Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

107. Heroic Women:Jocasta,Antigone,Sappho,Calpurnia, Desdemona,Beatrice,Helen

         It is the women in literature who inspire the heroes and lay bare men's souls to the truth. It is the women who suffer the greatest losses and travail in their loneliness and isolation, in their subjection and oppression, in their rejection and denigration. Euripides' Trojan women suffered the loss  the their spouses, as did the the countless wives and mothers carried into captivity every time new conquerors invaded, every time an Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman leader overwhelmed his enemy. A Medea abandoned, an Antigone scorned, a Medusa transformed into a Gorgon, and  a Jocasta mocked by fate, all face an unconscionable destiny contradicting their nature.  Sappho, the Poet of Lezbos. who inspires Plato; the Greek invocation to the Nine Muses;  the divine Beatrice who inspires Dante; and the Holy Mother who bore the Christ child, all comfort and encourage men to transcend their griefs and sorrows, as well as their challenges. The voice of truth echoes through the hearts of women. Desdemona taught Othello the strength of her love; Calpurnia, her Caesar, of men's true nature; Cordelia, her Lear; Athena, her Jason and Perseus; and Juliet, the depth of her loyalty of her beloved Montague. The archetypal Mother Earth or elan plays a prominent role in the survival of cultures, particularly the Latin American and American Indian. In America, Poe described the death of a beautiful woman as the ultimate subject for a short story; and in his diary, John Smith proclaimed Pocahontas as his savior. So did Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites of the late nineteenth century. In  British, European, Greek, and Hebrew history, Guinevere inspires both Arthur and Lancelot; Dulcinea, her Don Quixote; Delilah her Samson; Helen, her Paris;  Heloise, her Abelard; and Penelope, her Odysseus. Dumas used the life of a young woman as a symbol of society's corruption  in Camille, and even earlier, Defoe describes the  sad exploitation of women  in British society in Moll Flanders. In more recent times, the feminine mystique still survives in an exploited, victimized form. Thackeray's materialistic Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair; O'Neill's Abbie Putnam in Desire Under the Elms;  Dreiser's Carrie, Hardy's Tess and Eustasia, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, George Sand's Mauprat, Shaw's Barbara Undershaft in Major Barbara; Granny in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, and Dinah Morris in Eliot's Adam Bede, to name only a few, are all strong, determined women who struggle to maintain the unity and compassion essential for growth, some winning, some not, yet, despite their circumstances, they continue to symbolize the hope, endurance and potential of the human heart. Mary Shelley  senses the dangers of technology without moral guidance in Frankenstein, and the possibility of  a global pandemic destroying the earth in The Last Man, while Henry Adams uses the lens of Mrs. Lightfoot Lee to reveal the flaws of American government, even at its best, in his novel Democracy.  D.H. Lawrence's works such as Sons and Lovers,The Rainbow  and "The Rocking Horse Winner"also proclaim the life force,or elan, of the wife, mother, or lover who exerts an irresistible influence upon the hero, motivating him to transcend normal expectations and fulfilling his emotional and spiritual existence.   Many of the novels of Pearl Buck, particularly The Pavilion of Women, also  suggests the power of the woman as the central force in unifying the Chinese family. Henry James' novels  follow a  similar pattern in The Ambassadors and The American. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood also addresses the issue of exploitation of  women in her 1969 novel The Edible Woman.  A famous poem and 1954 short story "Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People"by Langston Hughes  recount the heroic life of Harriet Tubman whose character and leadership embody the life force of her fellow African Americans.  Similarly,  Alan Ginsburg's 2016 publication of The Salome Ensemble recounts the lives of four Jewish women who transformed the face of  early  twentieth-century American fiction, history, and film. Shirley Ann Grau's 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Keepers of the House also portrays a mother's determination to keep her family and lineal Civil War mansion intact. In essence, it is the woman in literature who  understands, comforts, and inspires man to overcome the obstacles of this life and beyond.