Making The Invisible, Visible
After decades of struggling with the limitations narrative archetype, The Hero’s Journey, I’ve gone on a five year quest and discovered a very different heroine has been hiding in plain sight.
The year is 2004. In a small room located in the basement of a New York hotel, two hundred people have gathered. With all the seats taken, some stand in the aisles, others sit cross legged on the floor. As a diminutive woman with a fierce streak of grey in her short hair takes to the stage, the applause is deafening. Maureen Murdock has arrived.
Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash
If I had written Joseph Campbell’s name here, would you nod your head in recognition? And yet, Maureen Murdock is not a household name, though, she bloody well ought to be.
In the early 1980s, Murdock, a sometimes student of Campbell, had been enamoured with the Hero’s Journey, so much so that she used the template in her family therapy practice, following the plotted path of the hero with both male and female clients. She found consistently that The Hero’s Journey failed to address the deep wounding in her patients. Murdock’s website says that she realised that women, “worked hard to make it in a man’s world,” and yet they persistently experienced an, “enormous spiritual aridity and deep wounding of their feminine nature.” She came to understand that women had, “to reclaim the feminine for ourselves.” She devised an alternative psycho-spiritual model, The Heroine’s Journey and presented this to Joseph Campbell.
His response stunned her.
“Women don’t need to make the journey,” he said. “They are the place everyone is trying to get to.”
Undeterred, The Heroine’s Journey: A Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, was published in 1990 and subsequently translated into seven languages.
But what is The Heroine’s Journey and how does it differ from its counterpart?
I’ve written about the differences between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s here, but what bears repeating is that The Heroine’s Journey is a different narrative structure entirely. What it is not, is an offshoot of The Hero’s Journey (I’m thinking of so many myths here, such as the genesis story of Eve being born from Adam’s rib). The very structure of both journeys are diametrically and physiologically different. Where the hero’s path is largely linear, the heroine’s is a spiral; one is an outward expression of transformation and the other is internal.
And therein lies the rub.
We live in a society that validates what is visible, whereas what is less visible and more nuanced is not only uninteresting, but more often than not, obliterated. In true fairytale fashion, The Heroine’s Journey has been banished from the kingdom by a dominant patriarchal paradigm that misinterprets external quests as being the only view point worthy of taking the centre stage.
In the foreword written for Kim Hudson’s book, The Virgin’s Promise, Story consultant, Christopher Vogler, stated, “The two approaches are seen as complementary rather than confrontational, and combining the two of them will give you a complete set of language and mental tools for dealing with any kind of story.” Hudson later poses that, if there are two narrative arcs, then surely there are more.
Just because we can’t see a thing, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Or that it is uninteresting (I’m looking at you, David Mamet).
In 2004, with a huge body of work behind her, Murdock had carved her name into the mythological, literary and healing spaces. But despite the interest, all she was offered for her presentation was a small conference room below ground. In the grand ballroom directly above her, The Hero’s Journey was being taught to much larger audience. Murdock warned the event planners, “Do not fall into the trap of unconsciously relegating the feminine to the basement.”
Creatives, artists and writers are guardians of narrative. Attempting to retrofit every story into a single model, forces our protagonists into one type of journey, as if there is no other journey. It gags so many storytellers, forcing them to the wings. Writing is a subversive act. Given the current state of world, it is our responsibility to ensure all stories find their own way. Only then can the paradigm change. And change it will.