understood image of natura naturans, and she acquires its moral ambivalence. As the womb of all forms of life, she has a cherishing and nourishing aspect; as the tomb of all forms of life, she has a menacing and sinister aspect; as the manifestation of an unending cycle of life and death, she has an inscrutable and elusive aspect. Hence, she is often a diva triformis, a goddess of a threefold form of some kind, usually birth, death, and renewal in time; or heaven, earth, and hell in space” (GC 68). Frye’s reference here recalls Robert Graves’s formulation of the “Triple White Goddess” (384) who ruled the “Underworld,” “Earth,” and “Sky.” But of course, as Graves recognizes, the archetype was invariably embodied as well:
[I]t must never be forgotten that the Triple Goddess … was a personification of primitive woman—woman the creatress and destructress. As the New Moon or Spring she was girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag” (386).
Indeed, Frye’s myth-making accounts for the presence and power of the goddess in a more extensive way than critics have noticed. For example, in her learned feminist revision of “Frye’s archetypological theory” (103), Margaret Burgess faults Frye not just for some scholarly “misunderstandings” (110) regarding prebiblical myths of goddesses, but also for his neglect of the ways in which Christianity has appropriated (or “confiscated”) these goddesses, along with its “confiscated gods” (118). Burgess complains that in his work Frye’s “occasional speculations that the divine should contain a feminine as well as a masculine component are generally discarded” (118); she attempts to correct this oversight by offering “a new mythology … in which God and Goddess—or divine feminine as well as divine masculine principles—are finally reconciled” (117). While Burgess offers a valuable feminist expansion, I find Frye’s “speculations” on the divine feminine to be more substantial and insistent than she suggests, especially when considered in light of his focus elsewhere on the generative power of the woman.
Even Frye’s early work does make reference to female goddesses alongside the dying gods who form his central myth, suggesting that the presence of the female is crucial to his mythology. For instance, in his student essay entitled “The Fertility Cults,” Frye outlines the dying-god myth in a remarkably gender inclusive way while at the same time stressing the importance of the earth mother:
[A]ll agricultural primitives develop much the same myth of a young (because flourishing and vigorous) god of vegetation slain annually in the fall and reviving in the spring. This spirit, being nourished by the soil, exists to that soil in the relation of son or daughter to mother. (SE 129)
While Adonis is the “most famous of all such fertility gods,” Frye recognizes, “[i]n Greek mythology there are dying goddesses as well, of whom Proserpine or Persephone, beloved by Demeter (whose name, earth mother, shows most clearly her origin), Iphigenia, and Kore are the best known” (SE 129).
As a type of the woman who saves after her death, Beatrice is connected with the archetype of the dying and reviving female, exemplified by Persephone and Demeter, which Frye has done so much to illuminate. His treatment of the death-rebirth mythos as a fertility rite extends from his early student essays through his Late Notebooks, The Great Code, and Words With Power. Moreover, as I argued in the introduction to Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, the death-rebirth mythos forms a fundamental part of Frye’s work on Shakespearean comedy and romance. Especially clear is Frye’s debt to the Cambridge ritualists ( Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford) and to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. From these myth critics Frye expanded two key points concerning the death-rebirth archetype: that it is ultimately comic and that it is feminine or maternal. Drawing on Frazer, Frye uses the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone as a prime example of the death-rebirth archetype. This myth figures prominently in Frye’s readings of Shakespearean romance, especially The Winter’s Tale, in which “the original nature-myth of Demeter and Proserpine is openly established,” as Frye already suggests in his famous 1949 essay “The Argument of Comedy” (69).10 Shakespeare sets up an extended analogy between Hermione and the goddess of the harvest, Demeter. The winter’s tale begins for Demeter when Hades steals her beloved daughter Persephone; for Hermione, when Leontes steals (and tries to murder) their infant daughter Perdita. Demeter plunges the earth into winter, mourning the loss of Persephone. In Shakespeare’s reworking of the myth, Hermione undergoes a ritual death that keeps her tyrant husband Leontes in a symbolic winter state for sixteen years until he can repent and Perdita, the lost one, can be found.
Jane Ellen Harrison sees Demeter and Persephone as two aspects of the same earth goddess, “two persons through one god” (Prolegomena 272). As Frye puts it, “The fact that the dying and reviving character is usually female strengthens the feeling that there is something maternal about the green world, in which the new order of the comic resolution is nourished and brought to birth” (“Argument” 69). Feminist critics and writers who have developed the Demeter-Persephone archetype have attested to its powerful resonance as a tale of shared female power (Pratt 116–120).
The renewal of the green world through a feminized force of nature becomes a central idea in Frye’s later writings on romance and is set up in his remarks on “the drama of the green world” in the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism: “In the rituals and myths[,] the earth that produces the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disappearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy generally involves the heroine” (AC 183). Shakespearean comedy ends on the “tonic chord” of marriage (“Argument” 59), renewing society through the couple’s fertile union and thereby enacting a sublime renewal of all creation, through the female resurrections of Thaisa in Pericles, Fidele in Cymbeline, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. All of these female characters become redeeming guides for the male figures to lead them, and the audience, toward a vision of renewed nature. If Frye keeps circling around comedy, one of the things that comedy represents for him is a vision of female empowerment. Frye refers to Shakespearean comedy and romance as The Myth of Deliverance because their mythic structure ultimately emphasizes the deliverance or liberation of human forces—including and led by female forces—at least within the space of the play world.
In his writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Frye’s sympathy toward Shakespeare’s comic heroines is shared by the woman-centred readings of Shakespeare that gained force in the 1980s and that are perhaps best exemplified by Lenz, Greene, and Neely’s popular essay collection The Woman’s Part. For example, Frye prefers Hippolyta’s version of events, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, over Theseus’s (NP 130). Hippolyta sees the story of the night as “something of great constancy, / But, howsoever, strange and admirable” (5.1.26–27), whereas Theseus offers a more sterile rationalizing of the events. Similarly, in The Woman’s Part, Judith Hays echoes Hippolyta’s speech while emphasizing the empowering function of Shakespeare’s comic heroines:
[A]gain and again in the comedies and romances, Shakespeare seems to question the limitations of the male-instrumental experience and to suggest that the more valuable spheres of love and affiliation, the ‘something of great constancy,” the “wonder” that concludes so many of the comedies and romances, require ways of behaving more characteristic of women than of men—since so often it is the play’s women who lead the way into this dimension. (92)
Hays adds, “The Demeter-Persephone pattern seems to suggest the grounding in a reality larger than individual life to which human beings must cede some of their sovereignty for the sake of the greater benefits of mutuality” (92). The dying and reviving female, as typified by the earth goddess herself, often operates as the very condition of possibility on which Frye finds that a renewed community founds itself. But so too, Frye insists, does the dying and reviving male. Frye’s comic perspective envisions a human community that above all includes every one of its members and is indeed characterized by “the greater benefits of mutuality.” This is a key difference between Frye’s work and the early feminist readings of Shakespeare: Frye devotes his attention to the larger structure of myth underlying the plays rather than focusing solely on the woman’s part. He sees the meaning of the woman in relation to her role in the community; in the world of comedy and romance he emphasizes not women’s subjugation but their generative power. Frye’s treatment of the woman thus avoids becoming simply an abject “view from below.”
Fifty years after his student essays, Frye affirmed that the dying god can be gendered as either male or female, and that the androcentric spin usually put on it is the product of ideology, not essential to the myth at all:
[T]he traditional patriarchal emphasis, along with the dying-god (usually male) myth with the female nature in the background is ideological manipulation, not an inherent principle of myth. The Cinderella archetype is an example of the opposite development; Cinderella is quite as important an image of human purgation as Prometheus. The ewig-weibliche theme is of course male-centred too. (LN 223)
In fact, in a remarkably open gesture subverting the patriarchal spin that has until recently been put on Christianity, Frye presents Jesus’s resurrection in female terms:
The Resurrection, then, is the marriage of a soul & body which forms the spiritual body. The body part of this marriage is female; the empty tomb is recognized solely by women…. The fact that Jesus took on flesh in the Virgin’s womb has certainly been dinned into Christian ears often enough; but the fact that he took on flesh in the womb of the tomb at the Resurrection, and that there’s a female principle incorporated in the spiritual body, seems to have got strangled. (LN 327)
Heretically (in our ideological age), Frye imagines the possibility of stripping away the ideological layer of the received Christian myth to reveal the common dying-god myth underneath, which incorporates “female” as well as “male” principles.
In a further fascinating twist, Frye links the commonality (indeed, the communism and communion) of myth to the human anxiety about satisfying the primary concerns (food and drink, sex, property, liberty of movement). According to Frye, Gill points out, myth is motivated by “these four bodily requirements” (Gill 186); hence, mythical discourse is grounded in and by embodied existence. Rather than accounting for differences (gender, race, religion, class) in embodied existence, Frye insists that the “axioms of primary concern” apply to “all people without significant exception” (WP 42). However, increasingly in the post-structuralist age, literary critics have tended to interpret literature in terms of secondary concerns (ideology) rather than primary concerns (mythology). Frye sees this tendency as fraught with problems, for it creates sects that divide and makes the interpretation of literature a matter of shifting value judgments and idiosyncratic readings that pander to ideological trends and the history of taste, rather than building up a systematic structure of knowledge:
I see it as the essential task of the literary critic to distinguish ideology from myth, to help reconstitute a myth as a language, and to put literature in its proper cultural place as the central link of communication between society and the vision of its primary concerns. (MM 103)
As Frye puts it in Words With Power, “The central structural principles that literature derives from myth” are precisely those “principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes” (xiii). Frye’s chief complaint about feminism, in fact, is that it ignores what he calls the “communism of convention” (AC 90, 98) in favour of advancing the interests of a special ideological camp.
In an unpublished response to Bogdan’s work, an introduction he wrote for the essay collection Beyond Communication, Frye articulates his complaint against feminists and other ideological critics “who approach literature with the aim of annexing it to their main interest. Here every work of literature becomes a document for feminism or Marxism, to be examined within that point of view.” Frye calls these approaches “determinisms,” “imperialistic ideologies out to conquer one more field” (WE 614), and insists that it is possible and indeed “essential to distinguish the ideological from the mythological elements in every work of literature,” for “[a]n ideology is a myth kidnapped by a power structure or a pressure group” (614–615). He laments the fact that Bogdan and the other writers in Beyond Communication have not “paid more attention to the study of myths and folk tales and the way in which they reflect the primary concerns of mankind, the concerns of food and sex and property and freedom” (615). These are the “concerns that the poets have inherited” and that “belong to all humanity, and are still there whatever their ideological contexts” (WE 615). Even feminist critics committed to the project of paying attention to women may well find Frye’s plea for a common myth of concern immensely compelling, given that we are all poised on the brink of war and ecological disaster on this planet of crisis, in the dawn of what many see as our new post-post-structuralist age.11 Despite commonalities, however, throughout his writings Frye shows antipathy as well as sympathy for feminism, most (in)famously in the Late Notebooks: “I think social feminism, genuine social & intellectual equality between men & women, a centrally important issue.
Feminist literary criticism is mostly heifer-shit” (223). Frye’s chief complaint against feminism is that it attempts to change the past rather than describing the vision of society that literature presents: “Perhaps female (not feminist) writing has a great future, but that doesn’t make its effort to rewrite the past any less futile” (223). Frye is not immune to the desire to change the past himself, such as when he wishes Cordelia in King Lear could have had a mother (490). But he believes that the critical enterprise must not “devalue the whole cultural tradition of the past in favor of a more satisfying culture to be set up in the future” (WP 60). The “cultural tradition” can deliver us from the burden of ideological criticism, the “art of clipping literature in order to distort it into a different shape” (60).
Despite his strong resistance to what he regards as the narcissistic selfinterest of some feminist readings, Frye’s focus on the contextualizing of literature and on the “communism of convention” continues to make his work useful for feminist critics and theorists. Indeed, Julia Kristeva, though admitting that she does not treat myths as “untouchable,” assesses Frye’s importance in terms of his “valorization of memory,” which she regards as “the primordial task of literary criticism” (335):
When we find ourselves faced with a nihilism which, after having rightly denounced the dead ends and horrors of the West, wears itself out in attacks that reject the complexity of tradition in the name of who knows what political correctness, it falls to humanists and most particularly to literary theory and criticism to defend, by elaborating, that tradition. (353)
Frye does not always serenely register the power of women within his own structural framework. Sometimes he confesses himself puzzled and caught by the difference of gender, specifically by women’s powerful roles in Shakespearean comedy and romance:
One curious feature is the way that the female is frequently the vice, either by disguise like Portia or by death & revival like Helena. As for Hermione, who vanishes from the action but returns in Antigonus’ dream, that foxes me, yet I suspect that something very significant is buried in Shakespeare’s entelechic females. What they accomplish I suppose is fundamentally their own will. (NRL 187–188)
Shakespeare’s females represent an “entelechic”—perfecting, actualizing— power or principle, which Frye suspects is “something very significant.” Here Frye deliberately leaves open the significance of the woman. On another occasion this open-ended question causes him downright perturbation: “Notice how linked the transvestite disguise & the disappearance & revival themes are: but why the hell is this theme always female?” (112).
If the female architectus in Shakespeare “foxes” Frye, so too does the female myth critic, for in The “Third Book” Notebooks, Frye wonders why it is women who have produced so much rich scholarship exploring the relation between ritual, archetype, and literature:
[W]hy so many women? Maud Bodkin, Jessie Weston, Gertrude Levy, Helen Flanders Dunar, Madame Blavatsky, Frances Yates, Enid Welsford, Jane Harrison, Bertha Philpotts [Phillpotts], Ruth Benedict: whatever the level of scholarship a woman’s book seems to meet me wherever I turn. (71)
It could be argued that what gives rise to Frye’s questions here is the assumption that women (even represented women) should not have the power, through the assertion of their own will, to move the plot through its complication to its resolution; or that it is unusual that women should have written so many valuable scholarly books. But Frye’s self-interrogations also leave open the possibility that, while myth aims at the common embodiment of primary concerns, gender does mark embodied experience with difference.
The difference that women make to the form(ul)ation of a united community becomes clear when we consider the issue of inclusive language. Up until his last works, Frye insists on using the term “man” to denote the human race, both men and women, and in so doing he reveals difficulties in negotiating a truly inclusive vision of a common humanity in our time. As the Oxford English Dictionary records, the inclusive sense of the word “man” has now been rendered obsolete: it is “understood to exclude women, and is therefore avoided by many people.” Frye’s use of the word hearkens back to its original meaning: “In Old English the word man meant ‘person’ or ‘human being,’ and when used of an individual was equally applicable to either sex. It was parallel to the Latin homo, ‘a member of the human species,’ not vir, ‘an adult male of the species.’” Over time, however, “man has been shifting away from generality toward specificity” (Miller and Swift 12–13).
Frye’s resistance to this linguistic shift apparently stems from his desire to preserve the cultural tradition, but it effectively subsumes and effaces the woman under the category of man. Although in his last works Frye begins to replace the collective noun “man” with “humanity,” on more than one occasion he defends his use of exclusive language—for example, by comparing what he presents as pedantic feminists, “who refuse to pronounce the word ‘chairman,’” to 17th-century “Puritans who refused to pronounce the word Christmas because the last syllable was ‘mass’” (WE 557). Frye argues,
[Nonetheless,] people kept on saying ‘Christmas,’ and Christmas did not turn Roman Catholic in consequence; it merely turned pagan. I see no reason why such words as ‘chairman, ‘spokesman,’ ‘mankind’ and the like could not fossilize in the same way. We sometimes forget how much the language has already changed in this respect. When I was growing up, in the early years of this century, men and women spoke appreciably different languages; different in vocabulary, in rhythm, in intonation. The flattening out of these differences is a sign, I think, that society has gone a long way in normalizing the relation of the sexes. (557)
Frye shows a surprising indifference to the violence inherent in language, and to the ways in which words have been used, and are still used, as weapons, to engender unequal relations—an indifference, in other words, to those members of society who interrupt his exclusive vision with a “view from below.” Frye’s inclusion of women in his vision of a united humanity is therefore contradictory.
Yet, though handicapped by a blind spot perhaps typical of his generation, Frye must and does include women, both as a principle of regeneration and as fundamentally embodied beings. The “female principle” continues to interrupt Frye’s myth and propel it toward an inclusive comic vision of a renewed society. After all, “[t]he freer the society, the greater the variety of individuals it can tolerate, and the natural tendency of comedy is to include as many as possible in its final festival. The motto of comedy is Terence’s ‘Nothing human is alien to me’” (“Argument” 5). Indeed, it is this same line from Terence’s play The Self-Tormentor that became the motto of the suffragette movement for Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the very myth critics upon whose groundbreaking work Frye built his own myth. The irony that what is seen as “human” has not always included women compelled Harrison to revise Terence’s line slightly in her plea for equality between men and women during the early 1900s, when women were fighting for the vote: “On the banners of every suffrage society, one motto, and one only, should be blazoned: “Homo sum; humani nihil (ne suffragium quidem) a me alienum puto.” She translates the line: “I am a human being; nothing that is human (not even a vote) do I account alien” (“Homo” 85). Frye would no doubt agree with Harrison’s plea for social equality, and might argue that the word “man” should continue to function, as it did in Old English, as a true generic like homo. Yet, as linguistic studies like that of Miller and Swift have documented, the use of the ambiguous word “man” in English does, in the experience of speakers and listeners, participate in the systematic absorption of the woman into an androcentric category of existence. No matter how strongly he positions “entelechic females” in his own analyses of the maternal archetype, then, Frye’s social relation to embodied women is split, because it disempowers the very force he recognizes as crucially empowering. And yet the repressed other returns at the limit of Frye’s own vision.
In his final notebooks Frye’s mythical framework unmistakably shows a fundamental reliance on the woman, both archetypal and embodied. Frye’s relation to the embodied woman first emerged most movingly in his early correspondence to Helen Kemp, the real “silent Beatrice” in and beyond Frye’s work, who after her death serves as a guide to higher levels of consciousness and the vehicle by which Frye hopes to achieve a new order of existence. The personal, embodied life of Frye, which had been joined flesh and bone with that of his first wife for half a decade, interrupts the conceptual theorizing of his later notebooks, so that myth-making is seasoned with lived experience. After Helen’s death in 1986, Frye’s intellectual propositions and questions in Notebook 44 are interrupted for several pages by Frye’s very private grief, searching for its own language of suffering. It erupts starkly: “This is not a diary, but Helen is dead” (LN 137). For the next several paragraphs, Frye painfully recounts the manner of Helen’s death and his struggle to come to terms with her absence. He clearly reaches for a way from death back to life, to breathe life into the theoretical proposition that “tragedy is an episode in that larger scheme of redemption and resurrection to which Dante gave the name of commedia” (“Argument” 66). Like Dante, Frye finds the path through the figure of Beatrice, which Helen’s death infuses with a new significance: “Since Helen’s death I’ve felt my love for her growing increasingly beyond the contingencies of the human situation. I begin to understand more clearly what Beatrice and Laura are all about” (LN 145).
In fact, Helen, though now disembodied, becomes the centre of Frye’s work, and her new role as inspiring muse to Frye seems to provoke more wonder than certainty: “I find all my ideas regrouping around her in a way I can neither understand or explain” (LN 150). In Notebook 44, Frye desperately uses the figure of Beatrice to try to pull the regenerative power of the woman as archetype into his own material reality:
I may be heading for the grossest kind of illusion here, but I still wonder about Helen’s functioning as a Beatrice: it may be nonsense for a man of 75 to talk about a “new life,” but all I want is a new book. With God all things are possible. Beatrice was mainly a creation of Dante’s love; my love recreates Helen in the sense of recognizing that if a world exists that she’s now in, she’s an angel. Her human frailties, as I’ve said, are now nothingness: only what she really was remains. (My own weaknesses & guilt feelings, of course, have greatly increased.) She didn’t read my stuff, of course, & didn’t need to, but she respected what I did very deeply. So although both of us were physically infertile for many years, perhaps another Word can still be born to us, like Isaac. (LN 153)
Like Beatrice and the biblical Sarah, Helen is maternalized here as an agent of fertility and renewal. Helen still is—she is an ultimately “emancipated fellow-creature” (LN 148) who has become a “saint,” revealing the divine (139). Frye concludes Notebook 44 by describing Helen as a dead presence and a living absence: “Helen was a pile of ashes, an absence to me, and an angel: perhaps she’s a genius to me (or anyone else who loved her and is still living or not living and still confused)” (254). As with Dante and his Beatrice, Frye’s search for renewal takes place in and through the woman whose body, now absent, still marks the site of plenitude.
In the end, then, the “silent Beatrice” has a much fuller life in Frye than an oppositional feminist reading might at first suggest. Beatrice does speak, and act, to regenerate the world in the myth of Northrop Frye. At the limits of Frye’s theory of myth and community, the woman comes to occupy the centre as an absent presence. Although her embodied existence is revealed as a crucial aspect of her empowering sacred and social role, the feminist search for embodiment in representation must be openended and ongoing (de Lauretis 26). The real story of the “silent Beatrice”—outside representation, in the “space-off ” of myth—can only just be glimpsed within the frame of Frye’s vision.12 As we end, the body is still our primary concern, engendered “elsewhere.” But as we have seen, Frye’s vision of an integrated humanity does crucially depend on the sacralized power of the woman, who nourishes and brings to birth a “new life” and a “new order.” Through her redemptive death the woman in Frye’s work both reveals the community to itself and founds it.
ENDNOTES
1 Feminist critics have respectfully used Frye’s categories but have also registered their alienation from his conceptual framework. Annis Pratt builds on Frye’s sense of archetypes as recurring images within literature but insists that his categories must be transformed in order to account for the marked difference between women’s and men’s archetypal experience. Patricia Demers offers a similar corrective to Frye, “an expanded code, and a re-vision of his literary biblical analysis to include early modern women” (99). Phyllis Galloway is more sharply antagonistic toward Frye, calling him an outright sexist because the “fundamental androcentricity of his position excludes half of humankind” (26).
2 Bogdan’s work on Frye includes her 1980 doctoral dissertation on Frye’s position as a 20thcentury apologist for poetry, as well as several articles and books that explore her increasing ambivalence toward him. She ultimately returns to Frye by reconfiguring the educated imagination, which she argues must pay attention to what the anagogic vision passes over and effaces, as well as to what it foregrounds and empowers (“Re[Educated]” 91).
3 See Bogdan’s book Re-Educating the Imagination for a slightly fuller use of Beatrice as a figure of both the silenced and effaced woman in male-dominated culture and criticism (283, 292, 294) and the newly empowered, speaking, or indeed singing woman (298, 304, 306). Surprisingly, Bogdan never contextualizes Beatrice as a literary character.
4 As Nancy Miller points out (26n4), the term “egodocuments” was first used by Dutch historian Jacques Presser, who defines them as “those documents in which an ego intentionally reveals or conceals itself ”; feminist historians have since adopted the term.
5 As Margaretta Jolly reminds us, “It was feminism that pulled down the wall between public and private, reason and feeling, and told us that minds and bodies could not be separated” (214).
6 See SE 137, 343.
7 Bodkin cites the famous last lines of Goethe’s Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan,” expressing for her “that aspect of the woman archetype which we have studied in its first great embodiment in Dante’s Commedia” (205).
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