The Boon

What is a quest without reward? The heroine starts her journey with an objective, a destination, or a goal. In many cases, the path is littered with distractions, shiny baubles that draw her away from attaining true transformation into her heroic self. Campbell seems to view the act of ascension and apotheosis as what he calls “the ultimate boon.” He views the reward of the hero as the attainment of godhood, that the moment the hero slays his foe he becomes one with the divine. Murdock cautions the heroine to avoid the trappings of “the illusory boon”, or the moments in life that feel like attainment but are really distractions. It is interesting to me that Campbell’s post-war American hero measures his success by the act of killing and Murdock’s heroine seems to be stuck on an eternal treadmill of distraction. So what is the reward for the heroine who has persevered?

Freedom.

Time and time again, we witness the heroine struggling against tyranny, oppression, abuse, and cruelty, with her primary goal being to liberate herself or others from the control of outside forces. The reward for Cinderella’s patience is she is freed from her stepmother’s enslavement. Gretel frees herself and her brother from the witch. The sister of the six swans frees her brothers from their curse and saves herself from being burned as a witch. Freedom is the true boon to the heroine. The right to autonomy, to control her own destiny, is the power denied women for centuries. This is where Campbell’s dismissal of fairy tales and bedtime stories told children by woman as being an inferior art form to “Myth” with a capital “M” does a disservice to the traditions of women everywhere. These tales are subversive freedom songs for generations of women who were in so many cases denied the ability to transcend their circumstances. Refused access to public life and academic discourse, women turned to stories that could be told around the fire while they spun wool or peeled vegetables to the people they spent most of their time with – their children. Requests for a bedtime story for a woman who had spent all day in back-breaking labor with little to no control over the direction of her life would result in the recitation of a story of another woman who lived a parallel, if romanticized, life of drudgery and helplessness. These are the daydreams of an oppressed gender. Campbell’s hero aspires to be equal to god, but the fairy tale heroine aspires only to be equal to men.

So many times, the fairy tale is dismissed as being sexist because of their focus on the physical attributes of the heroine. We think the emphasis on the youth and beauty of the heroine is a social constraint, as if only the beautiful are deserving of our attention. This is a distraction. We have used this as a way of marginalizing the heroine as little more than a “pretty young thing”, rather than treating her beauty as symbolic of her character and charisma. Rather than redefining beauty to match the image of the heroine, we redefine the heroine to match our idea of beauty. Action movies are filled with slender, young women in tight clothing who throw punches that defy the laws of physics for a creature so frail looking. Disney’s princesses are shockingly uniform: tiny waist, large head, huge eyes, demure mouth, and pert nose. The heroine is not rewarded with beauty, nor is she rewarded for her beauty.

In this weeks film, The Hunger, Sarah is a scientist studying the effects of aging and searching for the fountain of youth. When she crosses paths with Miriam, a 6,000 year old vampire, and her 300 year old consort John, her life is completely altered. John is slowly dying of old age, something that has happened to each of Miriams’s past lovers after only a few hundred years have passed. Unfortunately, her lovers do not die, rather they remain as withered, sentient corpses kept in coffins in her attic for all eternity. When Miriam attempts to transform Sarah into John’s replacement against her will, Sarah rebels. In an effort to kill both herself and Miriam, Sarah frees the corpse army, who descend on Miriam and finish the task. The lovers are finally freed, and Sarah survives the ordeal to replace Miriam as the next eternal vampire. It is important to note that the original ending of this film had both Sarah and Miriam dying, but studio interference changed this. Sarah is freed from Miriam, and frees her predecessors as well. There is no prince in this story, and while Susan Sarandon as Sarah is not exactly an ugly duckling, her short, boyish hair and 80s androgyny make her stand out from the perky, girlish concept of the fairy tale heroine, as does her age of 37 at the time of filming. She is offered the security of a wealthy and powerful spouse through Catherine Deneuve’s Miriam, but chooses her own path on her own terms. He destiny is her own, she has won her freedom. One can’t help but wonder what a woman with her scientific mind would be able to accomplish in 6,000 years.

We see the Handsome Prince as being the boon, but he is yet another of the false rewards cast in our path to throw us off the trail. The marriage is not the reward, the implied power that comes with being a princess is. The prince is a means to an end, he is the only gateway she has to changing her station in the fairy tale realm. He is never much more than a device, and more often than not the emphasis of the story is on his undying love for her, not how she actually feels about him. This isn’t a love story, it’s about role reversal. He is often shown to be a man willing to do anything for her. He will climb any mountain, slay any dragon, he is at her disposal. In a word, he is a slave. She has become the one with the ability to decide fate, to determine her destiny, and where she goes he will follow. This, not wealth or conquest or even godhood, is the boon of the fairy tale heroine.

References

Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.

Dundes, L. (2001). Disney’s modern heroine Pocahontas: Revealing age-old gender stereotypes and role discontinuity under a façade of liberation. The Social Science Journal, 38(3), 353-365.

Scott, T. (Director). (1983). The Hunger [Motion picture on DVD]. MGM/UA Entertainment Co.