Representation of Hero’s Journey in James Reeves’s Jack and the Bean Stalk and Molly Whipple

The study attempts to analyze two English fairy tales in the light of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. The discussion is based on Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s journey or the monomyth that he took from Jung’s archetypal ideas and applied them to the world mythologies. In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1611), he refined the concept of the hero and the Hero’s Journey. Fairy tales, without an identifiable author, are the most widespread and possibly oldest form of literature. They have been analyzed from variety of approaches. This study would investigate two stories of the book English Fables and Fairy Stories (1661) which James Reeves has collected and retold them, Jack and the Beanstalk and Molly Whipple. It illustrates the efficiency of Campbell’s ideas and theories specially Hero’s Journey archetype in these two famous English fairy tales and also shows that how different archetypes are interconnected to each other and to the overall structure. Although both female and male heroes were analyzed in this study, there was no fundamental difference between their gender and heroic actions. In comparison to the male hero, female hero does heroic actions as the male counterpart. In spite of this, the female hero never returns to their hometown but the male hero returns. It also demonstrates that although Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can be applied to this two fairy tales and the essential phases with the most important categories can be found in them, sometimes the order advised by Campbell has been changed and some stages omitted.

کلیدواژه ها:

Archetypes ، Fairy tales ، Hero’s journey ، Joseph Campbell ، Monomyth