Goddess theory and the heroine's journey in 'Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts' and 'Burger's Daughter' (Maxine Hong Kingston, Nadine Gordimer, South Africa)

This thesis applies goddess theory and the heroine's journey to contemporary women's literature. Research in archetypal criticism concentrating on Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, Jennifer and Roger Woolger's The Goddess Within, and Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey, determined an overall goddess archetype epitomizing the heroine's journey as portrayed in contemporary women's literature. My thesis applies the Athena archetype from The Goddess Within to the characters in two modern works, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, using the heroine's journey as a template for the spiritual quest of the woman searching for identity. Both works exhibited aspects of the Athena archetype and the heroine's journey. Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts was stronger in the goddess theory of the Athena archetype while Burger's Daughter concentrated on the heroine's journey of reintegration of its main character, Rosa Burger.