by Maria Tatar
The Cultural Surround of the Hero’s Journey
Reading Campbell’s concise summary of the Hero’s Journey jolts us into quick recognition of the gender distortions in the monomyth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”23 Driven by conflict and conquest, this narrative arc utterly fails as a model of women’s experience.24 As Campbell explained to Maureen Murdock, author of The Heroine’s Journey (1990), “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”25 “When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is,” he added in a way that can only produce exasperation today, “she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.” Campbell’s signature insouciant style—often winningly kindhearted—when talking about matters of far-reaching consequence can also mask an unconscious form of condescending misogyny. Women can never aspire to undertake the journey: reservations are restricted to men alone. Besides, who in the world wants to be a pseudo-male, whatever that may be?
For Campbell, the boon and elixir are the actual goals of the questing hero, but women also happen to be back home, waiting patiently for the hero’s return. Like Vladimir Propp before him, the Russian folklorist writing in the 1920s about how all fairy tales are alike in regard to their structure, Campbell gives us a “once upon a time” that begins with the hero’s departure from home and ends when “the hero is married and ascends the throne,” united with the princess or “sought-for person.” Along the way there may be Circe-like temptresses (yes, nearly always female) who seek to derail him on the way to a new home, but they can be cast aside, sacrificed and abandoned for the sake of a “mystical marriage,” a union representing the hero’s “total mastery of life.” And in a final flourish, we discover that “the woman is life, the hero its master and knower.”26 Lurking beneath this plot lies not just a need to “master” life (and women), but also a profound desire to cheat death and gain immortality.
These statements ring so quaint and old-fashioned that it is difficult to work up any real contempt for the rhetoric of narcissistic mastery and self-contained masculinity built into them. Still, in many ways it is a wonder that there was no storm of protest when Campbell’s book was published. The Hero with a Thousand Faces appeared in 1949, a time when postwar prosperity was just getting underway, with boat-sized cars sporting flashy hood ornaments and black-and-white television sets encased in clunky wooden consoles rapidly growing in number. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, with its chorus of frustrated sailors singing about how there is nothing like a dame, its naïvely sentimental efforts to explore racial prejudice, and its hero finding true love on “Some Enchanted Evening,” was attracting crowds on Broadway. And George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a chilling dystopia in which Big Brother is always listening in, was just about to become obligatory high school reading. Fears about the rise of Communism and the threat of nuclear annihilation were running high and preoccupying minds. But as important, the United States was just beginning to feel the tremors of what would become a seismic shift in women’s participation in the labor force. World War II had dramatically, if temporarily, increased women’s employment outside the home. The number of women in the workforce rose from eighteen million in 1950 to sixty-six million in 2000, at an annual growth rate of 2.6 percent. In 1950, women were 30 percent of the labor force; by the year 2000, that figure had grown to 47 percent.
Nineteen forty-nine was also the year that marked, on the other side of the Atlantic in France, the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Translated into English in 1953, it became one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism in the United States, the phase in which legal equality and reproductive rights became paramount. What the French philosopher did was to reveal how women, “free and autonomous” on the one hand, paradoxically live in a world that compels them to assume “the status of Other.” How, de Beauvoir asked, had the cultural difference between men and women been historically defined? In a word, men were conquerors, with women as their enslaved captives. Men invent, create, explore, and exploit, while women stay at home and procreate.
Simone de Beauvoir took seriously the fairy tales and myths that had been part of her childhood and her education in France. She saw them as revelatory. The storytelling repertoire of long ago unapologetically mirrored the rough truths of the gendered divisions in the social worlds. “Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. In songs and tales, the young man sets off to seek the woman; he fights against dragons, he combats giants; she is locked up in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive, put to sleep: she is waiting.”27 Women, in other words, are not cut out for action or accomplishment, let alone conquest or victory. Recall the women of Greek myth, with figures such as Danaë, Europa, and Leda, all visited and impregnated by Zeus, when he disguises himself in the form of a golden shower, a white bull, and a swan. After what can only have been wretched sexual encounters (thankfully, we never get the details), they give birth to powerful, adventurous sons. Then there is Andromeda, punished because her mother boasted of her beauty, after which she is forced to languish chained to a rock until the heroic Perseus finds and releases her. Or Arachne, the target of a goddess’s wrath for boasting that her tapestries were more beautiful than Athena’s. These long-suffering women far outnumber full-scale goddesses like the wise Athena, the fierce Artemis, and the beautiful Aphrodite, all deities embodying abstract concepts, beyond reproach and—fortunately for them—usually, though not always, beyond approach.
There are two powerful gendered plots in our culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured them in his pronouncement that “the two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—the charm of women and the courage of men.”28 “Charm” is, of course, a loaded term, implying all kinds of possibilities, ranging from agreeable grace to powerful magic, but the author of The Great Gatsby was not invested in nuances when he drew a sharp distinction between innocent persecuted heroines and giant slayers. Instead he solidified a contrast that has haunted the Western imagination and has become its default narrative option. On the one hand, there is the autonomous male hero seeking self-actualization through adventure and conquest (Jay Gatsby comes to mind). Then there is the patient, long-suffering, self-effacing heroine—what one critic calls the “afflicted woman trope.”29
The hero’s journey, as Jia Tolentino points out in a study of “pure heroines” and their self-destructive behavior, provided the story grammar for literary works reaching back to Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century A Tale of Two Cities and taking us up to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s twenty-first-century My Struggle.30 When we rattle off the titles of a host of nineteenth-century novels that foreground women—all firmly installed in the twentieth-century college curriculum—we come up with titles ranging from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Wharton’s House of Mirth, all works that breathlessly evoke suffering heroines, intolerable domestic arrangements, and ominous vulnerability.
Are there exceptions to the rule that women exclusively are the long-suffering victims in our mythical and literary plots? There is, of course, the spectacular example of the biblical Job, who loses his children, his wealth, and his health, and whose faith is tested by what appear to be undeserved trials. At the same time, there are also female exceptions (mainly historical or legendary) that, more than anything else, prove the rule that combat is the domain of men. France’s Joan of Arc blocks the English Siege of Orléans; the woman warrior Scáthach trains the Irish hero Cú Chulainn in the art of combat; the beautiful widow Judith of biblical tradition beheads the military invader Holofernes. An
d then there are the Amazons. But these chaste women (often gender fluid as well as virginal) remind us of how heroic behavior is predominantly in the DNA of men. There is something unnatural about them, for these legendary women, unlike their male counterparts, have a touch of the otherworldly or the grotesque. In some ways, they represent a perversion of the feminine by usurping the power of the heroic.31 Military valor has, above all, served as a hallmark of the discursive field that defines the hero, and for many, the mental image of a hero remains a helmeted male warrior. Virgil begins his epic poem The Aeneid by declaring that he will sing of “arms and the man.” As noted, the genre of epic or national myth, which bestowed on us the concept of the hero in its most conventional sense, turns on conflict and warfare: ancient Greece’s The Iliad, France’s The Song of Roland, England’s Beowulf, Spain’s El Cid, and the Mahabharata of India.
Even today we refer to the cult of the hero and to hero worship when we wish to designate our admiration for those who lead by example, usually in martial terms though sometimes in spiritual ones as well. Hero cults emerged in ancient Greece to commemorate those who had died in battle and to recruit their protective power over the living. More than ancestor worship at the local level, rituals honoring heroes offered a reassuring form of simple and direct piety uncomplicated by the full details of historical lives. Though devoted chiefly to warriors, hero cults occasionally found expression in votaries that included clusters of family members.32
Shining Achilles, clever Odysseus—let us remember that these heroes, almost always described with ennobling epithets, emerged from story and song at a time when the spoken word was the only means of transmission. Heroes had to be larger than life, with stereotypical traits that made it easier to learn their stories by heart. Superhuman beings solved a problem in a sense, for they were not just larger than life, but also all action, in ways that allowed their stories to circulate with ease, to replicate, and to endure in oral-aural cultures. With the introduction of writing and printing, characters began to lead more complex, subtle, and nuanced lives in psychological terms, and interiority became the hallmark of great fiction.33 Narrative turned inward and suddenly we catch more than a quick glimpse of what is going on in the minds of those in the narrative arena. Flat figures, as E. M. Forster told us, become rounded, fully realized characters. We can see inside the minds of Dickens’s David Copperfield and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and understand their thinking. Achilles and Cassandra, on the other hand, rarely invite us in, though we can often infer their emotions and motivations from their actions and reactions.
Odysseus on a Journey and Penelope at Home
Few will doubt that the hero with a thousand faces has dominated the Western imagination, preventing us from seeing how women have figured in fictions that we have turned into timeless and universal cultural expressions. Women may appear in those fictions, but all too often they lack voices and agency, let alone a presence in public life. We see Odysseus in action, held in thrall by his artful ruses and bold deeds. We feel his pain when he parts from Calypso, tremble with him in the cave of Polyphemus, and rejoice when he finds his way back home to Penelope and Telemachus. As a hero of classical antiquity, he performs the “wondrous deeds” that are the hallmark of men seeking glory in those times.34 Penelope, by contrast, like her many cousins in epic and myth, is confined to the domestic arena, with little to say for herself. In national epics ranging from the Finnish Kalevala to the French Song of Roland and in works ranging from Goethe’s drama Faust to Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, women quietly spin and weave, cook and clean, embroider, bear children, heal, and make things whole, clearing the way for the hero’s salvation, or, at the least, not getting in the way of it.
Consider Homer’s Odyssey. To assess its cultural impact, imagine how many young test takers and essay writers in the United States have been asked to describe the character traits of its protagonist. We can take the measure of that question about Odysseus by surveying sample responses available in a Google search of “Odysseus” and “hero.” Their number, as it turns out, is legion. Here is the first entry in a search conducted in January 2020: “Odysseus is brave, loyal, smart, arrogant at times, wise, strong, shrewd, cunning, majestic.” Here is SparkNotes: “Odysseus has the defining character traits of a Homeric leader: strength, courage, nobility, a thirst for glory, and confidence in his authority. His most distinguishing feature, however, is a sharp intellect.” And CliffsNotes tells us that Odysseus “lives by his wiles as well as his courage” and adds that he is “an intellectual.”
What about the other heroes of The Odyssey? Achilles, too, gains “a kind of immortality” through “valor and intense, honest devotion to a cause.” He is the hero of the Trojan War and the “greatest” of all the Greek warriors. Possessing “superhuman strength,” he also has “some character flaws” (his protracted sulking, along with his threat to hack the body of Hector to pieces and eat his flesh raw, may count among them). These shortcomings, alas, keep him from acting with “nobility and integrity,” but they still enable him to fulfill the mission of winning immortality, and he does it through the poem known as The Iliad.
As for Penelope, in the first Google entry for her traits, we find that she is defined not in her own right but by her domestic role as “Odysseus’s wife” and “Telemachus’s mother.” “Penelope’s most prominent qualities are passivity, loyalty, and patience (along with beauty and dexterity at the loom)—the age-old feminine virtues,” we learn. Then comes the coup de grâce: “She does very little but lie in bed and weep.” The commentator for LitCharts concedes that she has some “hidden qualities,” among them “cunning and cleverness.” eNotes also sees her as “pragmatic” and “shrewd,” but underscores the fact that “fidelity” remains one of her “most significant characteristics,” while her husband’s lack of fidelity fails to get a mention. In a website entitled The Psychology of Penelope, we learn that Penelope is “renowned” because she blends “the faithfulness that every man expects of his wife, but also exudes the sexual desire he wants from a lover.” Admittedly, some of these declarations can be dismissed as internet nonsense, but that they have been optimized by search engines suggests that they have played a not negligible role in shaping student thinking and essay writing about The Odyssey. And they reflect the standard curricular wisdom of a time well before the internet became a research tool. The young are taught early on and quickly about gender differences—what it takes to be a hero and what it takes to keep your man.
The Odyssey gives us female characters who do more than verge on the stereotypical: they are the foundational stereotypes. On the one hand there is the bewitching Helen, the seductive femme fatale who figures as a threat to human civilization because she is irresistible to men, conquering their hearts (note the irony of blaming her for male vulnerability to beauty). Then there is Penelope, the virtuous wife, chaste and faithful, staying at home while her husband exposes himself to the alluring attractions of sorceresses and sirens. Helen is positioned as responsible for death and destruction, her beauty turning heads and launching a thousand (war)ships, while Penelope weaves a shroud even as she carries out household duties while cleverly fending off her sycophantic suitors. And then, rounding out the trio, there is the murderous Clytemnestra, who plots with her lover to kill her husband Agamemnon (a man willing to sacrifice his daughter for fair winds to take him to Troy) by throwing a robe over him and stabbing him to death. She is a reminder that not all women are as chaste, faithful, and dazzlingly beautiful as the two other prominent female figures in the epic. Students have been taught to accept these stories as canonical, authoritative, and normative, and were rarely, if ever, encouraged to question silencing or to challenge gender stereotyping. Until now.
The Odyssey emerged from a Greek oral storytelling culture and was composed in the form we know it today in the eighth century BCE. Once written down, orally transmitted epics lost the improvisational energy that drove their tellings and retell
ings. Turned into sacred texts, immutable and unassailable, they became part of a literary-historical record, stories that no longer challenged listeners to weigh in, respond to, and reshape their terms and values as had been the case with oral performances. Traditional tales, as defined by folklorists, change with each new telling, incorporating the creative contributions of listeners, even as they capture and conserve what has been relayed by earlier narrators, bards, and rhapsodes. But once written down, even when reinterpreted for Anglo-American audiences by new translations, their historically contingent values and beliefs harden into timeless and universal truths. As we shall see, however, the telling of stories and myths from times past can be, and has been, contested, complicated, and reimagined.
Mythical Heroines Get Make-Overs
Mnemosyne: that is the name of the mother of the muses. She is the goddess of memory, and, without her progeny, song, music, dance, and story would not exist. It is Mnemosyne to whom women writers have appealed in the past decades. It is time, they seem to be telling us, to remember not just the heroes from the ancient world but also the heroines. Through belated acts of mythopoesis, writers today are doing what mythmakers have always done supremely well. From competing and conflicting histories, legends, and stories, they create new accounts. And, like magic, they re-member women from ancient times and bring them back to life.