Date of Award

12-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Statement

Master of Arts in English

Department

English Department

Granting Institution

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Committee Chair

Stanley, Sarah

Committee Member

Harney, Eileen

Committee Member

Carr, Rich

Table of Contents

Introduction.

The cost of isolation: the U.S. Surgeon General and Jonathan Haidt

Solitude, isolation, and the journeys of the hero and heroine

In this thesis

Primary sources: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and When Women Were Dragons

Chapter 1: The heroine's journey stages 1-3: separation from the feminine, identification with the masculine, and the road of trials.

Maureen Murdock and The Heroine's Journey stages 1-3

Cultural frameworks: Haidt, U.S. Surgeon General, and Estés

Sybel in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld: solitude as power

Alex in When Women Were Dragons: imposed isolation

Chapter 2: The heroine's journey stages 4-5: the illusory boon of success and awakening to spiritual aridity.

The illusion of success and spiritual aridity

Sybel's rage and the blammor

Alex's burnout and emotional collapse

Cultivating resistance: the garden as feminine reclamation

Chapter 3: The heroine's journey stage 6: the descent.

Descent to the goddess

Sybel's existential crisis

Alex's loss of identity

The wise women/mentor figures: Maelga and Mrs. Gyzinska

Chapter 4: The heroine's journey stages 7-8: reconnection with the feminine and healing the mother-daughter split.

Reconnection and healing

Sybel's reconciliation and the Liralen as symbol of wholeness

Alex's renewal and her mother's legacy

Chapter 5: The heroine's journey stages 9-10: finding the inner masculine and integration.

Healing and integration

Reconnection to ancestral and feminine wisom

Sybel's return to the mountaintop

Alex's found family

Integration and return to community

Conclusion and application.

The heroine's journey as a feminist roadmap and implications for contemporary feminist thought and current cultural dialogue

References.

Abstract

This thesis examines isolation, solitude, and the search for community in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974) by Patricia A. McKillip and When Women Were Dragons (2022) by Kelly Barnhill through the lens of Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (1990). While Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) has long shaped critical understandings of narrative transformation, its masculine focus leaves the solitary heroine’s experience underexplored. Murdock’s framework reframes the journey as one of healing the split between the masculine and feminine within both the individual and the culture.

Sybel and Alex, the heroines of these two novels, begin in inherited or imposed isolation, one in a wizard’s tower, the other in mid-century domestic repression, and move toward self­ knowledge through solitude, loss, and eventual connection. Their stories reveal that engagement in a collaborative community can be transformational. In analyzing McKillip’s high-fantasy archetype and Barnhill’s speculative realism, this study argues that the heroine’s journey reimagines triumph as collaborative rather than conquering. The movement from separation to integration illuminates a distinctly feminine narrative arc, one in which power is reconciled with empathy, and survival evolves into collective community.

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