Not exactly the Heroine's Journey

[nancylebov]

The Heroine's Journey is being discussed over at Tor.com, and aside from the question of whether, if there isn't something parallel to Campbell's Hero's Journey for women all over the place in literature and folklore, whether that isn't what women generally want from fiction, if there's any fiction about becoming a matriarch, by which I mean a story that starts when the protagonist is a girl and finishes when she has a large, successful, reasonably happy family, with at least grandchildren if not great-grandchildren.

This isn't the story I absolutely need to read to feel good, but I think I could enjoy it.

Maybe it's in sf I've missed, maybe it's in long historicals I haven't read, maybe no one's doing it.

Comments

[kiya]

McCaffrey has a distinct repeated pattern of "Once the lead female character Gets A Man she loses all personality and becomes all about The Domestic Bliss." (Including in cases where the Getting A Man was mediated by, y'know, sexual assault.)

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

You forgot the: daughter lives a dull, meaningless life under harsh father, until finally gets enough nerve to timidly defy father, who has reaction all out of proportion, and daughter then leaves.