Hello, writers. Maybe you're all familiar with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces-- I wasn't till I ran across it at a used book sale a few years ago. In the book, Campbell introduces us to the monomyth, or the hero’s journey. It’s a slow read, so here’s the cheat sheet (and I just know you’ll spot the problem right away)--
The Hero's Journey
Departure/Separation from the Known
- The Call to Adventure (Gandalf’s all like, Frodo, check out this ring.)
- Refusal of the Call (Frodo’s all like, Gandalf, you gotta be kidding me.)
- Supernatural Aid aka the Gatekeeper (For Frodo, Gandalf. For his companions, Tom "Gag Me" Bombadil.)
- The Crossing of the First Threshold (In LOTR, a river, like in your better sort of myths.)
- The Belly of the Whale (The Barrow, which is even shaped like a belly. Frodo comes out a different guy from when he went in.)
Initiation
- The Road of Trials (Complete with Nazgul, orcs, and a Balrog. Frodo begins his scar collection. What doesn't kill him... doesn't kill him.)
- The Meeting with the Goddess (Galadriel, natch, who else?)
- Woman as the Temptress (Galadriel again. Not that kinda temptress, because Frodo doesn’t swing that way--but he’s tempted to offer her the damn ring, which he does.)
- Atonement with the Father (you get this more in the Harry Potter books. Harry is also on the Hero's Journey, and is constantly atoning with his dad. NTM any number of dad surrogates.)
- Apotheosis (This happens on Mt. Doom. Frodo becomes a being of pure light, at least temporarily, then he goes over to the dark side and is rescued by Gollum, who is on a journey of his own.)
- The Ultimate Boon (Peace on earth, unless you’re an orc. We’ve got the atom bomb, and the Dark Lord is destroyed.)
Return
- Refusal of the Return (This happens out of order for Frodo, when he ditches the Shire to go walkabout with Gandalf, Elrond, Bilbo and the gang.)
- The Magic Flight (Eagles!)
- Rescue from Without (Eagles!)
- The Crossing of the Return Threshold (the same river as in step 4.)
- Master of Both Worlds (Immediately upon his return to the Shire, Frodo goes all Gandalf on us, knowing stuff he can’t possibly know.)
- Freedom to Live
The hero isn’t required to go through all of the steps. Some can be skipped, or hit out of order. But the pattern, according to Campbell, is fulfilled by all of humanity’s great myths.
But you spotted the problem, right? What if a hero comes along, and he’s a girl? Campbell touches on this briefly in Hero With A Thousand Faces, assuring us* that the above schedule works for female heroes too, but you can tell he’s not really thinking about it, or he’d realize that the role of the archetypal goddess relies on the hero being the opposite sex from her, regardless of his orientation. Woman is a mystery, see, unless you happen to be one. In which case, she isn’t.
Maureen Murdoch sets out to address that in The Heroine's Journey. It's a very interesting book if you're reading it from the perspective of a writer. Murdoch is a psychotherapist, though, and the book quickly shifts from mythology to self-help. Rather disturbingly, the author suggests that depression is something to experience and explore. Ignore that. You're a writer, you need your damn anti-depressants!
The steps of the Heroine's Journey:
- Separation from the Feminine
- Identification with the Masculine
- The Road of Trials
- The Illusory Boon of Success
- Strong Women Can Say No (There's some stuff about betrayal here. Betrayal is always good story material.)
- The Initiation and Descent to the Goddess
- Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with the Feminine
- Healing the Mother/Daughter Split
- Finding the Inner Man with Heart
- Beyond Duality
I'm not going into more specifics here, not because I don't think it's important, but because I can't think of a well-known tale that follows this pattern. (Also, this is the work of a living author still capable of complaining. And the book is quite likely in your county's library system. And it's a lot shorter than the Campbell book.)
The female hero is on a completely different journey, affected by the fact that she's a woman (or girl) and that puts her at the wrong end of a power relationship-- and that's part of what she's struggling against. From goddess to boon, the hero's journey just isn't where her head's at.
Perhaps because the book becomes a self-help book, the steps of the heroine's journey appear to be rather self-centered. I actually wrote a story using some of the steps in Dr. Murdoch's model, and the journey did not, as it turned out, need to be a selfish one-- like the hero, the heroine ended up constructing a new society.
(That story is currently headed for an acquisitions meeting
//don't think about it, don't think about it...)
Both journeys are full of fantasy elements, but it seems like they could work with an epic historical as well.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET) until it isn't. Be sure to check out other great lit'ry diaries like:
sarahnity's books by kossacks on Tuesday nights
cfk's Bookflurries on Wednesday nights.
In case you missed it last week, Bink is interested in starting a dKos writer's workshop for people interested in "creating fiction or non-fiction for the next-generation market of books created to be read online".
By the way, has everyone heard about the Espresso Book Machine?
*Later, he changed his mind. In her book, Murdoch says that he told her that woman does not need to make the journey because she is the goal. She might be for some people. That doesn't make much of a plot, however.