by Maria Tatar
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,
Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.
“It is not so, nor it was not so,” said Mr. Fox.
“And then—and then I opened the door, and the room was filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead women, all stained with their blood.”
“It is not so, nor it was not so. And God forbid it should be so,” said Mr. Fox.
“I then dreamed that I rushed down the gallery, and just as I was going down the stairs I saw you, Mr. Fox, coming up to the hall door, dragging after you a poor young lady, rich and beautiful.”
“It is not so, nor it was not so. And God forbid it should be so,” said Mr. Fox.
“I rushed downstairs, just in time to hide myself behind a cask, when you, Mr. Fox, came in dragging the young lady by the arm. And, as you passed me, Mr. Fox, I thought I saw you try and get off her diamond ring, and when you could not, Mr. Fox, it seemed to me in my dream, that you out with your sword and hacked off the poor lady’s hand to get the ring.”
“It is not so, nor it was not so. And God forbid it should be so,” said Mr. Fox and was going to say something else as he rose from his seat, when Lady Mary cried out:
“But it is so, and it was so. Here’s hand and ring I have to show,” and pulled out the lady’s hand from her dress, and pointed it straight at Mr. Fox.
At once her brothers and her friends drew their swords and cut Mr. Fox into a thousand pieces.
By producing evidence, Lady Mary has what she needs to recruit her kinfolk and their friends to slay Mr. Fox. The safe space of a dream narrative, told on a festive occasion, enables her to speak, and, surrounded by sympathetic listeners, she can be assured of rescue and relief. By filtering the truth through the medium of the dream, which is ordinarily counterfactual, Lady Mary works up the courage to reveal the facts as she recounts the horrors housed in Mr. Fox’s castle, then produces physical evidence, a gruesome little trophy proving that the dream is not mere fantasy but corresponds to a grim reality. This story reads almost like a playbook from times past for victims of sexual assault and marriages arranged to the wrong kind of groom. An exercise in social justice, it is also a reminder that you may need physical evidence to back up your claims.
Campbell’s heroes, drawn from myth and religion, embark on adventures and return with healing elixirs. The heroines of fairy tales are more modest in their ambitions. They pursue justice without weapons in hand, telling stories to broadcast misdeeds and to bring outlaws to justice. After a closer look at Campbell’s mythical heroes, I will turn to one of the foundational texts of the Western world, Homer’s Odyssey. In it, Odysseus, the wily wanderer, and Penelope, the stay-at-home mother, reveal a good deal about the gender distortions in our understanding of heroism. The hero on a journey and the heroine on a mission. Drawing this sharp distinction, crude as it may be, is a first step in understanding the driving force behind the protagonists of tales that we have enshrined as “classic.” Classic texts are the stories that have found a place in the classroom, in nationwide curricula that are foundational, designed to build cultural values.
Not many teachers have done what Philip Pullman, author of the young adult series His Dark Materials, did while employed as a teacher at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Oxford. Three times a week, the prizewinning author improvised, telling his versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, not repeating but retelling. Most other teachers have relied on the letter rather than the spirit of the poem, taking the words on the page and using Homer’s portraits of Odysseus and Penelope to educate their students and animate discussions in their classrooms. For that reason alone, how we approach Homer’s epic matters, and already a chorus of voices has been raised about the unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past. I count my voice in that chorus, and I hope here to identify how those who were silenced, suppressed, and sidelined in those narratives still managed to find strategies for heroic actions, large and small. Writers today, as will become evident later in this chapter, have resurrected marginalized women from times past and given them voices, affirming their resourcefulness and thereby endowing them with agency. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, and Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls are among the volumes that give us new perspectives on The Iliad and The Odyssey, reminding us that there is always another side to a story and also revealing that silencing does not foreclose possibilities for heroic action.11
Toni Morrison was quick to understand that she and other writers were not just reanimating figures from the past but making something new. She insisted that she was not repeating but re-signifying, fashioning her own version of archetypes in works like Beloved and Tar Baby. Madeline Miller reimagines Circe in the 2018 novel of that title, undoing her vilification in The Odyssey and enabling us to understand the defensive nature of her magic. The heroine of Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974) is the mixed-race daughter of a Black mother and a Jewish father, and she borrows tropes from the culture in which she lives to cross racial boundaries while on a quest that closely resembles Theseus’s journey into the Labyrinth. These authors enable us to see that the possibilities for heroic words and deeds are limitless, and heroines, like heroes, have features that are infinitely supple and endlessly malleable. But let us first look at heroes to understand just how Joseph Campbell identified the enduring features in their thousand faces.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Occupying a liminal space between men and gods, the heroes of ancient times were often associated with military valor or Herculean feats of strength. When Joseph Campbell set out to develop an understanding of the hero archetype, he discovered a drama that unfolded in a series of combative encounters, with conflicts and ordeals that required stunning high-wire acts ending in a triumphant victory and return home. The consuming idea of Campbell’s analysis turns on men of action and the redemptive journeys they take to secure some form of salvation for us all.
Born in 1904 in New York City, Joseph Campbell studied at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, earning a degree in English literature in 1925. After postgraduate work in Romance languages and in Sanskrit studies at universities in Paris and Munich, Campbell withdrew from the PhD program at Columbia and spent five years living in what he described as a low-rent shack in upstate New York, reading nine hours a day and contemplating his future. In 1934 he accepted a position at Sarah Lawrence College, at that time a college for women, and taught well-attended courses on literature and myth there for thirty-eight years.
Campbell sat out the war years at Sarah Lawrence. Turned a cynic by England’s history of colonial conquest and the United States’ deplorable treatment of Native Americans, even Hitler and his invading armies could not, at first, move Campbell from a position of pacifism. He considered registering as a conscientious objector, but, after reading in the Bhagavad Gita about Arjuna’s duty to fight, Campbell decided that, if drafted, he would fight as Arjuna had fought. When the Selective Service announced that it would be drafting only men under the age of thirty-eight, Campbell breathed a huge sigh of relief, for he had no interest in joining the ranks of what he called “shouting warriors,” the men who had attached themselves to “the Anglo-Saxon empire of machines and opportunistic lies.”
It is hard to imagine that Campbell’s 1949 study of the hero was not informed, at least in some subliminal way, by the bravery of American GIs, many of whom returned home triumphant from the ordeals of military combat and were celebrated as war heroes. To be sure, the war years also witnessed Campbell’s rising interest in South Asian religions and East Asian myths, with their exercises in self-abnegation. And Campbell had declared himself to be not in the camp of warriors and merchants but in a “third camp,” the one inhabited by people writing books, painting pictures, and playing musical instruments. It was their duty, and his of course too, to “discover and represent without compromise the ideals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”12 Still, GI
Joe was surely a consideration, if not a vaunted heroic ideal, as Campbell wrestled with a project that chronicled colossal ordeals, bloody conflicts, hard-won conquest, and triumphant returns home.
Campbell’s book captured the imagination of twentieth-century writers, artists, and filmmakers not long after its publication. Its popular appeal was amplified through Bill Moyers’s conversations with the mythographer and storyteller in The Power of Myth, a series of interviews filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in 1988. Described as “one of the most popular series in the history of public television,” it continues to draw audiences today.13 Like many other filmmakers, the creator of the Star Wars film franchise had found in Campbell’s work a blueprint for mythmaking. In radically inventive ways, Lucas drew on the classical motifs of the mythic journey but made them new to create the narrative wizardry of the original Star Wars trilogy. “If it hadn’t been for [Campbell],” he once said, “it’s possible I would still be trying to write ‘Star Wars’ today.”14
In some intuitive fashion, Campbell understood that all the heroic figures—Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, Jason, David, Perseus, King Arthur—who populate his many volumes on the power of myth are not at all so different from the less commanding characters who roam the fairy-tale universe, always also in search of Elsewhere, the Promised Land, a Better Place, Cockaigne, the land of milk and honey, or some other Utopian Ideal (succinctly summed up in fairy tales with the phrase “Happily Ever After”). What he wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces held true for all stories: “The magic is effective in the tiniest, nursery fairy-tale, as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a single droplet.”15
Campbell begins his study of the hero with a thousand faces by laying out the concept of what he calls the “monomyth” (a term he borrows from James Joyce, the writer who was the subject of his doctoral dissertation and, tellingly, the author of Ulysses). For him, stories about heroes tap into a deep well of human creativity driven by the need to face down our fears about mortality. Every culture “spontaneously” fashions its own myths, but with a tight discipline that orders and controls the flow of the locally inflected story. “Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costumes?” Campbell asked. The Lakota may call their trickster god Iktomi, but that deity does not operate all that differently from the West African Anansi, the Greek Hermes, or the Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl. And whether we are listening to the chants of witch doctors in Congo, reading the sonnets of Lao-tzu, or catching the words of an Eskimo fairy tale, he added, the story never changes. Campbell enumerates with stunning confidence the twelve building blocks used to create an interlocking edifice of story, an architecture that structures story with impressive uniformity even in the most remote corners of the world.
1.Ordinary World
2.Call to Adventure
3.Refusal of the Call
4.Meeting with the Mentor
5.Crossing the Threshold
6.Test, Allies, and Enemies
7.The Approach
8.The Ordeal
9.Reward/Rebirth
10.Road Back
11.Resurrection
12.Return with the Elixir
Campbell’s one “marvelously constant story” follows the trajectory of the hero from the proverbial womb to the (symbolic) tomb, followed by resurrection in one form or another. Departure, Initiation, and Return: that was the basic formula, as the professor summed it up for his audiences. Initiation is, as it turns out, something of an Ordeal, but since it is little more than a stepping stone to rewards, resurrection, and a return home, Campbell describes it with an abstract term, one that is drained of pain and suffering.
Quest narratives give us something primal: heroic figures banished from home, uprooted from a familiar world that has turned toxic, and in search of a new place to settle down. Long before Campbell’s monomyth, there was what scholars called the Rank-Raglan “mythotype.” The German psychoanalyst Otto Rank, Freud’s trusted colleague and collaborator for nearly two decades, had identified twelve transcultural features of hero myths in his 1909 volume The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. We can think here of Moses, King Arthur, or countless other figures who transcend their humble origins and perform deeds that enable them to attain nobility and heroic stature. As Rank put it, “nearly all prominent civilized nations” (and by that he specified Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Indians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and Germanic peoples) left a literature full of poetic stories that glorified national figures: “mythical princes and kings, and founders of religions, dynasties, empires, and cities.”16 The origin stories of these supermen, as Rank called them, has a “baffling similarity,” and he itemized the features of myths about them as follows:
1.Child of distinguished parents
2.Father is a king
3.Difficulty in conception
4.Prophecy warning against birth
5.Hero surrendered to the water in a box
6.Saved by animals or lowly people
7.Suckled by female animal or humble woman
8.Hero grows up
9.Hero finds distinguished parents
10.Hero takes revenge on the father
11.Acknowledged by people
12.Achieves rank and honors
Lord Raglan’s 1936 The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama doubled down on Rank’s model, emphasizing once again less heroic struggles than family conflict (we are back in the domain of ordeals rather than adventures), always based on a troubled and troubling male developmental model, one that can quickly become emblematic of what today, in a stroke of deep irony, we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity. Myths have been said to enact repressed wishes and have a profoundly antisocial dimension; hence the deep paradox of enshrining as cultural heroes men who are living embodiments of social pathologies.17
Campbell’s superhuman figures may know tragedy and die as martyrs, but they also acquire transcendent glory and a level of renown approaching immortality. How do they die? Better to ask, How do they live on? “He has been reborn,” Campbell tells us of the hero, and “his second solemn task and deed therefore . . . is to return to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.”18 The superhero, cleansed of sins and purified of offenses, becomes both redeemer and teacher, though it is not entirely clear that he has any real lessons to convey, beyond the singularity of his own life trajectory.
Not to be overly reductive, but all the hero narratives analyzed by these experts in psychology, anthropology, and religion seem deeply motivated by a desire to ward off the chill of death and to bring a reassuring message about redemption and renewal. The features about family life seem to signal more than anything else that the hero begins life as a defenseless victim, one who will rise above the adversities of social circumstances and the hardships of domestic distress to bring wisdom and solace to his culture. Autonomous and unbridled, he makes a name for himself by becoming the storied ancestor of a new tribal formation, kinship unit, or religious order.
Our collective infatuation with Campbell’s mythic journey, even many decades after its publication, is evident in the flood of how-to manuals readily available, each designed to help writers realize the dream of producing a Hollywood script for a blockbuster film. Christopher Vogler, in his self-help guide for writers, drew on Campbell’s work to identify “a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world.”19 Syd Field uses Campbell’s “template of the classical ‘hero’ throughout myth and literature” to explain the cinematic triumph of films like Casablanca, which feature present-day heroes who “die” and are reborn, sacrificing their lives “for the higher good.”20 Blake Snyder, in his bestselling manual of screenwriting, Save the Cat!, tells us that his craft is as much science as art: “It’s quantifiable.” There are “Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics” and those rules are “constants, and in some cases eternal (see Joseph Campbell).”21
Some writers have resisted playing by the rules, or, at the least, they are not interested in templates, blueprints, or master narratives of any kind. In an interview, Neil Gaiman, a writer who is completely at home in the world of mythology and roams around freely in it, was once asked if Joseph Campbell had influenced his way of telling a story. “I think I got about halfway through The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” he replied, “and found myself thinking if this is true—I don’t want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it’s true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is.”22 For Gaiman and for other imaginative writers, eccentricity and lack of predictability is paramount, and they have no interest in lifting their foot off the gas pedal to consider whether they are following the rules of the road. Instead they aim to shock and startle readers at every bend in the narrative lane, cutting us to the quick by creating something unprecedented.
Fanatical devotion to the hero’s journey or monomyth is evident not just in the world of screenwriting but also in therapeutic contexts, with spiritual and psychological growth as the end goal of treatment. Is it any surprise that the so-called mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1990s, formed in reaction to what was seen as the excesses of second-wave feminism, tapped into the popularity of The Hero with a Thousand Faces to distill a universal story-language for use in its workshops? Sometimes referred to as the New Age men’s movement, it was less interested in social advocacy than in organizing retreats that included drumming, chanting, and gathering in sweat lodges. Like Campbell, the leaders drew on the writings of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his theory of archetypes to navigate their way through what they saw as a crisis of male subjectivity and to find their way back to a deeply spiritual masculine identity.
Sessions led by the charismatic Robert Bly, author of Iron John: A Book about Men (1990) and coeditor of The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992), were designed to enable participants to enact various phases of the hero’s journey and to heal themselves by unleashing their “animal-males.” In initiation rituals under the banner of the “Great Mother” and the “New Father” (nine-day conferences are held annually in Maine), participants sequester themselves in discussion groups and return with a renewed affirmative consciousness of their masculine identity. They are encouraged to discover kindred archetypes (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, and Wild Man) that can be recruited as models for daily life. In Iron John, Bly drew on a fairy tale with that title, collected by the Brothers Grimm, to make a strong case for embracing the wild man within, a heroic archetype, to guide men to wisdom and self-actualization.