The Benomyth

  Murdoch’s Heroine’s Journey begins with a “separation from the feminine” and ends with “integration of the masculine and feminine.” Campbell’s Hero’s Journey begins with a call to adventure and ends after its hero gains the “Freedom to Live” and becomes a “Master of Two Worlds.” While both journeys maintain semblances to hallmark fictional conventions (rising and falling action, climax etc.), the beginnings and endings, and subsequently, the purposes, of these journeys are altogether different. Campbell’s structured format guides its hero beyond most normal expectations and onto higher fantastical callings wherein the protagonist more often than not achieves some degree of self-actualization. Murdoch’s heroine’s response to Campbell is more pessimistic. The lofty end goal for the heroine is to merely achieve the same status as the men of her world start with. The resolution of these journey structures retroactively dictates how we observe the previous steps. The differences betwe...

  To preface my blog, I would like to address a few things: the first, Beneatha Younger is not the protagonist of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. That is, she does not possess the lead role for whom the primary character development narrative is structured around. That status would fall to Walter Younger, her brother and head of the Younger household who dreams of striking it rich and becoming more successful than any of the Youngers’ prior four generations of colored ancestors. This is not to say that Beneatha is a completely inertial character, it is through Hansberry’s portrayal of Beneatha and her interactions with her relatives and peers (namely her revolutionary-oriented Nigerian boyfriend, Joseph Asagai) that A Raisin in the Sun conveys its primary message, the importance of aspirations and ambitions in a world society that was not constructed with you in mind. At the start of the film, Beneatha is portrayed as the Younger family’s “last hope.” While the “real” protagonist ...

Joseph Campbell’s penultimate step in the monomyth “The Master of Two Worlds” is an admittedly confusing one in the context of Siddhartha. This is owed in no small part to the fact that many of the final steps listed by Joseph Campbell seemingly mold together in Hermann Hesse’s novel. Steps like “The Ultimate Boon,” or “Magical Flight” quickly ease into the next one or gloss over one another entirely. In the context of Siddhartha, I would argue that the Ultimate Boon is the Siddhartha’s realization that he has become the “Master of Two Worlds.” Any further difficulty in applying Campbell’s monomyth to the text hereafter can be derived from the inherent difficulty in pinpointing the chronology of this realization in the text. I, myself, in struggling to select a passage that encapsulated the ideas of the “Master of Two Worlds” (in which the protagonist’s “ ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes,...