Once upon a time, I thought “strong female characters” was a great idea. Let’s see heroines kill monsters. Yah!
I can’t recall exactly when I realized that we’d been conned. Perhaps, it dawned on me slowly.
If, to be a good character, a heroine has to act exactly like a hero, except that we are told she is a girl, how is that honoring women? Isn’t that honoring men, while practicing Orwellian New Speech?
I thought it would be nice to take a look at the real feminine quest story. We all know about Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey. What is the Heroine’s Journey?
And where do we look for this?
We have been told that there were no quest stories about women—no stories of girls going on adventures—before the modern age. But this blatantly is untrue. There have been stories about this—beautiful stories—going back to Classical times.
That’s right, as far back as Ancient Rome.
And versions of this story have been told ever since.
Others have spoken upon this subject. YouTuber Galatea, aka The Authentic Observer—who has delightful insights into fiction and femininity—talks about this here. Jordan Peterson speaks about it here.
Peterson says that if the Hero’s Journey is to slay the monster, the Heroine’s journey is to tame it—like Beauty and the Beast.
This is rather clever, and I don’t think he is necessarily wrong. In fact, nearly every romance could be described as Girl Tames Beast—and romance is by far the bestselling genre in the world. (18% to 34%—accounts differ) of all fiction sold is romance. (It is amazing, considering how many readers enjoy romance, that so many people think it is okay to sneer down their noses at it—perhaps this is part of the denigration of anything feminine? But I digress.)
But before we move on to the Heroine’s Quest: How is most romance Girl Tames Beast?
Romance heroes come in two…flavors; Hermit and Rake.
The Hermit is the beast who has never been tamed by any hand. The Rake is the beast who adores every woman, and yet his heart remains untouched. The romance follows the young woman who turns out to be the one who tames this particular solitary or wild male.
So, yes. Girl Tames Beast is a very popular story.
But, you ask, what of quests? What of adventure? I mean, no girls went on adventures before the advent of feminists, right? Ancient Rome, you say? I’m not even sure they had women that far back, much less women in stories, but, if they did, she probably lay around being ravaged by Jupiter, right?
I say thee, nay.
Because there are heroine quest stories just as there are hero quest stories, stories where it is the young woman who must travel and face adversity. And there have been for millennia. The earliest version I know of shows up in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
It’s called Cupid and Psyche.
Nor was this story told only once. You see similar qualities in Hans Christian Andersen’s heroine quest, The Snow Queen, in my favorite of all fairytales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which is a longer version, and in the ballad Tam Lyn, which is a shorter version.
This story, very simply, goes something like this: A young woman has a man she loves. She loses him, usually due to her own foolishness, but not always, then she must go on a long journey or face terrible adversity (or both) to recover him.
This journey takes the same physical stamina as a hero on a journey, but it is not by fighting and prowesses of strength that she prevails but by three signature qualities (the same three qualities one often sees in a heroine in the movies of Japanese director Miyazaki ): perseverance, hard work, and kindness.
In these Heroine’s journeys, perseverance is the most important of all. Psyche must go to the Underworld to regain her lost love. The Norse girl from East of the Sun, West of the Moon must travel so far that even the North Wind is exhausted upon arriving. Gerda must travel to the far frozen north, the kingdom of the Snow Queen, and Janet must go out, alone, on Halloween and hold onto her love, even when he turns into a wild animal or coals if she is to rescue Tam Lyn from being tithed to Hell.
The task is daunting. Often it takes a great deal of time, or involves nigh impossible tasks (such as counting every grain of wheat in a large pile), and yet she does not dawdle, hesitate, or give up.
She perseveres, believing in her beloved and never gives up, even if he has been cast into an enchanted sleep by the long-nosed troll who hopes to marry him, even if she must travel, as Psyche does, into the land of Death itself.
Hard work is the second quality demonstrated by our heroine. Whether it is cleaning something that has seldom been cleaned, sorting thing that can hardly be sorted, or other tasks of menial labor, the Heroine on a quest does not hesitate to do the work requested of her. Often, it is because of her hard work that she is helped along on her quest by the person for whom she performed the tasks.
Kindness is the third quality our Heroine often demonstrates. It is because of her kindness of heart that she receives help from old women or ants or whatever it is that is needed to gain the supernatural help she needs to complete her task.
These are wonderful stories. They call on the Heronine to be strong, but not strong of limb and thew, like the Hero, but strong of heart, strong of spirit. This kind of strength is equally as important as the physical kind.
In fact, the argument might be made that it is more important.
In our modern day, with all our modern technology and conveniences, how often is anyone, much less women, called upon to perform acts of great physical strength? Do you even know a single person who has needed to swing a sword for self-defense? Ever?
But Fortitude? Perseverance? Hard Work? Kindness? Strength of Heart? Strength of Spirit?
Are not all these things still needed?
Are they not, in our modern world, tremendously more valuable than physical strength?
Vive la Heroine!
Thinking back to some of those 90s/early 2000s era shows where women undertook what would have been more traditional heroic roles - Alias with Jennifer Garner, La Femme Nikita with Peta Wilson, Witchblade and even Buffy - it strikes me how very unhappy all the MCs are.
Being a secret agent/having superpowers wasn't so much a power fantasy as a prison for them: with Alias and Nikita and the MC from Witchblade they can never form genuine friendships and relationships, they have to constantly lie to everyone they know in order to keep from endangering them, and the people around them are often used against them or killed. Happy ever after for them is ending the mission and going to a normal life.
Perhaps this is the origin of the cold, sour-faced, bitter heroines of today: they've carried on the misery but they don't know why - or can't admit to themselves why - but they're doing what the culture tells them they should, so shouldn't they be happy?
Must be the fault of that dang patriarchy.
I think the last honest ones were Black Widow and Wanda: they admitted the reason they were unhappy was because they desperately wanted children (in an early version of Endgame, Black Widow was to have devoted her time to caring for children made orphans by the Snap, but of course they didn't leave that in). But now that they've been killed off, they can be replaced by new heroines who are utterly sufficient in and of themselves and never stray from the approved message.
shudder
Cupid & Psyche was also retold in Lewis "Till We Have Faces."
And if you're going to bring up adventure girls, how can you forget Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz?