Building on the work of Joseph Campbell and expanding it to include heroines, Maria Tatar takes us back to Scheherazade and her use of domestic craft in the form of storytelling. With her 1,001 stories, Scheherazade deploys the art of telling tales not just to survive but also to save the lives of others and change the culture in which she lives. For centuries, women were unable to heed the call to adventure, embark on journeys, and return from ordeals with instruments for healing. Instead, they were obliged in the main to stay at home, using words as their weapons and homespun in the form of textiles to broadcast injury and repair the fraying edges of the social fabric.

The women who have figured prominently in our cultural imagination were bedeviled by curiosity. Like Pandora and Eve, they had more than a touch of evil and were shouldered with the responsibility for making sin and mortality a part of the human condition. This talk will focus on how curiosity can be etymologically linked with care, and how those two attributes, along with craft, form the defining features of the heroine. Women may not have been able to leave the house, but they found ways to tell their stories and bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

Maria Tatar is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Folklore and Mythology, Emerita. She is the author of The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, among other volumes on fairy tales, folklore, and literature. She is the recipient of the 2018 NAACP award for Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction for Annotated African American Folktales, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.