The Heroine’s Journey in fantasy film – an essay

The mythologist Joseph Campbell discovered that a large number of myths from different time-periods and cultures had a common pattern and structure. He described it in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) (Veale). Campbell proposed that a hero’s journey, or the “monomyth”, consist of up to seventeen elements that fit into a three-part structure: separation – initiation – return (Indick). Campbell believed this was the formula for the “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero,” (Campbell, cited in Indick). Campbell’s model has become highly popular, especially with screenwriters, mainly because its three-unit structure works well with the three-act structure of screenplays (Indick). Campbell’s monomyth has been widely used in many blockbusters, from Star Wars to Disney animated films. It can also be recognised in the plot of most superhero flicks.

However, one feature of the monomyth is that most characters Campbell studied were male and the hero’s journey unfolds from an inherently male perspective (Veale). Only two of the 17 elements Campbell describes feature women (Priester): “the meeting with the goddess,” where the hero meets the idealised mother-goddess, such as the Athena in The Odyssey (1997) that offers guidance and inspiration, or the “woman as temptress,” where the hero faces “temptation that threatens to divert him from the path of his destiny,” (Priester) such as Calypso, in the same film. These characters are represented as stationery obstacles or rewards for the hero, but do not themselves evolve.

One of Campbell’s students, the psychotherapist and author, Maureen Murdock, questioned Campbell about the heroine’s journey. He responded, “The Heroine is the object of the Hero’s Journey,” adding, “She doesn’t go anywhere, she’s what the Hero is journeying to” (Murdock, cited in A. K. Anderson). Murdock felt that this model did not respond to the spiritual and psychological needs of contemporary women’s journeys (Books) and later wrote her own book, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness (1990), in an attempt to bridge the gap in Campbell’s framework. Murdock proposes a mythic structure for heroine that is relevant to contemporary women (Indick).