The Female Hero: Personal Reflections on the Appeal of Leia Organa

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Title:	The Female Hero: Personal Reflections on the Appeal of Leia Organa
Creator:	Pat Nusmann
Date(s):	1982
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Star Wars
Topic:
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The Female Hero: Personal Reflections on the Appeal of Leia Organa is a 1982 essay by Pat Nussman.

It was printed in the feminist multimedia zine Storms #2.

The essay was a response, in part, to a letter of comment by Jean L. Stevenson Jundland Wastes #7 (January 1982) and an essay by Anne Elizabeth Zeek, "Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?", part two. Jundland Wastes #5/6 (November 1981).

It, along with Visible Women, also may have been a response to Princess Leia: An Analysis, or Running the Alliance is Not All Fun and Games which had been published in "Storms" #1 the year before. Several fans remarked that this previous essay was too short.

Some Topics Discussed

• Leia Organa as a hero
• fairy tales and Star Wars
• the fairy tales "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Frog Prince"
• mentions of George Lucas' "slipperiness"
• the growth of humans

The Essay

"For me...she is the hero."

As I read those words, I felt an inward chord struck, reverberating with all the force of a truth known but never verbalized. What I had long searched for in literature, in movies, in life — a heroine, a woman to identify with, to admire, and to cheer on to eventual triumph — was found the first time I saw The Empire Strikes Back. I wrote about Leia, talked about her, considered myself a Leia fan, but not until I read Jean's letter did a phrase capture the deep emotional pull I felt for Leia Organa since TESB: "...she is the hero."

I admired the Leia of Star Wars: A New Hope, but it was the Empire Leia who drew me. Here was a woman who had lost a world, but continues her struggle against evil in her society while she faces, simultaneously, another conflict: whether to continue to deny her emotional needs or to accept them in a "scoundrel's" arms. Near the end of the film she faces both the evil without and the woman within as, in a scene drawn from a medieval hell, her lover is immured in the limbo of carbon freeze. She declares her love and comnittment in the face of possible death, in the presence of the Dark Lord himself. In that instant, my emotions chose Leia as hero; Jean's letter prompted me to investigate the reasons for that choice.

There's the obvious. Leia's brave,: smart, witty, and despite the
doubts of those who consider her merely a" damsel in distress, she's
 central to the course of the saga. Anne Elizabeth Zeek, in a recent
 article stated it thus: "Leia is the McGuffin for the entire middle
trilogy. Because she is who she is and was where she was the entire
SWars sage is set in motion; she has the tapes, dispatches the droids,
enchants Luke, gets captured by Vader, watches Alderaan be destroyed,
escapes with Luke and Han, is a leader of the rebellion, exerts a strong
pull on Han, etc. etc."

Leia is the catalyst, the reason the events in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back occur. And she is by no means as passive a mover of events as many fans feel — it is her very active mission to transport the Death Star plans from rebel spies to her father that sets the action on its course. This is hardly typical of a "get-captured-and-wait-to-be-rescued" heroine.

The Leia of Empire is not strictly a catalyst to action, nor a swashbuckling heroine, but a growing, developing woman. In the course of the film, Leia Organa is challenged to mature, struggle, survive. There could hardly be a more universal theme than this. When I looked at other literature that attracts me in the same fashion, it became clear that here was the magnet — Leia's growth and search for the redemption of her society, for her own new feelings, for her love. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the main theme of the literature on which George Lucas modeled Star Wars: fairy tales. Many influences can be traced in the SWars saga — old movie serials, comic strips, westerns, a wealth of old fims (the Han/Leia relationship carries strong echoes of Tracy and Hepburn), but throughout the printed interviews with George Lucas, Gary Kurtz, Irvin Kershner, Harrison Ford, and others deeply involved in the saga, the fairy tale aspect surfaces again and again, much more frequently than any other cited influence.

"I was trying to design a modern fairy tale," Lucas said in an interview with Alan Arnold. "I wanted to give them (young people) a fantasy life they could act out and use, as^traditional fairy tales have been used by society for thousands of years." In another interview, in which Lucas discussed the origin of the saga, he noted: "There were certain underlying ideas when I started: one was to tell a fairy tale, which is what it is — a fary tale in space guise." And: "As_I say, it started out as a simple fairy tale and that's all it really is."

Says actor Harrison Ford: "What Star Wars has accomplished is really not possible—Nobody rational would have believed that there is still a place for fairy tales." Gary Kurtz: "The main purpose of telling the saga is the same purpose that £airy tales serve for young children. It's telling a moral story, in a way."

Significantly, when TESB director Irvin Kershner was asked about,his preparation for making the film, he replied: "I...read everything.I could about fairy tales, what makes them work — everything from Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment to the most obscure monographs."

How then does Leia's story fit into the larger fairy tale of Star Wars? She seems to me to fit perfectly into a particular type of fairy tale that I've always loved and which, as an adult, I found is known as the "animal-groom" cycle. When I first read them, as a child, I didn't see any particular 'type' to them; they were simply stories I loved, stories which spoke to me. The theme? A maiden's search, attended by suffering and learning, and hindered by her own blindness, for self-actualization and love.

In all of these the heroine, who is often fulfilling a task to aid her father, meets with an animal lover (or, to make it more obvious, a lover who appears to be something different than what he actually is). She does not, until it seems too late, recognize what lies beneath his unprepossessing exterior. When she accepts him — often after an arduous quest — she is able to restore him to his true shape and through so doing, lift the enchantment #hich the forces of evil have placed on the prince's land. She is the savior of both her true love — her other soul — and her society.

The echoes of this theme, to me, are clear in A New Hope and become even louder in the darkly rich atmosphere of The Empire Strikes Back. Leia Organa is sent by her father on a mission to redeem the freedom of the galaxy. This is in the true fairy tale tradition of the father — if unconsciously — pairing the hero and heroine in what will become a marriage contract. Bettelheim notes: "The father...in so many stories of the animal-groom cycle, is the person who brings his daughter and her future husband together..." ' In her struggle to carry out her father's wishes, Leia is aided by a "pretty Corellian smuggler", whose last-minute rescue of Skywalker enables Luke to destroy the Death Star and thus carry out Bail Organa's goal. Leia senses something behind the scoundrel ("I knew there was more to you than money," she says.), but doesn't perceive her feelings for him clearly until that moment on the brink, when it appears she will lose him. Thus, through her sufferings and the influence of Han Solo, Leia Organa is growing and learning.

If, indeed, Leia is one part of Lucas1 composite fairy tale hero, will she follow these animal-groom fairy tales and redeem her imprisoned lover? Is Han Solo indeed "not what he seems"? Some current speculation points in the direction of Han Solo as "the other", mentioned by Yoda. If so, when Leia redeems her lover, she may well release the "enchantment" which has that galaxy in thrall.

But all that is speculation — only next year and the release of ROTJ will tell. But as for why Leia and these other heroines appeal, I can only speak for myself. Bettelheim speaks of "the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence — but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust,hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end energes

In George Lucas' enchanted universe, Leia Organa is one guide. This is the female rite of passage, and for those of us living the journey of a woman's life, there is inspiration in this woman who is undaunted by the loss of a world and the withdrawal of a loved one and consolation in a heroine who has her own blindnesses and faults, but is able to grow, to rise above past mistakes. With Leia we struggle toward that final moment when our search is ended, the scales fall from our eyes, the enchantment set by evil forces fades, and we find at our side the soul-mate of our dreams and consummate the union which will make us whole and redeem our world, freeing us to live "happily ever after".

Yes, of course it's impossible.

But a reach beyond our grasp is what dreams, fairy tales, and the Star Wars saga is all about. These are the fictions that are truer than life, for they reflect our inward selves, rather than any false, outward "reality"; here the frog is a prince indeed. And the most mundane soul among us still a princess — tempermental, sarcastic, fallible, blind, but still in there trying.

That striving, that journey, that quest, is what makes Leia Organa the female hero — the heroine inside us all.

Reactions and Reviews

"The Female Hero", by Pat Nussman, is subtitled "Personal Reflections on the Appeal of Leia Organa". Nussman writes an interesting and entertaining essay in which she traces some of the common elements she finds in her favorite myths and fairy-tales and in Star Wars. Han Solo as the Frog Prince? Perhaps. But as Nussman points out, even more important is the quest of identity that Leia Organa, the female hero, is undertaking--and that we, through identification and empathy, can take with her.