Tag Archives: heroine
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.
Final Scene of ‘The Descent’
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.
Helena’s Transformation from ‘Mirrormask’
Scene from Mirrormask where Helena is transformed into the Dark Princess.
The Call to Adventure/Separation from the Mother
The Call to Adventure/Separation from the Mother
For this ISP, I deliberately selected two books that I have been meaning to read but never gotten around to it. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I have read excerpts from them for various classes, but this is the first time I have sat down and read the books in their entirety. In addition I am reading The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, at the behest of my sponsor. Since this is my first ISP, and every adventure has a beginning, that is where I am starting: the beginning of each book discussing how adventures begin.
What is different about the path of the heroine and the hero? Campbell’s work discusses the journey from an almost exclusively male point of view. In fact, in the first two chapters, female characters are primarily described in the section discussing the refusal of adventure. He speaks of the hero in terms of his inner, Freudian-inspired motives and drives. Estes, rather than specifically discussing the beginning of adventure, chooses to use the archetype of La Loba, or Wolf Woman, as the actual source of the call. Murdock takes the issue in yet another direction by emphasizing separation from the mother and reconciliation with the concept of the feminine as the critical first step. For Campbell, the mythologist, the call comes from the spiritual world. For Estes, the Jungian analyst, the call comes from archetype within, from the collective unconsciousness we share. For Murdock, also a Jungian psychotherapist, she finds the answer in the personal dynamic between the heroine and society’s expectations placed on women.
Campbell mentions The Herald, a figure who’s job it is to call the hero to his destiny and initiate the journey. This figure is often portrayed as grotesque or feared. Estes La Loba is certainly a fearsome figure, described as the Bone Woman who raises the dead, a feral and earthy creature. The Herald of the heroine’s journey seems to manifest in a friendlier but no less anxious way. We can see a different example of The Herald in The White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. Although few would argue that the bunny is grotesque, his preoccupation with time, authority, and death at the hands of the Queen certainly makes him a awesome figure for the adolescent Alice. He is Adulthood, he has obligations, his time is limited. Her decision to follow him is not reckless, it is her decision to heed the call of her own curiosity in spite her fears. Similarly, Toto from the Wizard of Oz is another Herald, although again of a far less frightening countenance than La Loba. In the film version of the tale, he is the reason Dorothy is caught outside in the tornado that carries her to Oz, and her motherly concern for his safety is the impetus for many different plot points in the journey. Toto is her child, another glimpse of impeding Adulthood leading her onward. Neither The White Rabbit nor Toto provides any guidance or advice as to how their heroines should proceed. While they share similarities, The Herald should not be confused with The Guide, which we will be discussing later in this class. The Herald’s only job is to beckon, not to inform. In some cases, the Herald will share the duties of the Guide, but they are not the same role.
This week’s films were Kevin Smith’s comedy Dogma and The Wachowski’s dystopian V for Vendetta. In both films, the heroine is called to service for a greater cause. In Dogma, the heroine Bethany is informed by The Metatron (voice of God, who appears as a pillar of flame initially, before douses him with a fire extinguisher, revealing him to be Alan Rickman) that she is the Last Scion, or descendant of Christ, and is the only one who can stop the apocalyptic actions of a pair of fallen angels, thus saving the world. She naturally refuses such a dangerous and terrifying responsibility, as most people would. She states that she is not worthy of such a task, due to her loss of faith over being incapable of having children. The Metatron informs her that she needs to put her resentments aside, as she is being offered the chance to become mother and protector to the entire world instead. Bethany eventually relents and sets off to New Jersey, which is where most apocalypses take place. But this act is what differentiates the hero/heroine from the rest of us. It isn’t bravery, strength, or magic powers. It is the willingness to follow The Herald, even if you aren’t certain of what lies ahead.
In V for Vendetta, the heroine Evey is pressed into service against a tyrannical British police state by a masked man who seems almost inhuman in his combat abilities and tolerance for pain. For the first half of the film, she refuses to do little more than the bare minimum to help his cause, although she expresses sympathy with his beliefs. She openly claims her fear, says she wishes she could be strong but she isn’t. After the masked man orchestrates her staged imprisonment and torture, she discovers the fortitude within herself to transcend her fear and follow The Herald. Although the movie is primarily concerned with her transformation into the heroine, her future trajectory as the heroine is implied by her actions as she takes place of the masked man after his death.
Interestingly, all of these women share something that Murdock alludes to in her book: the Absent Mother. Dorothy, Evey, and Bethany are orphans. Alice’s mother is unknown, and in fact a text search of the online version of the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reveals not a single reference to the word “mother”. These are all girls on the cusp of puberty who have been separated from the mother, for better or for worse, and are on their way to discovering themselves as the future women they will become. This is, at least in part, at the core of the heroine’s journey: who will you be when you finally have to stand on your own?
In each of these examples, the heroine is called by The Herald to address an injustice (although in Alice’s case, her confrontation with the Queen is less motivated by the urging of others as it is her own impatience with the bully and self-preservation.) Her fear and reluctance may or may not be a clearly stated issue, but in the end she realizes she has to confront that fear to protect the weak and disenfranchised. She might refuse the call with an “it ain’t me” moment, like Evey and Bethany, before heeding The Herald. She might go willingly toward adventure out of curiosity and boredom with society’s restrictions on young girls, like Alice. She might go out of love and concern, like Dorothy. In the end, however, in order for us to have a journey, she has to put aside her fear and say yes to The Herald.
References
Smith, K. (Director). (1999). Dogma [Motion picture on DVD]. London: Cinema Club.
V for vendetta [Motion picture on DVD]. (2005). USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.
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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