Sound of a Silver Horn - Hardcover

Noble Ph.D., Kathleen

3.7

20 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449905888 ISBN 13: 9780449905883

Publisher: Fawcett, 1994

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"Compelling, insightful, and inspirational....This book has an uplifting message: we can contain greater inner strength and support than we realize."
LINDA SILVERMAN, Ph.D.
DIRECTOR, THE GIFTED DEVELOPMENT CENTER and
THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT, DENVER
Now for the first time, a psychologist unearths the female face of heroism and asks: What is the female hero's journey? How do women undertake the twin quests of healing and empowerment? And how can heroic women help reshape our chaotic world? Dr. Kathleen Noble charts the contemporary women's hero-path through the poignant, dynamic stories of women she has studied over the past ten years. From their rich histories she has fashioned a new framework for understanding life's events, and shows women how to devise new archetypes of heroism out of their own experiences.

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About the Author:

Kathleen Noble is Research Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Capable Youth at the University of Washington.

From Kirkus Reviews:

After the eloquent title, the high rhetoric, and the elaborate heroic schema appropriated from Joseph Campbell, Noble (Psychology, Women's Studies/Univ. of Washington) offers the very antithesis of the heroic: ordinary women leaving home and family to become nuns, teachers, lesbians. Lamenting that literature offers no model of female heroism (certainly true in the wan examples she cites), Noble offers herself: after a repressed childhood, she ran away from college, hitchhiked to California, attended school, had a clinical death in England, and returned to become herself and write this book. She describes the stages of the quest to be herself as the Awakening (the call to fulfill herself); the obstacles, or the six Dragons (self-deception, depression, dependence, prejudice, acquiescence to excessive obligations, and unexpected hardship or loss); the Allies (teachers, therapists, partner, friends); and the Transformation and return, reaching what she variously calls ``self-hood,'' becoming the hero, the ``center'' of her own life, ``belonging'' to herself alone, ``insisting'' upon herself. Such an egocentric goal is the very opposite of heroic action, which, in Campbell's paradigm, is undertaken on behalf of others and is measured and rewarded by the significance, grandeur, and dignity of the obstacles the hero has overcome. Citing Carolyn Heilbrun out of context, and referring also to fairy tales (in which women are rescued, enclosed, and then disappear from their own stories), Noble argues that there are no female heroes, literary or historical, comparable to male, and offers in their stead 35 pitiful women for whom heroism consists of leaving marriages, changing occupations, or coming out as lesbians. Shallow, pretentious, and uninformed: not only failing to make its case persuasively but debasing the very concepts of heroism it claims to make available to women. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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