A Jungian feminist analysis of Natalie Haynes' The Children of Jocasta, Orhan Pamuk's The Red-Haired Woman and Simin Daneshvar's A Persian Requiem

This thesis examines three novels, Natalie Haynes' Children of Jocasta, Orhan Pamuk's The Red-Haired Woman, and Simin Daneshvar's A Persian Requiem via the Jungian theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, and Joseph Campbell's related concept of the Hero's Journey, and the Heroine's Journey, its adaptation by Maureen Murdock. In this context, the thesis also discusses the effect of archetypes and mythology on literature. On this basis, the idea that myths from all over the world share similarities as they are based on archetypes is one of the main ideas of the thesis. Notably, archetypal mythology is reflected in literature via the monomyth, the hero's journey, and the heroine's journey. This inner journey reflects our journey towards psychological healing, growth and individuation, in other words towards finding the identity of the self. This inner journey is also reflected in the mandala archetype. The process of individuation allows the person carrying out this inner journey to go beyond dualities and to become an integrated Self. All of the novels in this study refer to mythology; they are all, to some extent, rewritings and reversions of the old myths. Through a study of the Greek and Persian myths underlying these novels, the first part of the thesis focuses on the similarities between these myths in the framework of archetypal mythology, including the hero's journey. The second part of this study focuses on the heroines of the novels and their search for identity from the perspective of the heroine's journey. Through this reading, the study concludes that, in the novels, the heroines move beyond traditional gender roles, thus closing the circle of the archetypal journey towards wholeness. Key Terms: archetypes, the collective unconscious, mythology, Individuality, Psychoanalysis, Identity, Sexuality, wholeness