Goddesses of Love: How the Romance Genre Has Embraced Feminine Myths and Archetypes PART 2

Goddesses of Love:
How the Romance Genre Has Embraced Feminine Myths and Archetypes
PART 2/SUITE 101
by Suzette L. Mako

(Continued from last time)

Ancient myths of goddesses - Aphrodite or Venus, Persephone or Diana the huntress - emphasized their strength of character. These were females who did not submit, but rather shared with the males they chose to have in their lives. Fairy-tale females Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and the Beast's fair Beauty, fought their battles with feminine honor. Cinderella overcame prejudice, mistreatment and the social chasm between the different worlds of a scullery maid and a monarch. Both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White conquered jealousy in the form of an evil sorceress, though they had to experience a sort of death in the form of a magical sleep. Beauty used her gentle, loving kindness to bring the Beast's better qualities forward.

There are elements, too, of the romantic myth as a rite of passage. The romance's propensity for the virginal heroine is well known. The importance of her role is appropriate when considering romance in a mythic context. The virgin has from time immemorial been symbolic of many of humanity's most positive traits and energies. It is she who harbors great, untapped potential - for growth into maturity, for the very creation of life. She represents purity of spirit and intent blended with youthful vitality. So strong is the association between her physical innocence and the concepts of truth and honor, that virginity is often referred to as virtue, as though the physical state were one with the moral.

In the romance (especially the "contemporary," which is set in modern times with their looser moral strictures), her importance is further heightened when she has retained her virtue as a matter of mature choice rather than social force or naivete. This self-determining romance heroine's input is about the responsibility of making choices.

However, regardless of the reasons behind her status, the romance heroine recognizes the value of herself on both a physical and spiritual level. In the purely physical sense, virginity is ended by intimacy. In a spiritual context, the intimacy required for virginity's end is - or should be - also a beginning. This so-called "gift that can be given only once" has far-reaching ramifications for both parties.

For women, the transition from virginity to maturity entails physical change, even pain, that men do not experience. Therefore, this rite of passage is a natural blood mystery. Men have tried throughout the ages to emulate this mystery in passage rites requiring bloodshed through self-inflicted wounds or through the wounding or killing of an animal or another human. They simply do not understand that for women, through their monthly cycles and the labors of childbirth, blood and pain are experienced as facets of creation, not destruction.