The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: A Feminist Critique - Hardcover

by Mary J. Magoulick (Author)

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe.

Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women's speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly.

However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince "hopepunk." They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today's world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture's still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

Author Biography

Mary J. Magoulick is professor of English at Georgia College and State University. Her work has been featured in the Journal of Folklore Research, the Journal of American Folklore, the Journal of Popular Culture, and Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture. She has also been included in the edited volumes Encyclopedia of Women's Folklore and Folklife; The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales; and Reading Leslie Marmon Silko: Critical Perspectives through "Gardens in the Dunes."