The heroine’s journey
Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago. One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.
In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return. The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.
Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men. There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.
When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind. But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles… Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.
When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year. Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:
- Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
- Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
- …and Harlequin NASCAR. Yes, that’s not a typo.
Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae. And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.
beestar Said,
April 12, 2009 @ 7:28 am
Are there local media products that satisfy local desires? (With all the singing and dancing, isn’t Bollywood mainly targeted at women? If not, surely there is some massive subsector of Bollywood is targeted at women).
Actually, all these other countries are probably going to bypass dead trees altogether, aren’t they? Cell phone serials, DVDs, internet shows - I bet Harlequin is already expanding in those directions.
Interesting to read about the small-town and NASCAR market segmentation! What do small town readers prefer?