The desperate girl: Or, what *do* you call that archetype, anyway?

[hymnia]

I was getting ready to post this at

Comments

[prettyannamoon]

Interesting comparison, especially with Mayella. The wretched, maybe?

The artwork for Merope looks like it could be by Heather aka Makani.

[hymnia]

Actually, I took a second look at the French site, and I was able to figure it out. This is the artist: http://tearain.tripod.com/hp/index.html

The style is a bit similar to Makani's, though.

[prettyannamoon]

Tealin! She was one of the first HP artists I ran into - I didn't realize she was still around!

[tesgirl123]

Part of me has always wondered just how much we as readers unconciously internalize and would unintentionally borrow for our own purposes. Obviously nothing in those pieces is plagiarized, but the style and the imagery is so remarkably similar that you have to question things.

Is it because we all hold this image in our minds that our words reflect the image, or is it because the images have taken shape as a result of the words?

Hopefully that made sense because I'm really tired and slightly tipsy

[hymnia]

*nods* It made sense to me.

[thewhiteowl]

Oh, now I feel like re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Definitely seeing the Mayella resemblance.

[hymnia]

The Mayella-Merope resemblance is most striking, I agree. Eponine is similar, but there is at least one very important difference. As the essayist I linked to above pointed out, the obsessive love of those two girls drove them to do terrible things, and those terrible things led to even more terrible things that drove much of the conflict in their respective stories. Eponine, on the other hand, while a bit morally inconsistent, ultimately loved Marius in a much more self-sacrificing way.

[hymnia]

Also, Mayella and Merope are more similar physically; neither of them are "beautiful" in spite of their impoverished state, and both are noted for keeping clean where Eponine allows straw to entangle her hair. But what strikes me in all three descriptions is that in each there is a strong sense of contradiction: wretched but beautiful, fragile but thick-bodied, clean but defeated-looking.

[heavenscribe]

I agree Joie. This is a contradictory archetype. These women are pathetic yet they have some mysterious aura that draws both men and the reader. It is interesting that the way Hugo wrote Eponine is different from the way she is portrayed in the musical and other movie adaptions. In the musical she is just this rash teenager, not at all gentle or pleasingly poor.