The Virgin's Promise. Kim Hudson
The Coward believes he must control others to survive, and is a bully or an eternal child.
TABLE 1. Comparison of the Archetypal Features of the Virgin, Whore, Hero, and Coward
The Mother/Goddess, the Lover/King, the Femme Fatale and the Tyrant are the four archetypes who represent the middle stage of life, and all face the challenge of entering into a relationship with another. This is the search for the sacred union of the feminine with the masculine, at the risk of losing oneself.
The Mother/Goddess and the Lover/king know their power and must now enter into a relationship to use their power well and gain meaning in their life. This relationship can be between a man and a woman, a mother or a father and a child, and a woman or a man and her/his community. This union brings a form of wholeness.
The Mother/Goddess knows her power and is using her talent to nurture and inspire others, gradually depleting her resources. She must find a home for her power which rejuvenates her or she will burn out. To do this she must develop the art of receiving another into her heart and her life. Vianne, in the movie Chocolat, is seen as a threat to patriarchy as she brings sensuality and pleasure to her new village. When the battle for acceptance exhausts Vianne, the villagers open themselves to her ways and create a new type of community that embraces her. Pepa in Women on the Verge of a nervous Breakdown, Antonia in Antonia’s Line, Lotty in Enchanted April and Daniel in Mrs. Doubt fire all portray this essence of the Mother/Goddess archetype.
The Lover/king is challenged to surrender his heart to the feminine. However, attaching to the feminine renders him vulnerable to the mini-death of rejection if he is found unworthy, or to the vulnerability created by loving someone, providing his enemies with a means of inflicting death-like pain on him by harming his loved one. He also fears misplacing his love and meeting his emotional death at the hands of the Femme Fatale.
The Lover/king must face this fear, and even experience the death of some aspect of himself, in order to be reborn and have meaning and purpose in his life. In so doing, he becomes the dying and rising god. Through the experience of joining the feminine and the masculine or allowing love to become central to life, the Lover/king gains a form of immortality. He goes from living in black and white to living in Technicolor.
In Michael Clayton, Michael has an opportunity to acquire a large sum of money but chooses instead to expose evil and make the world a better place for his son. Michael rises above his past to reveal his better self to his son. In the movie Camelot, King Arthur must choose between standing by Guinevere, even when she has fallen in love with another man, or sacrificing her according to the code of his men. Arthur aligns himself with his men, the kingdom falls apart, and Arthur is a broken man.
The Bridges of Madison County, The Terminal, and Casino Royale contain strong images of the Lover/king archetype and his struggle with creating a relationship with the feminine.
The Mother/Goddess has the power to nurture, inspire, create ecstasy, and bring chaos. She uses her power to create growth and unconditional love in others. The Lover/King has the power to assert his will over others, even against their will, and bring integrity, order, justice, and security to his community. The Lover/King and the Mother/Goddess must come together to harmonize their powers to bring a balance of growth and stability, nurturance and justice, and receiving and offering.
The Femme Fatale and the Tyrant fail in the quest to join the feminine and the masculine by using people to preserve and enhance themselves. The Femme Fatale embodies a manipulative misuse of emotional power resulting in emasculation, dehumanization, and mistrust. These are all major impediments to entering into a loving relationship. In the movie Chicago, Roxie kills her lover, who told her he actually couldn’t get her into vaudeville, and tries to pin it on her husband, Amos. Amos believes his wife when she says the man was a burglar and willingly confesses to the murder. When he learns the guy has been visiting three times a week, he feels like a sap and rescinds his confession. Roxie accuses him of being a bad husband.
The Tyrant seeks to use his power for personal gain and is unfeeling towards the feminine. The Tyrant believes in transactional giving — he gives to get. He aims to control and dominate others. The Godfather movies enter the world of the Tyrant with murderous behavior in the name of the family. Codes stress the importance of respecting the Godfather’s dominance and superiority, and every interaction must give the Tyrant a benefit of status, respect, money, power, or future considerations.
The Femme Fatale and the Tyrant wish to maintain an imbalance of power. The Femme Fatale wants to emotionally manipulate the masculine until he is castrated. She sucks the life energy of others until they are dead. The Tyrant wants to assert his will over others to his maximum gain. He dominates a world of usury, rape, crime, violence, and patriarchal codes.
TABLE 2. Comparison of the Archetypal Features of the Mother/Goddess, Femme Fatale, Lover/King, and Tyrant
The end stage of life, the time of the Crone, the Hag, the Mentor and the Miser, sees the release of power and attachments to people and things and joining in relationship with the cosmos. The Crone and the Mentor spend their final days on earth releasing their power to leave a positive impact or discovering the beauty in their insignificance.
The Crone looks at the span of a lifetime and uses this perspective to recognize the growth people need to undergo when they can’t see it themselves. This growth initially appears to be a hardship, but eventually proves to be a transformation that makes life meaningful. The Crone’s abilities approach the magical as she moves towards releasing her body form and joining the spiritual world. She is the Trickster, using magic, intuition, and serendipity to drive people to face their flaws, as in Beauty and the Beast, where the old woman curses the Prince to be a beast until he learns to love and be loved in return. Fiona Anderson in Away From Her and Ninny Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes also represent this journey of the Crone where the old woman places a friend in a situation that challenges the friend to grow.
The Mentor reflects on his life and evaluates his value to humanity. He looks for ways to leave a lasting memory of his time on earth after his physical body is gone. He endows gifts, builds monuments to things he values, supports causes he deems worthy and transfers his knowledge and wisdom to worthy recipients. He ensures the continuation of stability and good values through philanthropy, building, and mentoring and in this way gains a form of immortality.
The Hag and the Miser refuse to enter into a relationship with the cosmos. The Hag refuses to accept her unused potential and uses her magic to deny aging and confound the pathway of others. She may divert a Lover/king from his true destiny and into a hopeless union with her. Rather than contributing to the next generation, she robs it of a future. Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate is the perfect model of a Hag, as are Sheba Hart and Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal. The Hag is also the harbinger of doom, spreading a pessimistic message of the hopelessness of the future, as Hanna does in The Reader.
The power of the Hag is to cause stagnation in the personal growth of others. She cripples people with fear or interrupts their growth by using her magic to inhabit their lives. Brook and Mel in Thirteen are examples of the Hag who confounds the lives of teenage girls, consumed with efforts to appear young rather than fulfilling their mother role. Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sebastien de Vamont in Dangerous Liaisons also embody the Hag interfering in the lives of others for their personal amusement.
The Miser refuses to see the value of his accumulations to the greater community, even though power and material things are becoming of limited use to him. He hoards his wealth for himself and ignores the effect of his neglect on others. The actions of the Miser make his time spent on earth quickly forgotten. The classic example of the Miser is Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The Miser also permit s ignorance, neglect, deprivation, and instability in the community. The father who is too busy working to engage with his children, as seen in movies like Thirteen