The Heroine's Journey (1990) de Maureen Murdock

 Para quem estuda ou se interessa por narratologia o monomito de Joseph Campbell, também intitulado a Jornada do Herói, não vem como nada de novo. É a estrutura pela qual grande parte das narrativas de Hollywood se seguem, dando origem à narrativa de três atos a que tanto assistimos. No entanto, entre questionamentos da jornada do herói e da sua aplicabilidade para o género feminino, deparei-me com a estrutura desenhada por Maureen Murdock, que foi aluna de Joseph Campbell e seguiu de perto as histórias de dezenas de mulheres enquanto terapeuta. A então chamada Jornada da Heroína,  é uma adaptação da Jornada do Herói à existência feminina.  Abaixo podemos ver as fases de ambas estruturas e as suas diferenças: 

Como podemos observar a Jornada da Heroína inicia-se logo com "Separação do Feminino". enquanto que na Jornada do Herói apenas temos o encontro com o feminino na sétima etapa, "O Encontro com a Deusa". Esta separação inicial parte do pressuposto que as duas aventuras têm um ponto de partida diferente, reconhecendo assim a diferente natureza de ambas. 

Ao longo de todo o livro Maureen utiliza histórias verídicas de pacientes suas e recorre a mitos para evocar novas formas de olhar para a experiência feminina. Deixo alguns excertos: 

“Our society is androcentric: it sees the world from a male perspective. Men are rewarded for their intelligence, drive, and dependability through position, prestige, and financial gain in the world. To the degree that women are like men they are similarly but not equally rewarded.”

“Many high-achieving women are considered daughters of the father because they seek the approval and power of that first male model. Somehow mother’s approval doesn’t matter as much; father defines the feminine, and this affects her sexuality, her ability to relate to men, and her ability to pursue success in the world. Whether a woman feels that it is alright to be ambitious, to have power, to make money, or to have a successful relationship with a man derives from her relationship with her father.

Lynda Schmidt defines a father’s daughter as “the daughter with a powerful, positive relationship with her father, probably to the exclusion of her mother. Such a young woman will orient herself around men as she grows up, and will have a somewhat deprecatory attitude toward women. Father’s daughters organize their lives around the masculine principle, either remaining connected to an outer man or being driven from within by a masculine mode. They may find a male mentor or guide, but they may have, at the same time, trouble taking orders from a man or accepting teaching from one.

Psychologists who study motivation have found that many successful women had fathers who nurtured their talent from a early age".

“I’ve noticed that women who feel least sure of themselves as women—in the shadow of their mothers’ self-denigration, those mothers who didn’t feel good enough about themselves to love a daughter strongly—are most likely to fall into the superwoman trap, trying to be Perfect Mothers, as their own were not, and also perfect on the job, in ways that men, grounded from boyhood in such games, don’t try to be. That female machismo, passed on from mother to daughter, hides the same inadmissible self-hate, weakness, sense of powerlessness as machismo hides in men.3

Unfortunately, in an effort not to be anything like their mothers, many young women did become like men. They measured their self-esteem, their self-definition, and their self-worth against male standards of production.”

“We live in a dualistic culture which values, creates, and sustains polarities—an either/or stratified mentality which identifies and locates ideas and people at opposite ends of a spectrum. In writing about “creation spirituality,” Matthew Fox explains in Original Blessing that the sin behind all sin is dualism: separation from self, separation from the divine, separation of me from you, separation of good from evil, separation of the sacred from nature. In dualistic thinking, we treat the other as an object outside of ourselves, some thing to better, to control, to distrust, to dominate, or to own. Dualism breeds suspicion, confusion, misperception, contempt, a lack of trust.”

“He goes on to explain that duality is an illusion. “There is right and there is left; if you take sides you are trying to eliminate half of reality which is impossible. It is an illusion to think you can have right without left, good without evil, women without men, the rose without the garbage, the United States without the Soviet Union.”