Price of Conformity
Opportunity to Shine
Dresses the Part
Secret World
No Longer Fits Her World
Caught Shining
Gives Up What Kept Her Stuck
Kingdom in Chaos
Wanders in the Wilderness
Chooses Her Light
Re-Ordering (Rescue)
The Kingdom is Brighter
Virgin Film Summaries
CHAPTER 3: ANTI-VIRGIN STORIES
CHAPTER 4: THE HERO ARCHETYPAL JOURNEY
Ordinary World
Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Meeting with the Guide
Crossing the First Threshold
Tests, Allies, Enemies
Preparations
Crisis
Reward
The Road Back
The Final Battle
Return with the Elixir
Hero Film Summaries
Part Two
CHAPTER 5: SCREENPLAY STRUCTURE
The Three-Act Structure
The Beat Sheet
The Central Question
Connections
Character Profiles and Symbolism
CONCLUSION
Appendix 1: Beat Worksheets
Appendix 2: Pitch Preparation Worksheet
Appendix 3: Character Symbolism Worksheet
Selected References
About the Author
List of Tables
Table 1. Comparison of the Archetypal Features of the Virgin, Whore, Hero, and Coward
Table 2. Comparison of the Archetypal Features of the Mother/Goddess, Femme Fatale, Lover/King, and Tyrant
Table 3. Comparison of the Archetypal Features of the Crone, Hag, Mentor, and Miser
Table 4. Various Names Associated with the Twelve Core Archetypes
Table 5. Comparison of the Virgin and Hero Stories
Table 6. Archetypal Beats Combined with Three-Act Structure
Table 7. The Virgin as a Symbol
Table 8. The Whore as a Symbol
Table 9. The Mother/Goddess as a Symbol
Table 10. The Femme Fatale as a Symbol
Table 11. The Crone as a Symbol
Table 12. The Hag as a Symbol
Table 13. The Hero as a Symbol
Table 14. The Coward as a Symbol
Table 15. The Lover/King as a Symbol
Table 16. The Tyrant as a Symbol
Table 17. The Mentor as a Symbol
Table 18. The Miser as a Symbol
acknowledgements
Writing The Virgin’s Promise has been a five-year journey of exploration for me. I kept pursuing this path thanks to people who encouraged me when the idea was young and fragile. People like Clodagh O’Connell, Harvey McKinnon, Harold Johnson, Lori Hudson-Fish, and many others I encountered along the way. The generous support of Dave Joe gave me the space to explore these ideas and write while still caring for our children in a soulful way, which was a real gift. I am grateful to Michael Wiese Productions for taking a chance on a first-time author with a dream. A sincere thank you also to my editors Silvia Heinrich, Melva McLean and Pat Sanders; my readers Gervais Bushe, Joyce Thierry, Mark Timko, Kent Robertson, Laurie Anderson, Robyn Harding, and Colleen Jones; and my friends Luke Carroll, Katherine and Rob Strother, George Maddison, Marcia Thomson, Laurel Parry, and Louise Hardy who were so generous with their time and insights. And finally, thank you to my daughters Jesse and Jamie who have enormous faith in me, and to Laurie Anderson who is a true hero to me.
foreword
by Christopher Vogler
The “Hero’s Journey” pattern that Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been a wellspring of creativity and inspiration for many people, male and female, who recognized the patterns as a metaphorical description of their journeys through life. It has been a roadmap for storytellers and artists, female and male, who find its terms and incidents to be perfectly designed to connect with the emotions and dreams of their audiences. For many people it can be a universal, one-size-fits-all guidebook to the inevitable stages of life, travel, launching anew business, or any serious endeavor.
However, and this is a big however, there has been a persistent shortcoming in this approach to life and literature, in that it has a slight gender bias towards the masculine. In my work I try to view it as neutral, genderless, a description of the general human condition, but it has been pointed out to me many times, and I have come to understand on my own, that there is more than a drop of testosterone in the assumptions and specifics of the Hero’s Journey, starting with that word “hero.” I noticed that when I started lecturing about the Hero’s Journey, many people immediately assumed I was talking about male action heroes, superheroes, traditionally male military heroes, etc. Women would say “Fine, I get it about the man’s journey to go out and conquer something, but what’s the woman’s journey?”
I had no good answer. I am a man, I see things as a man, and it would be foolish to speculate what it’s like to be a woman on her journey through life. So I looked around and found the work of female scholars like Marie-Louise von Franz, Marija Gimbutas, Maureen Murdock, and Carol Pearson on the mythic archetypes specific to women, and the very different ways they saw the journey. Kim Hudson, the author of the book in your hands, doesn’t even think of it as necessarily being a journey, but rather an emotional process. Maureen Murdock in particular had a way of restating the unique life patterns and signposts of the woman’s experience as a clear outline, so I began referring people who wondered “What is the Woman’s Journey?” to Murdock’s work.
But I felt there was more work to be done in this area, especially in applying the findings of sociologists, scholars, and therapists to the specialized worlds of storytelling and screen-writing, and I encouraged my questioners and all the women in the audience to develop a theory about what is unique about the feminine experience of drama and life’s patterns.
I was encouraged all along by the enthusiasm with which women, especially my friends