Jung, Campbell, and Frye: Recognizing the Hero's Journey in YA Literature

If you have taught middle grades or high school English for any length of time you have probably developed a unit that dealt with the hero's journey. Depending on when and where you went to college, you may or may not have been immersed in the "archetypal myth" of the hero's quest. I have seen it preached as holy writ and reduced to a stick figure diagram. I have heard it used to define Marlowe's journey to confront Kurtz, cited as the touchstone for understanding  Arthurian Legends, and to give meaning to the most complicated text of James Joyce. 

This week the guest contributor is Virginia Brackett. I, for one, appreciate her insight on how an understanding of a hero's journey can help us make connections to YA literature and the adolescents that read it. As we start our own journey into the new year, she offers us insight into this compelling instructional and analytical lens. Take it away Virginia

​Savvy authors and teachers understand that readers’ early and repeated exposure to the quest plot, aka the hero’s journey, makes its elements and stages familiar and reliable for continued use in story-telling.  We learn its patterns and feel comfortable as we encounter them at all levels, in most cases subconsciously cataloguing elements and their symbolic significance. We owe that ability to twentieth-century philosopher Joseph Campbell.  Campbell studied tales from many cultures and recognized repeated patterns, which he collected into a “monomyth” - one myth composed of elements shared world-wide.  Close similarities in the mythology of disconnected cultures seem startling until we consider all focus on our shared human condition. We all fear, hope, celebrate and mourn. Work by Campbell, Carl Jung, and Northrup Frye can help us better understand their usefulness of such patterns, especially to young readers.

We can quickly review some monomyth elements by examining the familiar contemporary Star Wars mythology, beginning with the first-released episode, later labeled “Episode 4: The New Hope,” through “Episode 6: Return of the Jedi.” Most hero journeys begin with what Campbell labeled a call to adventure.  Luke Skywalker’s call is accidentally discovered in Princess Leia’s recorded plea for help, intended for Obi-Wan Kenobi, who will become Luke’s first guide. Such accidental discovery, mistaken identity, and conflict with parents, experienced by both Luke and Leia, are popular quest theme elements. Others include shape shifters, threshold guardians, monsters, visions, and challenges to self-identity, all of which the Star Wars mythology supplies. Heroes may at first resist the call, as does Luke, and most have a guide, which may eventually be lost, plunging the hero into depression and disenchantment. Luke experiences both with the loss of Obi-Wan. But in the first-released episode, after training by Obi-Wan, Luke becomes “one with the force.”  As his cultural gift, or boon to society, Luke liberates many from destruction by Darth Vader’s Death Star. Quest elements build during “Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back,” when Luke discovers his true identity as the son of Darth Vader, his worst enemy, controlled by an evil Emperor.  Disillusionment and the cutting off of one hand by Vader leads to a descent into Hades when Luke crashes into a swamp and receives wisdom from a second guide, Yoda. Luke ascends, again ready for battle, and his victory again provides a boon to his community.  He does so by overcoming limitations to his understanding through the quest stage of apotheosis. According to Campbell, this is the most important stage in the hero’s development when he is able to no longer view the world in terms of opposites – good/evil; black/white, etc. He understands the world as more complex and recovers his self-identity. Many would-be heroes falter at this stage, failing the quest.  Finally, Luke must return home.  Campbell’s monomyth proved a winning vehicle for George Lucas who transformed the traditional quest journey across the ocean to a journey through space, introducing a new generation to an updated version of the already familiar hero’s story. The quest may also be updated by substituting a female for the male; by the hero undergoing a psychological, rather than physical “descent” (also known as being in the belly of the whale), and by decreasing violence for younger readers, to name a few examples.

​Future readers are exposed to the monomyth when young, as with Beatrix Potter’s “The Tales of Peter Rabbit.”  Peter answers a call to adventure; crosses the threshold into Mr. McGregor’s garden; completes a series of tasks; experiences near-destruction; succeeds where his father had failed; and returns home. We could all identify childhood quest stories, evidence that we learn the plot sometimes before we even speak. We then encounter it repeatedly in not only classical literature, but also contemporary tales. With each generation, the tale twists to fit our needs, whether to imagine a new frontier in space, to calm our fear of aliens, or to contemplate mass annihilation though dystopic and apocalyptic tales, with hope for a rebirth. And why not? In good story teller’s hands, that oldest of plots retains its ability to entertain and energize readers. 

When I ask college freshmen to read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, they are inevitably surprised that they already know many of the monomyth patterns, familiar from America’s creation myths and/or those of religious texts.  For instance, Campbell reveals that tales about a destructive flood that wipes clean the spoiled human slate, leading to renewal, is found in a number of cultures.  Undeniable echoes of mythological punishment of man through destruction with hopes for ultimate renewal abound in numerous YA works. 

Theme lines, such as the necessity of personal sacrifice for the good of the group and cultural renewal emerge from such stories, as do familiar symbols.  We discuss cleansing rituals that lead to symbolic rebirth, such as baptism in various forms.  These late teen readers also recognize fire’s prominent role in myth.  Stories may focus on man’s harnessing of fire for good, but also on its destructive power.  They’re reminded that fire, like water, also represents cleansing and renewal – thus, the phrase “baptism by fire.”  The tale of Prometheus represents the former plot; the tale of the mythical bird the phoenix, the latter. I recall as a child reading Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix and being horrified and thrilled by the bird’s destruction and rebirth at the story’s. Ormondroyd purposed myth to teach David and his readers a lesson, but I hardly noticed. 

​YA readers today find the phoenix in various works, including its redesign as the Hunger Games series’ Mockingjay.  The second entry in Patrick Carman’s YA dystopian trilogy incorporates two familiar symbols in its title: Rivers of Fire.  Floods in contemporary stories also allow emphasis on the threat of climate change for YA readers, as in Marcus Sedgwick’s   Floodland.  From the Finding Nemo movie and its sequel, Finding Dory to the Hunger Games and Harry Potter book series, the monomyth breathes life into almost all adventure plots. 

Students soon begin to recognize the monomyth in literature, movies, video games – all aspects of popular culture. Many myth archetypes may be found inhabiting a dream landscape, and Carl Jung’s theories offer additional understanding of monomyth concepts.  Although reductive, we can understand that Sigmund Freud, Jung’s teacher, viewed the conscious as a way humans store individual repressed desires. But Jung viewed it as storage for repressed memories, specific to the individual, but also to an ancestral past. That ancestral past grew from a sharing of stories and experiences with diverse, separate cultures into what Jung terms the collective unconscious.  Basically, we all share memories of eras long before our own. Such a theory easily supports the ideas of archetypes– traditional characters - employed by various cultures to create a mythology supporting cultural values. 

In class, we next search for monomyth elements in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.  Kingston focuses on story-telling to help her negotiate conflict with her mother and the development of her sense of self.  As a narrator challenged by her Chinese- American heritage, Kingston includes Chinese myths that incorporate familiar archetypes and symbols. Through application of Campbell’s and Jung’s concepts to literature, students recognize their own susceptibility to American myths as children.  Our discussion includes Disney’s influence on gender role development and its recent offering of stronger female characters, including Fa Mulan, the woman warrior of Kingston’s memoir. By the end of the course, many students joke that Campbell has ruined any chance that they may ever again enjoy a naïve viewing or reading of a quest story.  

Canadian critic Northrup Frye focuses on the monomyth to create a guide utilizing the four seasons to identify archetypes in children’s and YA literature. Spring represents Comedy; summer, Romance; autumn, Tragedy; and winter, Irony and Satire. Frye further divides each “mythos” into six themes.  Those who want to know more can easily locate Frye’s The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Frye turns to Jung to analyze the importance of symbols in dreams and myths supporting a culture’s value system.  Myths offer structure, and quest archetypes allow simple categorization of characters that avoids for young children the “ambiguities of ordinary life.” Thus, myths help teach children values, as they build “unities,” that is, images connected with one another. Frye held that the reappearance of archetypes and the resulting unities help young readers avoid challenges from the “real world” to their understanding as they develop self-identity.  Readers eventually understand metaphor and symbolism with no conscious knowledge of their origins.
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 Learning theories like those of Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson support Frye’s approach. Nilsen and Donelson proposed seven stages of categorization by children, including stage 3, “literary appreciation.” Additional theories, including that of Elizabeth M. Baeten, hold myth integral to cultural production and culture crucial to young readers’ self-realization. A study of children seven to 14 years showed them six familiar archetypes and associated them with objects from popular culture (a Power Ranger figure as a “hero,” for instance).  Participants could then select reading material based on their preferred archetypes. Pointing out plot elements to eager readers promotes reading pleasure, offering them a key to decode literature that falls into the monomyth category.  That key is context, and with such context, readers identify relationships between stories that may on the surface appear to be unrelated. For instance, young readers see that their favorite historical fiction hero is strongly related via the quest family tree to a science fiction hero.

How is such knowledge useful to those who write and teach? I sought to answer that question in my study of Barbara Brooks Wallace’s Peppermints in the Parlor, a 1983 William Allen White Children’s Book Award winner. I published an article supporting the claim that it offers a prime example of a twentieth-century monomyth plot for young readers. Our reluctant hero Emily suffers the loss of her parents, necessitating a cross-country train journey to California. Frightening visions appear during her trip, including a blurred self-reflection in her window. She fondly remembers her destination, the mansion Sugar Hill Hall, belonging to her Aunt and Uncle Twice. However, it has become a dark and unfamiliar retirement home. Like Aunt Twice, it is much changed, and Uncle Twice is missing, a mystery that Emily must solve.  Emily encounters the evil, serpent-like Mrs. Meeching, who with the motherly Mrs. Plumly, manages the retirement home.  Meeching’s scissors “hiss” when she uses them to chop off Emily’s braids, symbols of her previous status. Emily’s appearance, and her self-identity, is changed as Mrs. Meeching informs her she will serve as a maid.  Her confidence shaken, the disoriented Emily faces a major challenge to regaining a stable self-image.  Although Mrs. Plumly offers a seeming foil to the evil Mrs. Meeching, she hides dark secrets, placing Plumly firmly into the shapeshifter archetype category. Wallace labels the retirees “shades,” recalling the spirits of the dead visited in Hades by classical heroes. Emily soon meets her guide, the boy Kipper, and the two eventually descend into a dark tunnel beneath the house, which Brooks labels the belly of the whale. Additional archetypes, familiar symbols and situations abound, unique within Brooks’ particular plot, but encouraging to young readers who recognize the context.
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One day I was shocked and delighted to receive a phone call from Wallace herself.  She said that she had read with appreciation my application of the monomyth and various learning theories to her novel, the first such analysis published about her book. She also confessed that she was surprised as I discussed her inclusion of the many monomyth elements that the article – their inclusion was unintentional on her part. That wonderful revelation illustrates the fact that much of our use of the monomyth is inspired via the osmosis that writers, who are avid reader, experience from an early age.

​Our hunger for the classical hero remains insatiable, perhaps as an antidote to the inevitable disappointments natural to our state of humanity.  Exposing young children to the quest plot allows them to feel comfortable when they later encounter it in more sophisticated presentations. We can hope critics are correct in their assurance that the monomyth can continue to satisfy the reader’s need for a true hero. In so doing, descendants of classical figures teach each generation about the particular pleasure of striving for difficult goals while dedicating themselves to a universal need.