Challenging a classic …

… Joseph Campbell’s Woman Problem. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The Heroine With 1001 Faces is not exactly a rebuttal to Joseph Campbell’s 1949 classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces—but it is a counter-book. Campbell famously and rather rapturously identified the “monomyth”: the single great life-giving story that expresses itself in endless variations through the legendarium of every tribe and culture. The Call to Adventure, the Ordeal/Initiation, the Trouble in the Third Act, the Return—this is the Hero’s Journey, schematized by Campbell and unblinkingly cloned in a zillion Hollywood screenplays. We all use it, to a degree, writers and nonwriters. The voyage, the pilgrimage, the vision quest are part of our mental circuitry. “It’s difficult to avoid the sensation,” wrote Christopher Vogler in his best-selling The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, “that the Hero’s Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, a Platonic ideal form, a divine model.” But what if the divine model excludes women? Tatar is decisive: “Driven by conflict and conquest, this narrative arc utterly fails as a model of women’s experience.”