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Archetypal Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term “archetype” can be traced to Plato ( arche , “original”; typos , “form”), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle’s translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido ) appeared in English one year after publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (2 vols., 1890,3d ed., 12 vols., 1911-15). Frazer’s and Jung’s texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history.

Jung most frequently used “myth” (or “mythologem”) for the narrative expression, “on the ethnological level” ( Collected 9, pt. 1: 67), of the “archetypes,” which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their “most common and most normal” manifestation in dreams (8:287). Thus criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named “archetypal” and is quite distinct from “myth” criticism.

For Jung, “archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos ” (9, pt. 1: 4), but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his “empirical” data were dreams. In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often insisting that “archetype” named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers.

At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, “archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race” ( Literary Criticism 709). Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung’s specifically named archetypes—” persona and anima and counsellor and shadow” —and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy 291), a practice subsequently followed in some hand books of literary terms and histories of literary criticism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism , essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of “Jungian” critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: “This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious—an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge” (m-12). Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of “archetype” as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention (99).

Northrope Frye/Pinterest

On a general level, Jung’s and Frye’s theorizings about archetypes, however labeled, overlap, and boundaries are elusive, but in the disciplines of literature the two schools have largely ignored each other’s work. Myth criticism grew in part as a reaction to the formalism of New Criticism , while archetypal criticism based on Jung was never linked with any academic tradition and remained organically bound to its roots in depth psychology: the individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the analytic process. Further, myth critics, aligned with writers in comparative anthropology and philosophy, are said to include Frazer, Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright, and Francis Fergusson. But Wheelwright, for example, barely mentions Jung ( The Burning Fountain , 1954), and he, Fergusson, and others often owe more to Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Oedipus Rex, and the Oedipus complex than to anything taken from Jung. Indeed, myth criticism seems singularly unaffected by any of the archetypal theorists who have remained faithful to the origins and traditions of depth, especially analytical, psychology—James Hillman, Henri Corbin, Gilbert Durand, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Evangelos Christou. This article, then, treats the only form of literary theory and criticism consistent with and derived directly from the psychological principles advanced by Jung. Other forms previously labeled “Jungian” are here subsumed under the term “archetypal” because whatever their immediate specific focus, these forms operate on a set of assumptions derived from Jung and accept the depth-psychological structure posited by Jung. Further, Jung termed his own theory “analytical psychology,” as it is still known especially in Europe, but Jungian thought is more commonly referred to today in all disciplines as “archetypal psychology.”

The first systematic application of Jung’s ideas to literature was made in 1934 by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry : “An attempt is here made to bring psychological analysis and reflection to bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our nature there find objectification” (vii). This book established the priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological.

The next significant development in archetypal theory that affected literary studies grew out of the effort made by U.S.-born, Zurich-trained analyst James Hillman (b. 1924) “to move beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy” to formulate archetypal theory as a multidisciplinary field ( Archetypal 1). Hillman invokes Henri Corbin (1903-78), French scholar, philosopher, and mystic known for his work on Islam, as the “second father” of archetypal psychology. As Hillman puts it, Corbin’s insight that Jung’s “mundus archetypalis” is also the “mundus imaginalis” that corresponds to the Islamic “alam al-mithl” (3) was an early move toward “a reappraisal of psychology itself as an activity of poesis” (24). Hillman also discovers archetypal precursors in Neoplatonism, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Proclus, Marsilio Ficino, and Giambattista Vico . In Re-Visioning Psychology , the published text of his 1972 Yale Terry Lectures (the same lecture series Jung gave in 1937), Hillman locates the archetypal neither “in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination” (xi).

Archetypal theory then took shape principally in the multidisciplinary journal refounded by Hillman in 1970 in Zurich, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought . According to Hillman, that discourse was anticipated by Evangelos Christou’s Logos of the Soul (1963) and extended in religion (David L. Miller’s New Polytheism , 1974), philosophy (Edward Casey’s Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , 1976), mythology (Rafael Lopez-Pedraza’s Hermes and His Children , 1977), psycholinguistics (Paul Kugler’s Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , 1982), and the theory of analysis (Patricia Berry’s Echo’s Subtle Body , 1982).

These archetypalists, focusing on the imaginal’and making central the concept that in English they call “soul,” assert their kinship with Semiotics and Structuralism but maintain an insistent focus on psychoid phenomena, which they characterize as meaningful. Their discourse is conducted in poetic language; that is, their notions of “soul-making” come from the Romantics , especially William Blake and John Keats. “By speaking of soul as a primary metaphor , rather than defining soul substantively and attempting to derive its ontological status from empirical demonstration or theological (metaphysical) argument, archetypal psychology recognizes that psychic reality is inextricably involved with rhetoric” (Hillman, Archetypal 19).

Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory

This burgeoning theoretical movement and the generally unsatisfying nature of so much early “Jungian literary criticism” are both linked to the problematic nature of Jung’s own writing on literature, which comprises a handful of essays: “The Type Problem in Poetry,” “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” “Psychology and Literature,” “ Ulysses : A Monologue,” and “Is There a Freudian Type of Poetry?” These essays reveal Jung’s lack of awareness as a reader despite his sense that they “may show how ideas that play a considerable role in my work can be applied to literary material” ( Collected 15:109^. They also attest to his self-confessed lack of interest in literature: “I feel not naturally drawn to what one calls literature, but I am strangely attracted by genuine fiction, i.e., fantastical invention” ( Letters 1:509). This explains his fascination with a text like Rider Haggard’s novel She: The History of an Adventure (1886-87), with its unmediated representation of the “anima.” As Jung himself noted: “Literary products of highly dubious merit are often of the greatest interest to the psychologist” ( Collected 15:87-88). Jung was also more preoccupied with dreams and fantasies, because he saw them as exclusively (purely) products of the unconscious, in contrast to literature, which he oddly believed, citing Joyce’s Ulysses as an example, was created “in the full light of consciousness” (15:123).

Issues of genre, period, and language were ignored or subjected to gross generalization as Jung searched for universals in texts as disparate as the fourth-century Shepherd of Hermas, the Divine Comedy, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), E. T. A. Hoffman’s tales, Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide (1919-20), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” as well as works by Carl Spitteler and William Blake. But the great literary text for Jung’s life and work was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust , not because of its literary qualities but because he sensed that the drama expressed his own personal myth ( Letters 1:309-10). Further, the text offered confirmation (and poetic representation) of the only direct contribution Jung made to literary theory: a distinction between “psychological” and “visionary” texts ( Collected 15:89-90). This heuristic distinction was formed, however, solely on psychobiographical grounds: Did the text originate in, and remain principally shaped by, the author’s experience of consciousness and the personal unconscious or his or her experience at the level of the archetypal collective unconscious? And concomitantly, on which of these levels was the reader affected? Confirmation of this theory was Jung’s reading of Faust: part 1 was “psychological”; part 2, “visionary.”

Thus Jungian theory provided no clear avenue of access for those outside of psychology, and orthodox Jungians were left with little in the way of models for the psychological analysis of literature. Many fell prey to Jung’s idiosyncrasies as a reader, ranging widely and naively over genres, periods, and languages in search of the universal archetypes, while sweeping aside cultureand text-specific problems, ignoring their own role in the act of reading and basing critical evaluation solely on a text’s contribution to the advancement of the reader’s individuation process, a kind of literature-astherapy standard. This way of proceeding had the effect of putting, and keeping, archetypal criticism on the margins of academic discourse and outside the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines and departments.

Bettina Knapp’s 1984 effort at an authoritative demonstration of archetypal literary criticism exemplified this pattern. Her Jungian Approach to Literature attempts to cover the Finnish epic The Kalevala , the Persian Atar’s The Conference of the Birds , and texts by Euripides, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Corneille, Goethe, Novalis, Rabbi ben Simhah Nachman, and W. B. Yeats. And despite frequently perceptive readings, the work is marred by the characteristic limitless expansionism and psychological utilitarianism of her interpretive scheme.

Given this background, it is not surprising to find in a 1976 essay entitled “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems” the statement that “no purely Jungian criticism of literature has yet appeared” (Baird 22). But Jos van Meurs’s critically annotated 1988 bibliography, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980, effectively challenges this claim. Despite his deliberately selective focus on critical works written in English on literary texts that are, for the most part, also written in English, van Meurs, with the early assistance of John Kidd, has collected 902 entries, of which he identifies slightly over 80 as valid and valuable literary criticism.

While acknowledging the grave weaknesses of much Jungian writing on literature as “unsubtle and rigid application of preconceived psychological notions and schemes” resulting in “particularly ill-judged or distorted readings,” van Meurs still finds that “sensitively, flexibly and cautiously used, Jungian psychological theory may stimulate illuminating literary interpretations” (14-15). The critical annotations are astute and, given their brevity, surprisingly thorough and suggestive. Van Meurs also does a service by resurrecting successful but neglected early studies, such as Elizabeth Drew’s of T. S. Eliot (1949), and discovering value even in reductionist and impressionistic studies, such as June Singer’s of Blake. He notes that Singer’s Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake (1970), though oversimplified in its psychobiographical approach and its treatment of characters as psychological projections of the author, does make original use in a literary context of such Jungian techniques of dream interpretation as “amplification” and of such fantasy-evoking procedures as “active imagination.”

Van Meurs’s bibliography conveys the great variety of Jungian writings on literature even within one language, the increasingly recognized potential for further development and use of Jung’s ideas, and the growth in numbers of literary scholars falling under the influence of Jung. A few names form a core of writers in English (including many Canadians)—Martin Bickman, Albert Gelpi, Elliott Gose, Evelyn Hinz, Henry Murray, Barton L. St. Armand, Harold Schechter, and William Stein— though no single figure has attracted the attention of academic literary specialists, and no persistent commonalities fuse into a recognizable school critics who draw on Jung’s theories. To date, the British Journal of Analytical Psychology and the retitled American Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture are the best resources for archetypal criticism of literature and the arts even though only a small percentage of their published articles treat such topics.

Thus, with the archetypal theorists multiplying across disciplines on the one hand and the clinically practicing followers serving as (generally inadequate) critics on the other, archetypal literary theory and criticism flourished in two independent streams in the 1960s and 1970s. From the theorists, dissertations, articles, and books, often traditionally academic in orientation, appeared; the productions of the practitioners are chronicled and critiqued in van Meurs’s bibliography. And the 1980s saw a new, suggestive, and controversial direction in archetypal studies of literature: the feminist. With some of its advocates supported through early publication of their work in the journal Spring , feminist archetypal theory and criticism of literature and the arts emerged fullblown in three texts: Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981), which self-consciously evoked and critiqued Maud Bodkin’s 1934 text; Estella Lauter’s Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (1984); and Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht’s Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985). This last text explicitly named the movement and demonstrated its appropriation of archetypal theory for feminist ends in aesthetics, analysis, art, and religion, as well as in literature.

Feminist archetypal theory, proceeding inductively, restored Jung’s original emphasis on the fluid, dynamic nature of the archetype, drawing on earlier feminist theory as well as the work of Jungian Erich Neumann to reject absolutist, ahistorical, essentialist, and transcendentalist misinterpretations. Thus “archetype” is recognized as the “tendency to form and reform images in relation to certain kinds of repeated experience,” which may vary in individual cultures, authors, and readers (Lauter and Rupprecht 13-14). Considered according to this definition, the concept becomes a useful tool for literary analysis that explores the synthesis of the universal and the particular, seeks to define the parameters of social construction of gender, and attempts to construct theories of language, of the imaginal, and of meaning that take gender into account.

Ironically, as in the feminist revisioning of explicitly male-biased Jungian theory, the rise in the 1980s of Reader-response theory and criticism and the impetus for canon revision have begun to contribute to a revaluation of Jung as a source of literary study. New theoretical approaches appear to legitimize orthodox Jungian ways of reading, sanction Jung’s range of literary preferences from She to Faust , and support his highly affective reaction to Ulysses , which he himself identified (positively) as a “subjective confession” (i5:io9n). And new theories increasingly give credence to the requirement, historically asserted by Jungian readers, that each text elicit a personal, affective, and not “merely intellectual” response. Even French feminist Julia Kristeva has been brought to praise a Jungian contribution to feminist discourse on the maternal: recognition that the Catholic church’s change of signification in the assumption of the Virgin Mary to include her human body represented a major shift in attitude toward female corporaiity (113). In addition, many powerfully heuristic Jungian concepts, such as “synchronicity,” have yet to be tested in literary contexts.

Archetypal criticism, then, construed as that derived from Jung’s theory and practice of archetypal (analytical) psychology, is a fledgling and much misconstrued field of inquiry with significant but still unrealized potential for the study of literature and of aesthetics in general. Two publishing events at the beginning of the 1990s in the United States may signal the coming of age of this kind of archetypal criticism through its convergence with postmodern critical thought, along with a commensurate insistence on its roots in the depth psychology of Jung: the reissue of Morris Philipson’s 1963 Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic and the appearance of Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino’s multidisciplinary, multicultural collection of essays, C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture.

Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye

Bibliography James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983), Re-Visioning Psychology (1975); C. G. Jung, Collected Works (ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 20 vois., 1953-79), Letters (trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2 vois., 1973-75). James Baird, “Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems,” Literary Criticism and Psychology (ed. Joseph P. Strelka, 1976); Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D’Acerino, eds., C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (1990); Martin Bickman, The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism (1980); Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies in Imagination (1934); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975); Naomi Goldenberg, “Archetypal Theory after Jung,” Spring (1975); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” (1977, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Léon S. Roudiez, 1986); Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985); Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1974); Morris Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic (1963, reprint, 1991); Annis Pratt et al., Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981); Jos van Meurs and John Kidd, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Works in English (with a Selection of Titles after 1980) (1988); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Categories: Archetypal Criticism , Myth Criticism

Tags: Achetypes , Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language , Anatomy of Criticism , Archetypal Criticism , Archetypal feminist criticism , Archetypal Patterns in Poetry , Archetypal Psychology , Archetypal Theory , Archetypal Theory and Criticism , Archetypal Theory Criticism , Claude Levi-Strauss , Ernst Cassirer , Evangelos Christou , Francis Fergusson , Frazer , Gilbert Durand , Henri Corbin , Hermes and His Children , Hillman , Imagining: A Phenomenological Study , J. G. Frazer , J. G. Frazer The Golden Bough , James Hillman , Jessie Weston , Joseph Campbell , Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture. , Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious , Jungian Approach to Literature , Leslie Fiedler , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Logos of the Soul , Maud Bodkin , Myth , Myth theory and crticism , New Polytheism , Northrop Frye , Philip Wheelwright , Psychoanalysis , Rafael Lopez-Pedraza , Richard Chase , Spring Journal , Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture , Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought , The Golden Bough , The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

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A Library Guide to Jung's Collected Works

• Find an essay within the Collected Works
• The Red Book (Liber Novus )
• The Black Books
• Jung seminars
• Jung compilations
• Jung's correspondence
• Jung interviews
• Jungian reference books
• Jungian journals
• Active imagination
• Amplification

Reference publications on Archetypes

Jung on archetypes, additional resources on archetypes.

• Collective unconscious
• Individuation
• Synchronicity
• Transcendent function
• Transference
• Anima/Animus
• Hero/Heroine
• Kore/Maiden
• Puer/Puella (Divine Child)
• Wise Man/Woman
• New additions
• Dictionary definitions
• Encyclopedic overviews
• Guides & Handbooks

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure-indeed they are its psychic aspect. They represent, on the one hand, a very strong instinctive conservatism, while on the other hand they are the most effective means conceivable of instinctive adaptation. They are thus, essentially, the chthonic portion of the psyche . . . that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature. ["Mind and Earth," CW 10, para. 53 ]

Jung's essays on Archetypes from the Collected Works :

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 7. Two essays on analytical psychology (2nd ed., pp. 121–241). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850891.121

Jung, C. G. (1968). The concept of the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 9 pt. 1. Archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., pp. 42-53). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1936/37) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.42

Jung, C. G. (1968). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 9 pt. 1. Archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., pp. 275-289). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.275

Jung, C. G. (1968). Archetypes of the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 9 pt. 1. Archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., pp. 3-41). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.3

Jung, C. G. (1969). On the nature of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 8. Structure and dynamics of the psyche (2nd ed., pp. 159-234). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850952.159

• Books & book chapters

Book Chapters:

Goodwyn, E. (2019). Comments on the 2018 IAAP Conference on Archetype Theory: Defending a non‐reductive biological approach . Journal of Analytical Psychology, 64 (5), 720-737. Abstract: Comments on the 2018 IAAP Conference on Archetype Theory. During the course of the 2018 IAAP conference, a criticism of Jung’s idea of the archetype as inherited predisposition was raised that involved examining a number of dreams and visions and assessing them through developments in genetics and neuroscience. From this comparison it was argued that archetypes cannot be inherited and could more reasonably be argued to derive from early experiences. In this essay, the author responds by showing how this conclusion is flawed due to being based on reductive errors. An alternative, non‐reductive but inherited and biological position on the archetype is defended.

Hogenson, G. B. (2019). The controversy around the concept of archetypes . Journal of Analytical Psychology, 64 (5), 682–700. Related video: George Hogenson on archetypes Abstract: The paper reviews the course of the controversy surrounding Jung's theory of archetypes beginning in the mid 1990s and continuing to the present. Much of this controversy was concerned with the debate between the essentialism of the evolutionary position of Anthony Stevens as found in his 1983 book Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self, and the emergence model of the archetypes proposed in various publications by Hogenson, Knox and Merchant, among others. The paper then moves on to a consideration of more recent developments in theory, particularly as derived from an examination of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who introduces Bergson's somnambulistic unconscious into the discussion of Jung's theories. It is suggested that this largely unexamined influence on Jung may provide answers to some of the unanswered questions surrounding his theorizing. The paper concludes by suggesting that the notion of the somnambulistic unconscious may resemble Atmanspacher's argument for a dual‐aspect monism interpretation of Jung.

Lewis, R. C. (1989). The historical development of the concept of the archetype. Quadrant, 22 (1), 41–53. Abstract: Traces the development of Jung's concept of the archetype from its earliest antecedents in his early writings to its final form. A discussion of Jung's early notions of complexes and the intellectual influences on these notions is followed by a description of Freud's major influences on Jung, along with the development of the concept of the imago. The most mature view of the archetype expressed was that of a durable pattern that manifests itself through the image, idea, or physical event; a dynamic organizer of psyche and matter; a structure associated with strong affects; and an entity associated with synchronistic occurrences that meaningfully connect particular psychic and physical events.

Mills, J. (2020). On the origins of archetypes . International Journal of Jungian Studies, 12 (2), 201–206. https://doi-org.pgi.idm.oclc.org/10.1163/19409060-01201008 Abstract: The question of archetypes and their origins remains an ongoing debate in analytical psychology and post-Jungian studies. The contemporary discussion has historically focused on privileging one causal factor over another, namely, whether archetypes are attributed more to biology than culture and vice versa. Erik Goodwyn offers a mesotheory of archetypal origins that displaces the radical bifurcation as a false dichotomy. I offer my own reflections on the origins of archetypes and argue that this discussion can be further advanced by addressing the question of unconscious agency.

Rossi, E. L. (1989). Archetypes as strange attractors . Psychological Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, 20 (1), 4–15.

Merchant, J. (2019). The controversy around the concept of archetypes and the place for an emergent/developmental model . Journal of Analytical Psychology, 64 (5), 701-719. Abstract: This paper addresses two key controversial questions to do with the concept of archetypes—do they operate autonomously without connection to an individual's personal life experience? Does their biological base mean they are genetically determined, innate and thus a priori inherited psychic structures? These questions are addressed through the case of a person who began life as an unwanted pregnancy, was adopted at birth and as an adult, experienced profound waking visions. An emergent/developmental model of archetype is outlined which stresses developmental start‐points through this infant's engagement via response and reaction to the affective and material world of the infant/birth mother matrix and from which emergence later occurs by way of participation in a socio‐cultural and material context. The emergentism aspect of this model rescues it from being reductionist since it allows for cultural and socialisation inputs. The model's explanatory power is vastly enlarged by combining this with the developmental component. Critically, once developmentally produced mind/brain (image schema) structures are in place, they have the capacity to generate psychological life. Imagery can then appear as if it is innately derived when that is not the case. The contemporary neuroscience which supports this model is both outlined and related back to the case example.

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• Scriptwriting

What is an Archetype — Definition & Examples in Storytelling

W hat is an archetype? Archetypes play an integral role in how people understand each other – but what are they? We’re going to answer that question as we define archetype, then we’ll look at some archetype examples from classic literature and film. By the end, you’ll know why archetypes are so important for storytellers – and why they might explain something innate about the human condition.

Archetype Definition

First, let’s define archetype.

Archetypes may not have been formally defined until the 20th century, but they existed far before then. Archetypes are simply patterns that connect us across time and place. We’re going to look at some archetype examples in a bit – but first let’s formally outline an archetype definition.

ARCHETYPE DEFINITION

What is an archetype.

An archetype is a pattern that connects the people of the world across time and culture. The idea of the archetype was conceived by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In writing, archetypes are characters or symbols that are recognizable irrespective of their place or time of origin. 

Iconic Archetypes

• The Wise Old Man

For more on the foundation of archetypes, check out the video that asks, “What is an Archetype?” below.

What is an Archetype?

So, is an archetype simply a pattern? Well, yes and no.

It is a pattern, but it’s also something more than that. Many argue archetypes are intrinsic to human nature. Now let's look at some examples of these archetypal patterns in characters and symbols.

WHAT IS AN ARCHETYPE CHARACTER

Guide to archetypal characters .

As storytellers, we rely on archetypal characters to bridge the gap between people of different cultures. Take the hero for example: the hero is a character archetype that’s existed in stories all over the world for thousands of years.

And it existed in spite of the fact that there was little possibility that some communities were privy to the stories created by other communities. Take Gilgamesh for example – the character many historians regard as the first hero, and a direct inspiration for  Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey .

The Epic of Gilgamesh  established a stereotypically flawed hero that subsequently influenced Egyptian mythology and other river valley civilizations, via oral tradition. But why were other “Gilgamesh-esh” characters conceived in other parts of the world irrespective of the knowledge of their origin? Largely because they were archetypical – aka universally relatable.

Through a historical lens, we can see that heroic characters were conceived by Asian, European, African, and communities irrespective of one another. The hero is actually a subset of “the leader” archetype. For more on “the leader,” check out our video essay below.

Walter White is an Example of an Archetype  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Other subsets of the leader character type include: the antihero and the villain. In our video essay, we argue that “conflict is drama, drama is interesting, and leaders are conflict machines.” Thus, the leader is the perfect archetypal character for communicating drama. 

There are a lot of character types though. For more on this subject, check out our article on Character Archetypes Examples in Lit. & Film . 

Definition of Symbolic Patterns

Guide to archetypal symbols.

Archetypes aren’t just characters, they can be symbols or situations too. Anthropologists study patterns from different places and eras, to better understand world history. On a more micro level, this video looks at how symbols can influence cognition standards.

What is an Archetype? by Casual Cognition

Essentially, archetypes can affect the world on a macro and micro level. They can also explain innate aspects of the human mind. Think about it: if a star symbol that was discovered in different cultures around the world, is it possible that alien civilizations could use the same star symbol too? Or is the symbol simply a product of human creation? It’s fascinating stuff – and useful to think about for storytellers and anthropologists.

Archetypal Uses

What is the purpose of archetypes.

These archetypal patterns are universal and repeated ideas/symbols that unite the people of the world across time and space. We often focus on things that make us different from one another – but these patterns remind us that there’s an innateness of the human condition that makes us the same. 

Just take what writer/director Bong Joon-Ho had to say after he won out at the Golden Globes for Parasite :

I think we use only just one language: the cinema.

— Boog Joon-Ho

Cinema is just one medium through which we communicate the patterns that bind us together – there are dozens more. And whether you know it in the moment or not, you’re likely perpetuating archetypes everyday.

Related Posts

• What is Characterization? →
• Explaining the Mary Sue Character Trope →
• How the Foil Character Type Reveals Your Protagonist →

Archetype Examples in Lit. & Movies

We briefly touched on some of the different types of archetypal patterns, but there’s a lot more to characters than what we went over here. Up next, we break down a variety of examples from literature and movies. Follow along as we examine characters in Breaking Bad , The Lord of the Rings , and more.

Up Next: Character Types Explained →

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How to write Archetypes

If you write stories, you’re probably already using archetypes without realizing it. These characters , symbols , and situations seem to bubble up from every human being’s subconscious mind when we create stories. That’s why so many of the world’s mythologies have similar plot lines and characters . Once you understand the concept of archetypes, you can look through your own writing to see which archetypes are most compelling to you. Perhaps you frequently write archetypal heroes (ordinary people called to adventure who are then transformed by that adventure). Or maybe there are symbolic archetypes, such as trees or rivers, that appear more frequently in your writing.

When to use Archetypes

Archetypes make for some of the best inspiration. When you’re writing a story, it’s often helpful to think about which archetypes you’d like to throw into it. Is your main character a hero? Or an anti-hero? Is there a trickster somewhere in the story? If so, does he/she ultimately end up being evil, or good? You can select archetypes the way a chef selects spices – experimenting with new combinations to see how the archetypes interact with each other within the story.

Although archetypes usually appear in fictional stories and myths , they may also have a place in non-fiction writing, especially biographies. If you’re writing a biography of a historical figure, say, you may gain insight into the story by thinking about which archetype the person best fits. If you were writing about Napoleon, for example, you might write him as an archetypal hero (emphasizing his ordinary upbringing and his call to adventure), or you might write him as a trickster (emphasizing the way that he embodied self-contradictions and appeared to have different attributes in different situations).

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• Intertextuality
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• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
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• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
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• Protagonist
• Red Herring
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What Are Character Archetypes? 16 Archetypes, Plus Examples

by Fija Callaghan

Have you ever stopped to wonder why classic stories seem to have so many elements in common? We see the same types of characters in everything from 18th-century literature, to contemporary novels, to modern film and TV. And yet, each story feels as fresh and engaging as if we were seeing it for the first time.

This is because of archetypes: the timeless lineup of players that has stayed with us for generations because they’ve been proven to make effective stories.

Archetypal characters are successful in literature because they reflect real human truths that exist in every one of us. Let’s look at what archetypes are, some of the common archetypes that will populate your work, and how to subvert archetypes in bold new ways.

What are character archetypes?

A character archetype is a recurring stock character that represents something universal in our human experience. They’re immediately recognizable within novels, films, and other narrative media as fitting a predetermined pattern, even if certain details like names and physical attributes change. Writers can use these familiar patterns to engage with readers in a comfortable and relatable way.

Archetypes create an immediate sense of familiarity, even in an unfamiliar story, because they’re people that we’ve met time and time again. Even though we’ve seen them and their stories a hundred times, they still have the power to surprise us.

This isn’t quite the same as a stock character. Stock characters and archetypes are sometimes used interchangeably, but while an archetypal character represents a universal truth, a stock character is a more narrow character type with particular personality traits. Some examples might be things like “the bad boy,” “the mad scientist,” “the benevolent ruler.” They don’t necessarily have the same negative connotations as a stereotype (we’ll look more at stereotypes below), but they do represent a popular cliché.

By understanding character archetypes and applying them to our writing, we can connect with the stories our readers have grown up with and immerse them in the world of our own story from the very beginning. Then our readers get to see how we’ve taken these common character archetypes and used them in surprising new ways to create dynamic, multilayered characters that propel our story forward.

Character archetypes vs. story archetypes

In literature you’ll hear about two different kinds of archetypes: character archetypes and story archetypes. Both of these literary devices represent universal patterns that we can recognize in almost all stories across cultures throughout history.

The difference is that while character archetypes refer to the individual people that populate the world of your story—such as heroes, villains, mentors, and others that we’ll look at further below— story archetypes refer to the patterns of events and themes that drive the story towards its conclusion.

What’s the difference between archetypes and stereotypes?

Character archetypes and stereotypes share a lot of similarities, but the main difference is that character archetypes represent inherent truths in human nature, while stereotypes represent a pattern of (usually negative) traits that have become attributed to a particular gender, culture, or type of person.

Stereotypes are often born from one small true thing—that may only have been true for one person or one small group of people—which then grows into a vast generalization. These generalizations are flat, uninteresting, and contain nothing of the beautiful complexity that human beings have as individuals.

Examples of stereotypes are things like a ditzy prom queen, a shy nerd, a dumb sports athlete, the girl-next-door, an absent-minded professor, an idealistic starving artist, or a schoolyard bully.

Stereotypes rarely accomplish anything other than making your story flat, uninteresting, and cliché. Stories stuffed full of stereotypical characters are usually forgotten as soon as the book is closed, instead of becoming a story that will stay with its readers for generations.

As a writer, you have the entire landscape of the human condition from which to fashion your characters. That’s exciting and inspiring, and a stereotype that makes its way into your story is nothing more than a missed opportunity to create memorable characters that are dynamic and real.

Why use character archetypes in writing?

Even though the common character archetypes we’re going to show you are all very different, they share one important element: each of them represents a small piece of ourselves—of what it is to be human. Everyone has the capacity to be a reluctant hero, a mentor, a lover, even a villain. By creating stories built out of these universal ideas, we’re speaking to a very real truth that our readers will recognize, because these truths also exist in them.

By using these truths of our collective unconscious, you’re starting out with a structural framework that reflects the entire spectrum of the human condition. Then you can enhance that framework with context, themes, and other literary devices to create a story that will resonate with every reader.

The 16 classic character archetypes

Unlike stereotypes, which are extremely limited in their scope, character archetypes offer you a base structure from which you can begin building the people of your story world. Here are the 16 classic archetypes that you can use in your writing.

1. The Hero

The Hero is the axis on which a story revolves. They’re usually thrown into extraordinary circumstances beyond their control through which they need to fight for a singular objective. Along the way the hero’s strength will be tested in a number of ways—maybe physically, mentally, spiritually, and/or morally.

These trials will reveal exceptional strengths that set them apart from other characters in the story. These might be things like supernatural powers or a momentous birthright, or it might be something simple that comes from their humanity—a remarkable sense of compassion, an iron determination and sense of self, great courage in the face of terrifying acts. They might be natural leaders, or have a heightened survival instinct. Heroes are not flawless (pro tip: they’d be quite boring if they were), but the strength they exhibit in times of hardship is what will make your reader believe in them and follow them right up until the end.

One of the oldest universal story patterns in literature is called “The Hero’s Journey.” Also called the “Monomyth,” the hero’s journey follows the protagonist through an adventurous cycle of navigating an irrevocably changed world, passing through an initiation or coming-of-age, achieving a goal, and returning home to rebuild from a new beginning. Although your hero is the central axis of your story, they don’t carry it alone (even if sometimes they think they do). Along the way the hero will meet many of the character archetypes listed below—some as obstacles, and some as friends.

Examples of heroes in literature are Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and Sir Gawain from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .

2. The Shadow

The Shadow is a dark reflection of the hero. They might show us weaknesses in the hero that they fight to keep hidden, or what the hero could become if they allowed those weaknesses to consume them. In many ways, we all have this “shadow personality” (psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed it was an integral part of the human psyche) but in literature the shadow will either be a person mirroring the hero’s darkest traits and their darkest potential, or a very distinctive facet of the hero—for example, if they change their personality completely while under the influence of drugs, manipulation, or some external force. Very often you’ll see these characters take on two separate names for their opposing polarities, such as Angel and Angelus on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer .

Other examples of shadow archetypes are Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Mr. Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

3. The Sidekick

Sidekicks have been popularized by the comic book medium, but the idea has existed for much longer. The sidekick’s main role is to offer the hero a way to stay grounded despite all the obstacles they’re facing. This might be through comic relief or through cautionary advice (or both). The sidekick lacks whatever fundamental value has put the hero on their path—perhaps they’re not as brave, or not as strong, or not the “chosen one”—and they don’t carry the weight of the world in the same way. What they can do is offer a light in the darkness when your hero begins to lose some integral piece of themselves. Your sidekick keeps the hero from getting too close to the edge.

Very often sidekicks in literature serve as a foil character to the protagonist. This means that they work in juxtaposition to the hero to draw attention to certain aspects of their personality. A great example of this is Batman and Robin, where everything about Robin’s brightly colored costume, his chattiness, and his positive energy contrast the darkness of Batman’s character.

Other examples of sidekicks include Friday from Robinson Crusoe and Ron Weasley from Harry Potter.

4. The Villain

The villain archetype is the big baddie of your story —the challenge to which all roads lead. This character has an objective that is in direct conflict with the hero’s , and in order for them to reach their goal, they need to make sure that the main character is unable to reach theirs . This might be through killing them, humiliating them, discrediting them, or otherwise forcing them into submission.

The villain always has a reason for doing the terrible things that they do, even if that reason is twisted beyond what we might understand in our own perceptions and values. The best villains in literature are ones who truly believe that they’re doing the right thing, but have allowed their vision of the “right thing” to become clouded with ambition, fear, or pain.

Some iconic villains in literature are Valentine from The Mortal Instruments , Professor Moriarty from the “Sherlock Holmes” stories, and Shere Khan from The Jungle Book .

5. The Lover

In a story, the lover archetype really just wants everyone to get along. They’re usually a “good” character, in the sense of having a functioning moral compass, but they lack the courage, sense of injustice, and capacity for self-sacrifice that the hero has. Though guided by the needs of their heart, lovers tend to take the path of least resistance that brings the least amount of harm to themselves and those they care for. Many traditionally artistic characters will fall into this category.

In some ways, the lover is a reflection of the trickster archetype, which we’ll look at further below. Both try to stay out of trouble and have a limited scope of what’s worth fighting for.

Examples of great lover archetypes in stories are Dustfinger in Inkheart and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings .

6. The Mentor

One of the most essential figures in the hero’s journey, the mentor is older (sometimes), wiser (always), and has knowledge and experiences beyond that of the hero’s. They may also have supernatural powers or a particularly specialized skill set. The mentor serves to give the protagonist a little nudge (or a violent shove) forward onto their path, bringing out the potential of what that hero will become.

The mentor is also a great tool for exposition and immersing your reader into your story. As the mentor teaches the hero about their world, the threats they’ll be facing, the steps they can take to overcome those threats, and how to develop the skills necessary to do so, your readers will learn everything they need to know about your story world right alongside them.

The most recognizable mentor figure in modern literature is the wizard Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings . Other examples include Haymitch Abernath from The Hunger Games and Merlin from the tales of King Arthur.

7. The Mother

Made famous by the godmothers of classic fairy tales, the mother archetype represents a supportive, nurturing presence in the hero’s life. They won’t always be a literal mother (although they can be); they don’t even necessarily need to be female. The mother character is strong and wise, but they differ from the mentor figure in that they don’t give the hero the tools they need to move forward on their journey; rather, they give the hero a safe place to come home to, a place to heal.

Depending on where the hero is on their journey, there may be more than one character filling this role. Aunt May from “Spider-man” and Nokomis from The Song of Hiawatha are examples of mother archetypes.

8. The Everyman

The everyman character is a projection of the reader. They’re an utterly normal person thrown into remarkable circumstances, and they adapt to the situation in much the same way that any one of us would. They usually say what they’re thinking and call things out that don’t make sense, and their normality might make them an outsider in a world where very un-normal things are happening. This archetype functions to bring some perspective to the story and make the plot more relatable to us as readers.

The everyman might be an unwilling hero, or they might be a sidekick or other supporting character that acts as a link between the main character and the reader.

Dr. John Watson from the “Sherlock Holmes” stories is an everyman—faced with a genius best friend and some equally genius villains, he brings a comforting averageness to their world. Other examples of the everyman archetype are Arthur Dent from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Simon Lewis from The Mortal Instruments .

9. The Damsel

The iconic damsel-in-distress is one of the most recognizable literary tropes , but this character can take many forms of any age and any gender. Sometimes called the “innocent,” they represent naivety, inexperience, and trust. The damsel is similar to the everyman in that they see everything with new eyes; but unlike the everyman, the damsel never gives up the idea that there’s good in the world. They cling to their innocence even when the events around them threaten to strip it away. Unfortunately, this determined positivity can lead them into some difficult situations, often requiring the services of a hero to rescue them.

In a story, this archetype reminds us that there is always hope and wonder to be found in the world. Examples of classic damsels in literature are Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tiny Tim from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol .

10. The Trickster

Tricksters are perhaps our most enduring character archetype , even more so than heroes. Before storytellers were repeating tales of Beowulf and King Arthur, they were gathering around the fire listening to stories about Coyote, Raven, and the spider god Anansi. Tricksters are neither good nor evil, but use cunning and cleverness to further their own ends. They might help the hero or they might hinder them, depending on which best suits their own agenda at the time.

The trickster has given rise to one of our most popular modern archetypes, the antihero . Antiheroes are usually tricksters who, rather begrudgingly, have become invested in something more than just their own survival. They then need to reassess their goals which launch them onto a new path to becoming a hero in their own right.

Examples of famous tricksters in literature include Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the Weasley twins from the Harry Potter series, and Loki from Norse mythology.

11. The Guardian

The guardian archetype is someone who stands at a threshold, holding the hero back from continuing on their journey. Guardians are usually quite single-minded and fixated on their goal of keeping two worlds, people, or experiences separated. Sometimes this might be someone guarding a literal doorway, such as the Sphinx of Egyptian mythology; other times it might be a new stage of life, such as an admissions officer who stands between a student and their dream school.

Guardians challenge the hero to reassess their situation and look at things in a new way. If the hero continues using the same strengths, tools, or techniques as they always have, they won’t make it past the threshold. They’ll need to try something different, probably something less comfortable, and exercise a new skill in order to continue towards their goal. By the time they make their way across the obstacle, they will have grown as a result of stretching the limits of who they can be.

Examples of guardians in literature are the Wall guards from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust , the gatekeeper to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz , and the three-headed dog Fluffy from the Harry Potter series.

12. The Herald

The herald is a character that foretells a great change , usually near the beginning of the story. After they’ve made their appearance, nothing will be the same for the hero again. An example of a herald can be found in the classic fairy tale Cinderella , where a messenger shows up to announce that the king is seeking a match for his son, launching the plot into action.

Although the herald’s job is to set the events of the plot in motion, they may also hang around to fill another role in the story later on. In The Hobbit , for instance, Gandalf begins as the herald by marking Bilbo’s door, and then shifts into a mentor figure once the story is on its feet. Other examples of heralds in literature are Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games and the three witches in Macbeth .

13. The Scapegoat

In literature, the scapegoat archetype is someone who takes the blame for another’s misdeeds. This often works a bit like a reverse guardian—their defeat clears the way for the villain to move forward towards their goal. Using a scapegoat allows your characters to unite against a common perceived enemy, thereby (temporarily) dispersing whatever tensions had been brewing. This is a useful literary device for turning the plot in a new direction.

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat explores this idea in depth, looking at how someone might handle being burdened with another’s malefactions. Scapegoats in literature include Snowball from Animal Farm and Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon .

14. The Outlaw

The outlaw’s key strengths are their independence and the sense of self that keeps them from bending to societal constraints. This doesn’t always make them a lot of friends, but the ones they have are loyal and share the same ideas about what matters in life. The outlaw is often romanticized and well-liked, but other characters may grow to resent them through their envy of the outlaw’s lifestyle and freedom from expectations.

The outlaw is a major archetype in both The Adventures of Robin Hood and the original Spiderman comics, where the outlaw’s antagonists—the Sheriff of Nottingham and the newspaper man J. Jonah Jameson—express their hidden envy of a life that they could never have. Sometimes this animosity will put the outlaw onto a new path, turning them into a hero as their self-contained existence begins crumbling down.

Other outlaws in literature are Roux from Chocolat by Joanne Harris, and Maurice Leblanc’s character Arsène Lupin from the series of the same name.

15. The Rebel

Also called the revolutionary, the rebel archetype epitomizes “chaotic good”; they have a cause and they’re not afraid to burn a few bridges, or cities, in its name. The rebel sees something deeply wrong in their society and takes it upon themselves to change it, because nobody else is going to. The rebel archetype is deeply protective of the ones they love but tend to alienate all but the most devoted due to their inflammatory ideas.

The rebel is a natural leader, and their passion for their cause makes people want to follow them. This passion is boundless and transcends minor annoyances like common sense, which means that this archetype can be a hero, a villain, or an antihero that falls somewhere in the middle. Examples of rebels in literature include Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games , Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird , and Lyra Belacqua from His Dark Materials .

16. The Ruler

The ruler is a natural leader in a position of power, such as a monarchy, a government office, or the head of a powerful company. Unlike the leadership skills displayed by the rebel, the ruler archetype thrives on order, stability, and tradition. They thrive in the status quo. They can be a force for good or for ill, but they will usually be put at odds with the hero for one simple reason: the ruler likes the way things are and doesn’t want them to change.

While every one of us has the capacity to lead in times of conflict, not everyone handles being in a position of authority very well. Power corrupts, and even good people can find their values tested if they’re given too much power too quickly. This is why many ruler archetypes find themselves embroiled in conflict with those around them.

Some ruler archetypes in literature are King Uther from the Arthurian legends and Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada .

How to use character archetypes in your story

As you can see, character archetypes represent a range of people from all across literature. Don’t feel like you need to limit the cast of your story to just one of these archetypes—sometimes characters will fill more than one role in a story, or their role will change. Let’s look at a few things to keep in mind as you use archetypes to build characters.

1. Give your characters room to grow

Although character archetypes are useful building blocks, they essentially represent a static blueprint. In a good story, your characters will change over time as they learn, make mistakes, go through difficult experiences and come out stronger on the other side. If you begin with a character archetype, don’t feel that you need to stay within its boundaries for the entire story. Give your character permission to surprise you, break their molds, enter into a different archetype along the way, or become something new entirely.

For example, you may have crafted a perfect sidekick for your hero. But what happens if the hero is killed in battle? How will the sidekick deal with an irrevocably altered reality where their role is no longer what they thought it was? Or maybe your character is a lover, staying out of harm’s way until they see or hear something that they can no longer turn away from. Let the story take your characters in unexpected directions.

2. Subvert expectations

Many of these character archetypes come with classic preconceptions that have become ingrained in our minds over time. These are things like the hero as a burly, club-wielding man; the damsel as a slender, doe-eyed blonde; or the mentor as a white-haired sage in the twilight of his life. These clichéd, overused ideas have fallen out of favor in contemporary literature, and writers are constantly coming up with new and fresh ways to look at these classic archetypes. See how you can take the figures you know from literature and turn them just a little bit off-center.

Instead of writing a mentor that’s a hundred and eighty and looks like your typical wizard cosplay, why not try something new? Maybe your mentor is a fourteen-year-old girl whose experiences as a computer hacker have made her wise beyond her years. Or maybe your mentor is an award-winning ballet dancer who’s training her understudy in secret. If you want a damsel archetype in your story, perhaps instead of being a dizzy love of interest for your hero, your damsel is the hero’s eternally optimistic, chronically ill younger brother. See how far you can push these character traits to bring a fresh look to your story.

3. Combine archetypes to create something new

Sometimes a character might fit into more than one archetype. As we saw above, the antihero is a perfect example of this composite character archetype, fulfilling the role of hero and trickster at the same time. See what else you can splice together to create exciting new people for your story. What happens when your hero’s mentor turns out to also be the villain? If the villain was the one giving the hero the tools and drive to complete their journey, what was the real goal in the end? Suddenly your antagonist and their relationship with the hero is brimming with complexity.

What happens if your damsel finds themselves becoming the hero? How will someone used to being taken care of handle needing to suddenly take care of others? How will their determination to see the best in the world affect their need to make difficult choices? By combining different archetypes you can raise new questions and new ideas about your characters that give a deeper dimension to your story.

Character archetypes are an easy way to structure your story

Generations of writers and storytellers have perfected these character structures in literature because they’ve recognized that they’re facets of each and every one of us. While you don’t need to limit your characters to just one archetype, they give you a reliable place to begin building from the ground up—a place that your readers will recognize as an old friend, because they’ve met them in another incarnation before. Your characters will all be as unique as you are, but they’ll also be born out of a rich heritage of storytelling.

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NASA Is Recruiting a New Class of Astronauts

Victor Glover, a nine-year veteran of the astronaut corps who will fly around the moon in 2025, said the search for excellence and diversity were not mutually exclusive.

By Kenneth Chang and Emma Goldberg

The reporters interviewed a NASA official and an astronaut in The Times’s newsroom for this article.

Do you dream of leaving the planet?

NASA is looking for its next group of astronauts, and you have until April 2 to make a pitch for yourself .

“Typically, it’s a very popular application,” April Jordan, NASA’s astronaut selection manager, said.

The odds that you will be chosen are slim. The last time NASA put out a call for applications, in 2020, more than 12,000 people applied.

It took the agency a year and a half to go through the applications. NASA selected just 10 of the hopefuls, or 0.083 percent. That makes Harvard’s 3.5 percent acceptance rate among high school applicants appear bountiful.

“So when I say ‘popular,’” Ms. Jordan said, “it’s probably an understatement.”

Ms. Jordan is on a media tour to spread the word that “ the right stuff ” for being an astronaut in 2024 is not the same as what it was in the 1960s, when astronauts were all white men, almost all from the military.

Joining her on that tour, which included a stop at The New York Times, was Victor Glover, a nine-year veteran of the astronaut corps who offered a glimpse into how he made it through the rigorous selection process.

To become a NASA astronaut today, you have to be a U.S. citizen and you must pass the astronaut physical exam.

NASA does set a fairly high bar for education — a master’s degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, followed by at least three years of related professional experience.

Beyond that, the agency tries to keep an open mind. (There is no age limit, for example, or a requirement for 20/20 vision.)

“We want the group of astronaut candidates that we select to be reflective of the nation that they’re representing,” Ms. Jordan said.

Take, for example, Mr. Glover.

In some aspects, he fits the historical archetype. Before NASA, he was a Navy aviator and trained as a test pilot.

He is also breaking historical barriers.

In 2020, he became the first Black astronaut to serve as a crew member on the International Space Station after 20 years of astronauts living there. In 2025, he will become the first Black astronaut to fly around the moon for the Artemis II mission .

To stand out in NASA’s competitive application process, Mr. Glover knew he would need more than a strong résumé. He was particularly set on landing a good joke.

The night before one of Mr. Glover’s interviews at NASA for the 2013 class, he was asked to write an essay. The title: “Girls Like Astronauts.”

“They’re sitting in this room all day listening to all these dry answers,” he recalled thinking. “I’m going to try to make them laugh.”

The essay pivoted from a punchline to poignancy, reflecting on the ways he has tried to inspire his four daughters. He also decided to be vulnerable during the interview, sharing a “bone-headed” moment when he risked nearly hitting the water during an air show demonstration.

“You have to be able to share that information with the interview panel when you come in, because you’re inevitably going to fail at something,” Ms. Jordan said. “And so there’s a humbleness that you have to bring in even if you’ve achieved great things.”

As part of the application process, Mr. Glover wrote a limerick that concluded: “This is all dizzying to me, because I gave so much blood and pee.”

Mr. Glover set his sights on going to outer space as a child, when he saw his classmates moved to tears by the Challenger disaster.

His space ambition deepened years later when he heard a speech from Pam Melroy, a former space shuttle commander. Ms. Melroy, now NASA’s deputy administrator, recounted how her crew had scrambled to fix a damaged solar array on the International Space Station.

“I thought, ‘Wow, she just talked about something really technical, really logistically challenging,’” Mr. Glover said. “But the emotion in it was about the people.”

He realized, then, that just as astronauts need technical ability, they also need something that is more difficult to teach: social skills.

“You’re going to live in this tin can with somebody for six months,” he said of a stay on the space station. “We’re almost picking family members.”

Mr. Glover proudly points to the diversity of backgrounds among current astronauts. “If you compare our office to the country’s demographics, we match the country very well,” he said.

Indeed, the diversity within NASA outpaces that of the private sector in some aspects. The percentage of Black astronauts is higher than the percentage of Black people in the broader science and technology work force, Mr. Glover said.

That is the direct result of NASA’s sustained efforts over a couple of decades to recruit astronauts beyond the traditional archetype, he said.

“Our office looks the way it looks because of this intentionality, and thinking about our biases and how it may affect who we hire,” he said. “I think that’s a huge victory.”

But Mr. Glover acknowledged that diversity as a hiring goal was becoming increasingly fraught .

Critics include Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs SpaceX, the rocket company that NASA relies on to transport cargo and astronauts — like Mr. Glover — to the International Space Station. NASA has also hired SpaceX to land astronauts on the moon .

“His perspective on some things is a little disturbing,” Mr. Glover said of Mr. Musk.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment by Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musk has repeatedly called for the end of programs that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I. “D.E.I. is just another word for racism,” he posted in January on X, the social media network that he owns.

Mr. Glover said he had just listened to a contentious interview that Don Lemon , a former CNN anchor, recently conducted with Mr. Musk. “My mom sent it to me and she goes, ‘Does he remember you rode in his spaceship?’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Ma, he probably remembers very vividly.’ He’s a great intellect, but he probably just doesn’t care.”

People ask him how he feels about becoming the first Black person to go on a lunar mission next year when Artemis II will swing around the moon without landing.

“Actually, I’m sad,” Mr. Glover said. “It’s 2025, and I’m going to be the first? Come on.”

He recounted the story of Ed Dwight , the only Black Air Force pilot in the 1960s who met the restrictive requirements that NASA had for astronauts then. But Mr. Dwight was never selected.

“Ed Dwight could have done this in the ’60s,” Mr. Glover said. “How much better would our country be if he actually got the chance? Society wasn’t ready. It’s not him. He was ready.”

While Mr. Glover has heard some of the pushback to D.E.I. initiatives, he feels firmly that seeking diversity is not about lowering standards and accepting less qualified candidates. “I think it should just be excellence,” he said. “As long as you don’t equate whiteness or maleness with excellence, then we’re good. We’re speaking the same language.”

Many applicants are drawn by the potential glory of being the first astronauts to walk on Mars, an accomplishment that NASA is aiming for in the 2030s.

But Mr. Glover said they should also contemplate the sacrifices that they and their families might have to make along the way.

“The trip to Mars is six to nine months,” he said. “You’re going to be away from familiar for more than a year, one to three years. Are you really ready for that?”

Kenneth Chang , a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth. More about Kenneth Chang

Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change. More about Emma Goldberg

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