Guinevere's Quest: A Jungian Viewpoint

The unique vitality of the Arthuriad, which has touched more hearts for a longer period of time than any other body of legend, invites us to search the stories for a truth deeper than history. By the 11th century tales of Arthur were the rage of Europe, and even now not a year goes by when some artist somewhere does not feel impelled to work out a new treatment of the old materials. Since no other cast of characters has this kind of hold on us, our response must come from the deepest recesses of the unconscious, and it may be that only psychological criticism can elucidate the knights, damsels, the guides, and fairy folk we love. Puzzled by unlikely animals, strange sleeps, and lapses of natural laws, I have turned to the theory of Carl Gustav Jung.

The American literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman, believes that the psychology of Carl Jung, in particular, is essential to folk criticism because it addresses itself to the psychic process of an entire culture. Jung's name for the psyche of society is the collective unconscious, and he explains that it produces myth figures and myths in the same way that a personal unconscious produces our individual dreams. These characters and events are age-old images and patterns of experience according to Jung, and the major image is the male and female archetype. Behaving like instinct, the male and female archetypes rise from the unconscious to endow each of us with a sense of sexual identity. But the archetypes are complex. Each harbors a contrasexual identity which the archetype must integrate into itself so that psychic maturation can take place. If an individual personality, or a society's idealization of masculinity or femininity, appears to be one-sided, it is because animus and anima, the opposing male and female elements within the male and female archetypes, conflict with one another by definition.

Jung tells us animus is Logos and anima Eros, life forces that in the Orient are called the Yang and the Yin. Jung's psycholo