دانلود کتاب Guinevere’s Quest: A Jungian Viewpoint

Several scholars have already identified Queen Guinevere with what the psychologist Dr. Carl Gustav Jung calls the female archetype, which is another way of saying that whenever she appears in literature Guinevere projects the idea of woman that is held in the collective unconscious of society at that time. I will demonstrate through a Jungian examination of the symbolic language in four medieval texts that the embodiment of the female archetype actively strives to become the most she can be as a rational, emotional, spiritual, and sexual human being in Gereint, Son of Erbin, Le Chevalier de la charrete, Le Lancelot en prose, and Le Morte Darthur. Customarily, this adventure of the soul is associated with Arthur's knights, but Guinevere sends out signals that woman was struggling to become a whole person in the Middle Ages. In a sense, she is a questing knight no less than any of the male characters.

Curiously enough, however, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries the embodiment of the female archetype came closer to achieving the adventure of the self than she does today. In spite of the feminist movement, contemporary Arthurian fiction denies Guinevere her sexual identity. Although often awarded the hero's role, Guinevere succeeds as a manly woman, a child-woman, or an a-sexual woman. For all our modernity, we have yet to raise our consciousness to a fifteenth-century level.