The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folktale Protagonists

Abstract

Scholars have long remarked striking similarities in the depiction of male heroes in the world’s folktale traditions. The most ambitious attempt to document and explain these similarities is Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1936). Campbell’s work differs in detail from other noteworthy attempts to define universal features of heroes (e.g., Dundes 1980; Fontenrose 1959; Rank 1909; Raglan 1936; Tylor 1871; Von Hahn 1876), but its grand thesis is much the same: wherever you travel in the world’s folk literatures, and whenever you go there, heroes will share certain predictable patterns of characteristics; while the details of heroes “faces” may change as the investigator crosses geographical, cultural, and chronological borders, certain details of the hero’s life and challenges are everywhere the same.

An earlier version of this chapter was published in Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 85–103 (http://www.epjournal.net/). Rachel Berkey, Mitch Cawson, Carly Drown, Matthcw Fleischner, Melissa Glotzbecker, Kimberly Kernan, Tyler Magnan, Kate Muse, Celeste Ogburn, Stephen Patterson, Christopher Skeels, Stephanie St. Joseph, Shawna Weeks, Alison Welsh, and Erin Welch contributed to this research.