The Good Goddess in Popular Fiction

Popular fantasy or speculative fiction by women often embraces ideas of Goddess Culture and matriarchal prehistory in positive but essentialized ways. Jean Auel’s bestselling Earth’s Children series (1980 - 2011) features heroine Ayla, a human raised by Neanderthals who then finds other humans, in Upper Paleolithic Europe. Ayla becomes a shamanistic leader of a peaceful, goddess-mother-worshipping culture. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series, especially The Mists of Avalon (1983), set during King Arthur’s time, focuses mainly on Morgaine, recast here as the good heroine and priestess of Mother-Goddess worshipping culture, that sadly falls before Patriarchy and Christianity during the novel. Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) focuses on Odysseus’ wife and how she is haunted by the hanging of her twelve maids, conceived as an overthrow of matriarchal prehistory. Such popular, speculative fiction by women writers romanticizes goddess culture, showing matriarchy as mostly, sadly gone, disappearing, or largely forgotten.