Warning: this is a review of an at least partially academic book. It gets into theory-world (literary theory) pretty hard. However, it’s also very strongly based in popular culture, mostly to help make the point that the patterns of interest to certain types of theory are influential in stories and entertainment types things beyond “Literature”-with a capital L. The style of the book is also pretty low-key; this is not an insult; it is a statement that although the book tackles some pretty academic conceptual stuff, it does so in a very conversational and readable way. You should read it, especially if you like anything that might be given the label “genre fiction” including fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, romance, and several others. By ‘it’, I mean The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger.
Longish story short, there once was a guy named Joseph Campbell who created an outline of what he called the “monomyth” which basically means that there is a single pattern that applies to nearly all heroic adventure stories from and culture, time, or place. He called that pattern “the Hero’s Journey”. It has about 12 steps, often divided into three sections: Call to adventure, Quest, Return (these are Carriger’s labels). Campbell makes his arguments based heavily in Jungian psychology. Supposedly then, a student of his, Maureen Murdock heard her teacher say something about how women supposedly don’t have or need the journey, and decided to explain that women both need and do have their own journey. Carriger does a brief review of all of this, and she is clear to point out that she sees some problems with Murdock’s representation.
The main focus of Carriger’s argument has two elements: first, that the key distinction between the hero and the heroine journeys is actually how alone or social the journey is, and second, that the actual gender or sex of the protagonist is not what defines the story as hero or heroine, it’s the plot. Thus, Harry Potter goes on a heroine’s journey, while Wonder Woman (at least in the 2017 movie) is actually a hero, not a heroine.
Carriger is quite open that her book is intended among other purposes as a guide for writers who want to write certain kinds of stories. She also makes another point about genre that I find pretty interesting; she traces back the origins for the conventional understanding of “genre fiction” as of lower quality than “Literature with a capital L” back to the Victorian Gothic. I won’t review her whole train of reasoning here, but it’s actually pretty interesting to think about where the {utterly mistaken and badly reasoned for the most part} idea that something like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is less literary than something like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Knight’s Dream. Both have a heavy reliance on fantasy tropes and are strongly allusive, yet you probably won’t get in nearly as much grief for saying you want to study Shakespeare in college than if you said Pratchett.
If you are unfamiliar with Gail Carriger, she is probably best known for her Parasol-verse books which generally have a strong female lead character, some romance, and a steampunk sort of vibe. She also writes other stuff under other versions of her name. Even though the explanations are more abbreviated than I’d like, and the academic stuff less cited than I’d like (there’s not even an index with this book, and that would have been so handy!), The Heroine’s Journey is a good exploration of some of the ideas and options of what distinguishes the hero from the heroine, and why that might even matter in the first place.