Three “Best Picture” Films That Subvert Conventional Journey Arcs

March 28, 20201 Comment

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

Now that over one third of the world has been ordered to stay at home unless they are working in essential services, people are watching a lot of movies. So, we thought this would be a good time to update the Heroine’s Journey Project Drama and Film page and to offer our thoughts on three recent Academy Award winning films, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, and Parasite, that challenge conventional journey arcs.

The 2016 Best Picture winner is a three-part coming-of-age drama about Chiron, an African American boy in Miami, Florida who wrestles with bullying over his sexuality and with a pervasive drug culture neighborhood.

In Part 1, a Cuban drug dealer finds Chiron, who has been dubbed “Little,” hiding from a group of bullies in a crack house. The drug dealer, Juan, takes Chiron to his own house where he and Juan’s girlfriend, Teresa, make up a spare bed for Chiron. When Juan returns Chiron to his mother the next morning, Chiron’s mother, Paula, punishes the boy for worrying her although she is an addict and often out later herself. Juan and Chiron continue to spend time with each other and Juan teaches Chiron how to swim. When Juan sees Paula smoking crack with one of his customers, he berates her for being addicted and neglecting her son. Paula lashes back at Juan for having sold her crack in the first place. She suggests she knows why Chiron is bullied by his peers, saying he walks like a girl. The next day Chiron tells Juan and Teresa that he hates his mother and asks what “faggot” means. In a surprising departure from machismo, Juan describes it as “a word used to make gay people feel bad.” He tell Chiron that it’s okay to be gay and that he shouldn’t let others bother him. Chiron asks Juan whether he’s really a drug dealer and leaves when Juan answers truthfully. In short, in Part I, the film evokes and shatters masculine stereotypes, mixing objectification (Juan vis a vis his customers) with sympathy (for Chiron), indifference (Juan’s attitude as a crack dealer) with tenderness (for Chiron and Teresa), denial and bravado (in drug dealing scenes) with perspective and sociological imagination (Juan on the beach with Chiron).

In Part II of the film, the plot seesaws between increasing cruelty and powerless good intentions. Juan has died and the teen-aged Chiron spends his time trying to escape bullying at school and with Juan’s nurturing former girlfriend, Teresa. Chiron’s mother’s crack addiction progresses and she more openly abuses Chiron, begging and threatening him for money for a fix. A classmate, Kevin, is Chiron’s only friend. One night Kevin sees Chiron at the beach, and they smoke a joint let down their defenses, talk, and then kiss. Kevin masturbates a shy Chiron. The next day the leader of the school bullies threatens Chiron, and Kevin is manipulated into punching Chiron, believing that this will save Chiron from a worse fate. When Chiron refuses to surrender to Kevin’s punching the gang beats up Kevin. The next day an enraged Chiron smashes a chair over the bully’s head. The police arrive, and Chiron is sent to a juvenile hall. Rather than meeting and succeeding at increasing difficult obstacles as would happen in a hero’s journey, Chiron is caught in downward spiral in which neither he, nor sympathetic others, can protect him.

In Part III, machismo faces off against emotional connection and reality. Chiron, now a much larger, muscular adult, goes by the nickname of “Black.” After being released from prison, he becomes a drug dealer in Atlanta. His mother, much the worse for wear, now lives in a treatment center. One day he receives a call from his old friend Kevin who invites him to visit if Chiron is ever in Miami. Chiron visits his mother and tells her he is dealing drugs. His mother expresses regret and apologizes for not loving him when he needed it most and tells him she loves him even if he does not love her back. Later Chiron drives to Miami to visit Kevin, who now works as a cook at a diner. Kevin tells him he has a child by an ex-girlfriend and although the relationship is over, he enjoys acting as a father. When Kevin asks him about his life, Chiron is silent. Chiron asks Kevin why he called and Kevin plays a song on the juke box that he says reminds him of Chiron. After Kevin serves him dinner, they return to Kevin’s apartment. Kevin tells Chiron he is happy although his life didn’t turn out as he had thought. Chiron then breaks down and admits that he hasn’t been intimate with anybody since their encounter years earlier. Kevin comforts him and they embrace. Although the could suggest a happy ending, the film rejects the easy ending. Instead, the film closes with a flashback of young Chrion standing, alone, on a beach looking at the ocean where Juan taught him to swim, and where, later, he and Kevin would kiss. The beach may signify that it is still possible for Chiron to choose again, to envision a different future, but he is standing alone. There’s no suggestion that such change would be glamorous, quick, or easy.

Shape of Water, the 2017 Best Picture winner, is a dark fantasy about a mute young female cleaner, Elisa Esposito, who works at a high security government laboratory where she falls in love with a humanoid-like amphibian creature.

Elisa, who was found abandoned by the side of a river with wounds on her neck as a child, communicates through sign language. In the laboratory she begins to visit the Amphibian Man and non-verbally communicates with him. When she learns that his keepers (an American researcher and a Soviet spy posing as a researcher) plan to harm the Amphibian Man, she persuades her next door neighbor to help her save the creature. They plan to release him back into the ocean, but Elisa must bring him to her apartment until it rains and the canal that leads to the ocean is open. Various complications and a somewhat bizarre sex scene (unless one views the film as metaphor) ensue, and viewers discover that the Amphibian Man has magical healing powers. The laboratory researchers discover the Amphibian man is missing and chase Elisa and her neighbor to the canal where they are about to release the Amphibian Man. The lab researchers shoot the Amphibian Man and Elisa, but he is able to heal himself in time to slash the shooter’s throat and jump into the canal with Elisa. Underwater, the scars on Elisa’s neck open to gills, and Elisa and the Amphibian Man embrace.

In the voice-over narration, the next door neighbor states that he believes Elisa and the Amphibian Man lived “happily ever after in love.” Because the neighbor can’t really know what happens after Elisa and the creature sink into the ocean, the story can be interpreted as a hero’s journey in which two misfits find themselves and have a “happily-ever-after” conclusion, or as Elisa dying while trying to save a “creature” that will never be accepted in the world, or as Elisa and the creature attempting to flee (successfully or unsuccessfully) a world into which they will never fit. As a fairy tale, The Shape of Water follows the conventional hero’s journey arc. To the extent that one views the film as metaphor, the story can also be interpreted as a heroine’s journey metaphor in which Elisa is pursuing wholeness whether one interprets the Amphibian Man as an aspect of Elisa (and following Maureen Murdock’s heroine’s journey arc) or as a separate outcast who supports rebirth of Elisa’s true full creature self (Victoria’s Schmidt’s heroine’s journey arc).

Parasite, the 2019 winner and first non-English language film to win Best Picture, is a dark “thriller” directed by Bong Joon-ho (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won). The movie follows the lives of a poor South Korean family of four, the Kim Family, who live in a small basement apartment and are trying to survive on low-paying temporary jobs. A friend of the twentyish- year-old son, Ki-woo, suggests that Ki-woo take over his job as an English tutor for the daughter of the rich Park family. Once he is hired as tutor, Ki-woo sees additional opportunities that could come from working for the Parks. He helps his sister, Ki-jeong, pose as an art therapist to secure a job as counselor for the Parks’ hyper-active son. Ki-jeong then gets the Parks’ chauffeur fired, and the Kims’ father takes over as the new chauffeur. They then get Parks’ housekeeper’ fired, and the mother becomes the new housekeeper. Although the Kims’ rise in fortune looks something like a Hero’s journey and they sporadically see themselves in that light, the father continually disavows any plan or vision of sustained success.

Sure enough, when the Parks go on a camping trip and the Kim family assembles in the Park’s home to revel in the luxuries of the mansion, the former housekeeper returns and reveals that her husband has been living in a secret bunker below the house built by the prior owner. The original housekeeper and her husband’s deception are eerily similar to the the Kims’ who keep their own family basement living arrangements a secret from the Parks. After bad weather disrupts the camping trip, the Parks return home early and a melee breaks out in the Parks’ house. After several more plot turns in which a member of the Parks family, the Kim family, and the original staff’s family are killed, the movie ends in the Kims’ basement apartment where the son, Ki-woo, is writing a letter to his father, vowing to earn enough money to purchase the Park’s house, set him free, and reunite the family. Although the actor who played Ki-woo has suggested in interviews that he believes this could happen,

Parasite’s director has stated that he believes Ki-woo’s dream is only a fantasy and that the story’s characters end up where they started. Each family is “parasitically” dependent on the other as they focus on getting ahead; each family loses some of its members but gets nowhere. There is no economic/class journey arc because both families end up where they started (minus a member) and no one seems the wiser for having lived their story. The beauty of Parasite, is that it takes our natural (or at least conventional) inclination to expect that the story will become a Hero’s Journey (underdog wins) or a cathartic Tragedy (greedy characters get what they deserve) and teases and then frustrates our expectations while provoking us to reckon with class inelasticity both literally and metaphorically.

Although the majority of the winning films follow the Hero’s Journey pattern, there has been a significant increase in Heroine Journey films in recent years. More recently, film makers have also gravitated toward making movies that involve ambiguous journeys (The Shape of Water) or resist concluding a journey arc (Moonlight and Parasite). We believe this trend is based on an increasing recognition of the complexity of an interconnected global world and the legitimacy of multiple perspectives. We’d love to hear from our blog readers on what films you have been watching that follow a Heroine’s Journey, include multiple journeys, or provide variations on a journey arc as a meta-statement on the content of the movie.

Social Context and the Sociological Imagination in Our Real Life Journeys

March 15, 2020March 16, 20202 Comments

Written by Savannah Jackson; ed. assistance by Nancer Ballard.

How do our journeys interact with others’ journeys and larger world forces? In this post we examine the role of social context and social awareness in a protagonist’s consciousness, decision-making, and journey—a topic that is particularly relevant to these times of a pandemic, a time in which we are acutely aware of how we affect and are affected by others, and a time when we are watching to see how other communities across the globe are handling situations which may be on our doorstep tomorrow.

In the middle-grade novel, “The Lions of Little Rock,” Kristin Levine tells the story of racial school segregation in Arkansas in the late 1950s. Twelve-year-old Marlee is quiet and shy before she meets Liz, who helps Marlee become more confident as their friendship grows. When Liz disappears from school without warning, Marlee learns that Liz was removed from the all-White school because she was actually a Black girl “passing” as White. Marlee begins to talk to people and learn more about the social context she is growing up in. Her own parents don’t agree on racial segregation, and as these tensions grow within her own home, Marlee also sees them grow within the community. Marlee comes to understand how her relationship with Liz and Liz’s experiences are not unique. She realizes that their experiences are not fully within their control—and not only because they are children. Marlee joins integration efforts, but is unable to prevent a bombing attack on the home of a Black family. She is ignored by the police, but ultimately supported by her family. She fights to defend her relationship with Liz, but ultimately cannot stop them from being torn apart when Liz’s family moves away. She better understands her privileges and her friend’s hardships. She repeatedly takes action and discovers new communities but she also sees how her actions are not able to bring about the societal changes she wants—no matter how determined and passionate she is. By the end of the book, Marlee has developed a social awareness and has a deeper understanding of the interplay between her individual actions and experiences, and the larger forces beyond her control in the world.

“The Lions of Little Rock” illustrates how unrealistic it is to force complex real-world situations into the Hero’s Journey myth structure. It is unrealistic because in the real world, individual actions are embedded within a larger environment that is not susceptible to quick change for the better. The Hero’s Journey emphasizes the supreme power of individual agency (or of a group acting as one) rather than the complexity of interconnected personal and collective struggles. In many—if not most—hero’s journey stories, the hero solves their own problems through personal effort and brings about decisive changes to their world or community. The hero does not see how they are deeply embedded within a social context but see themselves as outside of and above it. For example, in Wonder Woman, in the course of completing her own journey, Diana also ends World War II and secures victory for the Allies. But such decisive, sweeping changes are rarely, if ever, possible in the real world.

In the late 1950s, the same time period described in “The Lions of Little Rock,” American sociologist C. Wright Mills articulated what he called the “sociological imagination.” Mills believed that people would feel less helpless and more empowered if they could recognize the societal and structural causes that shape their individual personal experiences. Mills suggested that people often feel stuck in their daily lives because they do not recognize how their personal troubles connect to and are part of larger public issues.

For instance, one person may feel like their fear of getting sick is a personal trouble because they know they cannot afford treatment and because if they miss work, they will not be able to buy food for their family. However, when a significant percentage of the population worries that they cannot afford to miss work or pay for treatment, each experience is part of a larger public issue. Moreover, each person who cannot afford treatment and continues to work while sick may inadvertently infect others. Thus, one person’s health options and decisions impact and are impacted by larger economic and societal factors that are beyond their individual merit, fault, or control.

The sociological imagination is most often discussed in the context of people who are at the bottom of social structures, but it can shed light on the experiences of those in advantaged positions as well. In the simple but powerful article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, author Peggy McIntosh lists forty-seven ways in which White people benefit from their privilege as members of a dominant group in society. McIntosh identifies experiences such as: “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race,” and “I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.” Such advantages are often considered to be “the norm,” which make them invisible to the people who benefit from them. By drawing explicit attention to everyday White privileges, McIntosh encourages members of dominant groups to examine their role in a racially (or otherwise) divided society.

As Mills points out, recognizing privileges and disadvantages can enable us to see what seem like personal shortcomings in a larger context so that collective responses can be developed to alter circumstances through structural change. When this is not possible within the desired time frame, seeing your own experience, and others’ experiences, in a larger context, promotes empathy towards others and towards yourself. Such empathy enables meaningful changes to take place at a local level and may also bring about imperceptible but cumulative changes in the larger world.

The sociological imagination usually plays a key role in a Heroine’s Journey story. The heroine works to integrate their understanding of themselves (including their values and social position) with a world that is not of their making. The very idea of wrestling with “the feminine” and “the masculine” requires one to examine the intersection between one’s own life experience and the roles and expectations ingrained in the larger culture. In order to heal, the heroine must come to understand how masculinity/masculine values and femininity/feminine values are defined by the culture, and what role those attributes play in the heroine’s own self-definition.

The sociological imagination also frequently plays an important role in a Journey of Integrity. In this journey, the individual frequently must make a decision that involves weighing personal interests against his or her ethical values on taking action to benefit the larger world. See our post on Marie Jovanovich’s decision to testify before Congress during the U.S. Impeachment hearings. The weighing process requires the protagonist to consider how their personal experiences and actions relate to and are part of larger realities.

The sociological imagination can also be a part of a Healing Journey. For example, a story about opioid addiction could address the role doctors and pharmaceutical companies play in making opioids seem less addictive than they are, or in making them the first rather than last response to chronic pain. This recognition may be important to the healing person to prevent him or her from feeling that their addiction is just a personal weakness, or to help them to work through their denial, shame, or prejudices for being someone “like that.” Of course, someone struggling to overcome an opioid addition could also formulate their story without significant attention to the larger societal structures that play a role in access to opioids and treatment availability.

The Coronavirus pandemic is shining a spotlight on the ways in which our individual and systemic vulnerabilities and our responses affect individuals, organizations, governments, countries, and the world. Some journey stories do not include any attention to the role of social context. However, a sustained sense of Wholeness is not possible without attention to context because context is part of the Whole, and each part affects the other parts and the Whole. Context is not static, nor is wholeness. As our context changes around us, and as we ourselves change, so too must our understanding of wholeness grow.

Harriet Tubman’s Storied Journeys

February 13, 2020March 3, 2020Leave a comment

written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson

Araminta “Minty” Ross, born into slavery in 1820, flees her plantation in Dorchester, Maryland and somehow manages to make her way 100 miles on foot to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she takes the free name that we know her by today—Harriet Tubman.

Tubman’s life as an agent for the Underground Railroad is the subject of the Academy Award nominated movie, Harriet, and she also has a key role in Ta -Nehisi Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, which tells the story of a young man with a similar background and talent who also becomes an agent for the Underground Railroad. harrietdirector

Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Cynthia Erivo, tells Tubman’s life story as a fairly classic Hero’s Journey. As a girl and young woman, Minty Ross watches several of her sisters being sold to far away slave owners and being taken from her and the rest of her family. She marries a free African American, John Tubman, and obtains legal documents that confirm that her mother’s previous owner granted her children freedom—only to have her current plantation owner rip up the documents. Cynthia Eviro as Harriet Tubman Unable to bear a lifetime of enslavement, she flees north on foot (leaving her husband behind because she does not want to endanger his free status) and makes it to Philadelphia, a “free” state. Tubman joins the Underground Railroad and repeatedly risks her life to bring hundreds of black slaves to freedom even after her former owner places a large bounty on her head. Her ability to guide so many runaway slaves to freedom earns her the nickname, “Moses.” How does an actual person, rather than a mythical god or cartoon character pull this off? harriet-1563893309

Although the movie focuses almost exclusively on Tubman’s near magical successes, it provides a few hints on how a real person could become Harriet Tubman. When Tubman returns to Maryland after becoming a free woman, she discovers that her husband had presumed her dead and is now wed to another woman who is pregnant with his child. Tubman leaves him to his new family and now, single and childless, can take life-threatening risks without being psychologically torn apart by conflicting maternal loyalties and obligations. From the time that she gives up on her husband and marriage, Tubman is portrayed as being more devoted to freeing slaves than to personal relationships.

Tubman is also depicted as having extraordinarily strong faith and intuition that manifests as spiritual visions and premonitions that forewarn her of imminent danger. Although the exact nature and origin of her visions is not explained (she is religious and also had a severe head injury as an adolescent), they seem to have given Tubman a combination of intuition and decisiveness that led others to trust her in the face of formidable odds. In the movie, her former master’s mother declares that she wants Harriet caught so she can be burned alive at the stake, “like Joan of Arc”—another well-known vision-driven crusader.

A final element that may explain Tubman’s intense focus is suggested in a short scene in which Tubman is shown in a stately Philadelphia home, crying while working as a domestic alongside another maid who looks at her quizzically. It’s not hard to imagine that, having risked her life multiple times and survived a perilous solo escape to Pennsylvania, Tubman would not be satisfied with a “free” life of making beds for a wealthy white family. But what can an illiterate runaway slave without any family do? Tubman decides to become a freedom fighter.

At the end of the movie we are told that Tubman went on to become a spy for the Union Army and the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. In her later years, she worked for women’s suffrage and started a rest home for former slaves. She lived to be ninety-one.

Although the movie follows a Hero’s Journey narrative arc, I suspect that Tubman’s lived experience was at least as much a heroine’s journey as hero’s journey. Her headaches, trances and visions were likely the result of the severe head injury she suffered when a slave owner threw a metal weight at another slave and hit her by mistake. She suffered from epileptic-like seizures and hypersomnia—the inability to maintain normal consciousness during waking hours—for most of her adult life. Perhaps the adrenaline produced by being in terrific danger played a role in helping her feel alive and engaged after her head injury.

Tubman was periodically recognized for her contributions to the Underground Railroad and the Civil War as a spy, nurse, scout, strategic advisor, and troop leader. However, she never received any pay for her work in the war and was denied veteran’s compensation for many years. After being heralded by newspapers for her work in the war, she was accosted by a train conductor while riding back to New York, where her parents lived, and was instructed to move to the less desirable smoking car. She produced government papers entitling her to ride in the car she was in and refused to move, whereupon the conductor enlisted several other passengers to help him force her to move, breaking her arm in the process. Most of her life, Tubman was penniless or nearly so, and what money she had was often spent providing food to the boarders who had even less than she did.

The movie, Harriet, depicts many of the amazing feats this determined woman accomplished. I look forward to another telling that shows the complexity of strategies Tubman used to persevere through her many challenges, hard times, tough decisions, physical and emotional stresses, simple pleasures, and heartbreaks. I would welcome another story that depicts the myriad of ways Harriet Tubman helped herself and others who once were counted as only 3/5 people to believe and experience themselves as whole.

In Ta-Neshi Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, protagonist Hiram Walker is portrayed as a male soul-kin to Harriet Tubman. Both were born slaves and both have similar talents for feats of miraculous transportation. In the magical realism of the novel, this talent is referred to as “conduction”—the ability to move people “magically” from one place to another based on the strength of the conductor’s desire and memory. Coates portrays Tubman as a mythical figure who appears and disappears and reappears at important moments. Hiram Walker, her psychic kin, is much more humanized and his story allows Coates to explore the psychological implications of post-freedom identity and purpose. Walker, too, becomes a daring agent for the Underground Railroad and much of the book leans toward a hero’s journey until he must confront how to integrate his family and community ties into his quest to fight slavery and re-connect families separated by it. I believe The Water Dancer is ultimately more of a heroine’s journey than a hero’s journey.

And, of course, the struggle continues.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Water Dancer

Where the Story Begins

December 2, 20191 Comment

Written by Savannah Jackson; ed. assistance by Nancer Ballard.

In our last blog, we discussed the role of the ending of a journey story. In this post, we’ll show that where and how a journey story begins can be equally important.

A journey story does not always start at the beginning of the journey. Sometimes, as in Barbara Leckie’s short story, “Kicking the Stone,” the beginning of the journey is revealed later in the story through flashbacks or character narration.

The opening of a story must hook the reader, so many journey stories begin with a moment of conflict or danger. In a hero’s journey story, the first stage occurs in the “ordinary world,” yet the story often open right at the precipice of the call to the adventure. This is particularly true when the “ordinary world” is routine for the character but new and intriguing to the reader. For example, in The Hobbit, the reader or viewer has barely learned what hobbits are when Gandalf arrives to invite Bilbo on an adventure. In the opening of a hero’s journey, the hero is often portrayed as being like everyone else at the beginning of the story—a quiet hobbit smoking a pipe outside his home as he has done many an afternoon.

But there are almost immediately hints that something greater and unusual (and usually dangerous) is about to happen. The reader quickly understands that the hero will not remain ordinary for long.

In a heroine’s journey, the story may begin with the betrayal (which hooks the reader). Alternatively, the heroine may be presented in a world they are expected to belong in, but the heroine is internally or externally at odds with this world. At the opening of the story the heroine may be at the point of trying new life strategies, and/or nearly ready to leave where they are. For example, the first act of the play, I Want to Go to Jail, opens with the main characters deciding to try a new picketing tactic because they are not satisfied with the results they have achieved thus far in their attempts to convince the country to grant women the right to vote. The fight for female suffrage in America did not begin where the play opens, but playwrights Pam Swing and Elizabeth Dabanka begin the journey of the play at a time when the suffragists are ready to separate from the more feminine tactics they have been using to try to win the vote.

Stories do not have a single “objective” place or moment where they must begin or end. We live in an interconnected world where actions lead to and impact multiple other actions, where every experience and event has multiple causes and consequences extending through time in different directions, involving ramifications we cannot fully see or appreciate. A storyteller’s task is not to tell the definitive story of a person or event, but a story that may increase the listener’s understanding or appreciation of some aspect of another person and/or of the world. The place where the storyteller chooses to begin the story shapes our understanding of the meaning of the narrative.

In the recently re-issued collection of essays on social movements, Hope in the Dark, by writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit, the author challenges us to re-envision where stories—even the stories of our own lives—begin. As the informal storytellers of our own world, we tend to see big, hard-to-miss, events such as the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, or the 2008 economic crash, as concrete moments that “changed everything” and started a new story or era. In Hope in the Dark, Solnit asks us to consider whether the “new era” really began with an explosion, or whether the beginning of this new way of life actually started quietly at an earlier time.

As informal storytellers, we live our history as we make it. We are constantly narrating our lives and our perception of the world to ourselves and those around us. Because of this, we tend to view the “end” or outcome of a story as the situation in which we currently find ourselves. Our current actions will shape the lives of those who come after us, but we can’t clearly look back from the future–we only know how the story “ends” now. We describe our current situation as the result of what has come before. Thus, we shape our narratives by look “backwards” towards “the beginning” and then telling it forward to the present moment.

Our understanding of ourselves and our reality changes if we simply consider that the story might begin somewhere other than where we assumes it does. Too often, history is written by and for the victors to glorify and validate their actions. A dominant person or group will start the story in a place that diminishes the experiences and achievements of “outsiders.” Dominant groups and people structure their narrative, consciously or unconsciously, to reaffirm their power.

Solnit suggests that if you feel trapped by lack of progress or by failure in the present moment, you should look back further for the “beginning” of the story. “[I]ncremental changes have happened quietly, and many people don’t know they have begun, let alone exploded.” “The powerful would like you to believe [their story] is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable,” writes Solnit.

“[A]nd lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view…. For a time, people liked to announce that feminism had failed, as though the project of overturning millennia of social arrangements should achieve its final victories in a few decades, or as though it had stopped. Feminism is just starting, and its manifestations matter in rural Himalayan villages, not just first world cities.”

What story might you understand differently by beginning in a new place?

Where the Story Ends

November 19, 2019February 13, 20203 Comments

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

One of the questions we are most frequently asked by our readers and workshop participants is “How do you know where a story ends?”

Where to end a story is one of the most important decisions a storyteller makes. A story ends when a central character finds what they are looking for—even if it wasn’t what they thought they set out to find—or finds what they didn’t know they were looking for.

Where and how a teller ends (and begins) a story frequently determines whether the story is a hero’s journey, heroine’s journey, or other journey story. The ending can be even more important than the nature of the events being described. For example, if you tell the story of Joan of Arc and end with her leading the French to an unlikely victory over the English at Orleans, the story would likely be a hero’s journey. If the story then continues through her capture and trial for witchcraft—depending on the perspective—it could be a hero’s journey (Joan as martyr) or a heroine’s journey (Joan seeking understanding and serenity in the face of a rigged trial). If the storyteller then reflects on Joan’s life and meaning from the present day, the story could be a hero’s journey characterizing Joan as an inspiring icon to generations of women and the French following her death. It could also be a heroine’s journey that reflects on recent theories regarding Joan’s mental health, or on the differences in how passionate male and female leaders are treated. Or it could be a Journey of Integrity, in which the narrator reflects on Joan’s decision-making process through the lens of victory, defeat, and the years since her death.

The Hero’s Journey ends when the hero finds success or the ultimate boon. He has achieved his goal, returns to his society, and/or is recognized by his peers as having achieved success. The hero is a master of two worlds—the inner world which makes him a good leader/hero and the outer world which allows him to be a leader or proclaims him a hero.

The hero’s journey also ends with the implication that the hero’s success won’t be snatched away any time soon. It’s a kind of happily-ever after ending. If a sequel is anticipated, perhaps the hero’s success will lead to other complications that provide the chance for a new hero’s journey, but the success won’t be undone—at least not for that hero. If the success is undone, the former hero tends to become a supporting character (no longer the main character). They may become a wise elder or a mentor who urges the hero of the next generation to reclaim, recapture, or make additional progress on a larger problem that wasn’t anticipated when the first success was achieved.

In a hero’s journey, there is always the sense that success is right around the corner. Their journey is not envisioned as a long, imperfect struggle that will continue forever. The hero’s agency—his or her ability to bring about change—is central to the hero’s journey arc, so the journey usually ends shortly after the hero accomplishes their final feat and/or their victory/ability is hailed by others.

In a heroine’s journey, the story ends when the heroine recognizes and experiences wholeness. Life includes both success and failure, vulnerability and ability, self and others, and a larger world. The heroine’s self is not necessarily dominant or foregrounded, even over long periods of time. The heroine’s final goal is not to defeat or dismiss vulnerability, or failure, or sadness, or pain, or self, or others. Their goal is to integrate and value all these as necessary and valuable aspects of the human experience. It is rare that this experience of wholeness is solely an internal realization; a non-dual world is also manifested in the events of the story. It may be tempting to try to view wholeness as a resolution to a story in which the unpleasant aspects of life are part of the past but not the present, or new understanding will eliminate future suffering—but that is a hero’s journey.

Several of our readers have wondered if the heroine’s journey is more depressing than a hero’s journey. Many heroine journey stories have heartwarming or uplifting endings. For example, in the play about the women’s suffrage movement, I Want to Go to Jail, the story ends with a celebratory moment after a group political action. However, the main characters and the audience (which has the benefit of hindsight) understand that more action will be required before women are able to vote.

Another example of a heroine’s journey that ends on a positive note is the 2018 movie, The Green Book, which tells the story of an African American pianist traveling through the American south in the early 1960’s with an Italian-American bouncer who serves as his bodyguard. The story has a heartwarming ending when the jazz pianist drives through the night so that the bodyguard can get home for Christmas. The jazz pianist is then is welcomed into their home, but it remains clear that the pervasive racism that has followed the pianist throughout his tour has been neither “solved” nor “conquered.” The odd-couple main characters have grown personally and relationally within the racist societal backdrop. The heroine’s journey doesn’t end with a sense of a “once-and-for-all” victory.

The end of the Healing Journey revolves around forgiving the self and sometimes others for not being able to control even one thing that you feel you most need to control. In this journey, the protagonist’s rage against the wound is at the center of the story. This may also appear as the apparent unfairness of an injury/illness, or the protagonist feeling overwhelmed by the cards they have been dealt. The protagonist often tries at first to solve their dilemma with a hero’s journey approach. For example, she might imagine that if she fights her illness hard enough, she will be healed, or that if she just accepts her illness instead, the conflict within will be resolved and she will get better. The hero’s journey promises that you can get well. The heroine’s journey involves finding compassion for one’s self and others whether or not you recover. The Healing Journey usually involves a point of absolute break-down, where the injured one wants to quit, and possibly die. Then there is a moment or experience of beauty that surprises them, and allows for a shift in perspective, a shaft of light to enter their consciousness. Sometimes they give up trying to control, sometimes they give up magical thinking, sometimes they give up, giving up—the action can vary. What is important is that the protagonist forgives him/herself and an imperfect world.

A Journey of Integrity involves both the protagonist action and awareness (culminating in the moment of integrity), and also the witness/viewers’ awareness of and reflection on the meaning of the protagonist’s action. These stories may end with the protagonist returning to ordinary action in the ordinary world, but they also often jump forward in time or expand geographically so that the narrator or audience can see and comment upon the protagonist’s action within a larger context.

Readers and listeners always evaluate the meaning of a story through the lens of its ending. No story has a single, objective endpoint. As storytellers, we shape the readers’ experiences and the meaning of a story through the endings that we choose.

In our next post we will discuss how the storyteller’s choice in where to begin a story affects the journey.

The Post-Mythic Journey of Integrity

November 14, 2019February 13, 20201 Comment

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

Today we are going to describe a new narrative arc that focuses on non-mythic human experience and the embodiment of human possibility. The Journey of Integrity differs from the mythic Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey in several important ways. First, the limits on a human being’s ability to control or impact the world is central to the journey rather than being an obstacle to overcome. The Journey of Integrity draws its power from the protagonist being an ordinary person, not an unusually talented hero or superhuman. Second, the protagonist in a Journey of Integrity recognizes that the world is a complex non-linear system that may continue to ramify geographically and in time beyond the story. Moreover, the success of the journey is not defined by changes in the external world. Third, the journey often comes as an interruption to the protagonist’s goals and life journey rather than as a call to adventure or invitation for personal transformation. The journey tracks a deepening of conviction rather than the protagonist’s transformation. Also, witnesses or readers play an integral role in the story which affirms the ability of ordinary people to speak out or act in a way that elevates our belief in human possibility.

Integrity Journey by Nancer Ballard — A post-mythic journey for ordinary people affirming the best of humanity.

Stage One: Protagonist sets out on their own journey, goal or path.

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist, and their dreams and goals are identified. Unlike the hero’s journey, and often the heroine’s journey, the integrity-driven story usually doesn’t start by focusing on the journey that ultimately defines the story. The moment that lies at the center of the Journey of Integrity requires a veering away from pursuing what the protagonist thought was her goal.

Stage Two: A concerning situation presents itself as a background event.

The protagonist learns about a concerning situation. The situation is often the sort of abstract concern we hear of half a dozen times a day—an act of corruption, a fire set in another county, someone has been accused of a crime, a group of people are being dismissed or ignored, a medical crisis has arisen in another country, etc. The protagonist is following their own journey and the situation may have nothing directly to do with the protagonist’s goals or those close to the protagonist. Stage Two emphasizes a real potential concern, the ordinariness of real concerns, and our tendency to screen out concerns that have no immediate effect on us.

Stage Three: Protagonist continues on their path as they observe or become increasingly aware of the unfolding of a concerning situation.

The protagonist experiences growing awareness of the unfolding of the concerning situation. Consciously or unconsciously, the protagonist begins to track developments. The protagonist may hope that they have overestimated the seriousness of the situation, or that the situation will be resolved through the natural course of events, or that someone else who is closer to the situation, or whose job is to respond to such situations, will take action.

Stage Four: The Protagonist grows more concerned about the unfolding situation.

As previously described, the unfolding situation often presents an interruption to the protagonist’s intended journey, goals, or plans rather than a manifestation of them. Stage Four addresses the central conflict of whether the protagonist will choose to interrupt (and potentially derail) their own plans and goals in order to respond to the concerning situation. The protagonist weighs difficult (e.g. worthy, but competing) feelings, priorities, values, and actions. This stage focuses on the problem of weighing alternative positive values rather than eschewing negative temptations or meeting the increasingly difficult tests of skill.

Stage Five: The concerning situation isn’t resolving. Protagonist is convinced someone needs to take action.

In Stage Five of the Journey of Integrity, “need,” “agency,” and “urgency” converge. The concerning situation may be deteriorating. Or time may be running out to fix the problem before it causes far-reaching or irreparable consequences. Or the protagonist may realize that the concerning situation is only the tip of the iceberg. The protagonist feels the need for action but may believe that there are others in a better position to make change or avert disaster. The protagonist is likely to tell a confidante that they feel someone needs to take action or speak out. They may try to gather support for group action, hoping that they can provide support and honor their prior commitments by not taking a lead role. Others may either agree that action needs to be taken or contend that action is useless. In Stage Five, the protagonist often begins to differentiate themself from others either by the intensity of their convictions or because they start to daydream or actively plan how action might proceed. Although the protagonist hasn’t yet committed to action, their mind turns over possibilities and strategies.

Stage Six: Others may try to dissuade protagonist from taking action.

The protagonist actively mulls over the “what ifs” of taking action and focuses on how to take action or speak out rather than whether to do so. Others may be alarmed at this change of focus and try to dissuade the protagonist from taking action. They warn that action could lead to adverse personal consequences (such as being dismissed, denigrated, fired, or being denied a long-sought opportunity). Action could also derail the protagonist from achieving their own goals by taking up too much time or attention, causing them to miss opportunities, or overtaxing them in an area unrelated to their personal goals. Moreover, taking action could be useless and a waste of time, or lead to disappointment and cynicism. Those trying to dissuade the protagonist may be justifying their own inaction, or they may have seen similar situations and realize that adverse consequences are real, and that the protagonist will not avoid them by acting out of good purpose.

Colleagues, friends, and/or family offer logic or reason to try to dissuade the protagonist from taking action. However, because the protagonist is often deeply empathic or emotionally attuned to those affected by the unfolding situation, logic is not enough to dissuade the protagonist. There may be differences in scale between the consequences to the protagonist and the consequences of not taking action. (What is losing a job compared to a child losing their parent?) On the other hand, the protagonist is not naive. They understand that they may suffer as a consequence of taking action and that the outcome is beyond their control and perhaps beyond the ability of anyone’s control. Stage Six of the Journey of Integrity differs from many mythic/epic journeys in that the protagonist consciously grapples with how to act given the limits of human control, time beyond the moment of reckoning, and the nonlinear complexity of cause and effect.

Stage Seven: The Protagonist decides they must act or speak out regardless of the consequences.

The Journey of Integrity protagonist’s decision to act arises from a deep conviction that the action must be taken, and must be taken now, or at a particular time regardless of the personal consequences. Stage Seven of the Journey of Integrity is akin to the existentialist moment. In existentialism, authentic existence means one has to envision or “create oneself” and act in accordance with this self rather than in accordance with one’s role, or societal demands, or personal history. In the Integrity Journey, the protagonist may begin to mentally and/or physically prepare for possible adverse reactions or ramifications of their decision on their own life or journey. They may confirm that they do not want to act, but realize that they have the ability to act in this time and in this place, and others cannot, or will not. They often feel like they have no choice, because not acting would be a betrayal of who they are what they stand for or how they want to live their life.

Like Søren Kierkegaard, who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, the Journey of Integrity protagonist recognizes, at least implicitly, that it is up to the individual—not society, or religion, or the state—to give meaning to life and to live authentically. The protagonist in a Journey of Integrity, like existentialist writers such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, focus on the power of an individual to act out of conscience (rather than for specific outcomes) and are acutely aware of their own and others’ vulnerability and the randomness of individual fates.

Stage Eight: Action is taken. In the moment that action is taken, the protagonist’s self and values are one.

At the moment of action, the protagonist’s values, beliefs, knowledge, experience, hesitancies, trauma, and abilities come together in the decision to act and also fuel the action. The protagonist sees that the world has more moving pieces, forces, and people than any one person, including the most powerful of people, have the ability to control. A mythic hero’s limitations may serve to make the hero appear humble or increase plot suspense, but viewers and readers are never really afraid that the hero won’t succeed. However, in a Journey of Integrity, the protagonist is profoundly aware of their and others’ human limitations and accepts those limits. In speaking out or acting, the protagonist simultaneously affirms who she or he is, and the kind of world that they want to live in. Because the protagonist has chosen to act from non-logical, non-strategic values regardless of outcome and others’ reactions, the protagonist often experiences a moment of profound freedom or power that may feel ironic or surprising in the context of taking significant personal risk in a high stakes situation they cannot control.

Stage Nine: The chips fall where they may. The result is important to the story but is not the measure of the protagonist’s worth.

The protagonist’s original journey may be helped or thwarted by their action of integrity. The protagonist’s action may have important, slight or no apparent consequences in the external world. If the teller wants the story to be a hero’s journey, then the protagonist will be rewarded for their bravery even if that outcome is somewhat unrealistic, or the focus of the story will shift to the positive results achieved by the action. Unlike a hero’s journey story, real world results are important in a Journey of Integrity story, but they are not viewed as a measure of the protagonist’s worth or the value of having taken action. In a Heroine’s Journey, the heroine’s action is likely to bring about an experience of community within a larger world. In the Journey of Integrity, the protagonist’s action is implicitly for the benefit of a larger community, but the protagonist may or may not experience a greater sense of community as a result of taking action.

Stage Ten: The protagonist continues life in the ordinary world. The world may or may not be changed.

The protagonist is changed as a result of their action, but this change is a deepening awareness and affirmation of who they are, rather than being transformed into a new person. Once the moment of integrity is over, the protagonist returns to their ordinary world as an ordinary person (albeit a person who, for a moment, has acted in a remarkable way). Sometimes the protagonist is hampered in returning to their ordinary life by those who would want to make the protagonist into a hero or use the event for their own purposes. The protagonist understands that the power of their action lies in it being available to an ordinary human being rather than associated with a god-like being. They may be declared a hero or heroine or may become a leader, at least momentarily, but the heroic status is likely to be short-lived, and it is not the protagonist’s destination. In a Journey of Integrity, the protagonist’s leadership is based on inspiration rather than extraordinary talent, intellect, or power over others. Such inspiration may flare for a moment, but its subliminal impacts can linger for years.

Stage 11—Those who witness the moment of integrity reflect on the nature of the world (or their new understanding of it) in light of others’ reactions to the action. Regardless of the world’s response, the protagonist’s act stands apart from the reaction as an act that affirms humanity’s capacity for good.

A story of integrity often ends with a depiction or narration on the ramifications of the protagonist’s action in the world. The ramifications can be major or minuscule. Whether the act was successful in fulfilling its mission and how long the change lasts will affect witness’ view of the goodness or fairness or cruelty of life, but the protagonist’s act cannot be denigrated by other characters’ reactions. The response to the protagonist’s action can give witnesses a sense of hope, confirm cynicism, bring relief, or evoke other feelings about the witness’s place in the world or view of humanity. However, regardless of the world’s response, the protagonist’s act stands apart from a cruel, or receptive, or crazy, or indifferent world. Their action affirms the possibility of good people, good works, or good results and demonstrates the power of the individual to represent the best of humanity for its own sake.

Unlike mythic tales, the witness never forgets that the protagonist is a human being, who–like the witness, viewer, or reader– suffers and tires, and can feel humiliated or elated, relieved or betrayed. Indeed, it is the protagonist’s human-ness that gives the Journey of Integrity story meaning. In the moment of speaking out or taking action, a palpably human protagonist enacts our best values and by doing so, elevates the reader or witness’s sense of positive possibility for humanity.

A Fourth Journey: The Journey of Integrity

October 17, 2019February 13, 20201 Comment

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

The word “journey” comes from the French journee meaning “day’s work or a day’s travel.” Thus, a journey doesn’t have to encompass years, or a whole life, or travel, or adventure beyond one’s everyday environment. Today I’m going to articulate what I have come to see as another sort of journey that I call the “The Journey of Integrity.” This journey often takes place in a relatively short span of time although its ramifications can be much broader.

The word “integrity” comes from the Latin root meaning “whole,” which is an important goal within the heroine’s journey. “Integrity” is, of course, also related to the word “integrated” which is an important element of all journeys. In Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey addresses the integration of masculine and feminine. The Healing Journey involves the integration of body, mind, and heart. In the Hero’s Journey, mastery of integrated inner and outer worlds is the penultimate stage. Thus, an integrity journey can be a complete journey by itself, or can play a critical role in a larger heroine’s, hero’s or healing journey.

The key element of the Journey of Integrity is that the protagonist makes a deliberate, considered, decision to speak out or take action based on the needs or plight of others. This decision is made with the knowledge that it may up-end the goals they are currently pursuing, and/or may have irreparable adverse personal impacts that are beyond the protagonist’s control.

Sometimes the moment in which the action of integrity is taken changes another person’s life or history in an obvious way (for example, a friend’s decision to donate one of his kidneys to another). Sometimes the action is an unheralded moment that comes to have important future ramifications. Sometimes, the action has no apparent effect beyond the protagonist’s experience.

In the United States, we have been watching President Trump and his administration prohibit members and former members of the government from testifying before Congress for fear that their testimony will reflect badly on the President’s actions or reveal discrepancies between the official version of events and actual knowledge of events.

On October 11, 2019, Marie L. Yovanovitch, former Ambassador to Ukraine and current American Foreign Service Officer, showed us a striking example of a Journey of Integrity. Ms. Yovanovitch chose to comply with a subpoena to appear before Congress, and to disregard the White Houses’ directive. She appeared to testify about her experience as former Ambassador to Ukraine and her work on behalf of the United States in supporting Ukraine as an independent democratic country situated between Russia and western NATO countries, which has been invaded by Russia and is fighting internal corruption.

As part of her decision to testify, Ms. Yovanovitch’s issued a public, non-classified statement citing her experience as a foreign service officer during the five previous administrations, and under the current administration. You can read Ms. Yovanovitch’s statement here.

Marie Yovanovitch did not set out to change voters’ minds about the current political situation in America. Although her ambassadorship in Ukraine was terminated, she is still employed by the government as a foreign service officer. Her decision to testify posed personal and career risks, especially since she was the first government employee to testify after the Trump administration decided not to cooperate with Congress on anything related to the impeachment hearings.

Marie Yovanovitch speaking at Ukraine Invstor Conference

On the day Ms. Yovanovitch testified, her name was the leading hashtag on Twitter. Her appearance was the subject of much discussion by radio, newspaper, television, and social media commentators. Less than a week later, most of those commentators have now moved on to discussing other superseding events. It seems likely that Ms. Yovanovitch’s courage may inspire others to testify, or share what they know as citizens or whistle blowers. Whether her decision to testify and the candor of her opening statement, combined with others’ actions, will help reinvigorate the country’s commitment to aligning our domestic and foreign actions with our ideals has yet to be seen. But her decision to respectfully speak her truth in these times is a testament to what we, fallible humans, are capable of.

The integrity-driven protagonist is acutely aware of the limits of their power, and the limits on their ability to change the world through deliberate personal effort. The world contains more moving pieces, forces, and people than any person has the ability to control. The mythic hero often verbalizes his or her limitations in order to appear humble, or the storyteller emphasizes these potential limitations in order to increase narrative suspense. By contrast, the protagonist in an integrity driven journey is profoundly aware of their and others’ human limitations and accepts those limits.

In an upcoming post, we will more formally set out the stages of the Journey of Integrity. Meanwhile, we would love to hear your experiences with integrity journeys—either your own, or the story of someone you know, or the story of someone whose integrity has inspired you as a human being.

“Gloria: A Life”: “Lead with love, low ego, high impact, and move at the speed of trust”

June 10, 2019June 10, 2019Leave a comment

By guest blogger Maureen Murdock; editorial review by Nancer Ballard and Savannah Jackson.

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Last year my partner, Bill and I went to a matinee performance of “Gloria: A Life, ” Emily Mann’s play about Gloria Steinem. The setting at the Daryl Roth Theater in lower Manhattan was arranged as if we were in a consciousness-raising group. The stage area was in the middle, carpeted with Persian rugs like Ms. Steinem’s own apartment. We, the audience, sat around the stage in bleacher-style rows covered with multi-colored pillows. Six aisles allowed for non-Gloria characters to come and go as scenes changed. Images of Gloria’s life were projected above the stadium seating on two opposite walls. Christine Lahti, looking exactly like the feminist trailblazer in black bell-bottoms and tinted aviator glasses played Gloria.

The first act traced Gloria’s life from small town girl taking care of her mentally ill mother in Dayton, Ohio through her rise to become an icon of the Second Wave of Feminism. What was poignant is that Gloria became a journalist to get away from her mother and found out years later that her mother had been a newspaper journalist herself before Gloria was born. Her mother was then abandoned by her husband and became terminally depressed. Gloria realized, like so many of us who have had depressed mothers, that she ended up living her mother’s “unlived life.”

Film clips of Gloria from her time undercover as a Playboy bunny, to her early reporting on the women’s movement, to her involvement in the creation of Ms. Magazine (with many others in her living room), to images of her addressing the crowd at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington D. C. appeared on the walls around us as the play evolved. Other actors played many other feminist leaders such as Florynce Kennedy and Wilma Mankiller, black and Native American leaders often left out of standard histories.

When her husband of three years died of cancer, Gloria turned to Wilma Mankiller. Wilma told Gloria a story about her own near death experience in her forties which included such a feeling of ecstasy that she didn’t want to return to the living when given the choice. However, she did make the decision to live and assured Gloria that her husband probably was also gifted with an ecstatic release from his suffering in death. The whole idea of death being an ecstatic experience gave me hope.

Gloria had her own #MeToo moment before the movement was named. A New York Times editor suggested to Steinem that they “discuss her work in a hotel room this afternoon”; and in 1963, when she was sitting in a cab ride in between Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, Talese said, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

Perhaps the most important part of Gloria’s coming of age was finding her voice by listening to others in consciousness-raising groups and speaking with other women. It surprised me to learn that she had a fear of public speaking and so she always invited another feminist like Florynce Kennedy or Bella Abzug with her colorful hats to share the stage with her. “Social justice movements start with people sitting in a circle,” she says in the play and that’s exactly what the second act consisted of. At the end, there was a 20-minute talking circle in which we, the audience, were invited to share our own responses to what we had seen in the play or what we had lived. The guidelines were principles enunciated by Black Lives Matter projected on the walls in big letters: “Lead with love, low ego, high impact, move at the speed of trust.”

The lights came up and the first person to raise her hand for a microphone was a 16-year old girl. I was pleased to see such a young woman present because most of the audience—almost all women and the few men—looked like survivors of the nineteen sixties. She said, “ I’m 16 and I grew up with a mother who always told me I could be anything I want to be. I appreciate the sacrifices that Gloria made for all of us and I’m really grateful to my mother for giving me the confidence that I can be anything I want to be.” Impressed by how articulate she was, we all clapped as Christine Lahti said, “There is the next Gloria Steinem!”

An older woman, sitting high up in the bleachers said, “I want to tell you what it was like in the ‘60s. My husband was a student at Yale and I worked in the library to support us. There was a man who worked with me in the library and I found out that he was making more money than me. I talked to some of the other women who worked there and we went to our boss and asked for a raise. Our supervisor said, “Well, he’s a man. Someday he will have to support a family!” The woman replied, “Well, I am supporting a family. My husband is a student and I work to support us both.” (I nodded, thinking back to how I worked on a psych ward while my first husband was in law school). Having received no satisfaction from her supervisor, she went above him to one of the Deans, who eventually gave her a raise. She interrupted our applause by saying, “Wait! There’s a happy ending to that story. I got promoted and now that man works for me!” We all roared with approval.

There were a couple of men who raised their hands to speak. One man, who appeared to be in his early ‘50s, said, “I work for a company whose name is not important. I wanted to give a woman who works with me a 20% raise. I was told by the HR department (managed by a woman) that I could only give her a 10% raise. So I said, ‘Oh, I see. She’s a woman. We always pay a woman less.’ We all groaned. As he gave up the mic, he said, “She got the 20% raise. It works every time.” We hooted and hollered!

Another man, with thin graying hair, on the other side of the theater, took the mic and slowly said, “I have been crying throughout this entire performance. It touched me deeply.” We all got quiet and the woman sitting next to him put her arm around him. He continued through his tears. “I have been thinking about how oppressed I have felt throughout my entire life.” His comment surprised me.

When he spoke the word “oppressed,” I thought he was going to admit to situations in which he had oppressed women and apologize. Or that in seeing the play and identifying with women, it began to dawn on him that he had been oppressed during his life as well. But he didn’t explain how he felt oppressed and I began to feel cynical. This show was about how women have struggled against inequality and I felt that he was co-opting Gloria’s story for himself. He continued, “I’m 72 years old and I was a feminist before any other man was a feminist.” The audience sighed. I wanted to scream. How dare he claim that for himself.

Here was a man pulling on our heartstrings by comparing what he saw as his own oppression to the oppression of women we had just witnessed on stage. The principle of Low Ego had been abandoned: instead the man was inducing the audience into expressing sympathy and taking care of him. Christine Lahti could have explained that the play wasn’t about male oppression, or called attention to the message on the wall. She didn’t do either, at least not on this afternoon. Instead, she fell into the trap of equating men’s and women’s circumstances by saying–with great warmth–“Thank you so much for your courage and your tears.”

He successfully hijacked the moment. But I am sure I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that the self-proclaimed first male feminist hadn’t grasped the concept of low ego. And a moment is not the journey. As Gloria—A Life, Gloria Steinem herself, and many of the other speakers that day showed us, when you encounter high egos blocking the way, it’s a call to step around them–and keep moving.

Maureen Murdock, Ph.D. teaches memoir writing at UCLA and in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s memoir certificate program, “Writing Down the Soul.” She is the author of the best selling book The Heroine’s Journey, which delineates the feminine psycho-spiritual journey, as well as four other books: Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Spinning Inward; The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, and Blinded by Hope: My Journey through My Son’s Bipolar Illness and Addiction published under a pseudonym.

You can find her blog on her website: www.maureenmurdock.com

Facing the Witch: The Aletis Heroine’s Journey

May 2, 2019November 1, 2019Leave a comment

by guest blogger, Jody Gentian Bower; editorial review by Nancer Ballard and Savannah Jackson. Jody Gentian Bower, PhD., is a cultural mythologist and the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story.

In the 1980s, I belonged to a women’s book club. Over time I noticed that most of the novels we read featuring a female protagonist had a similar plot. Then I realized that many of the great novels by women, the established classics, followed the same plot. I found a similar plot in the biographies of many noted women.

The idea that women authors* have been telling a consistent story for centuries wouldn’t leave me alone. Yet I couldn’t find any discussion of this plot by scholars of literature. The Heroine’s Journey by therapist Maureen Murdock, Women Who Run with the Wolves by folklorist Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and Jean Benedict Raffa’s memoir The Bridge to Wholeness touched on some of the motifs I’d seen (and opened my eyes to a few I’d missed), but their approaches were not quite what I was looking for. My fascination with the literary plot itself eventually led to Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story.

I came to call this plot the Aletis story—aletis being an ancient Greek word that means “wandering heroine.” Her story is not defined by an external quest like the Hero’s Journey plot. Instead, her journey takes her farther and farther away from home until at last she finds the place—both within and without—where she is able to create the life that she has always longed for. Unlike the hero, who proves himself a man by a heroic act that enforces and preserves the idealized vision of the status quo of the community, the Aletis finds her inner worth and bases her life on what she values. She doesn’t ask anyone else to change, but her example often causes her community to shift out of old ways that no longer work.

I call her the wandering heroine because she keeps moving, keeps on leaving situations where she cannot be herself. For example, Jane Eyre longs for a life lived fully, with passion. She chooses to leave her adoptive, abusive home to go to school; chooses to leave Lowood School and her teaching job to become a governess for strangers; chooses to leave Mr. Rochester when he asks her to compromise her integrity; and chooses to leave the safe harbor she’s found with her cousins when St. John tries to force her into a loveless marriage. Eventually, the Aletis finds (or, like Jane, builds) her own home where she can put down roots and create what she was meant to create. She provides an opportunity for others to do likewise, like Celie of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, who draws a community of like-minded creative people to her—including her own formerly abusive husband.

But first the Aletis must journey into the wild place, the place of danger, the very place her family and community have warned her against. In old tales like “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” she goes from her little village into the forest where the scariest thing of all, the witch Baba Yaga, lives. In many recent stories the wild place is the big city, the center of sin and crime. The heroine has been taught all her life to fear this place, yet she is drawn to it.

In the wild place she encounters the witch. The wicked witch is often the villain of a hero story; the hero must defeat her. But in Aletis stories, the witch becomes the girl’s teacher. The witch must be approached with respect; not as an enemy, but not in a craven way either. The heroine has to prove herself to the witch, and the first thing she must prove is that she respects herself too. She must stand boldly before the witch and tell her what she has come for.

The witch sniffs, unconvinced. She sets the girl a series of impossible tasks. These tasks require the girl to use discernment—to sort out the good seeds from the bad—or be diligent and unwavering as she spins the mountain of straw into gold. Her commitment provides the magic that allows the task to be accomplished. Once the girl passes the test, the witch gives her what she needs.

Miranda Priestly of Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada is a modern Baba Yaga, feared by all who know her. (“Miranda” means “miracle” and “Priestly” evokes someone in touch with divine power.) The heroine Andrea, newly come to the big city from her small town, walks boldly into Miranda’s demesne and asks for a job. Miranda sniffs, as do all the sycophants around her, but she lets Andrea stay and sets her a series of increasingly impossible tasks. After Andrea passes the tests, Miranda recommends her for her dream job, investigative journalism. Andrea will not only get to write but will have a positive effect on the wider world.

The Aletis story teaches us how to go willingly into the heart of the unknown. It teaches us that when we come face to face with those we’ve been taught to fear, we don’t have to fight them or defeat them. Instead, we must stand firmly in our integrity as they test our commitment to learning from them. In showing them respect while maintaining our own self-respect, we often receive their respect and ultimately, their cooperation and aid.

To learn more about Jody’s work or purchase a copy of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Journey, click here.

*And a few visionary men. Shakespeare’s Viola of Twelfth Night, Charles Dickens’s Lizzie Hexam of Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Éowyn of The Lord of the Rings are examples.

Peace in Her Time: Heroines’ Journeys in the Arts

April 20, 2019April 20, 2019Leave a comment

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

“Women’s voices and actions, while often unheard and unseen, have been and will forever be instrumental in conflict resolution.” So opens the Curatorial Statement by Susan Janowsky for the multi-media art show, Peace in Her Time; Visionary Women Against War and Violence. Sponsored by Unbound Visual Arts, the show is currently on exhibit at the Boston Public Library Honan-Allston Branch Art Gallery.

The exhibition includes a diverse collection of paintings, fiber arts, sculpture, collage, printmaking, book arts, and assemblage. Art helps us to see, and to not forget, both the horrific moments and also unexpected acts of inspiration. A a group, the artworks express the multiple dimensions of women’s struggles against violence and toward wholeness and peace throughout history and across the globe. Like art itself, the exhibit is a wonderful example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

The artists were invited to submit artist statements along with their visual / sound works which the sponsor Unbound Visual Arts has collected in a bound volume available with the exhibit. Their statements and their art offer a window onto many values, concepts, and examples that characterize heroine journeys.

Valuing Relationships & Community Effort

Jean Askerkoff: For peace in our time, we must work together. Equality, kindness and respect for each other are needed to end divisiveness in our world.

Tsurn Mig Shmiklinski: Being a Woman, a minority woman, I face may obstacles as well as opportunities. It is hard to make it alone… the truth is that I don’t believe we have to.

Linda Clave: Women are beacons for nurturing spiritual values. Staying with our feminine souls brings forth a balancing force of equal magnitude to situations under duress. This allows for the understanding of the other with clarity. We are here to join each other and grow as humanity.

Empathy and Inclusiveness

Elizabeth Geers Loftis: The role of women in all facets of life is a topic I return to again and again. I am especially attracted to women from more rural, indigenous cultures.

Nancer Ballard: I originally wanted to do a piece on women and work because I was frustrated by hearing so many intelligent people assert that women had only begun to go to work during World War II. What about all the African Americans who have been working since this country was founded? What about the indentured servants who paid for their way to America with years of working? What about the Lowell Mill workers? Women throughout the world have played important roles in virtually every form of constructive peaceable work from antiquity to the present. The piece’s subtitle, Women in Labor, is a play on the concept of women forever giving birth creatively to the world on many levels.

Peg Ehrlinger: Intisar is from Syria. Her home and mosque are in rubble, her beloved country destroyed by the ongoing Civil War. Her son is a first responder in the midst of the devastation… In the midst of the chaos, Intisar assists others as she is able, praying for the day the Damascus Rose may bloom again. Her gentle smile makes me wonder, would we be kinder to others if we considered the pain they hide?

Combining Binaries into Wholeness

Alicia Dwyer: The armor is constructed over a body case of a pregnant woman. Among the decorative flowers adorning the dress tiny toy soldiers lie hidden in the petals. Blending fabric and metal together creates a juxtaposition between contrasting elements of fragility and strength inherent in nature, individuals, and society.

Heidi Lee: Sacred is she. Holy, is she not. Within the same entity, does both wrath, lust, pride exist even for a short while alongside kindness humility, and self-control

Making Do, Repurposing, and Living in Concert with One’s Environment

Missiles and Oil Wells by Mary Gillis

Mary Gillis: The cloth piece was intended initially as a banner for a local weekly peace vigil but then turned into a wall quilt, which traveled to several art exhibits and now hangs in a charter high school in Roxbury.

Nancer Ballard: I believe art is a very powerful form of non-capitalist value—it is life affirming, it can be experienced by anyone who has access to it, and it can fulfill unlimited purposes. You can destroy a piece of art, but not the impulse and need to make art.

Persistence; Focusing on the Journey rather than the Moment of Triumphant Achievement

Brenda Gael McSweeney: This photograph captures Habibou Ouédraogo, Women’s Leader in the village of Zimtenga Kongoussi Zone, Burkina Faso and Scholastique Kompaoré, National Coordinator of the UNESCO Project for Equal Access of Women and Girls to Education as they debate the challenges of gender injustice, including the subordination of women and girls and violence against them, and income inequality.

Affirming Life rather than Conquest

Diane Sheridan: It is impossible not to feel [inspired] by women carrying their words proudly, their signs of protest towards peace and justice and hopefully opening someone’s eyes and heart even the smallest bit.

Peace in Her Time provides a multi-layered demonstration that art and peace work– in whatever way you do it— are like driving a stake in the ground and declaring that there is hope in the future—even if what you are depicting or experiencing is terrible.

Peace in Her Time; Visionary Women Against War and Violence is on exhibit at the Boston Public Library, Honan-Allston Branch Art Gallery through April 29, 2019. To find out more about Unbound Visual Arts, click here. To get directions to the gallery, click here.