Guide to Literary Terms | Archetype

Archetype (also called prototype) - the original model or pattern from which copies are made or from which something develops. It is also a symbol, theme, setting, or character that is thought to have some universal meaning and recurs in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, dreams, and rituals.

The term is from the Greek archetupon, meaning “pattern” or “model.”

The psychologist Carl Jung identified the archetype in the collective unconscious of mankind: the ideas or modes of thought derived from the experiences of a race—such as birth, death, love, family life, struggles—inherited in the subconscious of an individual from ancestors and expressed in myths, dreams, and literature.

Plato was the first philosopher to use archetypes, especially those of beauty, truth, and goodness. Sophocles used the archetypes of blindness, patricide, incest, and fratricide. Hawthorne and Melville focused on the archetypes of sin, retribution, and death in their works (The Scarlet Letter and Billy Budd, respectively). The Greek Myth of Pandora introduces the archetype of the mischievous woman, exemplified by Madame Merle in James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881).

see: folklore, imagery, literature, myth.