Walking on the heroine’s journey

George Lucas once said that if it hadn’t been for the work of Joseph Campbell, “it’s possible I would still be trying to write Star Wars today”. Campbell’s mythological framework of the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces was a huge influence on generations of filmmakers and storytellers and, through them, on popular culture worldwide.

During Campbell’s last year as a professor, though, one of his students asked him: “You’ve been talking about the hero. But what about the women?” Campbell raised his eyebrows and replied, “The woman’s the mother of the hero; she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?” The student’s answer: “I want to be the hero.”

Noted folklorist Maria Tatar aptly recounts this incident in The Heroine with 1001 Faces, her absorbing new book that’s an exploration of the student’s question. It’s not a rebuttal of Campbell’s work but an extension and a filling in of gaps by examining the treatment of women in myths, epics, fairy tales, fiction, and film.

Tatar doesn’t present a well-defined heroine’s journey of her own. The book is sprawling, a working through of linked concepts that have been on her mind for years, more so in light of the #MeToo movement.

Especially in the West, Tatar writes, unconventional women have often been seen as “wayward curiosities”. Like heroes, they too have been on journeys, but unlike them, “they have also flown under the radar, performing stealth operations and quietly seeking justice, righting wrongs, repairing the fraying edges of the social fabric, or simply struggling to survive rather than returning back home with what Campbell calls boons and elixirs”.

Thus, in age-old stories, she finds that heroines try to rescue, restore, or fix things, often using words as weapons. Heroes, however, seek glory in conflict, often in a quest for immortality. “No wonder,” she writes, “that when asked to list examples of heroes, we quickly rattle off the names of men and gods. It takes a bit longer to come up with the names of heroines.”

1. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the two basic stories are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer, “the charm of women and the courage of men”. Such gender stereotypes, formalised in Campbell’s monomyth, have become a default narrative option: the noble, self-actualising hero and the patient, self-effacing heroine.

Tatar also shows how the Iliad and the Odyssey, seen as foundational epics, portray pigeonholed female characters. Irresistible Helen, the seductive femme fatale, is blamed for conflict while patient Penelope, the virtuous wife, stays at home awaiting her husband’s return.

A necessary corrective comes in the form of work by Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Christa Wolf, Madeline Miller and Pat Barker, among those who write from the perspective of women in myths and folktales. They give voice to vulnerable observers, revealing their actions and feelings, and casting men in a different light. In India, too, there have been more than a few retellings featuring the women in the Mahabharata, for instance.

Many such accounts are in first-person, showing how stories change depending on who is telling them. For Tatar, it is the character of Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights who “stands at the head of a procession of women who begin to deploy narrative in strategic ways—using it to protect themselves from peril, to speak truth to power, and to transform their social worlds”.

Her discussion of Scheherazade’s stories is nuanced. She can be celebrated as a cultural heroine but there’s a paradox at the heart of the narrative. “Her aim is to cure the king of his misogyny. But she tells him stories that seem designed to strengthen his conviction that women are licentious, wily, and crafty.”

In fairy and folktales from around the world, too, there are several examples of girls and women being silenced. Among others, Tatar mentions ‘The Frog King’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ from the well-known stories of the Brothers Grimm, the compilation of which began as “a project with nationalistic aspirations”. In the former, the king tells a bawling princess to be silent; in the latter, Gretel is told to stop crying and stay quiet.

Over time, some of these tales were transplanted into the culture of childhood after being shorn of violence and transgression. In this way, they offered lessons in values and morals from a paternalistic playbook. Other tales containing women’s voices were, as Angela Carter once put it, dismissed as “worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the genuine art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it”.

However, a refusal to stay silent and remain cowed down has become “the hallmark of today’s heroines, in art as in life”. These voices reveal that so-called timeless truths are in fact nothing but socially constructed and historically contingent fictions.

These new Pandoras, Eves and Medusas broadcast misdeeds past and present, reassess women’s roles, and question aspects of gender. Even Disney seems to be getting the picture, with recent re-interpretations of Cruella de Vil and the Wicked Witch of the West, among others.

Tatar shines a light on another example hiding in plain sight: fiction featuring women detectives. She focuses on Nancy Drew and Miss Marple, both of whom first appeared in 1930. They operate with a high degree of autonomy, largely working alone to correct wrongs.

Their influence is widespread, Tatar points out. “Figures like Elsa in Disney’s Frozen franchise and Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games trilogy, but especially Hermione in the Harry Potter series, are all reminders of the powerful afterlife of Nancy Drew in cultural productions for children…Jane Marple’s colossal appeal can be documented not just in sales figures but also in the powerful literary and cinematic afterlife of the spinster detective.”

Given the many potent representations of women nowadays, especially in TV and film, the relevant question Tatar raises is: are they nothing but a carbon copy of Campbell’s hero, “fighting battles in dark places from which they emerge covered in blood but victorious?” (Think, for example, of the Bollywood films in which women play police officers or avengers.)

As Rebecca Solnit remarks, in enshrining stories about heroes and power, many cultures have dismissed other stories about ordeals that require resilience, persistence, and alliances. The need is not to mimic the old, but to create models that privilege empathy, care, and connection.

The insights in Tatar’s book aren’t just for those concerned with women’s representation. Many of the issues and tactics here will resonate with others who have been marginalised and undervalued, struggling to find their place. Joan Didion said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live; it’s time for many more stories featuring many more lives.