The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals, Post-Jungian and Postmodern Psychological Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Culture

by Tannen; Ricki Stefanie

• ISBN13: 9780415385312
• ISBN10: 0415385318
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-04-09
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Female Trickster presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture. Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women?s imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include: imagination and metaphor the traditional trickster law and the imagination humour: Eros using logos the postmodern femaletrickster. This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introducing the female Trickster	p. 1
Introduction	p. 3
Definitions	p. 4
What is a Trickster and is the female Trickster really different?	p. 7
How Trickster energy transforms culture through art	p. 9
The fictive female sleuth as postmodern female Trickster	p. 9
Notes	p. 11
Meetings with remarkable women	p. 12
Introduction	p. 12
Jung and I: captured by a literary manifestation	p. 12
Me and the girls	p. 13
The postmodern female Trickster appears	p. 23
Conclusion	p. 26
Notes	p. 26
Location, location, location	p. 30
Introduction	p. 30
Texts written by women and a feminist approach to text are not the same	p. 30
Psychological considerations: research on the feminine	p. 34
Jungian and post-Jungian perspectives on the feminine	p. 41
Summary	p. 50
Notes	p. 51
Calling upon the ancestors	p. 57
Imagination and metaphor	p. 59
Introduction	p. 59
Imagination and recovered memory: the numinous process of remembering	p. 59
Shape-shifting and transformation in the imaginal realm	p. 60
Imagination	p. 61
What has women's imagination produced?	p. 66
Summary	p. 70
Notes	p. 71
Where have all the virgins gone?	p. 72
Introduction	p. 72
Mnemosyne, mistress of Eleutherian Hills	p. 72
The pre-patriarchal virgin and today's virginal feminine presence	p. 73
The pre-patriarchal virgin energy and Jungian feminism	p. 75
Summary	p. 75
Notes	p. 76
Law and the imagination	p. 78
Introduction	p. 78
The enclosure	p. 78
The importance of being: ancient Athens	p. 79
The crumbling of the enclosure	p. 82
Can law produce a new archetype?	p. 93
Summary	p. 94
Notes	p. 94
From the madwomen in the attic to mainstream and mysterious: a brief and highly selective history of literature and literary theory as it relates to the female Trickster	p. 97
Introduction	p. 97
The novel form and early women's literature in England and the United States	p. 97
The importance of developments in the mid to late nineteenth century	p. 105
The importance of being single and mysterious	p. 107
The 1970s and women's literature	p. 113
Jungian approaches to popular cultural forms	p. 115
The psychological and the aesthetic attitudes	p. 115
Problems with traditional Jungian literary criticism	p. 118
Summary	p. 119
Notes	p. 119
Honoring the traditions	p. 121
The traditional Trickster	p. 123
Introduction	p. 123
Traditional Trickster myths	p. 124
Traditional Trickster as individuation myth	p. 129
Other voices on the meaning of Trickster	p. 130
Trickster as taboo transgressor	p. 133
Enter Hermes	p. 134
Conclusion: Trickster is humor	p. 135
Notes	p. 137
Humor: Eros using Logos	p. 138
Introduction	p. 138
Deep play	p. 138
How and when in the developmental sequence does humor develop?	p. 140
Psychoanalytic approaches to humor	p. 145
A brief gallop through humor's pasture	p. 148
Summary	p. 151
Notes	p. 152
Re/storation	p. 153
Women are funny	p. 155
Introduction: is there a female sense of humor?	p. 155
An example of a postmodern female Trickster	p. 155
Differences between male and female humor	p. 156
What is a feminist comic sensibility?	p. 161
Psychological considerations	p. 162
A woman with a sense of humor is dangerous	p. 163
Anger	p. 167
Women writing redux: women writing funny	p. 167
Conclusion	p. 173
Notes	p. 174
The postmodern female Trickster	p. 176
Introduction	p. 176
Reconsidering what Trickster signifies	p. 177
Refusal to be a victim	p. 179
The postmodern female Trickster as social worker	p. 181
Status within a culture	p. 187
Sex and pro/creativity	p. 188
Kinsey as quintessential Trickster or how to deal with the tough stuff through humor	p. 192
Ethics and the postmodern female Trickster	p. 196
Summary	p. 200
Notes	p. 201
Blanche White, re/storation agent	p. 203
Introduction	p. 203
Introducing Blanche White: re/storation agent	p. 204
Blanche's ancestry	p. 219
Conclusion	p. 223
Notes	p. 223
New sightings, Sex and the City	p. 225
Introduction	p. 225
Sex and the City	p. 225
The serious nature of being: Sex and the City	p. 233
Other Trickster sightings	p. 237
Conclusion	p. 238
Notes	p. 239
Conclusion: the divine comedy of being	p. 240
Introduction	p. 240
Individuation	p. 241
Does literature have the radical potential to change imagination into reality?	p. 244
Is mainstream culture capable of adopting the humor sassitude found in out-group humor?	p. 245
Ethics and the postmodern female Trickster	p. 246
Recent sightings or just another first wave?	p. 249
Conclusion	p. 251
Notes	p. 252
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 268
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