When I was young, I was only slightly annoyed there weren’t more adventure stories for girls.

Once I graduated from Winnie-the-Pooh and Dr. Seuss, I fell in love with Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea enthralled me, but it was slightly annoying to have to transpose the genders, so I could imagine a female Jim Hawkins or a woman sailor being saved from the waves by the Nautilus.

Still, I managed. I simply inserted myself as another character in Phileas Fogg’s journey around the world, and imagined being a girl sold into slavery and joining up with the rebellious Jacobites. Until I was well into puberty this worked fine. Every once in a while I’d find the rare book like Wuthering Heights that featured a strong female lead (even if Cathy was frustratingly perverse), and when I dutifully read Little Women and Jane Eyre, I appreciated the fact that Jo March and Jane both chafed at the bonds of the patriarchy (at least up to a point).

But where was there a female Odysseus or a female Achilles? A female Hamlet or Lear? As second-wave feminism began to ask these questions, the answers became frustratingly elusive. It was one thing to posit that male and female psyches might be fundamentally different (a result of nature vs nurture that’s still being argued about today), but why did this mean that men’s and women’s journeys had to be nothing alike?

Why, when a female student asked Joseph Campbell, “What about the women?” did he say, “The woman’s the mother of the hero; she’s his goal and his protectress; what more do you want?”

Only for the girl to reply, “I want to be the hero.”

In recent years there have been several very interesting attempts to address this question, most notably Maria Tatar’s The Heroine With 1001 Faces, and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey. While I recommend both these books, there’s one aspect of their shared assumptions with which I would take issue.

As Murdock explains it, “The feminine journey is about going down deep into soul, healing and reclaiming, while the masculine journey is up and out, to spirit.”

To which I would reply, WHY CAN’T A WOMAN DO BOTH??

Murdock’s model of the Heroine’s Journey follows Campbell’s to some extent, and then diverges sharply from it. Whereas Campbell’s Hero leaves “home” (the known world) and goes on a quest, only to return home with a boon for his community, Murdock’s Heroine does the same thing, but it leaves her feeling empty and spiritually dead. Only by descending to the chthonic Goddess and reconnecting with her “feminine” side can she heal the masculine/feminine split in herself and thus the world.

So why does this stick in my craw?

It’s because Murdock’s thesis is in fact deeply reassuring to MEN, while still accepting the patriarchy as an immutable fact.

Yes, within the patriarchy, a woman might well feel she had to be “one of the boys” to go on a quest. And then, according to Murdock, she might very well feel inauthentic, and have to undergo a spiritual or psychic “death” (like Inanna, Persephone, or Euridice) before reconnecting with her feminine side.

But that’s presupposing a woman would have to deny her feminine side to go on a quest in the first place.

Shruti Koti and Neha Ambati, in their podcast The Novel Tea, seem to be suggesting a way out. They make it explicit that Heroes can be Women (and/or identify as women) and Heroines can be Men (and/or identify as male). They point out that the Hero’s Journey is about being called OUT to action, while the Heroine’s Journey involves being called IN to introspection, there to experience growth and change.

Ideally, anyone should be able to go on either of these journeys (or both) to gain wisdom. This would allow for a female Odysseus, or a female Achilles, or a female Moses or Jesus. It would certainly allow for a female Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter. And it might even allow for a female Hamlet or Lear.

Until we can get to the point where a woman can plausibly return to her home disillusioned from war and reclaim her true kingdom, we won’t have that. Until we have a girl, small and fragile, being tasked with confronting and renouncing a towering evil, we won’t have that either.

Until we have a woman who can talk to God as her coeval, or a woman destroyed by her own superlative gifts, or a woman leading her people out of bondage, we won’t be there yet. And until we have a woman who can confront her ambition and grief with poetry and guile, and a queen whose every illusion can be stripped away until she stands alone, terrible in her naked majesty, we won’t have a Princess Hamlet or a Queen Lear.

But we can start. We can imagine them. And once we can imagine them well enough, we can begin to tell their stories.

XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks