Heroine's Journey: Yea or Nay

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     Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey at first glance seems like a simplified version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but upon further inspection, they each pertain to a different set of stories. While both templates utilize heightened language to make them more exciting, the Heroine’s Journey’s steps aren’t necessarily as “action” inducing as say an action movie with fighting. That isn’t to say that the stories can’t contain a lot of action, just that they are more likely to contain different types of action such as emotional fallouts etc. I think that this possible branding of the steps could be to incentivize those who enjoyed Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to be able to also appreciate the Heroine’s Journey even though they are different and speak for different types of stories. 

When looking at the Heroine’s Journey’s steps and what they actually mean when you break them down, they suggest a story centered around people and the social aspect. This makes this model more viable for genres such as realistic fiction, or ones where the center of focus is about the main character’s connections to other characters in the story. An example of this step is The descent: Passing Through the Gates of Judgement. Based on the language, one would assume that this is some kind of intense thing that the character goes through, and it can be intense, but in this case it could also be rephrased as the character starts to doubt themselves usually due to others around them not being supportive. This step shows how the Heroine’s Journey is mainly character centered, focusing on people and their interactions with the community or society that they have gotten themselves into. 

The focus on the character’s interactions with others reveals the differences between the Heroine’s Journey and the Hero’s Journey. I think one part that could be confusing is that the name “Heroine’s Journey” suggests that the main character is a woman. While I do believe that most stories that follow the Heroine’s Journey are women, I also think that this stems from the belief that women are supposed to more emotional, which plays into stereotypes of women not being capable enough of following the Hero’s Journey and of men not being capable of having and/or expressing their emotions. That’s not to say that the Heroine’s Journey is invalid, I just think that it could potentially be rebranded or renamed to better encapsulate what it’s about: the emotional social journey (definitely a better way to phrase it though). 

A possible reason for calling it the Heroine’s Journey is because it empowers women. I have some issues with this because in all honesty, I find that this template is less appealing to use than the Hero’s Journey, which kind of defeats the purpose of empowering women if you give them something worse than what men currently have. It’s hard to pinpoint why exactly I believe it’s not as good, but I think it has something to do with how generalized it can be, which means that you could theoretically push it out onto every story in some shape or form. This means that the stories following this template aren’t quite following a template. If I was going to write a story that was supposed to follow the Heroine’s Journey, it would probably be easier for me to just write my own story rather than adhering to the Heroine’s Journey which can be a good and/or a bad thing. I digress, I may be a hater.