Thoughts and discussion on the differences between the works published on [[The Hero's Journey]] and [[The Heroine's journey]]. # Comparison of Vogler's Hero and Hudson's Heroine | Hero | Heroine | | --------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- | | The Ordinary World | Dependent World | | The Call to Adventure | Price of Conformity | | Refusal of the Call | Opportunity to Shine | | Meeting with the Mentor | Dress the Part | | Crossing the Threshold to Special World | Secret World | | Tests, Allies, & Enemies | No Longer Fits Her World | | Approach to the Innermost Cave | Gives Up What Kept Her Stuck | | The Ordeal | Kingdom in Chaos | | Reward | Wanders in Wilderness | | The Road Back | Chooses Her Light | | The Resurrection | The Re-ordering | | Return with the Elixir | The Kingdom is Brighter | (adapted from [this pdf online](https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/41447/files/5933668/download?download_frd=1), which claims to be an excerpt from [[The Virgin's Promise]]) # The Need for a Heroine's Journey ## Campbell's Interpretation of Feminine > Joseph Campbell rejected the model personally in a conversation with Murdock, stating that it was an unnecessary expansion on his template. \- via Wikipedia > “I met with Joe (Campbell) and showed him my map of the feminine journey. He said, ‘Women don’t need to make the journey, they are the place that everyone is trying to get to.’ His response shocked me. > > “It is true that in the mythological tradition, the feminine is the place people may be aspiring to integrate, but what I was aware of was that most of the women I knew and worked with were disconnected from our feminine nature. Our task was to reclaim the feminine for ourselves. > > “The impact on me of his response was definitely to pursue the writing of my book. My writing was informed by therapy with women and by my work with women’s groups. When The Heroine’s Journey was published in 1990, it deeply impacted both women and men. > ... > “The hero’s journey is focused on the adventures: slaying the dragon, finding the boon, meeting the goddess. For the heroine, the first part of the journey is the separation from the feminine, because of the focus in our culture on the idealization of the masculine. > “The individual in a patriarchal culture is driven to seek control and power over themselves and others; still slaying the dragons, internally and externally, and finding the boon, more externally. But for women, this doesn’t feed our nature. We ask, ‘What happened to my desire to write, to paint, to dance?’ And then, we experience the descent. So, there’s a split when we focus more on making it in the world, rather than on listening to our deep self.” \- [[summer05-maureen-murdock.pdf|interview with Murdoch]] via [Jung Society of Atlanta](https://web.archive.org/web/20160126132003/http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/summer05-maureen-murdock.pdf) Campbell seemed to believe that because there was a sense of the typically masculine character on a journey to get in touch with with the feminine (in one way or another) that women had attained some kind of enlightenment and therefore did not need to go on a journey at all. This is beyond bizarre to me. Trying to model what he thinks the feminine or even masculine experience is literally making my head hurt. ## Privilege > According to a 2014 interview between filmmaker Nicole L. Franklin and artist and comic book illustrator Alice Meichi Li, a hero's journey is "the journey of someone who has privilege. > > Regardless of the protagonist is male or female, a heroine does not start out with privilege." Being underprivileged, to Li, means that the heroine may not receive the same level of social support enjoyed by the hero in a traditional mythic cycle, and rather than return from her quest as both hero and mentor the heroine instead returns to a world in which she or he is still part of an oppressed demographic. > > Li adds, "They're not really bringing back an elixir. They're navigating our patriarchal society with unequal pay and inequalities. In the final chapter, they may end up on equal footing. But when you have oppressed groups, all you can hope for is to get half as far by working twice as hard." # As a Writing Tool Much like Campbell's version being surpassed by Vogler's, Murdoch's was also surpassed by the later version by Schmidt's and Hudson's to really take hold in the mass consciousnesses. And for a similar reason too. Campbell was claiming to answer deep questions about human myths, but wasn't doing so with the intention of giving authors a framework to cheat off of. Vogler specifically was. In a similar way, Murdoch was focused on healing and spiritual journeys for patients and therapists. Schmidt and Hudson changed this and turned it into a formula - Hudson's book even has [a forward by Vogler](https://kehudson.wordpress.com/forward-by-christopher-vogler/)! # Development of the Journeys It is extremely clear that each of these narrative structures are products of their time and biases, but Murdoch's was perhaps the first of the genre that doesn't attempt to claim that it is a universal - and I think that is very telling. Also, the other works are presented as silver bullets, breathless, and ready to sell you (literally) on this revelation. > In analyzing the similarities between the "mythologists" Eliade, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, Robert Ellwood concluded that the three modern mythologists, all of whom believed that myths reveal "timeless truth", fulfilled the role "gnostics" had in antiquity. The diverse religious movements covered by the term "gnosticism" share the basic doctrines that the surrounding world is fundamentally evil or inhospitable, that we are trapped in the world through no fault of our own, and that we can be saved from the world only through secret knowledge (gnosis). Ellwood claimed that the three mythologists were "modern gnostics through and through", remarking, > > "Whether in Augustan Rome or modern Europe, democracy all too easily gave way to totalitarianism, technology was as readily used for battle as for comfort, and immense wealth lay alongside abysmal poverty. [...] Gnostics past and present sought answers not in the course of outward human events, but in knowledge of the world's beginning, of what lies above and beyond the world, and of the secret places of the human soul. To all this the mythologists spoke, and they acquired large and loyal followings."" > > According to Ellwood, the mythologists believed in gnosticism's basic doctrines (even if in a secularized form). Ellwood also believes that Romanticism, which stimulated the modern study of mythology, strongly influenced the mythologists. Because Romantics stress that emotion and imagination have the same dignity as reason, Ellwood argues, they tend to think political truth "is known less by rational considerations than by its capacity to fire the passions" and, therefore, that political truth is "very apt to be found [...] in the distant past".