The Hero's Journey First-Class Tourist Experience - Book Now!
Okay, it is probably shooting fish in a barrel to snark at this: Elizabeth Gilbert was 34, burnt out, her marriage in tatters when she left New York to travel the world. Her confessional book, Eat Pray Love, with its happy-ever- after ending, has sold millions. No wonder she says she's a 'favourite of destiny'. One (at least, I) can't really feel a massive amount of sympathy for someone who
knew she wanted to be a writer and also that her modest Connecticut background didn't furnish her with enough material. So she took off to have as many story-inspiring experiences as she could.
Wow, now we realise that Jane Austen should have disguised herself as a boy and sailed in the Navy as a powder-monkey and had similar colourful adventures before daring to set pen to paper.
Though I am not sure whether to blame the following crashing misapprehension on Gilbert or Emma Brockes who is doing this article:
To read The Last American Man and Eat Pray Love in succession is to remind oneself that there is no heroic journey for women, no concomitant woman of destiny trope, that doesn't involve childbirth.
To which I respond, and possibly this is not quite in context the most appropriate term, bollox.
All this shows is that you have not thought about women and what heroic journey might mean for them, in historical and cultural context.
And while, in these examples, there was a real journey involved, the physical journey in the real outside world was the outcome of long internal or hidden struggles:
Florence Nightingale sets out for Scutari with her band of nurses. Having resisted all attempts to make her conform to the expected trajectory of a wealthy, attractive and well-born young woman of her day.
Mary Ann Evans goes to Germany with the married George Henry Lewes. A woman who lacked Nightingale's advantages, being born into the lower reaches of the middle classes in the provinces, without advantages of looks or robust health, nothing but a massive intellect and determination, and had reached the point where taking this step (which many would interpret as becoming A Fallen Woman*) was the ethically Right Thing.
What we note about these instances is that the journey was not all about me me me but about Doing The Right Thing, even if it was not the right thing that their families and the society around them told them was the right thing. That there were high personal costs involved.
Dorothy Hodgkin. Alice Stewart. Emily Carr. St Teresa of Avila.
And for a literal female heroic journey: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as a journey into history and culture and the state of the world and a massive variety of phenomena at a time of impending doom.
These examples could be multiplied. Plz not 2 b telling me that a year spent racketing around the world as a experience junkie in the wake of a marriage breakdown and then writing an inspirational bestseller about it equates.
*Shout-out here to Caroline Heilbrun's perception that a fall of some kind was a common motif in the lives of women of achievement