The Golden Girls Archetypes

One of the most powerful things about a story is how good storytelling uses familiar archetypes to explain things in the world around us. Storytelling was the first science, it was a clever way to explain the world around us and how things are the way they are. The book religions are full of stories that helped ancient people understand the world around them. Even pagan religions that have been lost to time, had stories to explain natural phenomena that mankind did not yet have the technology or science to fully understand.

This was also true for people. Parables and allegory have been used to help people understand human relations and what kind of people there are around us. In this post, I wanted to talk about the archetypes within one of my favorite TV shows: The Golden Girls. From 1986–1992, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and Bea Arthur brought feminity into our living rooms in a way that hadn’t been on TV before. TVwas notoriously cruel to women. Once a woman hit 35, roles for women diminished. If an actress was lucky she could be a mother, maid of a grandmother brought on for a little screen time as possible. Main characters were young and vivacious. The Golden Girls broke that down and introduced the public to what salacious lives could be led after 50. In the 1980s, the generation that had won World War II was beginning to retire and figure out what life would be like after…