Abstract
Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books appear to be about the traditionally construed hero’s journey, though with a female hero rather than the conventional male. Superficially, this change seems insignificant: the “monomyth” is reproduced. Founded upon binary oppositions, this monomyth is the male hero’s journey – the traditional journey. However, while these female heroes may appear to conform, this paper explores how, upon a close reading of the narration of two particular moments of change, or “transcendence”, within that journey, the necessary structure collapses. The journey, as is traditionally conceived, is impossible. The first instance works to construct the apparently stable body as changeable, through the narration of shape-shifting. Through this reading, the obviousness of the body (and of identity) is explored and troubled. The second instance works, through the narration of transition into a womanhood, to question the individuality of the body. The body is again produced as changeable, but this transition works to expand readings beyond individual subjectivity to construct the body as operating within a collective. While collapsing traditional conceptions of myth, these readings also work to reposition and rearticulate the female body outside of myth’s masculine discourse, allowing a reinterpretation of that body in terms of the feminine.
Highlights
Contemporary Western culture privileges a developmental model of adolescence that favours white, able-bodied males – to the detriment of adolescent females
Dr Leah Phillips recently completed her PhD with the University of Warwick. This project, “Myth (Un)Making: Female Heroes in Mythopoeic young adult (YA) Fantasy”, reads how this vein of speculative fiction contests dominant, hegemonic ideals of being an adolescent girl, focusing on constructions of the body made possible by the fantastic nature of these texts
Alanna’s transition into womanhood begins with a physical, bodily transformation, a theme Daine’s shape-shifting, changing into the animals with who she shares a bond, expands by taking ‘normal’ bodily shape-change into the realm of the fantastical. This very mundane bodily shape-change includes instability of body within Alanna’s hero narrative, and in so doing, it expands the archetype, while commenting on the ‘problem’ of the female body within hegemonic regimes: the body must be controlled and contained. This is true for Alanna, as she refuses her female body in becoming Alan: “[i]t wasn’t easy to live with the binding on her chest
Summary
Contemporary Western culture privileges a developmental model of adolescence that favours white, able-bodied males – to the detriment of adolescent females (cf. Fausto-Sterling; Feldman and Elliot; Katchadourian; Lesko; Gilligan). Dr Leah Phillips recently completed her PhD with the University of Warwick This project, “Myth (Un)Making: Female Heroes in Mythopoeic YA Fantasy”, reads how this vein of speculative fiction contests dominant, hegemonic ideals of being an adolescent girl, focusing on constructions of the body made possible by the fantastic nature of these texts. As this article will demonstrate, the adolescent is perceived to be adolescent because of pubertal bodily changes, and the hero is hero in large part because of his bodily strength and potency, characteristics associated with the ideal adolescent body Both refuse the body’s fleshiness and materiality in favour of a discursive privileging of strength, stability, homogeneity, and wholeness, and they do so because of an underlying structure of binary opposition that privileges mind over body, male over female, linearity over cyclicality, and individuality over relationships. These texts offer a relational model of self that demonstrates how individuals may be “scored into uniqueness” through relationality (Battersby 7), complicating the notion of journey formulated by heroic patternings
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