Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc

A summary of Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness – the first alternative to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey narrative paradigm that is more appropriate for women’s life journeys.

As a student of Campbell’s, Murdock came to believe that the Hero’s Journey model did not adequately address the psycho-spiritual journey of women. She developed a model of a heroine’s journey based on her work with women in therapy.

When she showed it to Campbell in 1983, Campbell reportedly said, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

Perhaps Campbell viewed the hero’s journey as a journey toward wholeness, and in a patriarchal society in which men subordinate qualities traditionally associated with the feminine, the search for wholeness would lead to their reclaiming so-called feminine qualities and values.

However, it appears that Campbell was either uninterested in women’ reclaiming qualities that had been lost to them through enculturation or those that had never been viewed as rightfully theirs, or he was blinded by the fact that the myths that he was examining involved male figures.

At any rate, Murdock became convinced that women were involved in their own psycho-spiritual journeys and quests and developed the following model.