Heroine in Literature and Film as Expressive of the Twelve Natural Seasons

Written as a companion piece to complement Professor Eriksson’s prior groundbreaking analysis, The Appearance of the Mythic Hero in the Twelve Seasons of Nature, this text, focusing on the heroine’s experience, does more than just provide the other half to the hero’s journey. Instead, The Heroine In Literature and Filam as Expressive of the Twelve Natural Seasons further develops Eriksson’s original insight in a thought-provoking analysis that comprehensively details the correspondences between the dramas of human relationships and the seasons of life that shape the feminine quest for fulfillment within a larger cosmological paradigm.

The heroine in literature and film is an expression of seasonal occurrence. Her behavior exhibits, symbolically, the response of the earth to the sun at a given time of the year, beginning at the March equinox and proceeding through twelve seasons. She assumes, then, twelve distinct characterizations. Her conflicts, successes, and failures reflect the natural conditions of Early Spring, Mid-Spring, Late Spring, and so on, in an aesthetic development that converts traditional mythic dynamics, based in agriculture, into story lines in ancient and modern configurations. Her character in a given season suggests the dynamism of that season as reinterpreted into the drama of human relationships.