Don't hold your tongue
On women's speech + two writing prompts
Most of what we know about the hero’s journey has been filtered down from Joseph Campbell, an academic and folklorist who wrote The Hero with 1000 Faces in 1949. In it, Campbell argues that the hero is a dude who sets on a big adventure, leaving home to face worldy demons and obstacles, and to defeat them, usually with militaristic brawn and bravery, before returning home with something to show for it. The book was also adapted into a brief for filmmakers and has become central to many Hollywood plots.
Though the hero’s journey has come under scrutiny in recent years among writers and academics, Campbell’s work is still widely lauded as fact— as an inarguable take on the unavoidable, timeless patterns within all narratives. That’s only further reinforced by writing guidebooks, craft texts, and screenwriting manuals that encourage writers to follow the structure Campbell outlined.
On the other hand, in her brilliant study of the women Campbell left out of his work, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Maria Tatar makes a case for studying women in classic quests who disrupted the patriarchal construction of their identities and social roles. Tatar shows how women and girls in the myths Campbell studied frequently had subversive lives and rebellious powers— he just chose not to study those characters, favoring instead the brutes who served his understanding of story, heroism, and history.
But the women in the myths Campbell studied talked back, even when they were silenced, such as Philomela, in the Ovid, who is raped by her sister’s husband. When she threatens to tell the world what he’s done, her tongue is cut out and she’s imprisoned. So she literally weaves her story, creating a tapestry that represents the crime, then sending it to her sister, in pursuit of justice. (In some versions of the story, she is transformed into a song bird.)
The practice of cutting out women’s tongues was not, by the way, simply a symbolic trope in classic myths like the Ovid. As Tatar points out, it was a real practice. As was the witch’s bridle, sometimes also called a scold or gossip’s bridle—an iron muzzle put on women, which placed pressure on the tongue so the wearer would stop nagging or complaining:
These traditions have more than a symbolic significance today.