Here is an interesting website that provides an excellent guide to interpreting and using The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. Very helpful for writers who are interested in how these steps can be applied to their characters.
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Fairytale heroines
Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Fairytale heroines
Heroines, you will note, not ‘fairytale princesses’. For though princesses do figure in fairytales, the heroine is just as often a peasant – or a farmer’s daughter – or perhaps the child of a powerful magician. Even in the so-called Classic Fairytales, the ones which have been anthologised and Disneyfied almost to death, Sleeping Beauty and Snow-White are princesses, yes. But Cinderella and Beauty are merchant’s daughters; Red Riding Hood is an ordinary little girl; Rapunzel is a peasant woman’s child; the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin is a miller’s daughter – and so on.
Duality and Sacred Marriage
Duality and Sacred Marriage
This week’s theme was all about duality. In Hero, Campbell discussed woman as goddess and temptress, which I felt was a bit one-sided. He describes the rejection of the female by the hero as being rejection of life, the female in this case usually being depicted as a hideous hag who poses a challenge to the hero that includes some form of physical or sexual contact. The hero’s repulsion at the thought of this act is his rejection of the visceral and chthonic nature of life itself. It is only the hero who can embrace the less “savory” aspects of being who is given the opportunity to ascend to a state of unity with the goddess. I find this assessment a bit biased, in that it does not usually seem to pan out the same for the female heroine. If women are indeed the primal personification of the bodily requirements of life, why then does not the heroine’s journey include a male figure that seeks to unite her corporeal nature with his supposed virtuous nature? Instead, Campbell sites examples of the virtuous maiden winning the heart of the bestial male aspect. Although I acknowledge the long-held belief by scholars that “girls are icky because they bleed and stuff”, I think really what we are witnessing is the unification of the hero/heroine with their own primal nature, regardless of gender. There are as many examples of the gentle heroine/bestial man as there are gentle hero/bestial woman, but history is written by the victor…
So rather than seeing this phenomenon as the unification of the human and the goddess, maybe what we are seeing is the join of two halves of the same whole. Like Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, what was once torn asunder by the gods takes the act of a hero/heroine to repair. In Wolves, Estes discusses that the hero Manawee can only reveal the names of the sisters he is trying to woo once he dispatches his faithful little dog to spy on them. By incorporating and trusting his animal side, the quest is accomplished, and he wins his bride. Animus and anima are reunited through the merging of the primal and the ascended, or the sacred and the profane.
I have discussed previously the transformation of the heroine into her dark aspect as a common theme seen in the heroine’s journey. This is the opposite of the unification of the animus and anima or the god/goddess with the hero/heroine. It is the dividing of the heroine into her own diametrically opposed halves. This weeks films exemplified this duality perfectly. In Ridley Scott’s Legend, Princess Lilli is a young woman in a literal fairy tale world. She is love with Jack, who is feral boy who introduces her to the unicorns of his enchanted forest. When her attempts to touch the unicorns lead to their capture by a demonic force, she goes on a quest to rescue them and save the world from eternal darkness. In the process she is captured by the demon, and tempted by him with jewels, gowns, and other finery to be his bride. We witness Lilli fighting these temptations, but she appears to succumb to their charms and eventually transforms into Dark Lilli. The physical transformation from a young girl in a flowing white dress into the the raven-haired, bat-like woman is dramatic. Although in the end her transformation is shown to be partly ruse to gain the demon’s trust in order to free the unicorns, it is easy to see how the duality of Lilli is not only drawn between good and evil. The acceptance of the pubescent heroine of her “dark” aspect is the acceptance of adulthood. She is to become a woman and a bride, and this is the demarcation between life and death. Someone once told me that having children is the point in which you begin to die. They did not mean this in a negative way, only that this is the point where the focus of your life becomes rooted in the next generation and not in your own. As someone who has remained child-free by choice, I can’t attest to this. For the heroine, shedding her innocence to realize her fertile potential is the first step towards realizing her own mortality and accepting her place in the wheel of life.
We also see this in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, but interestingly enough the creators of this film seem more aware of the implications of this transformation. When Sarah throws a tantrum and wishes for her infant brother to be taken by the Goblin King (played by the perfectly cast, sexually ambiguous heartthrob David Bowie), he gives her until midnight to retrieve the child from the Labyrinth. His communications with Sarah are sinister but flirtatious. He attempts to woo her, and in a dream sequence she fantasizes dancing with him at an elaborate ball in a glittering fantasy dress. Here her transformation is not into Dark Sarah, but Adult Sarah.
At the end of the film, in their final confrontation, he reveals to her that he cannot understand why she is fighting him:
“*Everything*! Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for *you*! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations. Isn’t that generous?”
The Goblin King is her own wish for a mate come to life. After he reveals this to her, it isn’t long before she realizes he has no power over her, and he transforms into an owl and flies away. In the end, Sarah finds that she can embrace her impending womanhood, but knows that she need not sever all her ties with her childhood flights of fancy to do so.
(I am cutting this week’s journal a bit short, as I have 3 essays due this week (including this class) and over 300 pages of reading to do, half of them in German. Time management only goes so far as there are only so many hours in a day!)
References
Henson, J. (Director). (1986). Labyrinth [Motion picture on DVD]. Henson Associates/Lucasfilm.
Scott, R. (Director). (1985). Legend [Motion picture on DVD].
Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Down the Rabbit Hole from ‘Alice in Wonderland’
Dancing Dress Scene from “Legend”
“Dancing Dress” scene from Legend, where Lilli is seduced into her transformation into Dark Lilli.
Final Confrontation from ‘Labyrinth’
The final confrontation between Sarah and the Goblin King from Labyrinth, where it is revealed that he is a construct of her desires.
Ballroom Scene from ‘Labyrinth’
Ballroom scene from Labyrinth, in which Sarah imagines herself transformed into and adult version of herself and dances with the Goblin King.
A Day In the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine
A Day In the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine
Funny satire on what it takes to be a a Female Hero in our culture.
She woke up like she did every day: slowly pulling her motorcycle helmet off, then shaking her head slowly back and forth to reveal a long, blonde ponytail. Everyone gasped. “That’s right,” she said, kicking the winning football goal before sliding into a sheer, sexy camisole under a blazer and playing as hard as she worked, “I’ve been a girl this whole time.” One of the guys, the real sexy one, shook his head in slow motion, as if to say “wh-wh-wh-whaaat?” You know the kind. His mouth was kind of open while he did it. He was totally blown away.
The Six Swans
The Road of Trials
The Road of Trials
I married late in life. I was 36 before I met my now-husband, and was married just weeks before my 39th birthday. Part of my reluctance to marry was my inability to “settle” for less than what I thought I deserved. Ultimately, all of my relationships turned sour, each man proving to be either a disappointment or running for the hills at the first emergence of my rather intense nature. The last relationship I had before meeting my husband was with a handsome man who was an accomplished drummer and audio engineer. After that went belly-up, I was talking to a friend about it, telling her that I was bummed because he was a drummer and I liked drummers. She asked me why. I stopped and realized that the reason I found drummers attractive was because I had always wanted to learn how to play drums. It had nothing to do with any quality playing the drums actually gave him and everything to do with living vicariously through his accomplishments. He did the things that society had told me were things I could not do. This prompted a deeper reflection on my life and my values when it came to my relationships with men. It dawned on me that I needed to visualize my ideal man and become him, rather than try to date him.
So I did. Although, to be honest, the drum thing never really panned out, I changed my self-perception to one that incorporated this male figure as already being a part of me, not someone I had to search for. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I found that I had to look no further than my own backyard for self-fulfillment. It was only a few short months after this that I met my husband. Had I not had this revelation, I never would have been at the right place and time and in the right frame of mind to meet him. Because I was no longer seeking someone to complete me I found some one who could be my accomplice in life.
In many heroine stories, the heroine accomplishes her journey with the assistance of an entourage of helpers. These sidekicks are usually magical or alien in nature, and are interestingly most often male. In these stories, the heroine often encounters her sidekicks in a state of distress. After rescuing them, they become part of her world, incorporated into her quest. Dorothy had The Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion, and even Toto. Snow White had her dwarfs. These helpers often swoop in to assist the heroine with a task or peril that is perfectly suited to their abilities. It is possible that these male figures are the manifestations of her animus. They are aspects of herself that she needs to acknowledge in order to succeed in her quest. Although they come to her aid throughout her quest, they are not her saviors. They are tools at her disposal. She must warmly embrace them before she can call upon them. It is only through uniting with her animus that she can tap into her full potential.
In the movie The Cell, the main character Catherine is a child psychologist who is able to enter the dreams of her patients via a technological breakthrough. When a serial killer is found in a catatonic state, she is forced to use this ability to help police uncover where is latest victim is being held captive before time runs out. Because this film is literally set in the realm of the subconscious, her trials are primarily psychological but carry the potential for her demise in the real world (as they say, if you die in your dreams, you die in real life.) Our heroine is confronted with scenarios designed to fill her with fear or self-doubt. She is even captured at one point and subjected to the “Dark Princess” transformation as the killer’s love slave. In this film, the symbolism of the trials themselves is what matters, because it is through these symbols the secrets of the killer are revealed. The trials of the heroine as symbols for the clandestine theme of the quest are often present in the journey, as we see in the myth of Eros and Psyche. When Aphrodite charges Psyche with a series of trials to prove her love for Eros, they begin with the impossible task of sorting a multitude of seeds before dawn. Her final task is to travel to the Underworld and retrieve Persephone’s beauty treatment for Aphrodite, which ends with Psyche falling into a death-like torpor before being rescued by Eros. The symbolic progression from seed to death is evident, as is the entropy of life from chaos to order and back to chaos again. The secrets of the nature of romantic love, the combining of psyche and the state of eros, is the fuel of the mechanism of life.
The film The Descent is a trial of a much different nature, symbolically going from death to rebirth from the underworld. The heroine, Sarah, is spelunking with a group of women in Appalachia when they become trapped in an unmapped cave system. They encounter a group of horrific cannibalistic humanoid monsters that proceed to reduce the films cast by attrition. In the beginning of the film, Sarah is in mourning for her husband and daughter, who died a year previously in an unfortunate accident. She is fragile, broken, and unable to cope with much of what life has handed her. As she is presented with increasingly perilous situations, she becomes more and more adept at survival, and becomes more like the monsters she is hiding from. The final scene of her clawing her way out of the earth, bloody and gasping, after enduring hours of pain and torment might be an obvious symbolic choice, but is no less powerful to the viewer. It is made even more poignant when it is revealed that this is potentially her hallucination to escape the hellish underworld she is trapped in. This act of rebirth could be seen as representing the character’s need to live again after the profound loss of her family.
SPOILER WARNING: This is the end of the movie, needless to say it will ruin the film for you if you haven’t seen it.
VIOLENCE WARNING: The following clip is pretty gory.
For all of these heroines, their trials are not just a means to an end. In fact, we often see that these trials are almost a distraction from their overtly intended goal (e.g. to get home, free their loved one, escape from monsters.) These trials are commonly symbolic situations she finds herself in that often require her to call upon the skills of her animus to survive, usually in the form of enchanted companions.
References
Singh, T. (Director). (2000). The Cell [Motion picture on DVD]. New Line Cinema.
Marshall, N. (Director). (2006). The descent [Motion picture on DVD]. England: Celador Films.
Baum, L. F., Denslow, W. W., & Hearn, M. P. (2000). The annotated Wizard of Oz: The wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Norton.
Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
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