Christiana Morgan: Stereotypes, Achievements, and Thought Process

What makes somebody an archetype? As I was listening to Ms. Slater’s lecture, I kept returning to this question. An archetype, as the dictionary says, is “a very typical example of a certain person or thing.” In other words, it’s almost like the encapsulation of a kind of person or thing. So how can somebody be the female archetype? Well, looking closely at the definition, we see that an archetype is a “very typical” example—in a way, an archetype is often a stereotype of sorts. And to Carl Jung, there was a very specific type of archetype for women.

Carl Jung, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, had long believed that Christiana Morgan was the perfect archetype of a woman. She was, as he said, a man’s “muse”, their inspiration. She was beautiful and smart… and existed to serve men. At least, that’s what Morgan thought, it seems; she heavily based her own feelings of success on how successful the men around her were. It probably doesn’t help that her lover, Henry Murray, also encouraged this thinking, and would (if I remember the lecture correctly) physically abuse her when she wasn’t doing well. Perhaps this man-pleasing ideology primarily came after visiting Jung and being told that she is a muse, but there is still something to be said that this was the kind of person that Jung decided was the perfect example of a woman—it feeds the idea that women can only exist for men. Maybe Jung was inadvertently affected by his education under Freud, who believed that women have some form of “penis envy”—in which a woman “realizes she does not possess a penis, and experiences an envy of the male, which accounted for much of female behavior.”

Of course, there were a number of things that Christiana did that were beyond the stereotypical life of a woman. She was educated, but primarily taught herself. She was a scientist, at one point a nurse for WWI, becoming a psychoanalyst afterwards. She helped build her own house. There’s a chance that these aspects also fed into Jung’s Muse idea. All of these things are impressive, especially for a woman born in the 1800s. 

Speaking of her house, Morgan’s house is an interesting place. I’ve never seen a house with so much thought put into each metaphorical aspect of it. I was particularly interested in the stain glass windows in the lower area. Not only are they gorgeous, but they’re also somewhat sinister, showing snakes—potentially related to the snake in the garden of Eden—and fire. I think its interesting that Morgan depicted the woman as a tree of sorts—it seems like a representation, in my opinion, of how women are seen as the givers of life, how women are reflected in “mother” nature, and the ways that women are connected to the rest of the world.