The dangerous feminine: Female archetypes in Nikolai Gogol's short fiction

By treating Nikolai Gogol's fiction of the supernatural through an archetypal psychological approach the reader is able to synthesize myth, folk and fairytales with Gogol's supernatural themes and characters in order to gain a richer appreciation of his work. Gogol's Woman is a transformed archetype who is always linked to the supernatural. Gogol's female archetypes exhibit traditional archetypal patterns; yet Gogol' alters these images and the result is that the reader is misled from any probable outcome because of these new and unexpected traits and behaviors. This creates ambivalence with the Female and renders her as the "dangerous" Woman. By decoding Gogol's archetypes the reader can examine how he has transformed the original female archetype to elucidate his own message about Woman and how this dangerous female figure compromises the male.