Myth in literature

In my thesis, I examine the function and treatment of goddesses in six modern
feminist mythopoeic fantasy novels by Y olen, Shinn, and Harris. In these novels, the
goddesses and their worshippers serve as the agents of socio-political change within the
secondary world, inducing changes that end with the ultimate transformation of
oppressive social structures. Acknowledging these goddesses and incorporating them into
the fabric of communal life, the protagonists, and ultimately entire societies, are able
transcend issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion, in order to create a
peaceful and prosperous society. These novels work through many of the issues troubling
modern day feminist theorists and make important contributions to the discourse of
feminist spirituality and feminist theory as a whole. Extrapolating both a theory and
praxis from the texture of these fantasy narratives, I suggest that these stories offer a way
to transcend dichotomous thinking and escape the current stagnation of spirituality based
approaches to feminism.

Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry addresses literary genres in which women's voices have been silenced or marginalized, demonstrating John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill's claim that only when women have "lived in a different country from men and [have] never read any of their writings [will] they have a literature of their own" (207). This philosophy may be viewed in light of Edward Said's theory of colonization in which he argues that a people who colonize by violence maintain authority, while those people who are colonized are subject to "the paternalistic arrogance of imperialism" (Culture xviii). Winterson's desire to reclaim the authority of women illustrates her need for permission to narrate and to be "taken out of the Prism of [her] own experience" (Winterson, Into 17). As a result, she rewrites history, myth, fairy tale, and pornography, reversing the traditional gender roles and inverting the gender hierarchy. Women, in Sexing the Cherry maintain the authority and the Power to molest the now weaker sex, man.