Virginia Press - Journal Entry 15 - Peer review with Briar Bond

 One of, if not my very first journal entry, was about the pervasive sexism of Campbell's seminal writing on the Hero's Journey. While I, in my modern mind, initially assumed the feminine masculine dichotomy presented in his thesis to be arbitrary or symbolic, further reading through my friend Briar Bond's term paper illuminated how wrong I was. 

Briar and I both chose to write on Heroines which fulfill a Hero's Journey. As my choices, Captain Kathryn Janeway and her second self Seven of Nine, fulfilled the original archetype perfectly, I didn't need to investigate much further. The Hero's Journey is an arch applicable to characters, characters can be women; what's wrong there? 

A quote by Campbell that Briar pulled from one of his students irked this notion. He said, "Women don’t need to make the journey... All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to." As Briar points out, this leaves little room for growth in a female character. While this could be perceived as a positive stereotyping in favor of women, any misconception which flattens the complexity of any group of people is reductive and harmful. 

Briar's paper follows the later guidance of Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell's who proposed that while men and traditional heroes focus on external journeys, women and the contemporary heroine partake in internal journeys. Essentially, they must take on masculine traits and reconcile this change with their core femininity. While I even see remnants of this idea in my own presentation and experience, I think Briar and I agree that this, too, is something of a reductionist take on the issue. 

The paper goes on to examine how Elizabeth Swan, from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, goes on both interior and exterior journeys, similar to my own paper. Though we frequently disagree on interpretations of this material, Briar and I do agree on one this; women and female characters are just as capable of growth, complexity, and heroism as anyone else. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kip Redick Example of a blog post 1

  I just had a few thoughts on what "wilderness of the soul" meant. In class we discussed that it meant uncharted territory within yourself and I thought of Freud's Iceberg analogy where most of the hidden unconscious is the part of the iceberg that remains underwater. There had always been a debate between psychology and religion in regards to what exactly a soul is. Some would say that the soul is the consciousness of the human brain, while others argue it is something spiritual linking us to God. But in response to the wilderness aspect, I do wonder how much of ourselves do we not actually know? I have always thought of myself as someone who knows exactly who I am, but since this class discussion I'm not so sure. Don't get me wrong- I am not upset about this, but I am certainly more curious. It's almost exciting to think about what else I could learn about myself, but also slightly nerve-wracking. What if I learn something new that I don't ...
Read more

Kip Redick Introduction

 Welcome to the Heroes and Mystics blog for 2026. Make sure to start the blog with your name and the subject of the entry (Just as I have done with this post). . Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections that relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has while reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or from informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The studen...
Read more

Kip Redick Example of a blog post 2

  Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experience o...
Read more