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Hero-Ego in Search of Self: A Jungian Reading of Beowulf. By Judy Anne White. Studies in the Humanities, Literature-Politics-Society, 26. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. Pp. ix + 123. $53.95.
What to do with Jung in the twenty-first century? (Many literary critics ask the same question about Freud, though I am not one of them.) In college I read Jung's Symbols of Transformation and Beowulf in the same semester, and applying one to the other seemed obvious and profound to me—but the professor was stern. John Niles is just as stern forty years later, in the Beowulf Handbook (ed. Niles and Robert Bjork, 1997):
The landscape of myth criticism is littered with the bones of dead theories. Wherever one looks in this lunar dreamscape, one stumbles across elements of the unreal: weather gods, Terrible Fathers, chaos demons, rites of passage, ritual dismemberments, shamanic dream travel, phallic swords, uroboric wombs, and the like. . . . The aura of the holy is enhanced by reeking altars dedicated to Jung, Frazer, or other High Gods of modern mythography. (p. 229)
In the first paragraph of Hero-Ego in Search of a Self, Judy Anne White acknowledges a slim tradition of Jungian criticism of Beowulf, consisting of an article by Jeffrey Helterman in 1968 and another by John Miles Foley in 1977. (She does not mention Jung's greatest influence on literary criticism, however, in the work of Northrop Frye, or Frye's greatest influence on Beowulf criticism, in the work of Alvin A. Lee.) In her book White develops the thesis first suggested by Foley, "that the progression of battles between man and monster in Beowulf . . . recounts both the process of individual psychological growth and the development of universal
human consciousness." More specifically, the poem's plot "represents the process of individual psychological development through which the ego confronts personal archetypes in order to achieve complete self-knowledge: the process of individuation" (p. 1).
James W. Earl
University of Oregon
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