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Is the Heroine's Journey a Good Way to Analyze Narratives?

The Heroine's Journey template is not a useful tool for analyzing narratives, because it was written for therapy, instead of as a way to understand the journey of a character in a story as in Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey template. 

The idea of the Heroine's Journey originated in 1990, with the publication of the book The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness Maureen Murdock as a self-help guide for women and therapists (Wikipedia). This meant that it was written with the intention of helping women go through a spiritual journey, rather than as a template for reading or writing narratives. 

Despite this, it is still used as a means of reading stories. Perhaps the most egregious problem with using the Heroine's Journey (and the Hero's Journey to some extent) to analyze literature is that it flattens the unique and multifaceted aspects of the stories to fit with the steps of the template. The template of the Heroine's Journey rests on the assumption that there are values/traits that are inherently masculine/feminine. This is a problem when analyzing stories about women that don't revolve around their masculinity/femininity because it means that values that the characters accept or discard are only thought about in regards to how they fit into the dichotomy of feminine/masculine.

For example, in Legally Blonde, Elle has to balance what she cares about—looking good or being taken seriously. By the end of the movie, she finds that she can be both. However, a much larger part of her arc is learning to figure out what she really wants in life and applying her talents in new ways for the first time. Analyzing Elle's story through the Heroine's Journey template means that her newfound direction is mostly glossed over in favor of focusing on the dichotomy between Elle's looks and her legal competence (which are not inherently masculine or feminine traits either). Although many parts of the Heroine's Journey match up with parts of the movie, the Heroine's Journey alone is not a useful tool for analyzing this narrative with nuance.

Other examples would include many Disney princess movies. Many of those narratives (especially those that follow their fairytale origins closely) focus much more on the adventure and the world than individual character development. It would be difficult to argue that Snow White or Cinderella experience much character growth over the course of their stories! The Heroine's Journey would not be helpful in analyzing these narratives because none of the protagonists have steps of personal growth. This doesn't mean that these stories are bad per se (look at how embedded they are in pop culture), but the Heroine's Journey template is too limited to effectively help with writing or reading them.

In conclusion, although Murdock's Heroine's Journey can be a useful tool for therapy and self-reflection, it is not a reliable or nuanced way to analyze writing by itself. It feels disingenuous to use only the Heroine's Journey to categorize the nuanced and varied journeys in female-led stories, and trying to forcibly fit such a wide variety of stories into one journey reduces the uniqueness of each narrative.


Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine%27s_journey

Comments

  1. DmitryOctober 17, 2022 at 9:19 PM

    I think that the biggest realization I had reading your blog is that the original heroine's journey was for therapy. I think that this recontextualization allows me to sympathize with Murdock a lot more considering that at least it was not main to create different stories for men and women. I think that this point of view is something that I will carry forward in terms of whether to use the heroine's journey for literary analysis.

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  2. ZevOctober 17, 2022 at 10:01 PM

    Wow, that history you gave of the Heroine’s Journey is super interesting. I had assumed that it was similar to the Hero’s Journey in that it was simply a reflection of popular stories. The fact that it was written as part of a self-help guide provides a lot more validity for your arguments. Your main critique seems to be that the Heroine’s Journey is focused on identity and not the adventure, and this makes sense given its origins.

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  3. KralOctober 17, 2022 at 10:15 PM

    I agree that the Heroine's Journey can be reductive to the characters of heroines in written stories. This problem shows itself in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, where the journey of its female protagonist fits more with Campbell's Hero's Journey than Murdock's Heroine's journey because gender identity had little to no role in her story. Applying the Heroine's Journey to her adventure would have been extremely reductive to her character, and even harmful, as it ignores the overall message of the movie in favor of focusing on her character.

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  4. Miranda BurgosOctober 18, 2022 at 5:54 AM

    What you said about how the narrative was written for therapy was very revealing to me. It makes a lot of sense. It all boils down to the stereotype that women are overly emotional, so of course their journey has to be about emotion and their relationship with femininity. It's all pretty ridiculous. Why can't women be the ones out saving the world? This narrative is simply not a good way to analyze works.

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  5. JeanaOctober 18, 2022 at 6:01 AM

    Reading your post has made me much less inclined towards the heroine's journey than I was before. I think one of the problems with Murdock's heroine's journey is that it's too specific to be used as a broader way to categorize stories centering around women. Not all main characters who are women are constantly grappling with their own gender identity, especially in modern times.

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