The Hero's Journey

• The hero's quest, also known as the hero's journey or monomyth, is a common story template.
• It involves a hero venturing on an adventure, achieving victory in a decisive crisis, and returning home transformed.
• Joseph Campbell popularized hero myth pattern studies, influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology. He used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions.
• Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), describes the narrative pattern as a hero venturing from the ordinary world into a supernatural realm, winning a decisive victory, and returning with boons for mankind.
• Campbell's theories have faced criticism from scholars, particularly folklorists, who dismiss it as non-scholarly with source-selection bias.
• The hero's journey has been analyzed as a sympathetic plot, a universal narrative where a protagonist confronts and overcomes obstacles to reap rewards.
• The study of hero myth narratives dates back to 1871 with Edward Burnett Tylor's observations of common hero's journey plots.
• Other narrative patterns were proposed by Otto Rank in 1909 and Lord Raglan in 1936, discussing hero narratives in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualism.
• Campbell borrowed the word "monomyth" from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939).
• The singular the monomyth implies it's the ultimate narrative archetype. More generally, "monomyth" refers to a mythological archetype recurring across cultures.

Popularization and Definition

• The phrase "the hero's journey" gained popularity through the 1987 documentary, The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell, and Bill Moyers's 1988 interviews with Campbell in The Power of Myth.
• Campbell defined the monomyth as "a meta myth, a philosophical reading of the unity of mankind's spiritual history, the Story behind the story".
• Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) outlines 17 stages of the monomyth, though not all myths contain every stage explicitly or in the same order.
• These stages are mythemes bundled into the monomyth's structure.
• The 17 stages can be organized into three acts or sections: Departure (Separation), Initiation (Descent and Initiation), and Return.

Three Acts

• In the Departure section, the hero lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to adventure but is initially reluctant, later aided by a mentor.
• The Initiation section involves the hero crossing into a special world, facing trials, reaching the central crisis ("the innermost cave"), overcoming the main obstacle, undergoing apotheosis, and gaining a reward (elixir).
• In the Return section, the hero returns to the ordinary world with the reward, facing pursuit or reluctance, and may be rescued or forced back. The hero brings the treasure or elixir back, transformed by the adventure, and uses it to benefit others.

Campbell's Seventeen Stages

Departure

• The Call to Adventure: The hero receives information that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
• Refusal of the Call: The hero often initially refuses the call due to duty, fear, or inadequacy.
• Supernatural Aid: A guide or magical helper appears, giving the hero talismans to aid the quest.
• The Crossing of the First Threshold: The hero enters the field of adventure, leaving the known world for a dangerous, unknown realm.
• Belly of the Whale: Represents the final separation from the hero's known world, showing willingness to undergo metamorphosis.

Initiation

• The Road of Trials: The hero undergoes a series of tests, often failing some, to begin the transformation.
• The Meeting with the Goddess: The hero gains items that will help in the future.
• Woman as the Temptress: The hero faces temptations that may lead them to abandon the quest; not necessarily represented by a woman, as a woman is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life.
• Atonement with the Father/Abyss: The hero confronts and is initiated by the ultimate power in their life (often a father figure).
• Apotheosis: The point of realization where greater understanding is achieved.
• The Ultimate Boon: Achieving the quest's goal, often something transcendent like the elixir of life.

Return

• Refusal of the Return: The hero, having found bliss in the other world, may not want to return to the ordinary world
• The Magic Flight: Sometimes the hero must escape with the boon if it is something that the gods have been jealously guarding
• Rescue from Without: The hero may need guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life; the world may have to come and get him.
• The Crossing of the Return Threshold: The hero must survive the impact of the world to complete the adventure.
• Master of the Two Worlds: For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual.
• Freedom to Live: Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live.

Influence and Examples

• Christopher Vogler created a memo based on Campbell's work, which became the book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.
• George Lucas stated that Star Wars was consciously structured following classical motifs and inspired by Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Popular Culture & Literature Examples

• Star Wars (George Lucas)
• The Faerie Queen (Spenser)
• Moby Dick (Melville)
• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
• Allegory of the Cave (Plato)
• Odyssey (Homer)
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) (Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke)

Feminist Literature and Applications

• Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre illustrates heroines within the hero's journey, addressing the unique obstacles faced by Victorian women.
• Jane's goals are to love and be loved, and for liberty.
• Psyche in Cupid and Psyche undergoes a hero's journey prompted by her beauty, completing impossible tasks to reunite with Cupid and become a goddess.

Self-Help Movement and Therapy

• Robert Bly, Michael J. Meade, and others in the mythopoetic men's movement used the hero's journey for personal spiritual and psychological growth.
• They retold fairy tales and used Jungian archetypes to focus on gender roles, identity, and wellness for modern men.
• Research in 2023 showed that viewing life through the Hero's Journey narrative can enhance life meaning and resilience.

Criticisms of Campbell's Approach

• Folklorists criticize Campbell’s approach to myth, citing source selection bias and a lack of familiarity with folklore complexities.
• Barre Toelken and Alan Dundes note Campbell's tendency to build theories around single versions of tales and neglecting equally valid stories that don't fit the monomyth pattern.
• Mainstream scholarship has moved away from highly general and universal categories.

Alternative and Related Concepts

• Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence proposed an "American Monomyth" as a reaction to the Campbellian monomyth.
• The "American Monomyth" involves a community threatened by evil, a selfless superhero emerging to restore paradise, and then receding into obscurity.
• Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey and Valerie Estelle Frankel's From Girl to Goddess outline the steps of the female hero's journey, differing from Campbell's monomyth.
• The feminine journey concerns personal growth and awakening rather than an external quest.
• Alice Meichi Li suggests that a heroine, lacking privilege, may not receive the same social support as a hero and returns to a world with continuing oppression.
• David Brin criticized the monomyth template as supportive of despotism and tyranny.