The Heroine’s Journey

I think many people are familiar with the idea of “The Hero’s Journey” (by Joseph Campbell), but what about “The Heroine’s Journey”?

If I ever heard of it, I assumed the phrase simply meant the Hero’s Journey applied equally well to women.

Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell, came to believe it did not. She developed a model of a heroine’s journey based on her work with women in therapy. But when she showed it to Campbell in 1983, he reportedly dismissed the idea, telling her:

“Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

How passive is that, eh?

Yeah, I agree with Murdock, not Campbell, but it was only from Sacha Black, on The Rebel Podcast episode in which she interviewed Gail Carriger on The Heroine’s Journey that my eyes were opened. So Murdock in the 90s wrote her book, for people to use as a model for their own behaviour, to improve their own lives.

Carriger is the author of The Parasol Protectorate series, starting with Soulless, a whimsical steampunkish paranormal romance thriller. (I love the whole series.)

Most of what I know about this topic I learned from listening to the Gail Carriger interview, who has just published her first (and she quips, hopefully her only) non-fiction book, The Heroine’s Journey. She said she’d been waiting for someone else to write about The Heroine’s Journey for fiction writers, but eventually realised if she didn’t write it, no one might, so she rolled up her sleeves and set to work. Also, because Murdock’s book was from a Jungian Archetype standpoint, that concerned Carriger because she felt such analysis often conflates biological sex and gender, whereas the two journey types are really genderless.

In the interview, they start discussing the topic at around the 24 minute mark. It’s worth listening to. In it, Carriger explains that in The Heroine’s Journey, there are big differences in purpose, approach, strength, motivation, and ending.

Key differences:

Carriger says (after warning that what she’s about to say will cause a ‘psychological break’ in people’s minds!), that a heroine’s strength is the ability to ask for help from others. Western culture has real trouble in seeing the ability to ask for help as a strength. But that ability lies at the heart of networking, and making connections.

A heroine’s goal isn’t Power, but Networking, Connection: reuniting with someone taken from her.

A heroine’s motivation is not revenge or to right a wrong, but restoration or connection.

Her approach isn’t to take the offensive, but through communication and information gathering. She’s a builder and a general, self-aware enough to know when to ask for help.

A hero’s end is usually poignant isolation, in power. The heroine’s is usually happy, surrounded by family and friends.

The hero’s power comes from his innate abilities and strengths, but the heroine is strengthened by her network of allies and her connections. I think I’m struggling with this concept too, since I had to remind myself of the truth that one twig is easily broken, but a tightly bound bunch of them is super strong. Or that ‘old boys’ networks’ can form powerful groups. The more you look at it, the more obviously true it is.

Carriger noted that a heroine is weakened by isolation from her network, and that often, a Heroine’s Journey story ends with the restoration of connections.

In her book, she gives pithy but flippant definitions of each type of Journey in the Introduction:

The Hero’s:

Increasingly isolated protagonist stomps around prodding evil with pointy bits, eventually fatally prods baddie, gains glory and honour.

The Heroine’s:

Increasingly networked protagonist strides around with good friends, prodding them and others on to victory, together.

Note: neither Journey is gendered: e.g. Harry Potter is a Heroine’s Journey. Carriger noted that if as an author your heroine is struggling and the plot is stalling it may be because you keep putting the heroine in isolation, cutting her off from her network. That’s what you do in the Hero’s Journey to force him to draw on his core strength, but for the heroine it cuts her off from her core strength. So if this is happening it may be because you’re trying to force your heroine’s story into a Hero’s Journey structure.

Three beats: Descent, Search, Ascent

The Descent (involuntary withdrawal)

1. Broken network (something taken away)

2. Pleas ignored

3. Abdication of Power

4. Family Offers Aid

– Isolation and Danger –

The Search (aided by companions)

5. (Goes into) Disguise, Subversion (Hiding)

6. Surrogate Family

7. Visit to the Underworld

8. Delegation, Networking, Information Gathering

The Ascent (structured reunion)

– The Compromise –

9. Negotiation for Reunification

10. Revenge & Glory Irrelevant

11. Network Established or Rebuilt

Of course, as I listened, I was asking myself “Is Leeth’s journey a Hero’s one, or a Heroine’s?”, and realised (yeah, a bit of an epiphany): it’s both. Individually each book is a Hero’s Journey, but the series as a whole will be a Heroine’s Journey. That feels both correct and good to me. I’m writing the series by the seat of my pants, but this structure flows from Leeth’s deepest motivations: her need to belong and her hunger for acceptance and love. So of course that’s going to play out across the series as a whole.

Further reading

Some good references I found while writing this were Carriger’s book (The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers,and Fans of Pop Culture or the book description page on her web site), and for writers I think that’s the most helpful reference.

A much shorter look at the topic for storytellers is Why Screenwriters Should Embrace The Heroine’s Journey, aimed especially at screenwriters. It uses the film Wonder Woman as an example of its ten stages of the Heroine’s Journey – with nifty chart.

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine%27s_journey gives a reasonable overview, pointing out Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s version of the heroine’s journey (which is set up as The Heroine Journeys Project, “Exploring and Documenting Life-Affirming Alternatives to the Hero’s Journey”.

Another article good article is Julia Blair’s The Heroine’s Journey: Examples, Archetypes, and Infographic. In it, she notes that the Hero’s Journey is rooted in ancient myths that no longer completely fit the modern world. Her article looks at the topic from several angles, including Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, noting that the heroine typically faces challenges from higher up that pyramid of needs. (Also interesting is that she sees the film Wonder Woman as following the basic shape of the Hero’s Journey, just with a female protagonist. I don’t agree.)

Maureen Murdock breaks her version of the Heroine’s Journey (for self-improvement differently):

1. Separation from the Feminine

2. Identification with the Masculine and Gathering of Allies

3. Road or Trials and Meeting the Ogres and Dragons

4. Experiencing the Boon of Success. (The Hero’s Journey normally ends here.)

5. Heroine Awakens to Feelings of Spiritual Aridity/Death.

6. Initiation and Descent to the Goddess.

7. Heroine Urgently Yearns to Reconnect with the Feminine.

8. Heroine Heals the Mother/Daughter Split.

9. Heroine Heals the Wounded Masculine Within.

10. Heroine Integrates the Masculine and Feminine.

Towards a Theory of Everything

This post may seem way off-topic, but for writing science fiction it helps to stay informed on the latest developments, as a sprinboard for our imagination. And a new approach to a "theory of everything" from Stephen Wolfram certainly provides fuel for the imagination. ("It's hypergraphs all the way down".)

I follow Joscha Bach on Twitter, and spent an hour reading a link from a tweet from him about an interesting blog post by Stephen Wolfram on Mathematics, Combinators and the Story of Computation. I was intrigued by its opening paragraph about a mathematical tool called 'combinators' (maybe discovered by a mathematician in 1920, Moses Schonfinkel). I think these combinators underlie what Wolfram believes may be a new framework he's created for thinking about physics, that will probably lead to a Theory of Everything.

Back in high school I read some excerpts of Newton's Principia Mathematica, in which he described some of the laws he'd discovered (like the inverse square law of gravity), in English.  It was a struggle to understand what he meant: expressed in English, the statements were really hard to understand, but easy to understand when expressed in modern mathematical notation.

Reading of the argument between Newton and Leibnitz regarding their (simultaneous and independent) discovery of calculus, I was struck similarly that Leibnitz's notation seemed more elegant and easier to work with than Newton's (which is presumably why Leibnitz's notation is the one we adopted).

And probably the capstone was reading the SF book Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney.

Those things made it clear to me that introducing excellent symbolism (notation) for the right concepts, coupled with rules for how to manipulate those symbols to make true statement, can produce really powerful tools for reasoning.  (That and asking the right question, or framing a problem the right way.)

But Wolfram's (long but fascinating) blog post offered me two more big ideas:

1) That there were and are people who think about symbolism and notation, and invent new ways to think about stuff. And that Moses Schonfinkel was one of those people, who also tried to distil mathematics down to a minimal framework - and through his invention of combinators reduced all maths down to just three combinators.

(A note for any computer scientists out there: combinators are equivalent to Turing machines which are equivalent to the Lambda calculus which is equivalent to cellular automata.)

2) Wolfram's claim that probably the single most important idea of this past century is that of universal computation: that in an absolutely real sense, the universe is an engine like a cellular automata, that's in operation.

His blog post also mentions his new physics project (Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…,and It’s Beautiful), announced and released several months ago, and today I've listened to the 4+ hours of his fascinating interview by Lex Fridman about it (Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #124).  I highly recommend it.  Fridman conveniently breaks down the video with time coded links in the description (or you click on the "Chapters" link near the bottom of the video to call up a more graphical view of all those topic areas), if you want to just dip in.

(His explanation of the fundamental idea of his new framework, the hypergraph, is clearly described in that link above, in the section "How It Works".)  Wolfram is hoping to find "the right rule" (or small set of rules?) that would produce our observed universe and physical laws.

He says in the article:

"But in the early 1980s, when I started studying the computational universe of simple programs I made what was for me a very surprising and important discovery: that even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex.

"And this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way?"

To summarise some parts of the interview, I think he and his team have come up with a new mathematical symbolism for working with physics, and I think it's probably a major breakthrough.  I think it's important because it offers deep insights into quantum mechanics, as well as special and general relativity.

A few points that stood out for me:

- Space is quantised (I think he said thinks, at about the scale of 10^-100); and that there may be 10^400 or more points

- Everything is just space

- The key part of the symbolism is the idea of what he calls a hypergraph that captures the relations between points in space

- You could represent it as a graph (pairs of nodes connected by edges), but it's better to connect a node to multiple other nodes by a hyper edge (a surface?)

- Time is the sequence of applying cellular automata style rules. There may have been about 10^500 moments of time so far

- You can estimate how many physical spatial dimensions there are by how many dimensions you need to represent any specific hypergraph to avoid lots of crossings. For some hypergraphs that comes out as three.

- You can make statements about the curvature of space, and the expansion of the universe, in a hypergraph.

- Quantum mechanics, as formulated in the 20th century, falls out naturally from the representation.

- Ditto for general relativity, and also special relativity

- The new formalisation, the new mathematics, is relatively easy to learn, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit (insights) from applying it.

"It’s always a test for scientific models to compare how much you put in with how much you get out. And I’ve never seen anything that comes close. What we put in is about as tiny as it could be. But what we’re getting out are huge chunks of the most sophisticated things that are known about physics. And what’s most amazing to me is that at least so far we’ve not run across a single thing where we’ve had to say “oh, to explain that we have to add something to our model”. Sometimes it’s not easy to see how things work, but so far it’s always just been a question of understanding what the model already says, not adding something new."

- One example is that fermions and bosons are fundamentally different because in his formulation the fermions are the particles that like to bifurcate in the hypergraph and the bosons like to join branches.

- I gather integer spin and half-integer spin particles have interesting explanations in the theory

- He has an estimate that in the hypergraph that represents our universe, there's 10^200 times more "activity" going on to "maintain the structure of space" itself, than into maintaining all the matter we know exists in the universe.

Wolfram Physics Project: https://www.wolframphysics.org/
Stephen Wolfram's Twitter: stephen_wolfram
Stephen's Blog: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com
His Books:
- A New Kind of Science
- A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics

Wolfram writes:

"Will we be able to bring together physics, computation and human understanding to deliver what we can reasonably consider to be a final, fundamental theory of physics? It is difficult to know how hard this will be. But I am extremely optimistic that we are finally on the right track, and may even have effectively already solved the fascinating problem of language design that this entails."

and

"For me, one of the most satisfying aspects of our discoveries over the past couple of months has been the extent to which they end up resonating with a huge range of existing—sometimes so far seemingly “just mathematical”—directions that have been taken in physics in recent years. It almost seems like everyone has been right all along, and it just takes adding a new substrate to see how it all fits together. There are hints of string theory, holographic principles, causal set theory, loop quantum gravity, twistor theory, and much more. And not only that, there are also modern mathematical ideas—geometric group theory, higher-order category theory, non-commutative geometry, geometric complexity theory, etc.—that seem so well aligned that one might almost think they must have been built to inform the analysis of our models.

"I have to say I didn’t expect this. The ideas and methods on which our models are based are very different from what’s ever been seriously pursued in physics, or really even in mathematics. But somehow—and I think it’s a good sign all around—what’s emerged is something that aligns wonderfully with lots of recent work in physics and mathematics."

He's also doing this all out in the open (publishing the software and papers), and inviting collaboration.

Exciting days (in a good way!) may lie ahead.