Of all the books on female heroes that I have read, this one is the worst. The book presumes to offer stories of female figures as not merely a corrective but an alternative to Joseph Campbell’s supposedly exclusively male heroes in his Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949 first ed.). That is, Frankel intends to be providing the female version of Campbell’s Hero.
What is wrong with this goal? To begin with, Campbell, unlike almost all others who offer heroic patterns, hardly ignores female heroes. He may even have as many female heroes as male. His initial hero is the princess in the Grimms’ “The Princess and the Frog.” Bizarrely, Frankel herself uses Campbell’s pattern, including his substages, for the first two-thirds of the supposedly distinctive female heroic journey, yet then stops at Campbell’s third and final stage: return.
Now in truth, Campbell’s pattern is one-sided. For once the heroic journey moves from the stage of departure to the stage of initiation, Campbell abruptly narrows his focus to almost exclusively male heroes. While he does include female heroes in the first subsection of the stage of initiation, or the “road of trials,” once he gets to the encounter with the god and the goddess—the heart of initiation—all of his heroes are male. More precisely, most are, for Campbell still cites some female examples, even though they clearly are not “meeting with the goddess,” facing “woman as the temptress,” or achieving “atonement with the father.” In fact, it is because encounters with the god and the goddess are undertaken by male heroes only that the pattern has been misread as Freudian.
Yet nothing in the overall journey at either the manifest or the latent level actually demands exclusively male initiation. The encounter is with the masculine and feminine, or father-like and mother-like, sides of the personality, which both sexes harbor. Campbell could effortlessly have widened his pattern to encompass female initates. But he does not. Still, it is unsettling to be told by Frankel that for Campbell the hero is always a “man” (1).
Understandably, others have offered a female counterpart to what they take to be Campbell’s exclusively male brand of heroism. In The Female Hero in American and British Literature (Bowker, 1981) Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope lament that “The great works on the hero—such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces... —all begin with the assumption that the hero is male” (vii). In The Hero Within (Harper, 1989) the same Pearson complains that “The great books on the hero, such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, assumed either that the hero was male or that male heroism and female heroism were essentially the same” (xx). Frankel, who continually congratulates herself for her exhaustive reading, has apparently yet to come upon Pearson and Pope.
Nor does Frankel seem familiar with the secondary literature on Campbell, including my own Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (1990). From her endless bibliography, which is supposed to demonstrate her mastery of the field, one would never learn of the academic, not merely pop, Campbell industry that arose following the exceptional popularity of the PBS series on “The Power of Myth.” No biographies, no interviews, no guides, and no scholarly collections on Campbell get mentioned.
Worse, Frankel cites no other approaches to heroism. For all her purported independence, she sticks to Campbell’s equation of heroism with a journey. Her professed originality rests on the differentiation of the female from the male quest. Male heroes, she tells us, fight, and fight for kingship. Even the male hero’s encountering “the feminine” supposedly takes the form of rescuing a princess. Would that Frankel had read tales of male heroes. By contrast, the “true role” of the female hero “is to be neither [male] hero nor his prize” (3) but instead “to become this archetypal, all-powerful mother” (4), thereby restoring what Frankel unhesitatingly considers primordial matriarchy. The female goal thus turns out to be the same as the male one.
Oblivious to basic distinctions in Campbell and in Jung, Frankel conflates the human with the divine—a distinction necessary to keep ordinary consciousness distinct from the unconscious. But then, contrary to Campbell and to Jung, heroism for her is mainly conscious, yet also sometimes unconscious. She conflates the Freudian father and mother with the Jungian father and mother archetypes. In starting the heroic journey in childhood rather than adulthood, she conflates heroism of the Jungian first half of life with heroism of the second half, to which Campbell, despite some of his examples, restricts himself. The one virtue of her book, the stories, are continually overrun by banal remarks about the sexes that make Dr. Phil seem deep.
Finally, the stereotypes by which Frankel distinguishes the genders—“the heroine’s journey is a path of cleverness and intuition” (10), the male’s that of reason and logic— would make even high school students blush.
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[Review length: 817 words • Review posted on September 7, 2011]