One Tale to End All Tales?

 

When I was fifteen, I wrote my first novel and I was determined it should be revolutionary. It wouldn’t employ a single trope or similarity to another work of fiction. Before long, this proved tricky and I stayed after class one day to ask my English teacher if anyone could create a truly original story. She responded by sketching a Hero’s Journey monomyth diagram on the board. That is how, a few weeks ahead of my entire class, I learned that the Hero’s Journey was the one tale to rule them all.

Until college. Four years later, again a sophomore, I took a literary theory class where the course text was a book of essays and autobiographical fiction by the Native American writer Zitkala-Sa. While analyzing it in an essay, I once more broke revolutionary ground when I realized Zitkala-Sa’s stories didn’t fit in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model. Why, this was because Joseph Campbell, the great white male, had neglected to take women and native people’s stories into play. Oh, the injustice of it all! And so I set out to write a semester long research paper about how the Hero’s Journey in all its colonialist glory had overlooked marginalized storytellers.

Until the night before my paper was due. I’d been going off a Hero’s Journey diagram I’d found on the first page of google and assumed, because the website mention Campbell’s book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, that it was all accurate to the book. With my paper all polished and peer edited and ready for submission, I decided I’d check out the book itself, find a few quotes to throw in, and call it good. But when I flipped to the index, I found the names of several Native American tribes listed. Campbell had taken Native American myths into account.

I overhauled my entire paper overnight.

Two years later, I took a myths, legends, and folktales class and discovered that there are myths, legends, and folktales. Campbell’s myth model was only ever intended for myths. If you want to analyze a fairy tale, you don’t go to Campbell, you use Proppian analysis. Though Vladimir Propp tracked some elements common with Hero’s Journey stories (heroes, villainy, overcoming), they’re more tailored to fairy tales.

Proppian analysis starts with a family member absenting themselves from the home. Beauty’s father leaves for a journey, Hansel and Gretel are led to the woods, Cinderella’s mother is dead. It ends with a wedding and ascension to the throne. This can either be literal (Snow White marries her prince) or more figurative (Dorothy and her traveling companions are rewarded). Fairy tales feature a donor character, like Cinderella’s godmother or the dead Wicked Witch of the East, who grant the hero magical a magic talisman or assistance.

Last night I watched a stage production of Mary Poppins. Neither Miss Poppins nor the kids have a hero’s journey. The kids have a problem (distant parents) but don’t take action to fix it on their own. Mary Poppins takes action but she doesn’t have a problem. Fixing the Banks family doesn’t give her anything. At no point in the story is she really threatened or endangered. This bugged me for a while until I realized Proppian analysis is probably a better fit. Suddenly, this story follows the rules. Michael and Jane absent themselves to play in the park and their parents are emotionally absent. Mary Poppins functions as their donor. A wedding is the happy unification of a family and that’s exactly what happens to the Bankses at the end. 

Proppian analysis is the wrong choice for non-fairy tale stories, like YA contemporary novels. Popular author Sarah Dessen’s YA contemporary books usually feature a teenage girl on summer break. She has a job, family issues, friends, and, eventually, a boyfriend. But she’s not locked in battle with an evil overlord or witch. Some YA novels might include triumph over a sports rival, school bully, or an opponent in a class election, but  in many of them, like Dessen's, the end result is something like "the shy heroine learns to have confidence." 

YA contemporaries attempt to model real life more than mystery books do. In real life, a friend could be killed in a hit and run accident and your journey is one of grieving and healing. In a mystery novel, you track that sucker down. There are as many ways to understand stories as there are kinds of stories. Zitkala-Sa’s stories didn’t match Campbell’s pattern because she was writing biography, not because Campbell was some kind of racist. Myths don’t read like fairy tales, fairy tales don’t read like biographies, biographies don’t read like YA contemporaries, and contemporaries don't read like mysteries. The more you study different plot structures, the more you familiarize yourself with the breadth of different genres and learn new ways to frame your character's journey.