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foreword

by Christopher Vogler

The “Hero’s Journey” pattern that Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been a wellspring of creativity and inspiration for many people, male and female, who recognized the patterns as a metaphorical description of their journeys through life. It has been a roadmap for storytellers and artists, female and male, who find its terms and incidents to be perfectly designed to connect with the emotions and dreams of their audiences. For many people it can be a universal, one-size-fits-all guidebook to the inevitable stages of life, travel, launching anew business, or any serious endeavor.

However, and this is a big however, there has been a persistent shortcoming in this approach to life and literature, in that it has a slight gender bias towards the masculine. In my work I try to view it as neutral, genderless, a description of the general human condition, but it has been pointed out to me many times, and I have come to understand on my own, that there is more than a drop of testosterone in the assumptions and specifics of the Hero’s Journey, starting with that word “hero.” I noticed that when I started lecturing about the Hero’s Journey, many people immediately assumed I was talking about male action heroes, superheroes, traditionally male military heroes, etc. Women would say “Fine, I get it about the man’s journey to go out and conquer something, but what’s the woman’s journey?”

I had no good answer. I am a man, I see things as a man, and it would be foolish to speculate what it’s like to be a woman on her journey through life. So I looked around and found the work of female scholars like Marie-Louise von Franz, Marija Gimbutas, Maureen Murdock, and Carol Pearson on the mythic archetypes specific to women, and the very different ways they saw the journey. Kim Hudson, the author of the book in your hands, doesn’t even think of it as necessarily being a journey, but rather an emotional process. Maureen Murdock in particular had a way of restating the unique life patterns and signposts of the woman’s experience as a clear outline, so I began referring people who wondered “What is the Woman’s Journey?” to Murdock’s work.

But I felt there was more work to be done in this area, especially in applying the findings of sociologists, scholars, and therapists to the specialized worlds of storytelling and screen-writing, and I encouraged my questioners and all the women in the audience to develop a theory about what is unique about the feminine experience of drama and life’s patterns.

I was encouraged all along by the enthusiasm with which women, especially my friends in the world of romance novel writing, took to the Hero’s Journey as a useful template or toolbox for designing and troubleshooting their works. They could definitely see themselves reflected in it, but at the same time they felt free to amend it and rephrase it so it made sense from the feminine perspective. They emphasized some elements and diminished others as they saw fit, and changed terminology to reflect the realities of their business, the desires of their audiences, and the guidance of their own hearts. That seems in keeping with Joseph Campbell’s idea that the Hero has a thousand faces, countless interpretations, “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told” (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces). And among the shifting shapes must surely be plenty of uniquely female expressions.

I have a few guesses about the differences between the masculine and feminine approaches to dramatic structure, and one of them focuses on geometry. What geometric form makes a somewhat accurate model of how you see drama unfolding? Stories can be represented graphically by a straight line like a railroad track, as Syd Field diagrams screenplays in his books. You use a pyramid or a ballistic curve to represent the arc of the story, or as Campbell chose, and I have chosen to follow, you can trace the stages of a story as a circle. When women describe to me how they experience drama or a dramatic event in their lives, the graphic patterns that come to mind are a series of concentric circles or a spiral in which the female protagonist proceeds more inwardly through a series of levels than the male who tends to move out into the world. The female heroes seem to move towards the center of a series of rings that represent the different levels of female relationships – relationship with father and mother, other women, men, children, society, the gods and goddesses, and finally at the center with themselves, their own true natures. Then they may return through all those levels, unwinding the spiral, applying what they have learned at their center to each set of relationships. They may touch upon some or all of the stages of the Hero’s Journey while they trace their own geometry, but they seem to be more interested in these relationships than in the external adventures and physical challenges.

But I have been hoping someone would take on this subject with full commitment to work out the details of a comprehensive theory of drama from a feminine perspective, and I believe you are about to read a book that does exactly that.

What I found in these pages was an eye-opening re-telling of the universal human story from the feminine perspective, with quite different language and thinking than I had ever considered. Hudson starts by overthrowing the troublesome words hero and heroine and strikes out boldly to trace the unique adventure of the Virgin archetype. Many of the terms she uses are compatible with those of the Hero’s Journey, and simply emphasize a different shade of meaning in some common signposts. But other elements of her grammar of storytelling are unique, recognizing turning points that don’t have equivalents in the Hero’s Journey language, that are uniquely feminine, or at least reflective of a more inward and emotionally based approach to drama and life. She leaves plenty of room for male heroes to experience their own version of the Virgin’s Promise, suggesting the term “Prince” as the male counterpart of Virgin.

I have known a few Holly wood princelings in my career, sons and grandsons of powerful people who stood to inherit kingdoms, and so I heartily endorse the exploration of this rich archetype, which Shakespeare pioneered with his studies of the playboy prince Hal turning into the stalwart King Henry V.

Among the many revelations in this book is the author’s technique of pairing archetypes, which yields many useful diagrams and insights. For example, she pairs the Virgin with its polar opposite, the Whore, and shows how the two archetypes intertwine and reflect each other. Another useful pairing is the Hero and the Coward, with Coward replacing the terms I typically use to describe the hero’s moral opposite, Villain and Shadow. The choice of Coward emphasizes the unspoken quality of courage in the term Hero, and points out a deep and consistent truth about Villains and Shadow figures – they are cowards, choosing a selfish and greedy path rather than the heroic path of self-sacrifice for the greater good.

This book repeatedly pounds me with how much I didn’t know. The author has done a thorough, and I mean thorough, research job on archetypes and psychological theory, and you won’t find a more lucid guide to these sometimes challenging concepts. I have already mentioned Hudson’s useful diagrams that show the variations of the male and female archetypes and their positive and negative potentials at different stages of life; these alone are worth the price of the book. But there are many more nuggets of value in here, including a groundbreaking distinction between fairy tales and myths. The author maintains that fairy tales are generally the province of the feminine and tend to be domestic and family-oriented, and that myths for the most part are the outer-directed territory of masculine energy. She is not dogmatic on this or any other point, and gives ample acknowledgement of the exceptions.

Having identified them as the key to understanding the Virgin’s Promise concept, Kim Hudson caresses the fairy tales to bring out every nuance of their meaning for the storyteller who wants to accurately express the feminine experience.

The author has taken care to draw parallels and make correspondences with both Campbell’s language and mine, so that the Hero’s Journey is not rejected but acknowledged as part of a larger system that also includes the Virgin’s Promise. The two approaches are seen as complementary rather than confrontational, and combining the two of them will give you a complete set of language and mental tools for dealing with any kind of story.

I have always said that the screenwriter or novelist needs a lot of tools and a lot of language to manage and describe the many possibilities in these crafts. No one set of terms can encompass all the human possibilities, and so we need many templates, many models, many sets of terms to describe them to ourselves and communicate them to other artists. This book makes a substantial contribution to the lingo and the tools and will stimulate further thinking about this subject. For example, I have always felt that the Hero’s Journey is actually asexual and genderless, and therefore someone needs to do for the uniquely masculine journey what Kim Hudson has done for the feminine.

Until then, here is a work that fills a major gap in the theory of drama and life. One more thing before this foreword becomes longer than the book it introduces. I am struck by the persistence of light in this vision of the feminine experience. Light seems to be a uniting metaphor in this framework. Three of Hudson’s thirteen stages, “Opportunity to Shine.” “Caught Shining,” and “Chooses her Light” directly mention aspects of light and there are glimmers of light throughout the theory. Hudson reminds us that “Just as the Greek goddess Aphrodite was known for her radiance, the shining forth of an internal quality rather than any physical attribute, the Virgin’s beauty is often described in terms of light such as shining, glowing, brilliant, dazzling and iridescent… In other words, the Virgin’s beauty represents the shining forth of her soul.” In that spirit, this book brings light to the mysteries of the unique feminine experience of life’s journey, and delivers a boon to screenwriters and storytellers of all kinds.

Christopher Vogler