The Fairy-tale Heroine's Journey
A new midweek thread for paid subscribers, with narrative prompts
Dear enchanted community – or should I say community of enchanters? – here I am in your inbox again. I’m very much aware of the need not to wear you out with my enthusiasm for writing here, but the truth is that at the moment I have so many ideas I want to share that I’m going to have to break out and introduce a midweek thread for paid subscribers, as well as my weekend offerings.
The reason for this is that I’m working with some ideas, old and new, about the motif of The Heroine’s Journey in the context of fairy tales. I’m not just looking for readers, but for participants in the process, so that what I eventually produce is relevant to as many women as possible. I’m always delighted by your insights when we talk about fairy tales in our monthly live salons, and so I’m hoping you’ll join me in this new adventure. I promise these future posts won’t be lengthy; what I really want to do is offer up an idea about a particular aspect of the journey, and then a prompt or two for you to respond to.
This new project has erupted out of my decades-long narrative psychology practice and other work with fairy tales, and I hope that bringing that experience, and sharing new ideas and prompts with you here, will help you to enhance your understanding of your own personal journey through life.
This first post will be much longer than future posts will be, so that I can offer up the background to this project – and then you’ll find this week’s prompt following on from it at the bottom.
What is The Heroine’s Journey?
Most of my readers will be aware of the fact that, in the 1940s, American mythologist Joseph Campbell developed and published his well-known and tremendously influential outline of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Campbell suggested that the world’s most important mythological stories share a common framework: they all involve a hero (yes, a man), who happens to be a person of exceptional gifts – which may or may not be recognised by his close circle or society. He, or someone he loves, or the world in which he lives, suffers from a deficiency which is usually represented by a vivid image or symbol (in a fairy tale, for example, it might be a missing ring of power, or a bucket of water from the well at the world’s end). He must then set out on a great adventure to find the missing treasure and return with it to the world he originally left.
Campbell’s notion of the Hero’s Journey has been profoundly influential (especially among writers of contemporary ‘blockbuster’ fiction and in Hollywood ...) and has many fine and fascinating qualities – but it has also been subject to many criticisms, including the fact that it has little to offer women. It does not reflect the full reality of women’s lives, either inner or outer. In it, women appear either as the Temptress, there to test the Hero and lead him off-course, or in the guise of the Great Goddess, who represents the ‘unconditional love’ which must be won by the Hero to give him the courage to go on with his quest. In other words, at their very best, women can be no more than the destination: we represent the static, essential qualities that the active, all-conquering Hero is searching for.
Maureen Murdock, one of his female students, reported that Campbell told her: ‘Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.’ And indeed, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in the chapter ‘The Meeting with the Goddess’, Campbell writes: ‘Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.’ I really don’t know where to begin!
In 1990, Murdock produced her own version of the Hero’s Journey: the Heroine’s Journey. It’s a very interesting concept, but it focuses in on one particular kind of woman, the ‘father’s daughter’, and although I found much of it highly relevant to my own situation, it seems sometimes to fail women who are different.
The Fairy-Tale Heroine’s Journey
My own perspective on this has ranged from my introduction of ‘The Eco-Heroine’s Journey’ in If Women Rose Rooted, to my concept of ‘The Post-Heroic Journey’ which you can read about here.
But I’m interested on moving the focus away from myth (which informed both Campbell and Murdock, as well as others who’ve written about this) to fairy tales. This is because myths, by definition, are rarely about real people. The prime movers in myths are usually gods, goddesses, barely-human heroes and other extraordinary beings. Although we can of course see elements of the human story in them, it can frankly be hard to live up to them. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are a subset of folk tales, and folk tales are, by definition, the tales of the folk. They were told and retold, all down the centuries, by ordinary people – and, in the oral tradition, more often than not by women. And even when they’re presented as princesses, the heroines of fairy tales represent ordinary people.
Fairy tales offer us a wide range of characters (protagonists, allies and antagonists), places and houses, tasks, situations and resolutions to work with. They’re laden with beautiful, evocative images.
So in this series of posts and prompts, although we’ll certainly rub up against a myth or two from time to time, we’re going to explore the journey of the fairy-tale heroine, as well as working with wider ideas about women’s archetypes, personal mythmaking and other narrative processes. We’ll talk about ways of delving deeper into what arises for us. And in responding to the prompts, we’ll explore the ways in which these ideas illuminate our own ways of being in the world, and our own journey through life.
A reminder that if you’re interested in working with narrative psychology in more depth and detail, or if you’d like a credential/CECs in this work, please have a look at my eight-month online graduate certificate at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Image: John Bauer