If someone asked you to name the world’s most common plot, you’d probably come up with something like this: A hero heeds a call to adventure – perhaps slaying a dragon or protecting their homeland – then they cross an unknown frontier, where they face trials, triumph over a great challenge, and come home with a lesson or reward. They have grown, learned and made things better. He found the girl; They save the palace. They are often a man.
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It’s the hero’s journey, a familiar arc, one that’s easy to transfer to different situations. Basically universal, right?
Author Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology and philosophy, named the Hero’s Journey in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He said it is widespread and seen in every culture.
In the 1980s, Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychiatrist who was a student of Campbell, came up with an alternative narrative, which she called heroine’s journey. She found that in her healing work, the hero’s journey did not include everything that her patients – especially women – were going through. It didn’t answer questions about the roots of his struggles, or what happened after he climbed the mountain and still didn’t feel satisfied. Or some other, different mountain was found in front of them.
The final step is to accept that there never really is a dragon, not even at any moment after the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.
Like the hero’s journey, the heroine’s journey also happens in stages. The heroine begins by rejecting feminine values because she has seen no way to be fulfilled as a woman. Success looks like those masculine ideals, like big adventures or running a company, so she pursues them. Then, like the hero’s journey, he faces trials and tests; She succeeds and kills the dragons. But this is where the arcs start to diverge.
Murdock says that at the time, on the outside the journey may seem good, but on the inside, as the heroine, you feel hollow, and not true to yourself. You start to feel that your life is not perfect. You have achieved and achieved everything and you still seem dissatisfied. She says that a feeling of spiritual dryness. You feel oppressed, but you do not find anyone oppressing you except yourself. You may be in trouble, even if you have achieved what the world said you should do.
From there, the heroine has to reexamine and align the ideals she was pursuing with those that feel true to herself. Murdock calls this “wounded masculinity therapy.” I see it as trying to combine the pressure of achievement with a sense of belonging, which can be difficult regardless of gender.
The final step is to accept that there never really is a dragon, not even at any moment after the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.
Murdock found that this conceit resonated with many of his patients. But when she brought it up to Campbell in the early ’80s, his response was, “Women don’t have to travel. In the entire mythological tradition, the woman is there. She just has to feel that she is where people are trying to get to.”
Was I allowed to consider him a hero if he never received an award? Or if they behaved poorly along the way?
Which is exactly the same thing that happens on the heroine’s journey. You have been dismissed or sidelined. You face stagnation and disbelief and people telling you that your voice doesn’t matter, even when you’re absolutely sure you’re right.
When I was researching I came across the heroine’s journey my book terrible country About three women who fundamentally changed American entertainment and conservation, but who were never recognized. I’ve dabbled in the outdoor world that shaped him since adolescence, going from the mountains of New England to the rivers of the Southwest in search of sensation and a desire to be outside, but after more than two decades I realized I never had role models, or paths to follow along the way, partly because I was chasing that hero’s idea of making my way through adventure on the strength of my intelligence and strength. I didn’t allow myself to look at other types of stories. And when I finally realized what I was missing, I wanted to fill in the gaps.
I became obsessed with the idea of heroes: whose stories soared, why I never had any of my own. And I kept getting stuck in the conundrum described by Murdock: I had only heard stories of heroes that fit Campbell’s mold. But my own dragons were never plain and simple. Many of them were inside my mind.
So I set out to find heroes that felt more relevant to me, who were left out of the canon of stories that get told and retold.
I found the stories of three women who inspired me: Georgie White, the only woman to guide up the Grand Canyon for decades, who changed the way we get out and fought against dams; mountain guide Anne LaBastille, who conducted groundbreaking climate science from her off-the-grid cabin in the Adirondacks; Pioneering backcountry skier Dolores LaChapelle, who was also an environmental philosopher, shaped the radical environmental movement of the 1970s. They were all building what I consider ideal lives outside, bound to the landscape they loved, fighting to protect it. But they also seemed complicated. Was I allowed to consider him a hero if he never received an award? Or if they behaved poorly along the way?
I realized I was stuck in Murdock’s second stage, trying to fit myself into masculine ideas, frustrated when it didn’t feel right for me or the women I was looking at, because I was still clinging to expectations that the arc of achievement would be obvious.
The women I was watching were brave and courageous and committed to ideals that I think are important, but they were also mean and critical and prone to bending the truth. They didn’t get the chance to live happily ever after in the traditional sense, and their quest – like Anne’s effort to stop carbon pollution or Georgie’s desire to protect the landscape she loved – still, disappointingly, continues. They didn’t find easy solutions, they had to keep trying against misogyny, contempt, and more, but I think that makes their stories more interesting and more real.
A friend described the heroine’s journey as if the hero’s journey had gone to therapy – reflective and aware of the context. I guess that could be true, but it’s also like the hero survives the same quest. Those women are heroes because they did not just fight and then return home with glory. They kept fighting even when the rewards were hard to understand, even when their stories weren’t neat.
I think we don’t prefer well-known stories and familiar plots because it’s reassuring to feel that good will triumph over evil, that we will have a happy ending. But life doesn’t work like this. And it’s confusing and boring to think that storytelling and otherwise could be that way. I don’t want to keep cramming stories into the constraints of the hero’s journey. I want to keep them messy and complicated and ongoing.
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terrible country by Heather Hansman is available from Hanover Square Press.
