by Jaym Gates
Labyrinth shows some of these limitations to the Heroine’s Journey model, as well as the strengths. Sarah’s journey asks her to give up a world of fantasy and take care of a child. Even though Toby is her brother, this still places Sarah in a mothering role, positing the ultimate end point of a woman’s journey as one of domesticity and child care.
While questions surrounding motherhood are reflective of many women’s unique experiences, they are not universal. Not every woman wants to be a mother, and not every woman is physically capable of doing so. This comes with its own nasty set of clichés, for example, the notion that motherhood is the only way a woman can truly be fulfilled, or that a woman’s sole value is her ability to give birth.
While Murdock’s model does not convey a perfect universal experience for women, it does work as a response to Campbell’s model by using his framework and expanding it to address the concerns of women and their desire for journeys of their own.
The Limits of the Hero’s Journey
There are also limitations to the structure of the Hero’s Journey that do not necessarily link to gender, class, or background. The end point of the Heroine’s Journey is the stability and balance achieved in the Beyond Duality stage. However, the final stage of Campbell’s journey, the Freedom to Live, reads more as a state of suspended animation, a pause, waiting for the next adventure.
“The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. [...] He does not mistake the apparent changelessness in time for permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the “other thing”), as destroying the permanent with its change.” (Campbell, 209).
At the end of his journey, the hero lives in the moment, not regretting the past or looking forward to the future. It is a state that allows him to be forgiven for his past actions and not held responsible for his future actions, simply going where he is called.
In the applications of the Hero’s Journey given as examples earlier - Luke Skywalker, King Arthur, and Frodo Baggins — this certainly seems to be the case. There is an undercurrent of loss to the end of each of their stories, but also a rejection of the domestic as well. Like Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey, these heroes do not find domestic bliss. They sever ties with their families (or those ties are severed for them), and they await the next adventure.
In these practical applications, the hero is never asked to grow up in that they are not asked to deal with the consequences of their heroism in the world. They do not stay to raise children, and if their wisdom benefits later generations, it is further down the line at a remove (see, again, Luke Skywalker). These heroes remain iconic, frozen in the moment of their heroism, ready to be called on again in the future, while the rest of the world moves on. The Hero’s Journey is a circle; the Heroine’s Journey is a straight line. Campbell’s model, and many of the stories drawn from it, allow only for a limited understanding of heroism, and a limited model of masculinity — one that calls for a constant state of action, rather than domesticity and rest.
Using Tropes to Build a Better Story
As this essay has shown, Labyrinth can be mapped to the Heroine’s Journey as laid out by Maureen Murdock. However, not every step is a one-to-one match. In its practical applications, The Hero/Heroine’s Journey trope is malleable, like all tropes. Buffy can end her journey with the Freedom to Live. Elsa, Anna, and Katniss do not need to Encounter the Goddess or Reconnect with the Feminine in a way that requires them to consider whether they want to have children in order to make their journeys complete. Steps of the journey can be swapped out, rearranged, or dropped all together.
Tropes and archetypes are narrative building blocks, a jumping off point, not a set of hard and fast rules. Not every woman wants to settle down into motherhood, or return to the status quo at the end of her tale. Not every man wants to keep on adventuring. Some heroes might want to settle down and start a family, and some heroines might want to continue journeying and see what is beyond the horizon.
Just as Maureen Murdock took Joseph Campbell’s model and expanded the conversation to include the unique experiences of women, we must recognize there are other stories to be told and other archetypal models for expressing them.
We need to recognize stories that flip the script. We need models that do not require heroines to reject femininity in order to begin their journey, or reclaim it at the end. We need models that allow for men to find domestic bliss and balance at the end of their tales. Even more importantly, we need models that recognize the unique journeys of non-binary characters, trans characters, characters of color, neuro-atypical characters, and characters representing a wide array of marginalized identities. Like the Heroine’s Journey itself, Murdock’s model is only a jumping off point. We need to keep the conversation going and continue to expand the models and tropes that form the building blocks of our stories in order to capture all the facets of our world.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell). Navato, CA USA: New World Library. Third Edition. 2008.
Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. Lucasfilm/Jim Henson Company, 1986. Film.
Meeker, Lloyd. Essential Differences in a Gay Hero’s Journey - Starting on the Outside. Rainbow Romance Writers. 7 April 2014. < http://rainbowromancewriters.com/node/733>
Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Boulder, CO USA: Shambhala, 1990.
Teich, Howard. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey - The Twin Heroes. SolarLunar. , http://solarlunar.com/articles/twin-heroes/joseph-campbell-heros-journey/>
Footnotes
[1] http://www.starwars.com/news/mythic-discovery-within-the-inner-reaches-of-outer-space-joseph-campbell-meets-george-lucas-part-i
[2] http://solarlunar.com/articles/twin-heroes/joseph-campbell-heros-journey/
[3] http://www.maureenmurdock.com/heroine.html
[4] http://rainbowromancewriters.com/node/733
Escaping the Hall of Mirrors
Victor Raymond, PhD
New York and Seattle are cosmopolitan cities, home to dozens of different ethnic communities, each city having a vibrant cultural life. But in both cities [1], attempts have been made recently to stage new productions of The Mikado — the Gilbert & Sullivan opera set in an imagined feudal Japan. In both cases, the productions were criticized for being examples of “yellowface” — casting white actors in Asian roles, when there are clearly lots of Asian actors available. That by itself wasn’t the only problem. The deeper problem of The Mikado is that any traditional production is a racist relic of the 19th Century, and telling people to “lighten up already” doesn’t fix that. There have been some very decent rewrites to update it for modern audiences, but more often than not, The Mikado gets staged in a traditional manner — racism and all.
Probably the biggest reason for this is that The Mikado is a reflection of British ideas about how the world looked at the height of empire, some 130 years ago. Between nostalgia and familiarity, there’s enough of cultural resonance for many white Americans to not really notice how jarring it is for most Asians — especially Asians who grew up in the United States.
This cultural perspective — the world seen through Western (white) eyes — is pervasive in American and European media and literature. By placing a white — usually male — perspective as the viewpoint for seeing the world, it becomes easy to see everything else as “other” or “different” and often “inferior.”
Consider for a moment the list of familiar archetypal characters easily found in books, movies, and other media:
* The Noble Savage: usually a “Red Indian” who is either a bloodthirsty warrior or living in harmony with Nature.
* The Happy Negro: from Stepin Fetchit to more recent depictions, a character usually acting in ways to validate the social inequality of the status quo.
* The Yellow Peril: the stereotype of the mysterious and menacing Oriental, out to destroy the American way of life.
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bsp; * The Shaman: somewhat more plastic in ethnicity, the Shaman is the holder of non-Western (and therefore suspect) knowledge. The Voodoo Priest is a variation on this theme.
* The Magical Negro — a Black character whose main job is to assist the (white) main character in succeeding, with the white main character getting the glory (and the girl) at the end of the story.
The list of clichés is practically endless. This suggests how wide-spread they are, as unquestioned elements of storytelling. The problem with the clichés already mentioned is that they presuppose a particular kind of unmarked state, that of a white, cisgender, heterosexual Christian male usually from an American or Western European cultural background. Anything that varies from this set of norms is therefore different or abnormal. It is particularly a problem for writers who are writing outside of their cultural background or frame of reference. In Granta 92, published in 2006, Binyavanga Wainaina dispassionately lists off Western cliché after Western cliché in “How To Write About Africa” — “The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo, or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth….” — these are but two from a much longer list.
But if it happens in theatre and various genres of literature, does it happen in other forms of media? The answer is an unsurprising affirmative. TV Tropes, as a website (www.tvtropes.org ), has many clichés, culled from television, movies, and related media. Yet movies get made and books get written which use these tired, outworn elements again and again:
* Dances with Wolves — a movie which suggests that the main character — who is white — is the only real savior of the native people he encounters. At least one friend of mine sardonically referred to it as “What These People Need is a Honky.”
* The Last Samurai — this time with Tom Cruise, and set in early modern Japan. Seen as both an idealistic portrayal of an end of an era and also something of an outsider’s view of the events around the Meiji Restoration.
* Avatar — which manages to repeat many of the themes from Dances with Wolves while also providing a look at a future human-alien conflict. The plot is centered on the perspective of a white male soldier from Earth, who “goes native” and becomes the savior of the Navi.
Each of these movies was successful, and each of them made a lot of money. As a result, there are clearly no barriers or disadvantages in terms of popularity for recycling tropes and clichés — indeed, there seems to be a clear market for what might be described as “comfort food” in terms of entertainment. Why should anyone be surprised? It’s safe and it’s a money-maker. What’s not to like? It would be easy to cast this as a “popular work” versus “avant-garde work” but it’s more complicated than that. The risks of movie-making are considerable, and often, films and television are willing to break new ground if there is some success elsewhere — often in published literature — to use as a guide for potentially successful projects.
Computer and video gaming is even more affected by the economics of production and sales. Lara Croft is a memorable character — but very much a cliché and stereotype. Beyond characters, the limitations of computer and video games end up embedding clichés into the very structure of many games: enemies are divided into “mooks” and “bosses” and problems are solved by fighting — over and over again. While there is some pressure to make adventures and storylines more varied, that doesn’t often result in better games. In fact, there has been push-back from some gamers precisely when games try to break out of the mold and do things differently, notably in the Dragon Age series from Bioware. Fortunately, there is enough diversity amongst gamers for Bioware to continue dealing with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity — but this may be more of the exception than the rule.
At this point, it is worth suggesting that science fiction (perhaps more so than fantasy) has an internal responsibility to eschew clichés, if only because science fiction is based on the notion of speculation on the unknown, the improbable, and the yet-to-come. But this is where fantasy and science fiction literature are not as progressive as one might hope. “You need to maintain a connection with the reader” is one defense, usually with a set of assumptions about whom that reader might be. This seems based in the paradox that precisely because science fiction is so strange, it should avoid exploring that strangeness because it might be too strange. This “comfort food” approach means that at the very moment fantasy and science fiction are supposed to transform our perspective is exactly the moment when the opportunity is lost by playing it safe by providing the familiar and the comfortable. “Wait!” the concerned observer might respond. “What if the work itself is simply unintelligible to the reader because of that strangeness?” That particular frontier is much more shunned than crossed, and even when a work becomes a “difficult read,” that doesn’t mean it isn’t rewarding and fulfilling, e.g. Iain M. Banks' Excession comes to mind (or really any of his Culture novels), or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, or any of a number of works by authors such as Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Hiromi Goto, Ken Liu — the list is long and well worth reading.
It has also been suggested as another kind of defense that writers do not wish to burden their readers with too many unknowns, and instead prefer to use well-known (well-worn?) plot elements in order to avoid distraction from the real focus of the story, whatever that might be. Such a defense comes across as a justification for a “paint-by-the-numbers” approach to the edges of what are supposed to be original works. While more nuanced than the first approach I’ve mentioned, it also pre-supposes what the reader will find familiar and unfamiliar. But this is more treacherous territory than might otherwise be thought — simplifying your audience down to an archetypal “reader” or typical “gamer” is a vast oversimplification at the best of times. All that is happened is that the “reader” or “gamer” is substituted for the writer as the point of perspective — and with even less justification for what that perspective is, except some idea of who might be most likely to buy the book.
On a deeper level, it is difficult to avoid reaching the conclusion that fantasy literature has become more and more self-referential, with the implication that the clichés will themselves become part of the assumed background and the moorings connecting fantasy to the real world will be finally and completely cut. An illustrative example comes to mind: a number of years ago, I loaned a friend a copy of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s The Compleat Enchanter — specifically the 1976 Del Rey edition — and later asked him what he had thought of it. “Oh, it wasn’t all that bad…” he responded. My raised eyebrows must have given away my surprise at his relatively low assessment. “It was pretty good for one of those Lord of the Rings imitation stories…”
I pointed out the original publication dates for the stories — 1940 for “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic” and 1941 for “The Castle of Iron” — “James, this was written before The Lord of the Rings was published.”
“Oh! Well, then — it was really good!”
Considering that this conversation took place some twenty-five years ago, this problem has only gotten worse since then. In the case of fantasy fiction, Diana Wynne Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a bitingly funny look at clichés in fantasy literature. In an immediate sense, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland highlights the shortcuts authors take when writing fantasy while adopting clichés, and how common — and obvious — those short-cuts have become. Science fiction — if considered as a separate genre (as Barry Malzberg suggested [2]) — may have a different set of recurrent clichés, but it doesn’t take much to find them.
The price of fantasy and science fiction becoming self-referential involves two things: the loss of context and the risk of building barriers to entry through reliance on insider jargon
and meaning. The loss of context is the more dangerous one, I would suggest, because of the lack of intended connection to anyone’s world — the writer, the readers, really anybody. This is problematic in two ways. Because the connections made to the real world are still there, albeit inferential and not explicit, it makes it possible for people to claim that those connections are really in the eye of the beholder, and therefore a matter of subjective interpretation. It further creates a kind of echo chamber where different elements are combined without any sense of how they might or might not go well together. It is therefore possible for readers to encounter stories which careen back and forth between anachronisms and fantasy elements bereft of context — with the presumption that because it is supposed to be fantasy, it does not need to avoid these problems. It can even happen when an author is otherwise trying to have a coherent context for the story, e.g. the political discussions found in Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz, and critiqued by Ursula K. Le Guin in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” in The Language of the Night, which ring false precisely because there is no difference in the conversation between Prince Nigel of Gwynedd and his brother’s liege Duke Morgan, and what a conversation in Washington, D.C. between two Beltway insiders might sound like.