Abstract
The article considers the narrative shape of the Hero’s Journey, first described as the ‘monomyth’ by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2004, 12), exploring Campbell’s claim that it is a ‘universal’ representation of human experience, the ‘deep structure’ of all myths, a description of our shared values, and the measure of whether a new story is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In such terms, it would seem impossible for a new story to escape the requirements of the Hero’s Journey, and yet the Hero’s Journey is implicitly a patriarchal, racist and toxic narrative model that we should seek to resist or unravel, so that its values are no longer perpetuated. The article moves on to consider how far alternative theoretical models concerning narrative shape (e.g. The Heroine’s Journey (Davis 2005) and The Queeroe’s Journey (Beckham 2021)) have been successful in contesting the Hero’s Journey, along with literary and film-based attempts (works of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and N.K. Jemisin, along with a variety of Disney films, Twilight (Hardwicke 2008) and The Hunger Games (Lawrence and Ross 2012)) to resist, subvert or unravel the Hero’s Journey. Consistently, the models and attempts are found to be unsuccessful or only partial in their success, or to have paid a ‘dramatic’ price. The article ends by moving beyond the question of narrative shape to the issue of gender-based character types/archetypes (e.g. the Chosen One, the Dark Lord), further analysing the previously mentioned creative works to show how, again, the Hero’s Journey cannot be fully escaped or entirely resisted.
Keywords: Campbell, Jemisin, Hero’s Journey, Heroine’s Journey, gender, race
Resisting The Theory Of The Hero’s Journey
Joseph Campbell spent his life researching ‘the complex of universal myths and symbols that he called “Mankind’s one great story”’ (Kudler & Walter 2008, xi), monomyth or his Hero’s Journey. Yet the so-called universality of the ‘patriarchal’ (Hart 2014) monomyth and gender-specific ideolanguage like ‘mankind’ have long been challenged by feminists and ‘advocates of gender-neutral (or nonsexist) language’ (Earp 2012, p. 4): the proscribed, excluding and prescribed nature of the female within Campbell’s understanding of the complex might be considered to be limiting, disempowering, non-diverse and implicitly misogynistic. Indeed, Maureen Murdock, Campbell’s former assistant, having asked him for his thoughts upon her Heroine’s Journey, reported in interview:
I met with Joe (Campbell) and showed him my map of the feminine journey. He said, ‘Women don’t need to make the journey, they are the place that everyone is trying to get to.’ His response shocked me. It is true that in the mythological tradition, the feminine is the place people may be aspiring to integrate, but what I was aware of was that most of the women I knew and worked with were disconnected from our feminine nature. Our task was to reclaim the feminine for ourselves. (Davis, 2005)
In describing women as a journey’s-end ‘place’ within the Hero’s Journey, the female is relegated to the position of, and objectified as a passive (sexual and/or socio-economic) prize to be attained, won and owned by the heroically active male, as per classic versions of the St. George legend, in which the knight frees the princess from the Satanic dragon (Dalton 2020, 15). The dualistic nature of, or binary oppositions implicit within Campbell’s monomyth (with known and unknown, untransformed and transformed self, outward quest and return, life and death, and more) thereby map onto the binary of heroic male and trophy female. Murdock, however, understands the female ‘place’ as psychoactive, empowered and potentially self-defining, especially when the wider community might act in solidarity. She continued:
The impact on me of his response was definitely to pursue the writing of my book. My writing was informed by therapy with women and by my work with women’s groups. When The Heroine’s Journey was published in 1990, it deeply impacted both women and men. It has been published in seven languages. (Davis 2005)
For all that Murdock’s model has succeeded in finding currency within the fields of both literary studies and psychoanalytic therapy, it sets itself up in the sort of binary opposition to the Hero’s Journey that can only see Murdock’s model named and defined via ideolanguage that is as gender-specific and non-diverse as Campbell’s own: the Heroine’s Journey. As Murdock states, the Heroine’s Journey is a direct response to both Campbell himself and the Hero’s Journey, a response that predicates itself upon and borrows from the general shape and stages of the Hero’s Journey while at the same time defining itself as a direct binary opposition to the Hero’s Journey (for the sake of illustration: much as a photonegative does). This is a multi-layered but patriarchally heteronormative binary opposition which might be read throughout, therefore: the original success of Campbell’s work v Murdock’s feminist challenge to it; the rejection of Murdock’s later work v its various successes; Chosen One v Dark Lord (using female agents, just as Eve and Lilith have been accused of being so used (Dalton 2020, 17-18)); male v female; active v passive; ego v id; good v bad; virtue v sin, right v wrong. Yet, immanently, such a heteronormative and binary opposition concerning male and female surely only confirms the existing and proscribing patriarchal dynamic of the Hero’s Journey in its own broad terms (since the Hero’s Journey complex has always accommodated, proscribed and demonised such opposition), such that the Hero’s Journey continues to dominate contemporary media as much as contemporary society is patriarchal and wider cultural production organizations (e.g. publishing houses and movie production houses) continue to commercialize, promote and prioritize traditional myths that valorise our own pre-existing social formation and essential self-interests (Giannelli 2022).
It is the pseudo-religious essentialism and binary predication of the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey that has seen them critiqued from a gender-diverse perspective by the likes of Beckham (2021, vi), who explores whether the ‘Queeroe’s Journey’ might be ‘discover[ed]’. Significantly, as Murdock did with the Heroine’s Journey, Beckham predicates the Queeroe’s Journey upon and borrows from the general shape and stages of the Hero’s Journey, meaning that the Hero’s Journey remains as ‘accommodat[ing]’, re-mythologised and reiterated as before. It further means that the Queeroe’s Journey fails to define itself in its own terms, patriarchally proscribed by the binary oppositions within the Hero’s Journey (Dalton 2020, 19-20) and the larger binary opposition of the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey, the gender-diverse perspective somewhat compromised, as further suggested by ‘I would like to thank Maureen Murdock and Joseph Campbell for helping me discover a queer-identified journey from their pieces of literature’ (Beckham 2021, vi). Fundamentally, if the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey can accommodate a queer-identified journey, then the Queeroe’s Journey does not offer a competing model, and criticisms that the Hero’s Journey is entirely binary or heteronormative lose some validity.
Subverting The Mythological Plot-Shape Of The Hero’s Journey In Literature
The African-American author N.K. Jemisin discussed her much celebrated novel The Fifth Season (2015), that novel the first of a trilogy that won the Hugo Award three years in succession (2016-18), in post-colonial terms to identify how the ‘mythological tradition’ described by Campbell and Murdock might be considered lacking in further areas of diversity: ‘I’m doing a secondary world whose people don’t need to emulate myths; they are creating their own. They are living their own myths. This is The Iliad that they’re going through, and then some stuff’ (Carroll 2015). The Iliad (and the majority of the texts considered by Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces of 1949) is a celebration of empire and conquest, the male elites of the empire evidencing their divinely-sanctioned moral, racial and physical superiority via the invasion and defeat of demonised ‘other’ races, winning valuable possessions, including women, as reward. As per The Iliad, Jemisin’s novel presents us with a world ruled by a patriarchal empire that cruelly subjugates women and various races (not to mention the sentient natural world), yet The Fifth Season, rather than celebrating that empire, quickly moves to the tectonic destruction of that empire, the capital city of Yumenes (can be read as You-Men) brought to ruination. The narrative becomes one of small communities of survivors looking to rebuild, refugees judged and welcomed based solely upon their skills-sets to help with the reconstruction, rather than upon their race, gender or sexuality. The apocalypse proves to be a great leveller, one that ‘liberates’ the female protagonist(s), as characters are no longer judged or oppressed based on the values of the former society. Free of this past, characters also get to reinvent themselves, including the apparent Dark Lord character (Alabaster), the most powerful ‘geomancer’ of the former empire, one who ‘hunted’ women with magical potential, cruelly forced their obedience, and sexually used them in order to produce powerful heirs of the empire. The reader comes to learn that even this most toxic of males has only behaved in such ways because the empire would have punished him terribly if he had not. Now free of the empire – and we come to realise that he deliberately brought about its downfall (making him anything but a Dark Lord) – he ‘frees’ the female protagonist so he might pursue a gay relationship with a pirate captain, agreeing to a polyamorous arrangement only once the others have argued for and agreed respectively.
We can see in the above that, at the start of her novel, Jemisin establishes genre-specific reader expectations concerning the Hero’s Journey and its archetypes, but then employs a range of tactics to destabilise, subvert and unravel that Hero’s Journey, thereby to critique and challenge politically the nature of those expectations within and for the reader. For all the positive recognition and commercial success of Jemisin’s ‘genre-busting’ (imyril 2018) work, however, the narrative success of the trilogy should be more closely examined. When Jemisin asserted she had created a ‘world whose people don’t need to emulate myths’ since ‘they are creating […] and living their own’, the suggestion is that the people have been successfully freed from having to repeat mythological tradition. Yet, we need to remember that those people have been pre-formed by the mythological tradition and will therefore, even post-apocalypse, still go about triumphantly rebuilding the empire, overcoming challenges and enduring self-sacrifice in order to win personal transformation and social celebration. Such a repeating cycle of self-construction and self-destruction indeed comes to describe the larger narrative of each novel and the trilogy itself. Such a cycle, of course, is the characteristic, character-defining and character-driven pictorial representation of the Hero’s Journey.
We can find a way to decamp to another world, where we will surely not repeat our mistakes… except that we selfishly define ourselves in such a way that we may not be able to behave in any other way than we have already been behaving. We will not be able to escape ourselves, the nature of ourselves and the nature of our appetites. We will repeat our mistakes. (Dalton 2020, 119).
Largely as a consequence of The Fifth Season’s attempts and tactics to subvert, destabilise and unravel the Hero’s Journey, the author continues to suffer ‘a backlash among […] conservative science fiction writers and fans’ (Paulson 2017), and is occasionally debated as a cisgendered author by those at the other end of the political spectrum concerning her appropriative, fantastical and inauthentically liberated representation of trans characters (Jemisin 2020; Ath 2016). Furthermore, both The Fifth Season and its trilogy, particularly when the narrative delays or refuses to pursue the drama of the mythological tradition more rapidly, have been described by critics as anticlimactic, ‘static’, ‘sedentary’ (Alexander 2016) and ‘defy[ing] easy literary categorization’ (Khatchadourian 2020), the latter perhaps explaining why Jemisin’s printed novels do not carry an explicit genre label. Therefore, in seeking to subvert and unravel the Hero’s Journey, Jemisin’s work might be said to enact its own narratological unravelling, excluding itself from the genre mainstream, and seeing her ‘voice’ becoming marginalised in some ways.
Attempting to subvert or unravel the Hero’s Journey appears to come at a ‘dramatic’ price, then. Indeed, even the world-famous British fantasy authors Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman paid a certain price for satirising and defeating reader expectations with regard to plot progression and a raising of the stakes in the likes of Good Omens (Gaiman and Pratchett 1990) and American Gods (Gaiman 2001). Both books duck the climactic final battle that they have built towards, removing the male protagonist’s toxic need to become a transformed hero who aggressively self-sacrifices to ensure the salvation, further propagation and celebration of the patriarchal empire, in turn for their name to live on forever. Consistently in their genre-satirical works, with Rincewind and Twoflower in The Colour of Magic (Pratchett 1983) and Richard and the female Door in Neverwhere (Gaiman 1996) to name but a few, we are shown that protagonists can achieve ‘heroic’ adequacy, satisfaction or happiness, and a measure of success (or survival at least) by rejecting the toxic, martial behaviours of the mythological tradition; conversely, those who pursue such behaviours end up as self-defeated, be it the LGBTQ Hunter, bodyguard to Door, the Dark Lord or their dark agents. Yet such works explicitly define themselves against the Hero’s Journey, meaning they are still in significant part defined by its expectations, shape and terms: if these works do not conspicuously begin by conforming to the Hero’s Journey, the non-conforming endings make no sense; the works make no overall sense without the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is therefore essential to and at the heart of the narrative ‘sense’ and meaning. The attempted subversion or unravelling is therefore never completely successful and only, dramatically, ‘anticlimactic’ (Gilbert 2019), that being the most common criticism of these works, even when the genre-satirising intent behind these works may have been understood by a critic:
Good Omens ends with a deliberate anticlimax. All the hosts of Heaven, all the legions of Hell, and the whole wacky ensemble assembled over the course of the book suddenly find themselves completely stymied a second away from Judgment Day by the only force on Earth more powerful than the hosts of Heaven, the legions of Hell, and everything in between: An 11-year old who does not want to do as he is told. But as hilarious, fitting, and even somewhat profound as this climax plays in the book, it all lands with something of a thud on the show. (Foley 2019)
Challenging The Nature And Identity Of The Hero In Western Film
A number of the creative science fiction and fantasy works considered so far have looked to challenge or subvert the Hero’s Journey by employing, amongst other tactics, an empowered and often independent female protagonist. This tactic became fairly standard practice with a spate of young adult (YA) Hollywood releases in the early 2010s, including films like The Hunger Games (Lawrence and Ross 2012), Brave (Andrews and Chapman 2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders 2012), Frozen (Buck and Lee 2013) and Maleficent (Stromberg 2014), and more. YA uses the ‘rites of passage’ or bildungsroman version of the Hero’s Journey, in which, as a natural part of growing up, the hero suffers the wrench/trauma (or rebellion) of leaving the limiting family nest or home community, then to go out and face the perils of the outside world, learning and growing as they go, and ultimately learning to negotiate, compromise and self-sacrifice (defeating the selfish or self-obsessed individual they once were) in order to validate, benefit and prove themselves worthy of the ‘place’ of the wider community, thereby finding a renewed home for their renewed self. Every individual goes through a general journey of this sort in their lives, for it also describes Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Michael 2021) in terms of self-development within the context of societal competition (for resources, survival, security and relative dominance over the demonised ‘other’). Implicitly, however, the journey ultimately sees the hero conforming to and becoming an agent of a particular society’s dynamic. Therefore, even if a narrative begins with an empowered and relatively independent female protagonist, that protagonist tends to become an agent of their patriarchal society.
Considering The Hunger Games more closely, by way of example, we begin with the fiercely independent Katniss Everdeen, who has hunting skills and fantasises about escaping her limiting community (District 12) in order to live more freely and happily in the wilderness. Yet, to save her younger sister, Katniss must confront her wider society within the arena of a lethal TV reality gameshow. Katniss, ever the fiercely independent female, refuses to train with the male (Peeta) also selected from District 12. Once the gameshow begins, though, Katniss painfully comes to learn that she cannot survive on her own, first relying on her male mentor to beg medicine from rich patrons of the games to save her life, and then accepting she must cooperate with Peeta if she is to make it through. The movie ends with Katniss and Peeta triumphing together, winning reputation and reward for District 12, and implicitly celebrating for the audience the value of self-sacrifice and co-operation with heteronormative patriarchy, devaluing the fiercely independent female we began with, a character who was overly ‘selfish’ and requiring of corrective transformation. The movies Brave and Snow White and the Huntsman share with The Hunger Games the trope of the female protagonist needing to choose a male (from among a number of competing males indeed, a trope also evident in earlier YA films like Twilight (Hardwicke 2008)) with whom to ‘cooperate’ (an ostensible love-story). When, as per Bechdel’s ‘Rule’ (Caplan 2021) perhaps, the female protagonist rejects that ‘need’, such as in Brave, or a movie avoids the trope entirely, as shown with Maleficent and Frozen, the female protagonist tends to be left ambivalently ‘alone’ at the end of the movie while above or otherwise isolated from the wider community or society. Such movie endings come with a tinge of poignancy and a suggested ongoing sacrifice of self, providing a warning about the ‘price’ to be paid for not conforming, and thereby reconfirming the particular requirements for adhering to the Hero’s Journey.
It would seem, then, that if the Hero’s Journey is ultimately about the individual learning to conform and co-operate with their wider society, to perpetuate and promote it as necessary (even if only by way of self-censoring any criticism, challenge or confrontation), sacrificing themselves as required, then the ‘process’ of society or the social programming and creation of an ‘individual’, described as the Hero’s Journey, concerns the ‘erasure’ or inevitable disempowerment of individual distinctiveness (hence Campbell’s notion of the same hero with a thousand different faces) when it comes to behaviours, personal values and gender-identity. The positive ‘transformation’ of self described by the Hero’s Journey can actually be understood as the loss of self, or the impossibility or inability of the self to survive even while apocalyptically ending the society and values that formed that self (as in Jemisin’s The Fifth Season), since something of that society and its values live on through the formation of that self, even if just as the basic human needs described by Maslow’s hierarchy.
Immediately after completing that analysis, I experienced a profound shift in my personal consciousness regarding the hero’s journey pattern. I had a vision of the hero’s journey as a living entity, as old as time and human consciousness, and I found my place in its vastness. It was a true peak-experience as described by Maslow (1964), one of those rare lifetime events when a broader view of life and its meaning can be seen. It gave me a sense of purpose and assured me that I was walking on a powerful and entirely positive path. (Vogler 2017)
The protagonist in the Hero’s Journey ultimately becomes a self-erasing or self-sacrificing ‘vehicle’ for the ongoing assertion, aggressive promotion (martial if necessary) and growth of their society, specifically at the expense of ‘other’ societies and their agents. After all, one cannot escape one’s society while still living within it or if essentially formed by it. Furthermore, given that the hero’s society has been patriarchal since at least the time of the ancient Greeks (from whose language the term ‘patriarchy’ originates, after all), then it is patriarchal society that finds its affirmation, valorisation and continuation when Westerners re-create and tell ‘good’ stories, stories which implicitly teach us patriarchal values during our formative years, stories which form and define our cultural identity, sense of self, self-interest, and ideas about dramatically ‘satisfying’ and ‘unsatisfying’ narrative. It is immaterial to the perpetuation of the Hero’s Journey, it could be argued, if either we or the protagonist are male, female, gender non-binary, LGBTQ+ or consciously seeking to resist patriarchal society: we will still re-create and tell stories in which the hero self-erases or self-sacrifices for the benefit of their existing society, and we will still instinctively re-create and tell stories that have the sort of conflict-driven plot-beats (with moral reward and punishment) that describe Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in terms of human communities looking to ensure their existence ahead of ‘others’ (us v them) in a world of increasingly limited resources (simply another way of describing the Hero’s Journey).
One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good [my emphasis] archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. (Campbell 1988, 197)
Confronting The Toxic Archetypes And Characters Of The Hero’s Journey
The above discussion suggests that Western individuals cannot escape from the Hero’s Journey that is the social process of patriarchy, for they are born within it, formed by it and programmed to behave in ways that (sometimes subtly, unconsciously or implicitly) see to that patriarchy’s continuation. Indeed, for all the efforts of particular groups (activists, leaders, writers, and otherwise) in particular Western societies to end patriarchy, none has yet been entirely successful. We might question once again why or how opposition or resistance to patriarchy, in the longer-term, seems either to fail or somehow end up facilitating patriarchy. Beyond the various examples and explanations already provided in this essay (in which the Hero’s Journey has been understood as a model for the individual’s relationship with competing communities), we might also reflect that, due to (third-wave and fourth-wave) feminism resisting patriarchy’s binary and limiting definition of an individual’s ‘nature’ (and prospects) being principally determined by their being male or female, ultimately it has become all the harder to identify where, how and by whom patriarchy even exists, and therefore all the harder to resist or subvert it. During the early waves of feminism, the male dominance of both public life and the workplace was ‘easy’ to identify and address in relatively immediate ways, but more modern, ‘nurture’-based understandings of an identity’s formation as plural, non-binary and intersectional have meant that there are no longer universally accepted definitions of male/man and female/woman, meaning that finding a majority audience and platform for addressing, protesting and contesting patriarchy as a whole is more challenging, contested and cancelled than ever before. Consequently, some critics have described ‘cancel culture’ as having had a ‘chilling effect’ upon public discourse (McWhorter 2020).
Yet we can consider in still other ways ‘why or how’ resisting or trying to ‘escape’ the archetypal and patriarchal Hero’s Journey always seems to fail. Speaking personally (an occasional faux pas in academic writing, but on the issue of identity I feel I might have something to contribute), as a heterosexual male of working class background, and as a feminist, I very much wish to escape the ‘toxic’ Hero’s Journey of patriarchy and my archetypal formation within it, but I have not as yet discovered a fully non-toxic set of male/masculine behaviours or a fully non-toxic model of maleness, masculinity or manhood. It is perhaps this very sort of situation that social historian Jablonka (2022) describes when they state that men remain caught in ‘pathologies of the masculine’, their inheriting a patriarchally heroic formation/disposition even if it does not reflect their position in contemporary society, resulting in an ‘almost tragic’ sense of alienation, frustration (with all the toxic behaviours that then feeds), inadequacy and self-loathing (more frequently self-destructive among working class males). Jablonka calls for the recognition of a ‘fundamental identity’, then to facilitate a ‘redistribution of gender’ that might allow for the emergence of ‘new masculinities’ as all but ‘lifestyle choices’. However, Jablonka’s essentialist notion or position that there might be a ‘fundamental identity’ surely echoes the archetypal nature of the hero (along with the other character-roles) within the Hero’s Journey, suggesting that these ‘new masculinities’ can only ever be the same old hero wearing a thousand different faces.
The desire for and challenge of discovering a fully nontoxic set of male/masculine behaviours, a fully non-toxic model of masculinity or ‘new masculinities’ is explored as a corollary by several of the books that have been previously discussed in this essay as seeking to unravel or subvert the Hero’s Journey: namely The Colour of Magic and Neverwhere. In Pratchett’s novel, the Dark Lord character actually carries the title of ‘The Patrician’, we witness a satirically tragic scene in an inn when dozens of toxically selfish, male ‘heroes’ (Chosen Ones) kill each other and themselves to be the first to Twoflower’s travelling chest, and Hrun the Barbarian (a spoof of the Sword and Sorcery Conan the Barbarian (Milius 1982) character in the eponymous movie released a year before the novel) is presented as the most famous (and archetypal) of warrior-heroes, but one who is murderously efficient, dangerous to know, entirely selfish, of low intellect, and more than likely a rapist.
On the whole, the unpleasant carvings and occasional disjointed skeletons he passed held no fears for Hrun. This was partly because he was not exceptionally bright while being at the same time exceptionally unimaginative, but it was also because odd carvings and perilous tunnels were all in a day’s work. He spent a great deal of time in similar situations, seeking gold or demons or distressed virgins and relieving them respectively of their owners, their lives and at least one cause of their distress. (Pratchett 1983, 14)
For all its feminist perspective on the classical hero, however, The Colour of Magic’s plot recognises that the likes of Hrun (the most toxic of males) always win out, whether they are willingly seduced and manipulated by power-hungry ‘politicians’ like ‘the curvaceous Liessa Dragonbidder’ or not. When such males thrive within their society, the avoidance behaviours that non-classical males are forced to adopt (if they wish to ‘win’ the prize of basic survival) are equally self-interested, but also ‘cowardly’ (in the style of the Rincewind protagonist), non-committal, manipulative, deceitful, utterly cynical (in the style of the Bravd and Weasel protagonists), often criminal, desperate and toxic. Therefore, there seems to be no alternative, in this novel at least, to toxic masculinity if toxic masculinity is already in play in society.
Turning to Gaiman’s equally satirical novel, the male protagonist Richard does everything he can to resist the toxic, uncaring, self-interested and cynical behaviours of the capitalistic ‘rat race’ of London, a city where ‘the possessors [live] above us, and the dispossessed, we who live below and between, […] live in the cracks’ (54). On the street, he helps the injured female protagonist, Door, even when his money-hungry and selfishly ambitious girlfriend Jessica warns him Door must be a drug-addict and dangerous (besides, they do not wish to be late for an important meal with their capitalistic boss – time is money). Richard takes Door home, but does not seek any sort of patriarchal reward or prize for ‘saving’ her. Indeed, throughout the novel, Richard shies away from the role of male Chosen One and all forms of confrontation, finding ‘displays of real violence unnerving’ (68), yet suffers constant anxiety, self-doubt, distress and self-erasure as a consequence: ‘It was as if he could not entirely trust himself, and [… he] hated it and himself’ (46). Indeed, he has no self-possession throughout the novel, remaining passive or reacting to events (often by fleeing through another magical ‘door’) rather than being toxically assertive, proactive or in control of his own narrative. He self-erases to such an extent that in many scenes we forget he is present, for he fails to initiate conversations, take action or be, actually, the protagonist. Unsurprisingly, towards the end of the novel, it is the entirely suicidal/self-erasing/self-sacrificing Richard (and in this moment of self-sacrifice, Richard ironically steps into the role of the Christlike Chosen One, for all that he has tried to resist doing so) who has to be saved by the female characters: his continual inability to escape (his own) toxic masculinity leaving him only the two possible solutions of ending it or implicitly finding female indulgence, permission or forgiveness. Thus, we can see how Richard represents the ‘crisis of masculinity’ which requires ‘constant confirmation’ (Baranova 2016).
In facing the ongoing dilemma of whether to be a toxic male hero or not (a Dark Lord antagonist or a new Chosen One protagonist), Richard invites the reader’s empathy or sympathy concerning his struggle and desire to become his own (non-toxic and non-archetypal) man, yet he only realises sufficient self-possession to avoid suicide, and he only wins through via the sort of absolute ‘escape’ from his toxic society that the magic (or sleight of hand) of a fantasy novel can achieve. At the very end, he is returned to the ‘real’ world of London Above, to the life he knew before he met Door, and so nothing has actually changed in the world, except that perhaps Richard feels slightly more confident and validated concerning whom he might be in the future: he has the hope and resolve to keep on his quest not to be the toxic and archetypal male he fears he could be. He inevitably decides he still does not fit in this unchanged world of toxic males, however, and so he ‘escapes’ once more to help Door with her ‘work’ in London Below.
Gaiman’s novel is replete with toxic males who are agents of the Dark Lord (the latter ironically revealed to be the Angel Islington, a vengeful angel barred from heaven, much like Satan in his ambition), from Mister Stockton, to Varney, to the Earl, to the ever-living Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, and even to the Marquis de Carabas, the latter occasionally helping Richard and Door, but having to operate in precisely the toxically cynical style described for the ‘avoidance’ males in Pratchett’s novel: ‘The Marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself—his clothes, his manner, his carriage—as a grand joke’ (131). These toxic males do end up exposed as criminal bullies, satirised, killed and/or victims of their own toxic nature, so the novel exercises a moral judgement upon them. Islington, Croup and Vandemar are sucked through a doorway to hell (or so it is suggested), yet we know they are not ended, for they are still part of the world ‘Below’, Croup and Vandemar are ever-living, and the Angel Islington will continue to operate as the archetypal Satanic Dark Lord of the Hero’s Journey, a journey and quest that can or will only continue for Door and Richard even at the apparent end of the book.
Therefore, in Neverwhere the protagonist Richard escapes neither the archetypal plot-shape nor the archetypal character-formations of the Hero’s Journey, for all his endeavor: his struggle or quest is actually a Hero’s Journey, of course. He ends up back where he started, with precious little achieved except for a confirmation of the inescapability of the Hero’s Journey and its formations, just as Bilbo Baggins does in the tellingly subtitled The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again (Tolkien 2012). Both end up going ‘full circle’. What Richard and Bilbo have in common (and they share it with every Hero, of course) is that the journey sees them reach a place of personal ‘transformation’/acceptance in their relation to their societies and the world: they no longer resist the notion of their society’s Hero’s Journey and its ongoing, fundamental, all-encompassing and possibly ‘eternal’ (as per Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion, 1970) requirements of them.
All of the above might suggest that even a feminist act, attempt or struggle to unravel or resist the Hero’s Journey is itself engaging in a type of quest or Hero’s Journey, one that ultimately confirms the inescapability of the Hero’s Journey and the formations of patriarchal society. Certainly in Neverwhere, the character of Hunter, a female warrior demonstrating many of the classic traits of the Hero but also an LGBTQ+ character who aids Door throughout, except when looking for the magical spear (loaded with both Christian and phallocentric symbolism) with which to defeat the male Beast of London (the principal, ‘patriarchal’ threat and enemy for much of the novel). She ultimately comes to demonstrate the futility of attempting to use the patriarchy’s own weapons against it. Therefore, neither avoiding nor confronting patriarchy seem to be strategies that might successfully unravel the archetypal and patriarchal Hero’s Journey that is the process of societal formation. Such an inference might then beg the question whether the endeavour is, therefore, futile and not worth pursuing.
In responding to this last question, there are major protests to be made, naturally. The Hero’s Journey is an imprisoning, limiting, punishing and toxic process, oppressing, using, persecuting and demonizing non-male genders, those without class mobility, non-heteronormativity and, more often than not, non-white ethnicities. If we are ever to become our better selves (both as individuals and collectively), we must continue and must strive to challenge, subvert and unravel the Hero’s Journey as best and as creatively as we can. It is all-important to do so, in the spirit of multiculturalism and its championing of diversity, to honor the foundations laid by the feminist movement, and to promote that ‘transformational power’ capable of providing ‘interconnectedness among people by having them face the perplexing problems of equity, equality, social identity, and personal philosophy’ (Beachum 2020). In terms of originality, the creative challenge perhaps remains not in inventing ‘something without precedent’, but in allowing the reader to ‘perceive’, by ‘deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality’, what is known ‘in a conceptual sense’ to be the fundamental nature of the problem (Lodge 2011, 64).
To conclude, if the Hero’s Journey is simply a description of the socially dependent individual’s struggle to meet their fundamental needs, then it can never be fully subverted or unravelled, unless the very nature of human existence and reality are subverted or unravelled. Until we become a different life-form with different needs entirely, therefore, the Hero’s Journey is apparently here to stay. The Hero’s Journey, after all, is an unending cycle, and perhaps the circle of life. Potentially, while in our current form of existence, to subvert or unravel it successfully might only be the same as everything ending forever. Yet there is hope we might yet transcend ourselves, perhaps in transhumanist ways, and no longer have to endure our anthropocentric existence. Perhaps that is another story entirely, but it is one already anticipated by this author, many of the authors already cited in this essay and by Escobar (2018) in Designs for the Pluriverse.
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