Fundamental Issues with the Hero's Journey Format

    Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey is a useful tool for understanding the general path that stories sometimes follow. That being said the steps presented are not always infallible and sometimes have extremely surface-level issues. The first issue I think is the most obvious is the sexism present in his step 7. As Joseph Campbell states about step 7 in The Hero with a Thousand Faces “The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed—whether she will or not”(91, 99). The complete lack of agency given to women in this quote is honestly astounding. The fact is that many literary analyses are built on a framework that is so fundamentally flawed. These flaws are extremely simple things with widespread effects, things like overgeneralization of women and the women only being seen as basically a tool in the hero’s tool is incredibly objectifying.

    Similar problems can be found in another of Campbell's steps, number 8. As Campbell writes “But when it suddenly dawns on us or is forced to our attention that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, a woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul”(101-2). One pretty glaring flaw in this account by Campbell is that a thrice pure soul somehow cannot, at least for a moment, tolerate a woman. Needless to say, these statements are not very hard to describe as sexist with only a few questions. What happens if the protagonist is a woman? Do they then fall into a pit of self-loathing somehow intrinsic to only women protagonists? Why is it that of all representations of life Campbell doecides that the woman is the one a pure soul can not tolerate? Not only that but the steps name of “Woman as the Temptress” seems to not only have a certain antagonism towards the idea of a woman but seems to exclude the idea of other sexualities who pose no interest in women.

The chart I will be referring to
    Other than Campbell’s personal opinions there are some structural issues with the format which he lays out. First and most important is the order that he lays out the steps. One of the most egregious examples is the Road of Trials. The Road of Trials is a path the hero takes, in which they experience a lot of challenges or tests. The issue with this analysis is that a lot of the other parts of the story can be characterized as being under the umbrella term “the Road of Trials”. The refusal of the call is a test of faith in whatever adventure the hero must go on, temptation is another example. This means that what Campbell lays out is not just a series of steps, but a combination of interlocking stages of the journey. The only issue with this idea is that it quickly unravels the entire concept of the Hero’s Journey. Once you start combining steps into stages they quickly merge until you just have the beginning, middle, and end, or as the chart calls it separation, initiation, and return. This is not to even mention the fact that not all stories must contain these three parts, especially return. When many characters enter the world of magic they simply just stay in it and become a cog in the machine. Luke Skywalker does not return to moisture farming, or to Tatooine in the original Trilogy at all so the entire back quarter of the journey is broken in one of the most famous examples of the Hero’s journey.     Finally, the main structural issue of the Hero’s Journey reveals itself, it is not a step-by-step playbook of how stories go, not even close. Instead, the journey is more like some things that sometimes happen in famous stories. The issue with that sort of definition for the hero’s journey is that then it will never be complete. There are a million things that could happen in a story, and that happens in thousands of others. For example the gathering of a party or team to do the journey with each other. Star Wars ultimately follows Luke, but it is not like he is the only character in the story going on this journey. There are certainly thousands or millions of stories that follow a similar dynamic, even going back to Ancient Greece, which Campbell uses frequently, with Jason and the Argonauts, Jason is the main character, but there’s a host of other characters around him. Why was Supernatural Aid chosen to be in the beginning but not something as fundamental to a story as other characters? And when other characters are seen in the Hero’s Journey they seem to be exclusively god-like characters or at the very end student-like characters, separated in one way or another from the hero. I understand that the Hero’s Journey is not a complete summary of all things that can happen in the story, but how the steps specifically were chosen and which ones are relevant, at least to stories today, should be up to debate.

Comments

  1. You've done a very good job of laying out some of the more egregious flaws within the Hero's Journey. Reading some of the quotes you provided was pretty shocking. I also absolutely agree that Campbell has made some bizarre decisions on what narrative stages to include and to not include- it seems like his Jungian philosophy has had a negative impact on the potential precision of his monomyth.

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  2. Though you say that many books and movies do not follow the Hero's Journey, I still think that it does a decent job. The monomyth is a rough sketch of the overall stories that Joseph Campbell has observed. I'd say that A New Hope does follow the monomyth pretty well and though the movie doesn't follow the monomyth step by step, it still doesn't stray too far from it.

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  3. I think that you do a good job outlining some of the inherent flaws with the Hero's journey and how sexist it is. It also isn't nearly as broad as it's meant to be and I agree that it doesn't apply very well to everything. I do think that there are some stories that fit the model pretty well, so maybe it should be applied just to some specific stories instead of trying to read everything as a Hero's journey narrative.

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  4. You brought up many topics in your post, and I agree with your views on several of them. I pointed this out in a comment on Miranda's post, but I feel like "Temptation" is a good substitution to using "Woman as Temptress." Why does it have to be a woman? I also agree that the Road of Trials and its definition are awkward. Not only is there a loose definition, but the road can also breach other stages of the Hero's Journey since it possesses the potential to be long and strenuous. Finally, however, I have to disagree with your last comment. The Hero's Journey is not meant to summarize all stories that follow its narrative, it is meant to outline themes present in many of them. I am sure that better examples exist than what we have used so far.

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  5. I definitely agree with your comments about the layout of the story. I think this comes from it being produced after the stories themselves. So, it's meant to be an analysis of the typical structure, rather than an exact template. I also agree that, (although still problematic) because it is a product of its time, it is inherently dismissive of the majority of identities, and very gross in its portrayal of women.

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  6. Off the bat, I am so impressed! The sentence acknowledging sexuality in relation to the woman as temptress stage is so on point! I also totally agree without about how dismissive it is and while it's merely like ^^Anna said, a product of it's time, that doesn't excuse it. I also would definitely agree with you when you say it is not meant to be a set by step playbook.

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