Are we defeating purposes???

I'm reading Tim's blog, and Ashley's blog, about the archetypal female. I was even reading an essay for yet ANOTHER class about abuse in women, and how we all fail to come to terms with our own pain. Anyway, this idea kept forming in my head, rising up it's ugly head to shout it's opinion. The comment i wrote on Tim's blog touches on the beginnings of this topic. After this blog I'm done with female archetypes.

We've beaten the topic to death, talked all the new meanings out of it, to the point that all we can do is come full circle to what already was. And that's just it. Everything is full circle of itself. I even have a tattoo of an ankh that has the same meaning of life. Yet again this is referring to Mother Earth. People are still trying to draw conclusions, and make an ending for their points. They try to describe the archetype for what it already is, and come up with examples and stories and other relations. The describing of the Plutionic Ideal, of the devouring mother, and of the great earth mother has lead to many great discussions, don't get me wrong there. But something in Ashley's blog sparked my thoughts enough to have to rant about them even more. She's talking about another author from a favorite reading.


"...The female archetype throughout his works alone fits every single one of the descriptions we've talked about in class, everything from the temptress to the earth mother."

In Tim's blog I commented this: "Maybe it's not what you said. . . or what you did. . but simply the fact that real life fails to follow literature, seeing as many literary authors use ideals and archetypes. There is never one archetype to a person, it's never that easy. . ." (in that sense, in literature, im mainly referring to romantic literature. . as that was the topic of his blog.)


So in saying and quoting those, here's where I draw my conclusion, and will thusly expand and explain: There is no ONE archetype to a person or character. Even male and felmale archetypes are often confused, the lines blurred. Can't a woman have a hero's journey? Can't a man play the "temptress" in a way? Why not? We see them in real life all the time. In a perfect ideal, the female hero would become the Plutonic Ideal, innocent but strong. The male temptress would become "the player" in real life, tempting women from their morals and twisting their emotions. Wouldn't he then also be a trickster? ?

Real life complicates literature, and blurs the lines of everything. A woman can be the male, female, or trickster archetype all in one character, as in the life we all live, which inspired literature (to a point, there are the authors who write total fiction and write nothing but ideals in an ideal world with an ideal fantasy love affair. . .)I can go off on even more deep tangeants of thoughts, all logical, just as Jay did about rappers,but I'll shut up for the moment. I'll leave with this though. . If all archetypes can be one another, is it useful to even try to describe them? Just as it's useless to pull a moral from a story? Does defining a character and giving it a catagory defeat the purpose and intended complexity of the character and the story???