Creation And Destruction:an Archetypal Analysis Of Updike’’s The Witches Of Eastwick

John Updike is one of the greatest American writers in the 20 th century. He is a novelist, poet, dramatist, proser and critic. He is one of the remarkable prolific American writers who has published over 50 books in his whole life. In his whole life, John Updike won almost all the American national writing awards, including two Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, two National Book Award for Fiction, and many other major awards. However, after John Updike published Rabbit, Run, he was repeatedly criticized for creating women characters who occupied the fringes of his stories, as wives and mothers, or even worse, as sex objects, and some feminist critics believed that he was misogynist. His novel The Witches of Eastwick is intended to be his counterargument against the feminist accusation that he is a misogynic writer.This study aims to explore Updike’s attitude toward women through an archetypal analysis of the characterization, structure and plot of the novel. By examining the connections between the novel and Greek mythology and the Bible, this author finds out that Updike believes in the true parity between men and women, which is men and women are all just humans; women are not inferior to men, but they are not superior to men, either.The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the subject of this study, John Updike and The Witches of Eastwick. Chapter two introduces the theoretic method of the study, archetypal criticism. Chapter three reviews the researches of Updike and the novel abroad and in China. Chapters four and five analyze the heroines’ creative and destructive powers. The last chapter concludes that Updike believes that women are indeed powerful and creative, but they can also be as destructive as men.