The Heroine’s Journey
This month I was reading books on what makes a good story, and have been disappointed so far. Last weeks book was more of a biography on Joseph Campbell, which while not what I was looking for, was at least entertaining. This weeks book, The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger, was….I am angry this book made it’s way to my library. We’ll come back to that.
When I got this book, I was looking to see if there was a counter to the Hero’s Journey, as depicted in this diagram I threw up last week.
Turns out there is…if you are a fourth wave feminist who views the world through strictly gendered lens. I am irritated with this book.
So she starts by breaking down side by side a hero vs a heroine:
Purpose: A hero is defeating an enemy or retrieving a boon. A heroine is looking to reunite with someone taken from her. She wants to network and connect with others, find a family.
Approach: A hero is always on the offense and will kill or trick his way to winning. He’s always moving. A heroine achieves her goals through community and communication. She builds civilizations and delegates as needed. She fears isolation.
Strength: A hero must go it alone to win one on one. A heroine requests help and is stronger through her friends.
Power: Hero’s are the most powerful when they are alone. Heroine’s when they are with others.
Ending: Hero will end alone, loneliness, death, and alcohol are his reward for all his work. Heroine will end with happiness and family.
See the trend? She has characterized all things masculine as bad, and all things feminine as good. But where she really lost me and I knew I was in for a rough read is when she says “In other words, women, female-identified, and nonbinary characters can be heroes. Men, male-identified, and nonbinary characters can be heroines.”
Fuck me….she’s a gender critical SJW. And mentions her degree in anthropology and former career as an archaeologist to support her belief that nonbinary is a thing. That wasn’t even in the body of the book. It was in the INTRODUCTION. Page XV. FUCK!!!!!
For my own sanity, I did a double check with Dr. Debra Soh’s book…the one I read a few years ago, The End of Gender…you know, the book written by the sex neuroscientist? The one with an actual doctorate on this very topic. And yes, I recalled correctly. Biological sex is not a spectrum. Gender is not a social construct. And there are only two genders. Nonbinary is not a thing.
Back to this book.
Carriger then spends the next 278 pages explaining the Heroine’s Journey. And does not convince.
She says “The Heroine’s Journey is NOT simply the Hero’s Journey undertaken by a woman. It’s narratively different, not biologically different.”
Uh-huh.
She then says “Joseph Campbell, the original propagator of analyzing the Hero’s Journey, is reputed to have said: Women don’t need to make the journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place people are trying to get to.”
Carriger did not have a high opinion of this, and also said that she could not find any evidence that Campbell actually said this. And ok, fair enough, I’ve only read the one book by Campbell, I certainly don’t know everything he ever said ever, but the quote struck a bell. Like, I was sure he HAD said something very similar. So when I was removing the tabs from last week’s book, I made sure to keep this tabbed out:
Pp 109-110 of The Hero’s Journey: “I was teaching these courses on mythology and at the end of my last year there this woman comes in and sits down and says, “Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the Hero. But what about the women?” I said, ”The woman’s the mother of the hero; she’s the goal the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?”
And truly, if you compare a typical life cycle to a hero’s journey, it could be argued women are hero’s every damn day. This also applies to men….to a point. Call to adventure would be about the time they start dating. Meeting a mentor…meeting the one. Crossing a threshold: getting married. Trials and failures. A lot of that in early marriage, finding out what works for you as a couple. Growth/new skills: growing as a couple, finding your feet. Here’s where men and women diverge: Death and rebirth would mean literal child birth. Men cannot follow women down that path, no matter what the gender warriors want you to think. And sometimes the death and rebirth is realizing that you can’t have children, and that knowledge too will change you. The revelations of parenthood or that you will never have kids change you in different ways. Atonement might mean realizing that your parents may have known a thing or two, having gone through this journey themselves. Gift is in raising well adjusted children, who give you grandchildren. Life returns semi-normal, but changed. Kids are out of the house, so it’s just you and your husband again. And the life cycle/heroine’s journey is complete.
So women ARE what men are trying to achieve. She’s already living the hero’s journey, as a woman’s life is going to change the most. Not that none of this changes men, but MEN CANNOT HAVE BABIES. That is the key element that sends them questing out of the house.
So I think if I were to bring this analysis to Campbell, he might be very pleased. Or not, he might think I was stretching, as much as Carriger stretches in describing the Heroine’s journey. So what are the “beats” as she calls them of the heroine’s journey?
Descent (loss or separation) includes familial network being broken, help is denied, so she involuntarily abdicates power, resulting in isolation and danger to the heroine, as her family offers aid but no solutions.
Next we have The Search. The heroine has lost family, and so disguises herself as she wanders about. She makes a new family and rebuilds her community. She visits the underworld (metaphorically or literally) and receives help from her new friends and family.
The Ascent or return: The Heroine negotiates a compromise in which everyone wins. She has a new network, or re-establishes ties with her old network. Revenge and glory are irrelevant.
She then briefly describes three myth’s that she says are the foundation of the heroine’s journey: Demeter, Isis, and Inanna. Oh boy.
Demeter, mother of Persephone, who was infamously taken to the Underworld to be the bride of Hades. When Demeter realizes her daughter is missing, she asks the gods for help, and they turn her out. So she goes to earth, makes new friends, eventually has them build temples in her honor, finds out hades has her daughter and compromises with Hades to keep Persephone three months out of the year in recompense of the pomegranate seeds Persephone ate while in the underworld. No one dies and everyone is happy in the end. In her telling Carriger does include things like Demeter visited a famine on the planet while looking for her family and passes off temple building as building civilization and not a quest for glory. Even though….like why do we build temples except to glorify one god or another? And no one dies….except for all the poor little humans who starved to death because of the famine? Or do they not count, since they’re only human? And everyone wins in the end? What about Persephone, who is sentenced to spend part of her life with her kidnapper and rapist? Doesn’t seem like a win to me.
And what’s particularly ironic, is that Carriger says multiple times that Rape as an attack is weak sauce and don’t do it, and even at the end of the book acknowledges the rape of Persephone. But Demeter won in the end. So that makes her a heroine.
And please understand, I am familiar with Lore Olympus, which is a wonderful retelling of the Persephone/Hades story that turns it from one of horror, i.e. kidnapping and rape, into a love story for the ages. It IS a good narrative arc. But it’s a romance, not a heroine’s arc
Isis and Inanna are more of the same, twisting of the myth to try and sell the narrative that the heroine’s journey is a separate narrative arc from a hero’s journey. But where she really went off the deep end with this book, was insisting that Harry Potter was a heroine’s journey. She…again…cherry picks scenes from the books and movie to try and spin her theory, disregarding the overarching heroic tale, and pretending that in the end, because Harry was married with children, when Harry stood alone, and killed Voldemort, that was a heroine’s story….directly contracting what she said about heroine doesn’t need revenge.
She describes the 2017 movie Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot as a classic Hero’s Journey and explains why she labels it thus. And she says the original Star Wars trilogy is a classic Hero’s Journey, even though it has a happy ending which she says “is unusual for a Hero’s Journey.” And after reading this book, I’m pretty sure she only gave Star Wars the Hero’s nod because George Lucas himself and Joseph Campbell both said Star Wars was the classic Hero’s Journey. She couldn’t contradict the master without looking foolish, so she just bowed to the inevitable and said it was a Hero’s journey.
She spends a chunk of the book talking about how big in the industry romance novels are. Which is true! Women are big readers, and overwhelmingly they read in the romance genre. I spent a significant portion of my tween and teen years reading romance novels, so those “beats” I am very familiar with. But reading her try to shoehorn the typical romance beats into a grander thing by calling it a heroine’s journey….ouch.
She says near the very end that no one else had written such a book, which directly contradicts what she said earlier in the book, when she references Maureen Murdock’s book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, which according to Carriger is “a little dry and academic.” By which she means, if I had to guess since I haven’t read this one, it only acknowledges two genders, and not some overarching grand theme. But here’s the thing. If you want to know how to write a romance, there’s a free to read blog post by Robin Lovett posted on DIYMFA.com, outlining the story structure of a romance. And it does reference the hero’s journey, in how to make this arc. And this free to read blog post was written two years before Carriger’s junk journey.
Basically, if its funny and has a happy ending, it’s a heroine’s journey. If it’s serious and has a sad ending, it’s a hero’s journey. Because men only bring sadness, I guess, and only women can be funny.
Now, I don’t, for one second, doubt Carriger’s chops as a romance novelist. She has well over 20 books published, in multiple languages, and while I had never read any of her books, I recognized her name, which is why I bought this one. So she isn’t just some rando who couldn’t sell a book, trying to pass on advice on how to write a book. It’s just that her formula…there are better writing forums available for free. Also, based on how she stereotypes in the book, I am probably guilty of “internalized misogyny” since I no longer read romance novels. Mostly because as I moved into adulthood, I realized they gave me an unhealthy idea of what true love looks like. I dare say, most of the AITA posts on reddit, the people involved have read one or more romance novel to bring this level of drama into their own lives.
While I was reading this book, I posted my frustration with the bullshit contained herein on one of those free forums, The Writer’s Dojo on Facebook. And after much kvetching of bad writing and bad writing advice, I got this incredibly useful comment from Matthew Bowman, of novelninja.net “Most people don’t understand the Hero’s Journey, including Campbell. I’ve got a whole presentation on it. I could write a book on it, but it would be a very thin book. Wordy as I am, how to actually use it as a tool to understand heroic character arcs (because it’s NOT gender specific) is really a simple process.”
And when I asked Matthew if I could quote him here, he generously said yes, sent me a few slides as examples, and said I could use those too, so here they are. This is NOT the full presentation:
I love how he specifically references Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, as objecting to the Hero’s Journey and he shaped his famous book around his objection to the monomyth…because Carriger specifically CITES Dune as a classic Hero’s journey. So…take that for what you will.
This book was….disappointing. So very disappointing. I was hoping for some great insight. Instead I got 270 pages of how to write a romance novel and why it’s heroic. It’s not. It’s a romance novel. There is great money in that. But I think Carriger knows she was spinning bullshit and calling it art. Because like a bad poker player, she has a tell. Every time she knows she’s about to throw bullshit at you, she precedes it with a disclaimer that not every story will follow the same guidance. Hero’s can be heroine’s and vice versa. And then she spouts utter nonsense. So for writing advice, I will refer you back to The Writer’s Dojo. Where they spin hard truths, but no bullshit.
