I was editing my novel, The Sword of Vivienne, when I toured the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on a preview day. When I saw the sign for the first exhibit, “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred,” it hit me: I had just written a Heroine’s Journey. Not Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the one that inspired Lucas, but a whole new thing: a Crone’s Journey.
They are all different, these hero and heroine stories. The Wizard of Oz, inspired by the work of early feminist Matilda Gage, is different from Lucas’ Star Wars. Katniss in The Hunger Games is on a different mission than Xena, Warrior Princess. But these are all quests, and most of them resolve long before the Crone stage of life.
The author K.M. Welland proposed one version of a Crone’s Journey and said, right at the outset, that there are few sources to draw from. As she writes:
“I believe these arcs are desperately important and under-served. It is, in fact, difficult to think of many suitable story examples. Most of the time when a Crone or a Mage shows up in a story (especially a popular or genre story), they appear as a supporting character within the arc of a younger protagonist.”
These stories are so rare that Welland ends up using male examples (like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) to illustrate the stages in the Crone’s Journey. With such a paucity of sources, it’s no surprise that the stages in Welland’s Journey emphasize wisdom and acceptance over reinvention and action.
A Cultural Gap – And An Opportunity
“Desperately important and underserved” means the Crone’s Journey is ours to create.
Consider the essential work happening on the nonfiction side in the anti-ageism space. Books like Ashton Applewhite’s This Chair Rocks and Tracey Gendron’s Ageism Unmasked challenge us to rewrite the story of our older years. And Becca Levy’s new study of olders shows that many of us improve in cognitive and physical function in our older years. Why wasn’t this known before? Because previous studies of olders did not look for improvement, baking in the researchers’ ageist bias. Science is powerful because it’s based on data; but the Achilles Heel of science is that you don’t find the data you don’t look for.
Ageism is baked into our culture just as much as our science. I’ve written before about the effect of older female villains like Maleficent and Ursula on how we see older women’s power. If our exercise of power were evil, then the best we could hope for on our Crone Journey might really be be wisdom and acceptance. But no. It is time for stories about the Heroine Crone.
Where is the room in our culture for the Crone as reinventor of herself? How to build a new world with our hard-won wisdom? Where is our pantheon of Woman Kings?
The Power of Fantasy
Fantasy has distinct advantages over scientific study. It doesn’t require a lab, a budget, or study participants. Yet it asks “What if?” questions and plays with variables just like science does. When the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” she knew whereof she spoke. In fantasy, just as much as in Becca Levy’s study, we can focus on improvement (and transformation) after sixty.
I’ve been writing fiction about powerful older women for years, including my 2021 novel, Brilliant Charming Bastard. At some point I thought, “What if we take it to the max? What about a 500 year old woman?” In other words: What if we remove death as a variable? Those questions led to my first fantasy novel, Vampires of a Certain Age. It turns out that vampires are great metaphors for post-menopausal women.
Long-lived women have time to reinvent ourselves several times over, just like vampires. And like a woman becoming a vampire, when “the change” arrives at menopause no one explains all the ways her body transforms. Older women’s sexuality has a forbidden luster, just like vampire sexuality. The vampire’s lack of reflection in a mirror symbolizes the older woman’s invisibility. And just like a vampire, after menopause a woman can spend the rest of her life trying to disguise her age.
The other variable that the female vampire changes is the physical disadvantage of women versus men. My new novel, The Sword of Vivienne, explores that aspect: A medieval woman warrior becomes a vampire and combines her fighting skills with inhuman strength. How to use that strength is the challenge she faces that makes her story a Crone Journey.
I did not set out to write this book with a Heroine model in mind, but now that it’s written I can see the stages of Vivienne’s quest: Her early embrace of masculine power and allies, the delays in finding her true family and true mission, the conversion of her skills to a new purpose, her embrace of long life as the source of continued transformation. While writing this book I kept saying Vivienne was nothing like me, but I see now that her life is a metaphor for my own (or vice versa).
Those are the stages in my Crone’s Journey; what are yours?
Your Turn
Our older years are far more than a lovely vacation that ends in death. And those of us who are Creative Crones have the privilege of creating art that is founded in the perspective and wisdom our years have brought us. Art that takes what we know and transforms it. Art that transcends mortality and refuses the false narrative that equates aging only with decline. Art that knows the value of the Crone’s Journey.
Whether you are a visual artist, a musician, an actor or a writer, try playing with the mythic structure of your own life, your own journey. Where have you been, where are you now, and where are you going? Where did you encounter obstacles and overcome them? Your stories are well worth telling, and play is the key to the adventure.
