Last Saturday afternoon at Boskone I was fortunate enough to be on an excellent program item about the heroine’s journey. My fellow program participants were Lois McMaster Bujold, Greer Gilman, Rosemary Kirstein and Margaret Ronald. I didn’t make notes and I’m not going to do a proper panel report with everything everyone said, I’m going to give you an impressionistic overview of what was nifty about it. I’m not going to specify who said what unless it particularly stood out, but you can safely assume that everyone on the panel was brilliant and that we also had some terrific audience response.
The problem with this sort of item is that it’s impossibly broad. We weren’t just talking about stories with women in, but about heroines as parallel to heroes. The panel description asked us to consider how the heroine’s journey differs from Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. (John Campbell’s hero’s journey is also an interesting thought, with rather a different trajectory.) I said that the Hero’s Journey made rather an odd life, with a distinct lack of what most people do, such as making things and having children. Lois said that traditionally in most cultures men went out and came back again, off to have adventures and then home to settle down and inherit from their father, whereas women went out and didn’t come back, inheriting from strangers—their husband’s parents. You can see this in a lot of fairy tales.
There aren’t many books that give a heroine a Campbellian Hero’s Journey. If there is a parallel canonical Heroine’s Journey it’s one that ends with marriage, and that’s seen as a kind of ending. In genre romance, the woman’s agenda wins. But in many books ending in marriage closes the doors of story, as if it isn’t possible to see past that—once the heroine has chosen her man there’s no more to be said. And there are the stories where the adventure ends with becoming a mother—I thought about the great line in Mockingbird “The longest trip I ever took, from being a daughter to having one.”
In fairy tales you have the hopeful young girl. Her great virtue is kindness to the helpless. She is often aided by those she has helped, by animals, old people, servants, and dwarves. She has a good mother who is dead, or turned into a tree or animals, who may give magical help on occasion. She has a bad shadow mother, often a stepmother. She may have rivals, sisters or stepsisters, but she rarely has friends or equals. Her aim is to survive, grow up, and marry a prince. Older women are represented by the two formats of mother, and old women by witches, who may be benevolent but are generally tricky to deal with.
In myth it’s rare to have women who journey, who are changed by what happens to them. There’s Persephone’s descent into hell and Demeter’s search for her daughter—and you can take that any way around. I’ve written a poem where Persephone doesn’t want to leave. Margaret mentioned Inanna and the idea that the women’s journey of labyrinths and finding your way out of them. There’s also Isis and her quest for the pieces of Osiris—was gathering together the pieces of a man a useful way of viewing woman’s journey? (Pieces of a man as plot tokens… it’s odd that this hasn’t been done more.)
From labyrinths we talked about Le Guin for a while, and what she did with heroine journeys in The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu. Greer and I admitted being dissatisfied with Tehanu, but a number of people in the audience claimed it worked for them. Greer said it had been “the grit in the oyster” inspiring her novel Cloud and Ashes, and I admitted it had been the same for me with Lifelode.
We moved on to talk about the difference between coming of age stories and the stories of older women—we discussed Lois’s Paladin of Souls which is all about the older woman having an adventure. There aren’t many books like that. We also mentioned domestic fantasy, of which, again, there isn’t much. We talked about women as goddesses and as minor characters and how that’s different from having a journey, a trajectory. Someone in the audience asked if there was a crone’s journey to go with the maiden’s and the mother’s, and someone mentioned Granny Weatherwax, and we discussed whether she changed over the course of the books. After the panel someone suggested Howl’s Moving Castle as an example of a crone journey, and I’m still thinking about that. Of course, there aren’t many old man stories—but Beowulf slays the dragon at the end and is killed by it, you don’t hear about Cinderella doing that.
Where are the books about heroines who change and who aren’t defined by the men around them? There are some, especially in SF, but not enough, especially when you’re thinking in terms of journeys and being heroic.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Jo – one possible old woman journey is Kettle from Hobbs’ Assassin Quest. She travels far looking for the subject of her search, becomes an integral player in Fitz’s parallel quest, and has an interesting resolution which I won’t mention for fear of spoiling the story.
Rob
I have just finished Cherie Priest’s _Boneshaker_, which is about a mother who goes into a walled, zombie-filled Seattle to rescue her teenage son in an alternate 1879.
I am still pondering the book [*], but I think an argument could be made that it is about the protagonist’s journey away from being defined by the men around her–which she is very thoroughly for most of the book: her father’s daughter, her husband’s widow, her son’s mother. It’s tricky, though, because I’m not sure I understand why she originally chose to stay near Seattle, where her father & husband were (in)famous, so it’s hard for me to be precise about how much of a change happens, and because the ending is rather understated and open-ended.
[*] At first I was respecting but not loving it; the pace picks up later on, which helps.
It would be interesting to look at this from a class perspective too, and how that affects journeys taken — e.g. if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t the woman in PALADIN OF SOULS very high class?
Caleighm: Yes she was. But the protagonist of Mockingbird is very much working class. And in fairy tales you get princesses and woodcutters daughters.
Moonwise has a two-headed woman’s journey– it has two different happy endings, and I was pleased to see it.
Thinking about middle-aged women’s journeys– the accountant in Abrahams’ A Shadow in Summer should count.
I’m also thinking about Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life, in which she concludes that men’s lives are supposed to have trajectories, but women’s lives are more likely to be one thing after another. It’s a life, it can be a very good life, but it’s not very much like a story.
“Where are the books about heroines who change and who aren’t defined by the men around them? There are some, especially in SF, but not enough, especially when you’re thinking in terms of journeys and being heroic.”
Thank you! This is why I stopped reading fantasy and SF in my teens and moved to romance… only to get irritated with marriage and childbirth being the end of the woman’s “journey” in so many romances. I would like to read both actual HEROines and plain ol’ female characters who have self-determination… or at least interesting character arcs of their own.
I’ll try every book suggested in the comments.
bluejo: Yes, exactly! I never meant to say that there are no working class women in stories. I just wonder what the differences are between those stories. For example, if you’re familiar with the Robin Hood legends, the only recurring woman in the stories is Maid Marian, a noblewoman, which is interesting/puzzling/worth thinking about because the Robin Hood legend is about (among other things) working class men fighting against corrupt higher-ups (the whole “exiled lord Robin Hood” trope started only much, much later in the tradition).
This is not to refute your essay by any means — only to wonder about other journeys that might exist within the scope of the heroine’s.
My favorite heroine arc in recent years is Vin from Sanderson’s Mistborn series. She’s very working class – indeed, below that was a barely surviving street urchin teen – who turns out to have remarkable abilities, and then has to recast herself, become heroic and become an adult all the while wondering whether she is doing the right thing. Love the contrast between what a bad*ss she can be in certain circumstances and an uncertain teen in others. The scenes where she has to pass as a noble in high class balls in the first book are worth the price of admission.
Rob
On the topic of noblewomen being the ones who get starring roles in adventures, I wonder in an uninformed sort of way if it’s because they’re the ones presumed to have the time to do so. A peasant woman who needs to watch three children, make the food, clean the house, and probably work the fields as well just doesn’t have a lot of time to go out and have adventures, unless one starts with the classical D&D backstory of “entire family and village destroyed by orks”. A noblewoman who has servants to scrub the soot from the walls might have a few hours a day free to pursue plot.
There is also Paksenarrion in the series by Elizabeth Moon, about a sheepherder’s daughter and it is actually mentioned how different real life and “adventuring” is than the tales.
Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows Trilogy is about Talia and her adventures/journey. Granted there is a bit of MarySue there, but still, a young girl leaving home and growing up…
Bujold’s Vorkosigan series has Miles’ eventual fiancee and wife, Ekaterin discovering how she was defined by her former husband and how she can change that. Yes she ends up married again, but it is despite all her changes.
What about Aerin and Harimad-sol? Yes, got married at end to the kings, but they had just saved their countries pretty much by themselves.
And a wholehearted second on Vin.
The historical fantasies by Judith Merkle Riley (which I think were mentioned in your neglected works thread) mostly have an interesting journey for the heroine. In The Master of All Desires, for example, as well as travelling to Court in 16th century France, the heroine Sybille has to abandon a lot of her pretensions and come to terms with the fact that she’s a very bad poet before she can see a future for herself as a historian.
Michelle West has written some heroines that might fit the bill. Jewel who rises from thief to a legitimate power in her city (I think – she’s not done writing the story).
Jewel’s first appearance is in Hunter’s Death, but West is now going back and doing the back story for Jewel in the Hidden City and sequels.
Also, in the Hidden Crown six book series, there’s a woman who makes a literal as well as literary journey, remaining herself, but growing. And not doing the American thing of shucking off the shackles of her culture.
I know it’s none of my business and I can’t tell anyone what to do, but when I see a name, say Melanie Rawn, I think FINISH THAT AMBRAI SERIES!!
I experienced some of the same when I saw Rosemary Kirstein highlighted in this post. However, I’m just happy she’s still participating in things like this…it gives me hope…
carry on…
Kivrin in Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book–goes on a journey of sorts, undergoes changes, comes back. Not a classic hero’s journey, no, but perhaps in some ways a commentary on the same. And neither marriage nor motherhood is part of her story arc.
I think Graceling is a good example of a heroine’s journey. Katsa goes on journeys, finds love, saves the day, but doesn’t settle down at the end to just be a wife or mother.
Shah8: Rosemary Kirstein says she’s working on books 5 and 6 of the Steerswoman series. She hasn’t abandoned it. She’s just a slow worker. Also, she has a blog.
16 comments and nobody’s mentioned Pyanfar Chanur? She starts out as a wife and mother, and that is part of her journey, but not all of it.
But anyway… does it matter all that much what sex a hero is? Why do we expect this question to have a different answer in the first place? Isn’t it just as likely that as sex roles become less rigid in our society, we’ll see more characters like Firekeeper, Torin Kerr, Lyra Belacqua, Kylara Vatta, etc., whose heroic actions aren’t particularly linked to their sex? Most of the male heroes aren’t being heroic with their gonads, anyway. And the positively Anvilicious Struggle Against The Oppressively Sexist Society (e.g. Delilah from the Sword-Dancer series) is going to seem awfully dated in another half century, isn’t it? Maybe sooner.
Books set in the future are already mostly assuming that we’re going to be pretty much over that stuff, possibly with the exceptions of some neo-barbaric throwback societies like Barrayar. (ISTM that that wouldn’t have been the default assumption in SF written 50 years ago, and possibly not even within some writers’ imagination.)
As I was writing the foregoing I realized that there’s not much heroic fiction about fathers, either. (I can’t be the only one to notice the catastrophic drop in the number of Miles Vorkosigan books since he got married…) And some of those have the fathers separated from their families most of the time (e.g. Aubrey-Maturin series).
Although I guess there’s a sense in which some heroes are a sort of uber-father to the whole community, but with the distinction between fatherly and motherly roles becoming less sharp, that’s not going to be exclusive to men either. Torin does it pretty well.
Raederle, in The Riddle Master of Hed trilogy, starts out by trying to find out what happened to Morgon, the young man she was supposed to marry, and goes on to discover her own frightening and powerful heritage.
Alldera, in the post-holocaust/dystopian Holdfast series (Suzy McKee Charnas), who covers a fair amount of ground geographically and even more psychologically and socially.
Nancy Kress’ first novel, The Prince of Morning Bells, in which a princess goes on a quest, gets waylaid by a prince, and resumes her quest in middle age, after the death of her husband.
What about the theme of “breaking the enchantment” as part of the heroine’s journey? It turns up repeatedly in fairy tales and myths. Usually the hero frees the heroine, but sometimes the heroine frees the hero.* It’s also a theme that feminism made its own, broadening and extending it to include breaking free of oppressive religion, social convention or expectation, traumatic past experience, a bad marriage or relationship, or even the heroine’s own principles—pretty much all of which show up in SF&F. Then the prince with the kiss has been superceded by a whole variety of liberators—a suitor whom she marries or doesn’t, a man on a journey of his own, a wise man or woman who acts as a teacher or guide, or the heroine herself. Then rather than the breaking of enchantment being the prelude to marriage and the end of the story, the breaking of the enchantment becomes the first part of the heroine’s story.
* Aside: is that one of the class differences? Princesses usually have to be rescued. Woodcutters’ daughters seem to have more latitude to do the rescuing. Or at least, as best this mythologically semi-literate scientist recollects.
Seattle-area writer and editor Jessica Salmonson has devoted a significant part of her career to shining a spotlight on epic/heroic fantasy with strong female protagonists. One could do worse than checking out her 1979 anthology Amazons!, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. It features stories by Cherryh, Lindholm/Hobb and Tanith Lee, among others. (There’s a sequel, Amazons II, which I’ve not read.)
Also, Salmonson wrote a fantasy trilogy in the early ’80s about a female samurai named Tomoe Gozen. The books are Tomoe Gozen, The Golden Naginata and Thousand Shrine Warrior. I think all three, as well as the previously mentioned anthologies, are out-of-print, but they’re very much worth tracking down.
Paksenarrion is good. I’m also fond of _Remnant Population_. The moral of the story is “do not mess with grannies, for they are stubborn and will kick you into orbit.”
Not to sound obsessed with Oz or anything, but many of the original 14 Oz books contain stories of adventuring girls that do not end in romance, and although Thompson’s sequels do feature romances, they also feature adventuring girls and Ozma refusing more than one marriage opportunity, and Thompson allows her characters to grow and mature during the course of a book. I know that’s one reason why I liked them.
Stories about strong, heroic women who change and are not defined by the men around them… Hmmm … Its a little more tricky if we discount books by Cherryh and others with strong female characters – who do not change much during the story… How about:
– the Family Trade series by Stross
– Zoe’s Tale by Scalzi
– the Jani Kilian books by Kristine Smith
– several of the Pern books by McCaffrey
– the Patternist books by Butler
– Rite of Passage by Panshin
– Coyote by Steele
– the Wheel of Time books by Jordan
– the Potter books by Rowling
(which include Hermione Granger)
– Desolation Road by MacDonald included at least
three such characters (though they might not
be considered heroes…)
It might seem like I am trying to make the point that there are plenty of these stories. Not so. I had wander through my book shelves (and my unreliable memory) to come up with this list.
Oh, and I forgot The Court of the Air by Hunt. And I second the recommendation of the Mistborn by Sanderson.
Martha Wells, the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy.
Does Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed fit here, do you think? In some ways I think it does, certainly the journeying out and back and adventuring; it doesn’t feel as though her story ends at the end of the book (she isn’t retired, or marrying a prince, or settling down to be ruler of a kingdom, or write her memoirs), though the story of that adventure and journey does.
Naomi Mitchison was doing historical (with more than a touch of fantasy) quests by women back in the 1920s and 30s (e.g. When the Bough Breaks, The Corn King and the Spring Queen) and her definitely fantastic (dragons, Valkyries, etc) Travel Light (1950ish) was reissued quite recently. Her Memoirs of a Spacewoman might also count, although that is more one thing after another (at least on the surface – thematically there’s more connection going on), and every beginning being a new venture.
I think romance is more a special case of coming of age story than a heroine’s journey. (And I’d question whether the woman’s agenda always wins — I read a lot of historicals, and the woman being brought to marry against her determination is a common plot element, probably as a sop to modern readers’ horror at the primitive state of marriage law at the time. Obviously the agenda of the woman reading wins, but it’s not necessarily the agenda of the heroine.)
I think the whole thing about the distinct lack of what most people do is sort of key to what makes a hero, having no personal obligations that override your desire to wander around the fantasy map leveling up. Hence why the post-apocalyptic and the post-personal-apocalyptic (they killed, or kidnapped, my family) story lines work so well — they supply at once motivation and believable removal of a whole set of normal life obstacles.
Otherwise you get the privileged hero, who can afford to go off heroing because someone else is minding the home front. And this is where women are at a real disadvantage, because even if we posit a world where it is socially acceptable for her to do this and there is someone who will pick up the slack, readers are living in this one and are apt to find her behavior unsympathetic, especially if she dares to like it better. Or else she finds love and that’s the end of her heroing — except for Tommy and Tuppence and Aral and Cordelia, the few married hero pairs).
This is also why heroes are traditionally just come to adulthood — it’s a time with much of adult skill and strength, but relatively free of obligations (assuming in the fantasy world there are no student loans).
And now that people are living longer and healthier, we are starting to see a second such time — empty nesters, whose family obligations are largely limited (and in the fantasy world kids can be somewhat less prone to moving back in when they have crises).
John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is probably the prototypical case of this in genre, but I see a trend toward this in mainstream movies — particularly since divorce makes this group available for the romantic plot as well, and demographics means Baby Boomers are keen to see stories that don’t end at 30.
Because it resolves the biological clock disparity and the need for family-making to be most important, I think this trend is a hopeful one for more, and more complex, female heroes.
Picnic on Paradise takes a heroine on a journey – though not a Campbell journey perhaps an anti-Campbell journey?
“Where are the books about heroines who change and who aren’t defined by the men around them? ”
When I read that I thought of Paksenarrion from Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion right away. I actually think that her doings DEFINE the men around her (none more than Kieri Phelan, the Duke).
Which reminds me that Kieri has gotten a book to himself recently (or soon to be released, not sure) which I still have to order…
Gah, of course Paks was already mentioned *just now checked the comments*, well then I throw Jamethiel Dreamweaver into the ring. And while she starts out being defined by her relationship to her father, the fact that she is her mother’s daughter – and (HUGE SPOILER) the most active of the three avatars of the god of her race, the god of destruction no less – she ends up being the catalyst for a LOT of change in all of the books.
The focus so far is largely on her, with occasional povs of her twin brother.
BAEN is just now re-releasing the earlier parts of the series as The God Stalker Chronicles and Seeker’s Bane and in March there’s the new novel Bound In Blood.
Where are the books about heroines who change and who aren’t defined by the men around them?
Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” trilogy (or quadrology, if you count “Extras”) is the first thing that leaps to my mind. Octavia Butler’s “Parable” novels are the second. I’m not sure whether these are proof that a separate paradigm is now well-established in the s-f genre or if they’re exceptions to a trend.
Thanks for writing this up. Sounds like it was a good Boskone from the programming perspective,with this and Charlie’s singularity panel.
a) I recently re-read Joan Vinge’s Snow Queen, and one of the things I was struck by was some of the pacing. She lays out the various archetypes she’s using in the story pretty bluntly and early, but it’s only later that I saw itas a Campbellian hero’s journey.
b) One of my most beloved memories of Gordy Dickson is from a panel where he discussed the absence of a feminine parallel to the masculine word “hero”. “Heroine” isn’t it; it’s something else. His example was Pilar from For Whom the Bell Tolls.
How about Pope Joan and St. Joan. Of course it didn’t end well for either of them.
I *so* wanted to go to this panel, but was on one opposite it. (I did however, write much of the precis for it.) Thanks for the report, but I’m somewhat bemused to note that everyone seems fixated on actual physical journeys. My understanding is that the physical journey is less important that the psychological journey for which the physical journey is merely a stand-in.
Texann said “The moral of the story is “do not mess with grannies, for they are stubborn and will kick you into orbit.” ”
Which promptly reminded me of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Ozark Trilogy. Excellent books if you can find them.
MKK
A number of people have mentioned Elizabeth Moon, but only in relation to the Paks stories. What about her Familias Regnant universe? Her Heris Serrano and Esmay Suiza series are about the struggles of growth and discovery not only for three major heroines (Heris Serrano, Esmay Suiza and Lady Cecilia de Marktos) but also for the entire younger generation of the Familias, who mature from irresponsible party girls and boys into the new leaders of their galactic empire.
For that matter, I believe another author has written a few obscure novels about a woman named Honor Harrington, which detail her growth from a relatively junior space navy officer to a very senior space navy officer, politician, ruler, wife and mother. The series and its spinoffs have also looked at gender roles, among other things, in several forms of society, while relating the stories of several other female characters.
She is usually classified as ‘young adult’, but Tamora Pierce has also written quite a few fantasy novels that could best be described as ‘heroine’s journies’.
Marjorie Westriding in Tepper’s _Grass_. Has the internal journey and is also a mother of teens and a wife.
While she’s a secondary character, Clarissa MacDougal’s arc in the Lensman series doesn’t end with marriage and children. In Children of the Lens (1954; the last book of the series) she goes back to work along with all the other Second Stage lensmen, and in fact gets her full Second Stage training for the first time then.
I really wish I’d been able to attend this panel. Thanks for bring us the report. And I am definitely interested in any pearls whose first seed was Tehanu – a magnificent failure which has been grit in my mantle for a long time too, and not directly a productive one.
Annice in Tanya Huff’s Sing the Four Quarters has a rather unusual quest-arc, with pregnancy and motherhood at the heart of it. She is pretty darned independent.
Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle strikes me not so much as a crone’s journey, as a maiden’s journey in crone drag. She hasn’t lived the years she gets lumbered with, has she? An interesting and very Wynne-Jonesy thing to do, though.
Speaking as a guy who’s fiercely occupied right now with a crone’s journey yarn of his own, I offer two contributory reasons for the shortage of same: she knows too much to make it easy to plot, and it hurts too much to make it easy to write. This, above and beyond whether the tale itself is a joyous or a sorrowful one.
That sounds like a wonderful panel!
Tossing one in — Cat Valente’s “The Orphan’s Tales” books are an interesting take on a Heroine’s Journey. The outer layer’s a maiden’s journey, but all sorts of different womens’ stories populate the inner ones. They keep subverting this notion that the stories ought to be about men and that womens’ stories end with getting their men.
My two cents in three words: Kara Frackin’ Thrace.
(Or OK Kara “Starbuck” Thrace.)
So much depth. I was a die-hard fan, wanting her passion, her abandon, her skillz, her strength. Starbuck is a true heroine, and her arc took her all around Campbell’s Heroic Cycle, from the Call to the Journey into Darkness to the Return, over and over.
Remember the downed raider she discovered was partially organic? The Arrow of Apollo? Scar? Leoben’s prison on New Caprica? Death in the Mandala storm and the resurrection? Demetrius and rescuing Leoben? The math behind the Watchtower song?
Arguably, the whole of Battlestar Galactica was about Starbuck the Redeemer.
You could also make an argument for Starbuck’s Heroine’s Journey according to Maureen Murdock:
* separation from the feminine (her abusive mother),
* identification with the masculine (military service and adoption of Adama as father figure),
* lots of trials (list above),
* illusory success (her assignment as CAG, her marriage to Sam, her affair with Apollo),
* initiation and descent to the Goddess (death in the Mandala storm and discovery of both Earth and the charred remains of her body),
* healing the split/reclaiming the madwoman (the dreams of her mother),
* finding the inner man with heart (rediscovery of Sam as a Cylon, visions of her father that help Starbuck transmute the music to the way to Earth),
* and beyond duality (the mystery of her disappearance – what was she anyway?)