ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the exchange between life and archetype in the writings of Flora Tristan, but it must be remembered that she is paradigmatic of a whole group of writers for whom the voyage was as much a mystical as a physical rite of passage. Another rich source for the creation of both public and personal myths - again closely, but not exclusively, bound to the utopian thinkers - was the divinisation of woman: not any woman, but that strange hybrid who has always been the stuff of myth and religion. On the one hand, Tristan suffered from the fact that, as biological woman, she was cursed with an excessive fertility which threatened her with mental extinction and physical exhaustion in unremitting pregnancy. On the other hand, one of the few weapons she had in her determined battle against social odds was precisely that of her physical beauty.
