Dr. Bower’s presentation is called “The Heart of the Hero: How Superhero Movies are Re-Imagining the Hero’s Quest Story”
Joseph Campbell tells us in The Hero With a Thousand Faces that once a hero has faced all his trials and succeeded in completing his quest, he can earn the boon of being loved by the feminine, as represented by the Princess—a vague figure who represents “the goddess who is incarnate in every woman . . . mother, sister, mistress, bride.” She is all women, not an individual in her own right.
Marie-Louise von Franz warns us that feminine figures in folk and fairy tales and myths are usually “not a woman’s idea of femininity but rather what Jung called the anima,” and so represent the psychology of men. When Campbell’s hero wakes the sleeping woman, he is awakening his own feminine side that he has suppressed. But awakened or not, he still projects it onto someone else. The feminine remains Other while the hero perceives love as coming from outside him, a gift bestowed on him. He is passive, receiving; love is not something he does.
And yet the archetype of the hero is all about doing!
Our modern myth-making modalities of comic books, film, and television are redressing this issue in origin stories about superheroes. In the new version, love is no longer a reward given to the hero—or the heroine, for modern female superheroes follow a similar story arc—after the quest is finished. Instead, the climactic moment often hinges on the heroic person’s ability to draw upon their innate capacity for love.
In her presentation, cultural mythologist Jody Gentian Bower looks at the origin stories of superheroes, including Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Starlord, Diana the Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Jake Sully, and Harry Potter, as examples of this new version of the hero whose greatest power comes from the heart.
About Dr. Bower
Jody Gentian Bower is a cultural mythologist who earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with a Depth Psychology Emphasis from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2013. She is the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story (Quest 2015), based on her dissertation about how women (and some men) have been telling a similar story about female protagonists in novels since the 15th century. She also wrote The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties Become Warrior Goddesses (Mandorla 2020), which traces the evolution of fantasy heroines over the last century. She lectures and leads workshops on hero/heroine journeys and blogs about popular culture on jodybower.com.