Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: F, Schanoes..

Taylor & Francis

Testing the relationship between feminist psychoanalytic theory and feminist retellings of fairy tales and myths in the 1970s and 1990s, Schanoes shows that these contemporaneous developments in theory and art advance complementary interpretations of the same themes. Her book posits a new model that emphasizes the interdependence of theory and art and challenges the notion that literary revision involves a masculinist struggle with the writer's artistic forbearers. > At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumass, and Angela Carter were embarked on their own revisionist project to breathe new life into fairy tales and classical myths based on traditional gender roles. Similarly, in the 1990s, second-wave feminist clinicians continued the work begun by Chod.