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The Hero enters the forest. He doubts, struggles, sacrifices, and overcomes. He fights the dragon, gathers treasure, and returns home forever changed.
The Heroine lingers at the crossroads. Her doubts knit themselves around her heart, entwining more quickly than she can unwind them. After some struggle, she begins to suspect that the unwinding may not be the point. In fact, if she stops pulling at these threads in vain, she can pull at others—larger ones, older ones. She unwinds what she can, knowing she’ll never finish: her journey is perpetual.
Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle was drawn from his observation of parallels in mythologies across cultures, but immediately became a lens through which to examine our own lives. While people of any gender can find themselves on a “Hero’s journey,” it’s an undoubtedly masculine cycle—a linear, often physical march through ego to conquest—that represents only a corner of human experience. It lends itself so well to the concept of masculine transformation, though, that it’s been co-opted for decades by conmen who sell the elixir of “ideal” manhood to wounded and vulnerable men as a means of quashing perceived weakness and actual ambiguity.
Rather, the male and female associations are purely archetypal: far from being a gender essentialist concept, the Hero and Heroine are representative of the masculine and feminine in us all—that is, Jung’s animus and anima, respectively—and our quest for balance between the two. In her 1990 book The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdoch explains the heroine cycle this way:
“The model I am presenting does not necessarily fit the experience of women of all ages, and I have found that neither is it limited only to women [ . . . ] It describes the experience of many people who strive to be active and make a contribution in the world, but who also fear what our progress-oriented society has done to the human psyche and to the ecological balance of the planet.” (4)
Murdoch drew her own analysis directly from her experience as a therapist working mainly with women, adapting her observations to mirror Campbell’s hero cycle as a means of filling in what many perceive as a gap in his work. She writes that while the hero cycle is illuminating, “it did not address the deep wounding of the feminine on a personal or cultural level.”
I mention this not to dismiss or devalue Campbell’s assertions of the hero’s journey, but to raise up its yin. Campbell was clear that the basis of his own philosophy was softness, kindness, and shared understanding. “The fundamental human experience,” he writes in an essay collected in A Hero’s Journey, “is that of compassion” (219).
For at least 50% of the planet’s population, the journey cannot begin with a Call to Adventure: something else has to happen first.
Rejection of the feminine
Consider for a moment the now-ubiquitous Strong Female Character. While some live up to the concept (with varying levels of nuance), “likable” female characters must walk a fine line. Popular Strong Female Characters tend to satisfy the demands of a masculine culture by being physically strong, outspoken, rejecting formality and fuss, but still conform to the incredibly narrow definition of acceptable femininity by being slim, pretty, fragile. Failing to stay in bounds lands them in a sea of other labels, where they drown as a Shrew, a Tease, a Nag.
In Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, titular girl (and antagonist) Amy famously excoriates the “cool girl,” a type of woman that she believes suppresses her feminine self in order to appeal to the men around her. She sees this rejection of femininity as itself the weakness, a coward’s path out of navigating feminine ambiguity—and masculine pushback—to endear themselves to men.
The truth is that in a world where masculinity is loud, fast, physically powerful, individualistic, definitive, and lacking in nuance, praise can signal protection. Being sensitive, thoughtful, questioning, and gentle is an existential risk. Optimism and kindness is perceived as naivete, a liability in a masculine culture. Initial rejection of the feminine isn’t a choice so much as a compulsory protective stance in a crush-or-be-crushed world, the only way to survive long enough to pick it back up down the road. While women and those outside the gender binary are most clearly in the crosshairs, even men who have always identified as straight and cisgender have been harmed by the indiscriminate shrapnel of patriarchy, friendly fire from a world that still alleges to have been built for them. Like the deep, unhealing wound Anfortas takes to his literal manhood in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, it’s not damage that can be healed by the hard science of medicine but requires an approach so obvious as to be almost insulting: compassion.
The road beyond survival
While the Heroine’s initial rejection of the feminine is most often shown as critical to her survival, the pattern can play out even in the safest utopia. Becky Chambers’s 2021 novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built takes place in an idealized future world that has learned from our own: humans, having narrowly avoided disaster centuries before, now live in closer harmony with one another and the natural world.
A nonbinary monk named Sibling Dex wakes up to realize they’ve reached their goal, but they still feel unhappy. Dex, whose doctrine is based in brewing tea and offering comfort, feels a deep, inescapable feeling that something is missing. Immediately, they berate themself:
“Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?”
Dex’s life sounds so peaceful, so kind, that some readers may be tempted to agree with their self-assessment. Even so, Dex decides to leave the comfort of their home and career to set off on a dangerous journey, completely alone and without a concrete goal. This feels like the beginning of a Hero’s journey, but no—Dex did that already, before this story even began: they left their childhood home, found their grail, settled down in a new world of their own making. What Dex is actually doing here is rejecting the feminine—their quiet life of studies, tea, and compassion—to fill the emptiness in the most masculine way possible. They must find the Thing that will make them whole.
A foolhardy journey into the woods may have been the last thing they ever did if not for a chance encounter with a strange, wild creature—a robot, of all things, named Mosscap. Just as Parzifal approaches the Grail King, Mosscap asks Dex what the trouble is. And Dex, in their struggle to make Mosscap understand, is forced to interrogate their own need for meaning.
Mosscap offers a deceptively simple reframing, one which becomes the thesis for this novella and its sequel: “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.”
Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths.
This is a hopeful, freeing, radical realization. Dex’s journey is, like all Heroine’s journeys, unending. Participating in the joys and sorrows of the world isn’t one quest with a reward but a lifelong wandering, an evolution with many deaths and rebirths: you don’t leave your mark on the world, but on other people.
Recognizing this interconnectedness is the heart of the Heroine’s strength: while the Hero alters his own perception of the world through one epic quest, the Heroine’s infinite waves of influence, like water against stone, can alter its reality. Maybe all Hero’s journeys are followed by a Heroine’s journey, and if we push past “happily ever after” we’ll always find “what now?”
MythBlast authored by:
Gabrielle Basha is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a working associate for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and a member of the executive communications team at the Wikimedia Foundation.
In addition to an informal yet life-long study of where pop culture meets folklore, Gabrielle holds a BFA in art history and illustration and an MFA in creative writing, both from Lesley University.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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In this bonus lecture to Episode 32: "Mythologies of Quest and Illumination", Campbell discusses the mythology of the Buddha, and gives a comparison of the Buddha's "Tree of Illumination" to the Bible's "Tree of Immortal Life".
This Week's Highlights
All of the great mythologies and much of the myth storytelling of the world is from the man’s point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring in female heroes, I had to go to the fairy tales. These are told by women to children, you know, and you get a sense of the woman’s journey.
There is a feminine counterpart to the trials and the difficulties, but it certainly is in a different mode. I don’t know the counterpart—the real counterpart, not the woman pretending to be male, but the normal feminine archetypology of this experience. I wouldn’t know what that would be.
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 148