LESSON 2

C. ROMANTIC THEORY
English literary criticism of the Romantic era is most closely associated with the writings of William
Wordsworth in his Preface' to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria
(1817). Modern critics disagree on whether the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge constituted a major break
with the criticism of their predecessors or if it should more properly be characterized as a continuation of the
aesthetic theories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and English writers.
In 1800, in the Preface' to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth issued his famous proclamation about the nature
of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." With this statement, Wordsworth posited a very
different view of poetry than was standard at the time, shifting the center of attention from the work as a
reflection or imitation of reality to the artist, and the artist's relationship to the work. Poetry would henceforth
be considered an expressive rather than a mimetic art. Although the analogy of art as a mirror was still used, M.
H. Abrams reports that the early Romantics suggested that the mirror was turned inward to reflect the poet's
state of mind, rather than outward to reflect external reality. William Hazlitt in his "On Poetry in General"
(1818) addressed the changes in this analogy "by combining the mirror with a lamp, in order to demonstrate that
a poet reflects a world already bathed in an emotional light he has himself projected," according to Abrams.
Additionally, music replaced painting as the art form considered most like poetry by the Romantics. Abrams
explains that the German writers of the 1790s considered music "to be the art most immediately expressive of
spirit and emotion," and both Hazlitt and John Keble made similar connections between music and poetry in
their critical writings. Many of the principles associated with early nineteenth-century English criticism were
first articulated by late eighteenth-century German Romantics. René Wellek has documented the contributions
of Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Novalis, and other important
figures of the period. Novalis, for example, shared the English Romantics belief that the poet was a member of a
special breed, "exalted beyond any other human being" Similarly, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, in his comprehensive
history of German literary criticism, traced the development of various elements of Romantic thought that
appeared in Germany either prior to or concurrent with similar developments in England.
The literary reviews of the early nineteenth century, most notably the Edinburgh Review and the
Quarterly Review, participated in the formulation of critical theory as well. Although earlier reviews were little
more than advertisements for the books being considered, or "thinly concealed puff for booksellers' wares," in
the words of Terry Eagleton, the change in reviewing style in the Romantic period was not much of an
improvement. According to Eagleton: "Criticism was now explicitly, unabashedly political: the journals tended
to select for review only those works on which they could loosely peg lengthy ideological pieces, and their
literary judgments, [sic] buttressed by the authority of anonymity, were rigorously subordinated to their
politics." John O. Hayden reports that reviews were tainted not only by politics, but by "malicious allusions to
the private lives of the authors," and concedes that "the critical values of the reviewers were neither uniform nor
well established." Coleridge's unhappiness with the vicious, opinionated reviews in the periodicals prompted his
attempt to devise a critical method that would supplant mere opinions with reviews based on a set of sound
literary principles. However, because such norms and conventions were associated with rationality-the very
target of most Romantic poetry- criticism needed to head in a different direction. It had to "comer for itself
some of the creative energy of poetry itself, or shift to a quasi-philosophical meditation on the nature and
consequences of the creative act," according to Eagleton. The Romantic poet/critic thus began to produce
criticism that explained and justified not only creativity itself, but also his own creative practices, even his own
poetry. T. S. Eliot reports, for example, that "Wordsworth wrote his 'Preface' to defend his own manner of
writing poetry, and Coleridge wrote the Biographia to defend Wordsworth's poetry, or in part he did." Paul A.
Cantor, in his study of twentieth century attacks on Romantic criticism, acknowledges the self-serving quality
of the image put forth by Romantic poets who saw themselves as isolated and inspired geniuses possessed of
special gifts unavailable to the masses. According to this image, explains Cantor, "the artist stands above
society as a prophetic visionary, leading it into the future, while free of its past and not engaged in its present
activities (in the sense of being essentially unaffected and above all uncorrupted by them.)"
 In addition to the primacy of the poet, the aesthetic theories associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge
in particular, were critical of earlier poets' "poetic diction," which to the Romantics, was affected and artificial.
They preferred, according to William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks "the primitive, the naive, the directly
passionate, the natural spoken word." Wordsworth argued that there should be no difference between the
language of prose and that of poetry, thus defending his use, within the Lyrical Ballads, of the everyday
language of the middle and lower classes. Wimsatt and Brooks write that Wordsworth's primitivism was part of
a general reaction, setting in well before his own day, against the aristocratic side of neo-classicism." But where
Wordsworth associated poetic diction with artifice and aristocracy and his own poetic language with nature and
democracy, Coleridge saw the issue differently. "To Coleridge it seemed more like an issue between propriety
and impropriety, congruity and incongruity. In etfect he applied the classic norm of decorum," according to
Wimsatt and Brooks.
Coleridge's critical theories also differ from Wordsworth's in that they are heavily grounded in theology.
Sometimes, particularly in his later writings according to Timothy Corigan, the theological overwhelms the
literary. "What is most peculiar about his work during this period is the unusual extent to which he disregards
the primary text and how completely his complex theological models and language usurp that text," contends
Corrigan.
Current scholarly work on Romantic literary theory often suggests that many of the Romantic critics
were far ahead of their time, anticipating the work of various late twentieth-century thinkers. One example is
provided by Kathleen M. Wheeler, who states that "Coleridge's concept of polarity, of opposition, is in many
ways anticipatory of Derida's concept of difference for Coleridge, as for Derrida, relations and oppositions form
the substances of experience." Wheeler also suggests that the work of several German Romanticists, whose
writings were well known to Coleridge, is also directly related to Derridean deconstruction. "These ironists
[Ludwig Tieck, Karl Solger, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Jean Paul, and others] developed concepts of criticism
as play, destructive creativity (=) incomprehensibility, the reader as creative author, ideas about the unity of
poetry and philosophy, literature and criticism, and criticism as art," according to Wheeler. Along similar lines,
Wellek asserts that the work of German Romanticist Tieck anticipates the theories of Sigmund Freud. "Freud
could not have stated more clearly the association of art and ust than did Tieck," claims Wellek. Abrams makes
a similar claim for John Keble's Lectures on Poetry (1844), insisting that they "broach views of the source, the
function, and the effect of literature, and of the methods by which literature is appropriately read and criticized,
which, when they occur in the writings of critics schooled by Freud, are still reckoned to be the most subversive
to the established values and principles of literary criticism."

The chief precepts of the Romantic Theory are as follows:

Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly
with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the
imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative
powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions.
Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans
to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part
create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual
intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile
differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the
Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed
to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a
work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of
Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and
"pokeweed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the
handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably-- nature as a
healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of
civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically
unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of
"mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic
image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time,
Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous
nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of
observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of
meditation.

Symbolism and Myth

Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic
view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too
because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one
communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--
through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at
another.

Emotion, Lyric Poetry and the Self

Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity
of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings,
and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical
reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred.
Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning
point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching
back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic
qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but
as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person
lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the
direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of
successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic"
enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as
Byron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self-
recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic
type.

Contrasts with Neo-Classicism

Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of
"Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical
studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne,
Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-consciously asserted their differences from the previous age
(the literary "ancien regime"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features
of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the
replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a
mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism had
prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable
subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening
statement of Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare
believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am different."--this view was
challenged.

Individualism
The Romantic Hero: The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the
eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. In another way, of course,
Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-
storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester
Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic
striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity--that earlier had
been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble
defiance, was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost.) In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the
preceding age's desire for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free
experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the
artist as "inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master. Although in both Germany and
England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics allied themselves
with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and
they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and
in the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute
systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively)
must create the system by which to live.

The Everyday and the Exotic

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true
that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local color" (through downto-earth
characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or
Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was
usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the
above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had
promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to
folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used
"the language of commen men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as
individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults). Simultaneously, as opposed to
everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were
also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions
of "objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations.
In the Lyrical Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide their labors according to two
subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too
familiar, while Coleridge would try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to
dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly body, as
characterized in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is another variant
of the paradoxical combination.

The Romantic Artist in Society

In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They
were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the
public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these
emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that
reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote
works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge,
as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their
private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a
subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde,
who, as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary
and life styles.) Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending
audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence about this situation--it was earlier
pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her "letters" to the world would go unanswered. Yet a
significant Romantic theme became the contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine." Unfortunately, in
many ways, this distance between artist and public remains with us today.

D. MYTHOLOGICAL/ARCHETYPAL APPROACH

Definitions and Misconceptions

In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Vi- king, 1959), Joseph Campbeli recounts a curious
phenomenon of animal behavior. Newly hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart
for cover when a hawk flies overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model
of a hawk, drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled
backward, however, there is no response). "Whence," Campbell asks, "this abrupt seizure by an image to which
there is no counterpart in the chicken's world? Living gulls and ducks, herons and pigeons, leave it cold; but the
work of urt strikes some very deep chord!" (31;
Our italics).
Campbells hinted analogy, though only roughly approxi mate, will serve nonetheless as an instructive
introduction to the mythological approach to literature. For it is with the relationship of literary art to "some
very deep chord" in human nature that mythological criticism deals. The myth critic is concerned to seek out
those mysterious elements that inform certain literary works and that elicit, with almost uncanny force, dramatic
and universal human reactions. The myth critic wishes to discover how certain works of literature, usually those
that have become, or promise to become, "classics," image a kind of reality to which readers give perennial
response-while other works, seemingly as well constructed, and even some forms of reality, leave them cold.
Speaking figuratively, the myth critic studies in depth the wooden hawks" of great literature: the so-
called archetypes or archetypal patterns that the writer has drawn forward along the tensed structural wires of
his or her masterpiece and that vibrate in such a way that a sympathetic resonance is set off deep within the
reader.

Some Examples of Archetypes

Having established the significance of myth, we need to examine its relationship to archetypes and
archetypal patterns. Although every people has its own distinctive mythology that may be reflected in legend,
folklore, and ideology- although, in other words, myths take their specific shapes from the cultural
environments in which they grow-myth is, in the general sense, universal. Furthermore, similar motifs or
themes may be found among many different mythologics, and certain images that recur in the myths of peoples
widely separated in time and place tend to have a common meaning or, more accurately, tend to elicit
comparable psychological responses and to serve similar cultural functions.
Such motifs and images are called archetypes. Stated simply, archetypes are universal symbols. As Philip
Wheelwright explains in Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP,1962), such symbols are those which
carry the same or very similar meanings for a large portion, if not all, of mankind. It is a discoverable fact that
certain symbols, such as the sky father and earth mother, light, blood, up-down, the axis of a wheel, and others,
recur again and again in cultures so remote from one another in space and time that there ís no likelihood of any
historical influence and causal connection among them.
Examples of these archetypes and the symbolic meanings with which they tend to be widely associated
follow (it should be noted that these meanings may vary significantly from one context to another):
A. IMAGES
1. Water: the mystery of creation; birth-death-resurrection, purification and redemption; fertility and growth.
According to Jung. water is also the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
a. The sea: the mother of all life; spiritual mystery and infinity; death and rebirth; timelessness and
eternity; the unconscious.
b. Rivers: death and rebirth (baptism); the flowing of time into eternity; transitional phases of the life
cycle; incarnations of deities.

2. Sun (fire and sky are closely related): creative energy; law in nature; consciousness (thinking, enlightenment,
wisdom, spiritual vision); father principle (moon and earth tend to be associated with female or mother
principle): passage of time and life.
a. Rising sun: birth; creation; enlightenment.
b. Setting sun: death.

3. Colors
a. Red: blood, sacrifice, violent passion; disorder.
b. Green: growth; sensation; hope; fertility; in negative context may be associated with death and decay.
C. Blue: usually highly positive, associated with truth, religious feeling, security, spiritval purity (the
color of the Great Mother or Holy Mother).
d. Black (darkness): chaos, mystery, the unknown death; primal wisdom; the unconscious; evil;
melancholy.
e. White: highly multivalent, signifying, in its positive aspects, light, purity, innocence, and
timelessness; in its negative aspects, death, terror, the supernatural, and the blinding truth of an
inscrutable cosmic mystery (see, for instance, Herman Melville's chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale"
in Moby-Dick).

4. Circle (sphere): wholeness, unity.

a. Mandala (a geometric figure based upon the squaring of a circle around a unifying center; see the
accompanying illustration of the classic Shri-Yantra mandala): the desire for spiritual unity and psychic
integration. Note that in its classic Asian forms the mandala juxtaposes the triangle, the square, and the
circle with their numerical equivalents of three, four, and seven.
b. Egg (oval): the mystery of lifa and the forces of generation.
C. Yang-yin: a Chinese symbol (below) representing the union of the opposite forces of the yang
(masculine principle, light, activity, the conscious mind) and the yin (female principle, darkness,
passivity, the unconscious).
d. Ouroboros: the ancient symbol of the snake biting its own tail, signifying the eternal cycle of life,
primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces (cf. yang-yin).

5. Serpent (snake, worm): symbol of energy and pure force (of. libido}; evil, corruption, sensuality;
destruction; mystery; wisdom; the unconscious.

6. Numbers:
a. Three: light; spiritual awareness and unity (cf. the Holy Trinity); the male principle.
b. Four: associated with the circle, life cycle, four seasons; female principle, earth, nature; four elements
(earth, air, fire, water)
c. Seven: the most potent of all symbolic numbers- signifying the union three and four, the completion
of a cycle, perfect order.

7. The archetypal woman (Great Mother--the mysteries of life death, transformation):

a. The Good Mother (positive aspects of the Earth Mother): associated with the life principle, birth,
warmth, nourishment, protection, fertility, growth, abundance (for example, Demeter, Ceres)
 b. The Terrible Mother (including the negative aspect of the Earth Mother): the witch, sorceress, siren
whore, femme fatale-associated with sensuality, sexual orgies, fear, danger, darkness, dismemberment,
emasculation, death; the unconscious in its terrifying aspects.
c. The Soul Mate: the Sophia figure, Holy Mother, the princess or "beautiful lady'"-incarnation of
inspiration and spiritual fulfillment (cf. the Jungian anima).

8. The Wise Old Man (savior, redeemer, guru): personification of the spiritual principle, representing
"knowledge, reflection, insight, wisdom, cleverness, and intuition on the one hand, and on the other, moral
qualities such as goodwill and readiness to help, which make his 'spiritual' character sufficiently plain. . . .Apart
from his cleverness, wisdom, and insight, the old man . . . is also notable for his moral qualities; what is more,
he even tests the moral qualities of others and makes gilts dependent on this test... The oid man always appears
when the hero is in a hopeless and desperate situation from which only profound reflection or a lucky idea... can
extricate him. But since, for internal and external reasons, the hero cannot accomplish this himself, the
knowledge needed to compensate the deficiency comes in the form of a personified thought, i.e., in the shape of
this sagacious and helpful old man" (G. G. Jung,
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F.C. Hull, 2nd ed. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1968]: 217ff.)

9. Garden: paradise; innocence; unspoiled beauty (especially feminine); fertility.

10. Tree: "In its most general sense, the symbolism of the tree denotes life of the cosmos: its consistence,
growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes. It stands for inexhaustible life, and is therefore
equivalent for a symbol of immortality" (J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage [New York:
Philosophical, 1962]: 328; cf. the depiction of the cross of redemption as the tree of life in Christian
iconography).

11. Desert: spiritual aridity; death; nihilism, hopelessness.

These examples are by no means exhaustive, but represent some of the more common archetypal images that
the reader is likely to encounter in literature. The images we have listed do not necessarily function as
archetypes every time they appear in a literary work. The discreet critic interprets them as such only if the total
context of the work logically supports an archetypal reading.

B. ARCHETYPAL MOTIFS OR PATTERNS

1. Creation: perhaps the most fundamental of all archetypal motifs-virtually every mythology is built on
some account of how the cosmos, ature, and humankind were brought into existence by some
supernatural Being or beings.
2. Immortality: another fundamental archetype, generally taking one of two basic narrative forms:
a. Escape from time: "return to paradise," the state of perfect, timeless bliss enjoyed by nan and
woman before their tragic Fall into corruption and mortality.
b. Mystical submersion into cyclical time: the theme of endless death and regeneration-human
beings achieve a kind of immortality by submitting to the vast, mysterious rhythm of Nature's
eternal cycle, particularly the cycle of the seasons.
3. Hero archetypes (archetypes of transformation and redemption):
a. The quest: the hero (savior, deliverer) undertakes some long journey during which he or she
must per- form impossible tasks, battle with monsters, solve unanswerable riddles, and
overcome insurmountable obstacles in order to save the kingdom.
b. initiation: the hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance and
immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood, that is, in achieving maturity and becoming a full-
 fledged member of his or her social group. The initiation most commonly consists of three
distinct phases: (1) separation, (2) transformation, and (3) return. Like the quest, this is a
variation of the death-and-rebirth archetype.
C. The sacrificial scapegoat: the hero, with whom the welfare of the tribe or nation is
identified, must die to atone for the people's sins and restore the land to fruitfulness.

C. ARCHETYPES AS GENRES
Finally, in addition to appearing as images and motifs, archetypes may be found in even more complex
combinations as genres or types of literature that conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle. Northrop
Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), indicates the correspondent genres for
the four seasons as follows:

1. The mythos of spring: comedy

2. The mythos of summer: romance
3. The mythos of fall: tragedy
4. The mythos of winter: irony

With brilliant audacity Frye identifies myth with literature, asserting that myth is a "structural organizing
principle of literary form" (341) and that an archetype is essentially an "element of one's literary. experience"
(365). And in The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970) he claims that "inythology as a whole
provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is all about, an imaginative survey of the
human situation from the beginning to the end, from the height to the depth, of what is imaginatively
conceivable" (102).

MYTH CRITICISM IN PRACTICE

Frye's contribution leads us directly into the mythological approach to literary analysis. As our
discussion of mythology has shown, the task of the myth critic is a special one. Unlike the traditional critic, who
relies heavily on history and the biography of the writer, the myth critic is interested more in prehistory and the
biographies of the gods. Unlike the formalistic critic, who concentrates on the shape and symmetry of the work
itself, the myth critic probes for the inner spirit which gives that form its vitality and its enduring appeal and,
unlike the Freudian critic, who is prone to look on the artifact as the product of some sexual neurosis, the myth
critic sees the work holistically, as the manifestation of vitalizing, integrative forces arising from the depths of
human kind's collective psyche.