How to Make an American Quilt: An Archetypal Exploration of Marriage

APHRODITE sprinkled scented nectar on
his blood, which then fermented, even as
bright bubbles form when raindrops fall on mud.
One hour had yet to pass when, from that gore,
a bloodred flower sprang, the very color
of pomegranates when that fruit is ripe
and hides sweet seeds beneath its pliant rind.
And yet Adonis’ blossoms have brief life:
his flower is light and delicate; it clings
too loosely to the stem and thus is called
Anemone – ‘born of the wind’- because
winds shake its fragile petals, and they fall.
(The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Book X)

How to Make an American Quilt explores the concept of marriage through multiple generations. Finn, the main character, is a 26-year-old graduate student contemplating marriage. Her narrative is stitched upon the backdrop of a wedding quilt, crafted throughout the movie by her grandmother’s quilting bee. In the movie, each woman elder creates a quilt square that represents where love resides for them, and as the viewer, we are able to share in their stories through multiple flashbacks to the 50’s when these women were coming of age and finding love. Though this is a quilt formed to celebrate marriage, the stories these women share are tragic, and Finn is left to debate whether marriage is worth it at all.

This essay explores the archetypes present in How to Make an American Quilt and how these archetypes move and interact to create an engaging story surrounding marriage and relationship. We begin to understand the inner workings of a narrative when we recognize the movement of the archetypal energies within them, just as we begin to understand our own inner narrative when we recognize the archetypal energies within our own psyche. James Hillman refers to these archetypal energies as “impersonal inhuman immortals [who] take up rooms in the personal frailties of the human household […]” (“Marriage” 11). These immortals battle between us and within us. As we learn to recognize archetypal energies, we begin to make meaning of our suffering, a suffering that is inherent to love and relationship, inherent to our human condition. According to Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, “The central issue in marriage is not well-being or happiness; it is […] salvation” (124). Marriage is the relationship of two people working through one another, two souls entangled and wounding each other, in the hope of opening into the numinous that touches the soul. This is what relationship does, it is what love does when we give fully of ourselves – it wounds us in the end. However, this is part of the initiation, as Ginette Paris explains, marriage is a series of initiations, with multiple stages and levels (“Marriage” 1). She continues, “One can only hope for a finer consciousness, one that transforms psychological distress into soul-making” (2). If we hold onto the suffering, the tension of love and loss, there arises within us a higher consciousness, or the Jungian term individuation. This is the numinous experience of soul-making. To understand the suffering of love and marriage as portrayed in the narrative, we must explore the archetypes that move about this movie. The images of archetypal studies offer an exploration of suffering within this narrative and our own psyche.

In the opening scene of the movie, we see the main character Finn as a child. She sits beneath a quilt as her grandmother and her quilting bee pull their needles and thread through the fabric. Her adult voice plays over the scene as she explains, “I remember sitting under the quilting frame pretending that I was surrounded by a forest of friendly trees and that their stitches were messages from giants written across the sky” (00:01, Chapter 1). This young girl’s vision of what takes place above her is mythic, and we see her experiencing the wonder of a child and understand that in some sense throughout the movie, she is striving to touch this wonder again. Fabric and trees are the underpinning for the narrative as Finn continues to weave her story. We then flash to Finn as an adult graduate student working on her third master’s thesis (00:02, Chapter 1). She switches topics each time she gets close to the end of her work, unable to commit to anything that defines or constricts her. Her voice over the scene explains this as her fiancé puts a hammer through the wall. They are renovating and she has decided to go to her grandmother’s home for the summer to finish her thesis and contemplate her upcoming marriage. Through these multiple images of upheaval and the inability to commit she explains, “How do you merge into this thing called ‘couple’ and still leave a little room for yourself? And how do we even know if we’re supposed to be with one person for the rest of our lives?” (00:03, Chapter 1). And then she holds up a book with a Cycladic figure of the Goddess, and we as viewers recognize that this movie is concerned with the movement of the feminine. The goddesses are at play and it is for us to recognize the archetypal elements that are moving about in the drama.

In the next scene, we are taken into an Artemisian realm as we go to her grandmother’s house full of women (00:04, Chapter 2). Paris explains, “Sometimes an encounter or a trip exclusively with women becomes an occasion for re-activating our ‘puella,’ that is, the little girl who still inhabits us” (Meditations 155). Finn seeks to find the little girl beneath the quilt, who lived amongst the trees and read the writing of giants. However, Artemis is not the only goddess present, for this movie is about love. It is about the attraction that pulls us to one another, and though the grounds of her grandmother’s home are lush with vegetation, they are not wild like Artemis. These gardens are manicured, these elder women are dressed beautifully, and the domestic craftsmanship of these women open us into the realm of Aphrodite. It is she who teaches the viewer where love resides.

Aphrodite is the goddess of attraction and beauty. She is beauty, its creation, and enjoyment. She manifests in cultured gardens, lovely attire and in ordinary crafts beautifully made for pleasure. Paris explains, “Aphrodisiacal art is a matter of making everyday life more beautiful and more ‘civilized’” (Meditations 18). The design of the quilt is a creation of beauty, an appearance of Aphrodite, and Finn explains this as she tells the quilting bee that her thesis is “looking at women’s handiwork in various tribal cultures and […] showing how making a basket, or a digging stick, or whatever, is all done with a sense of ritual” (00:07, Chapter 3). She, in some aspect, is writing her thesis about the appearance of Aphrodite in the rituals of creation. Aphrodite opens us to beauty amidst all that life brings, even the wounding. As these women create their images of love, Aphrodite is re-visioning them, offering her lens which sees the beauty that resides in the tragic. Through a series of multiple flashbacks throughout the movie, each elder woman explains the quilt square they are creating, each square holding an image symbolic of where love resides for them. Life has met each of these women in tragic ways. All of them are wounded by love. Adultery, abandonment and a great deal of patriarchal sexism tell of the pains of love and relationship and the scars they leave upon us.

There are multiple flashbacks throughout the movie, two of which hold archetypal themes. One flashback introduces Sophia, a grumpy menacing old woman who was once a beautiful young woman who loved to dive. We see her meeting her future husband, a geologist, at the neighborhood pool. On their first date, he has a well-planned outing but she instead takes him out into the wilderness where she immediately gets into the water, for it is the freshwater of the natural spring that is the love of her life. “This is where I usually come to swim” she explains, and we see Artemis in her (00:31, Chapter 10). Artemis is the goddess of the wilderness, of virgins, and children. She remains in and of herself, not giving any of who she is to any “other.” Paris explains, “Artemis, […] thus comes to sanctify solitude, natural and primitive living to which we may all return whenever we find it necessary to belong only to ourselves” and she “guarantees our resistance to a domestication that would be too complete” (Meditations 110). Therefore, we watch as Sophia’s marriage to the geologist falls apart after multiple children. The domesticated life of a woman in the 50’s with multiple children to care for and a husband working all the time kills her soul. She never steps into the archetype of Demeter, never really wanted that anyway. She wanted to escape her alcoholic mother and in a rigid era of patriarchy, marriage was the only way out. In one last effort to reanimate who she was, her husband builds a pond for her in the backyard (00:36, Chapter 11). Bitter and numb, she snaps back at his efforts with disgust and that night, he leaves her with all four of their children. A tragedy we could see coming.

A second flashback tells the story of Anna, a young servant who works with her aunt for a wealthy white family. She is seduced by a young white man visiting his relatives and sent away when it is discovered that she is pregnant. Though it is expected that she give her daughter up for adoption, we see the mother archetype of Demeter awaken in her as she vehemently defends her right to keep her baby daughter. Demeter is the great mother of the earth, the energy that brings the grain, all that feeds us and nourishes us. According to the Homeric Hymns, when Hades captured her daughter Persephone, “sharp grief seized [Demeter’s] heart, and she tore the veil on her ambrosial hair with her own hands” as she cried out demanding that her daughter be returned to her, refusing to let anything grow on earth until Zeus conceded to her demand (Foley 4). This passion awoke in Anna with the birth of her daughter. She explains, “It was not the love of a husband I was meant to find but the love of my daughter” (01:18, Chapter 21). Though an erotic attraction pulled two together, the love Anna found was that of her creation, to love and be loved by the awakening of the archetype of the mother.

As the flashbacks continue to dance between the past and the present, Finn is introduced to Leon, a vivacious and attractive young man that exudes sex appeal. The day is hot when Leon enters the narrative. We see images of sweat, Finn melting ice down her neck, and Leon slinging water from his hair onto Finn at the pool (00:23, Chapter 8). His presence makes her squirm and we continue to watch this develop each time they interact. In the next scene, she is sitting on the front porch studying ritual art and as she examines a figure with an abnormally large phallus, Leon steps onto the porch with a basket of strawberries (00:55, Chapter 16). He feeds them to her awkwardly and a few scenes later they are meeting in the tree orchard, making love under the stars (01:20, Chapter 22). Leon introduces the archetypal energy of Dionysos, what Annis Pratt calls the green-world lover (140). He is the one “who call[s] up libidinal powers that signal maturation” (Pratt 140). He resides within the humid night and the fluids of sexual union (Paris, Grace 35). Dionysos is the liberator and he breaks through, destroys, or rearranges what appears before us, whatever inhibits the ability of libidinal energy to move (Paris, Grace 25). Hillman states that Dionysos is the “loosening within any moment, place, or condition” (“Marriage” 5). He will not be resisted and he tears down barriers blocking psychic energy especially the barricades which we place upon ourselves, or that society places upon us. Paris explains that “archetypal psychology […] describes Dionysos as a path of freedom for our inner oppressed woman” (Grace 33). Women are liberated not through “intentional, calculated, heroic process” but rather “when the inner Maenad finally is let out, free to feel whatever she feels, including vulnerability as well as strength, distress as well as potency” (Paris, Grace 33). Finn is all in her head, attempting to find a rational and strategic solution to life. However, Dionysos refuses such rigidity. To experience the energy of life requires a letting go and an opening to the fullness of life, of soul-making. This kind of movement has no strategic plan. It must move in its own way. Paris states, “Dionysos can’t bear people who value reason and moderation above all else, who repress all grunts, spasms of laughter and tears, those naive enough to think they can rid themselves of all darkness, of all madness” (Grace 19). Dionysos breaks Finn out of her psychic enclosures, opens her up, and the entire narrative starts to shift.

As Finn admits to her mother that she is sleeping with another man, a devil’s wind blows in. The strong winds blow open the windows and her dissertation floats into the wind. We watch as the pages go throughout the little town and we observe as the wind pulls each of these elder women into a realization of the love they have found in their lives (01:30, Chapter 25). We witness Artemis stepping back into the water to retrieve one of the thesis pages and we watch her spirit awaken (1:34, Chapter 25).

The presence of Hermes, the god of change and movement, guides the soul to its own revelation. His wind stirs the narrative in a disruptive movement that agitates but also assures the awakening of love in whatever form. Paris states that Hermes and Aphrodite “will stoop to lying, cheating and conniving to serve the principle they personify, which is the essential libido, love of life, not marriage” (“Marriage” 7). Domestic arrangements mean nothing to Aphrodite unless they are in service to love. Dionysos opens Finn into this love that promises nothing and Hermes as psychopomp, the one who guides souls through transition, brings her to this threshold.

In this narrative, presided over by Aphrodite, Finn stands at the threshold of a love that offers no promise of forever. Paris states, “love gives itself as eternal and departs; that is part of Aphrodite’s myth” (Meditations 77). It is tragic and yet beautiful just as the myth of Adonis, the beautiful young love of Aphrodite destined to die in his youth by a wild boar. Upon his death Ovid tells how Aphrodite:
sprinkled scented nectar on
his blood, which then fermented, even as
bright bubbles form when raindrops fall on mud.
One hour had yet to pass when, from that gore,
a bloodred flower sprang, the very color
of pomegranates when that fruit is ripe
and hides sweet seeds beneath it pliant rind.
And yet Adonis’ blossoms have brief life:
his flower is light and delicate; it clings
too loosely to the stem and thus is called
Anemone – ‘born of the wind’- because
winds shake its fragile petals, and they fall. (Book X)
Aphrodite’s myth gives us the courage to love again and again knowing all the while, it will break our heart.

The final scenes of the movie shows Finn pulling together the pieces of her thesis while the elder women connect the squares of her wedding quilt. The goddess Mnemosyne resides as each individual narrative of these elder women is contained into a symbolic image sewn onto a square. The great Titaness of memory, Mnemosyne moves with the stories as experience transitions into memory. In this way she is the form on which we interweave the narrative of our life. In the words of Paris, “Memory the myth-maker weaves the fabric of our lives” (Grace 124). Memory does not solidify form but rather moves within us, looking back while also pulling us in, allowing us to see the soul-making in the suffering. We become our wounds and yet they do not destroy us. Rather, they become our story.

Hillman states that we suffer until “memory returns as image,” until our personal identity releases “into the mirrors of impersonal reflections” (“Silver” 22). These women bear witness to this awakening, to this coming into themselves, in the way that Aphrodite is in-and-of-herself, allowing nothing to define her but her. These women begin to own what has happened to them not as victims but as wounds that bring depth and a never-ending wealth of love. Paris states, “The cult of Aphrodite is not the cult of oneself and of one’s own beauty; it is the artful giving of oneself” and the beauty of this offering to Aphrodite is witnessed in this narrative as each woman connects her image of love with the other, all tragic, all heart-breaking, and all visions of love given again and again (Meditations 103).

Hera is the goddess of marriage. Robert Stein explains how the rigidity of the Zeus-Hera archetypal marriage locks the feminine aspect of soul into “coupling and carrying the responsibility for upholding the sanctity of the marriage bond” (277). He continues, “If the feminine is always a function of a responsiveness to the quick of life and to the movements of soul in the moment, to make it the responsible guardian for a rigid patriarchal marriage oppresses soul and the flow of life” (Stein 277). This is where Aphrodite enters the marriage bond, for the soul needs to be free to be responsive to the movements of life and love. Stein explains how the feminine places the highest value on the relationship rather than the masculine value of purpose and accomplishment (363). Aphrodite’s fidelity is to the soul, the lovely tug that pulls us to one another, the beauty found in giving of ourselves amidst the loss–with no other purpose than to love–is beauty.

Hillman explains that it is a “simple truth that we are each deeply and necessarily dependent on one another” (“Marriage” 4). He continues, “Freedom is assured less by exercising your individual will in distinction to all others and more by belonging to the other” (5). It is through relationship that we learn who we are. Throughout the film, Finn is fighting for her individuality, fearful to lose herself in marriage. Aphrodite awakens the beauty of loving simply to love, with nothing in return. This interconnection taps into soul-making, the numinous that is beyond the two but also of them. It cannot be kept, not beyond moments, but we love to reach beyond ourselves, even if it tears us apart. Wrapped in the quilt that holds all the images of beauty others have found amidst the pain, perhaps because of it, Finn steps across the threshold into the journey of marriage with her fiancée. Her final words in the movie, “You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave” (1:49, Chapter 29). We are the ones that wound as well as the love that heals.

Works Cited

Foley, Helene, trans. and ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Print
Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf. Marriage Dead or Alive. Trans. Murray Stein. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1977. Print
Hillman, James. “Marriage, Intimacy, Freedom.” Spring 60 (1996): 1-11.Print
—-. “Silver and the white earth (Part Two).” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1981): 21-66. Print
Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Print
Paris, Ginette. “Marriage, Intimacy, Freedom.” Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California. 1993. Lecture Handout
—-. Pagan Grace: Dionysos, Hermes, and Goddess Memory in Daily Life. Trans. Joanna Mott. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1990. Print
—-. Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia. Trans. Gwendolyn Moore. Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1986. Print
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Indiana: Indiana UP, 1981. Print
Stein, Robert. Love, Sex, and Marriage: Collected Essays of Robert Stein. Connecticut: Spring Journal Books, 2001. Print