A Caution About the Monomyth

Because the Hero carries Campbell's authority into the twelve-archetype scheme, the state of that authority matters. Campbell's monomyth has been widely criticised by folklorists and scholars of religion for selective use of evidence, for flattening the differences between traditions, and for imposing a single narrative shape on stories that do not share it; the pattern is very much easier to find once one is looking for it, and Campbell drew heavily on a comparative method that the discipline has since moved away from. This does not make the pattern useless as a tool for writing or for self-reflection, and it plainly works as both. It does mean that a claim of the form all cultures tell the hero's journey should be treated as a statement about a modern interpretive scheme rather than as a finding about world mythology.

Campbell's own sources leaned heavily on nineteenth and early twentieth century comparative mythology and on psychoanalytic writers, particularly Jung and Freud, and his method of abstracting a common narrative skeleton from myths collected across very different societies has been specifically criticised for treating translated summaries as equivalent to the myths themselves, losing the ritual context, performance setting and local meaning that specialists in any one tradition would insist on. Folklorists working within structuralist and historic-geographic methods developed rival, more rigorously comparative approaches to myth and folktale that require documented textual relationships rather than thematic resemblance, a standard the monomyth does not meet. None of this prevents the pattern working well as a compositional tool, which is the use screenwriting manuals and story consultants, including George Lucas's acknowledged debt to Campbell in developing Star Wars, have made of it.