In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell begins his thesis of the Monomyth with a recounting of the story of the Minotaur. His purpose is straightforward: the initiation and cycling of the hero’s journey is predicated on an origin of evil narrative which the story of the Minotaur quintessentially is. It is interesting to note, however, that differently gendered expressions of narrative evil give rise to distinct and gendered vectors of protagonist action. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, Maleficent, a female/mother variant of the tyrant-monster, gives rise to a protagonist, Princess Aurora, who is never the conscious agent of the action she takes. On the other hand, in Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa literally drives the narrative action which is initiated by the tyrant-father, Immortan Joe. Though it’s clear that Furiosa’s journey adheres to a more manifest expression of empowered action than Princess Aurora’s, this paper will argue that neither protagonist nor the implied origin of evil story setting each character’s journey in motion suffices to define the heroine’s journey. Rather, the fairytale princess and the female action-hero require a new interpretive model in order to describe both their conflicting and, surprisingly, common relationship to personal agency. Drawing on the methodology of Vladimir Propp, I intend to offer an alternative framework for understanding the attributes of the heroine’s journey which circumvents completely the essentializing gesture that is necessarily made in positing an expression of the hero-task which would be unique to a female protagonist. Rather, I offer the Multimyth, an interpretive framework which 1) applies the model of the hero’s journey to Sleeping Beauty and Mad Max: Fury Road in order to define, reveal, and interrogate the functioning of each film’s narrative structure foregrounding the roles of Princess Aurora and Furiosa, respectively; and, then 2) uses the aggregate conclusions of the application of Campbell’s model to each text to counter-interrogate the model itself. In doing so, I intend to expose the assumptions, omissions and limitations of the Monomyth as a narrative heuristic and at the same time elucidate the Multimyth as an interpretive model which honors Campbell’s conception of the hero-task and proffers new methods for the application of the hero’s journey which will result in a richer and more complex understanding of narrative structure.
Joseph Campbell’s functions of myth in Galway Kinnell’s The book of nightmares