Jody’s presentation is called, “Edenic Comedies—The Missing Fourth in Louise Cowan’s Theory of Comedy”
In The Terrain of Comedy, professor of English Louise Cowan proposed that all comedies can be categorized as Infernal, Purgatorial, or Paradisal, depending on how the plot plays out. Jody Gentian Bower argues in this presentation that many comedies—particularly those featuring women as the main protagonists—fall into a fourth category. Following Cowan’s naming scheme, Dr. Bower calls this the Edenic comedy. In addition to describing the unique characteristics of the Edenic comedy, Dr. Bower delineates how careful and deliberate use of costuming, lighting, props, secondary characters, and background contributes to the distinctive “archetypal field” of each type of comedy.
About Jody:
Jody Gentian Bower is a cultural mythologist who earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with a Depth Psychology Emphasis from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2012. She is the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story (Quest 2015), which examines the “wandering heroine” story that has been told for centuries, and The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties become Warrior Goddesses (Mandorla 2020), about the evolution of female agency in scifi and fantasy shows over the last 80 years. She writes and lectures about archetypal and mythological motifs in modern culture and blogs about movies at jodybower.com. She is currently at work on a historical romance, set during the War of 1812 and based on a family legend.