Reflections on Feminine Archetypes

When writing my previous blog post about Carl Jung and his theory of archetypes I couldn't help but reflect upon my undergraduate dissertation. My dissertation focused on the character trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) and how she has evolved in contemporary cinema. When I was writing about the limitations of Jung's idea of archetypes and how stereotyping characters leads to restrictive, limiting and boring narratives especially for female characters I was thinking of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term in 2007 in his review of the movie Elizabethtown. Kirsten Dunst's character of Claire Colburn, who he describes as a "psychotically chipper waitress", was the inspiration for the term. Claire becomes the very first Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the MPDG blueprint.

Claire Colburn

Rabin defines this character trope in his review as a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Rabin).

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is defined by men and is created for them. It all centers around this patriarchal notion of female fantasies, similar to feminine archetypes. Whether it be the mother, the muse, the lover, the sacred wife, all of these archetypes are just like the MPDG in that they are crafted by men and are male fantasies birthed from patriarchal ideologies and beliefs.

Nathan Rabin, the creator of the trope, recognises the issues with it. He regrets ever coining the term in the first place and issued an apology for introducing it to pop culture and to the contemporary film lexicon.Rabin acknowledges that the trope is a fundamentally sexist characterisation as "it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualise” (Rabin, par.4). Categorising women into tropes, in general, is sexist practice and the same could be said for the archetypal view of women. Rabin describes his intention when coming up with the term as a means to “call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters" (Rabin). While he apologises for "creating this unstoppable monster”, the points he made regarding such a character depiction are not entirely invalid or wrong. He pointed out something that was true. Rabin calls for the death of the “Patriarchal Lie” of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope” and goes on to appeal to writers to instead create “more nuanced and multidimensional female characters: women with rich inner lives and complicated emotions and total autonomy, who might strum ukuleles or dance in the rain even when there are no men around to marvel at their free-spiritedness” (Rabin).

While we are calling for the death of sexist tropes such as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, maybe we ought to consider killing stereotypes and archetypes while we are it? Maybe we should bring an end to categorising women and female characters, especially if we are categorising them by their relationship to men and the purpose they serve the men in their lives.

R.I.P Manic Pixie Dream Girls

Works Cited

Rabin, Nathan. "The Bataan Death March Of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown". The A.V. Club, 2007, https://www.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1- elizabet-1798210595.

Rabin, Nathan. “I'm Sorry for Coining the Phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl.’” Salon, Salon.com, 16 July 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/im_sorry_for_coining_the_phrase_manic_pixie_dream_girl/.