A BALANCED EARTH, Chapter 2, part 1

The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Hello beloved reader,

This post is a continuation of the serialization of my book. Please click this following link to read the contents I’ve serialized so far:

A BALANCED EARTH: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine for Personal and Planetary Healing

Chapter 2: The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Section 2.1

Throughout my twenties, thirties, and early forties while working in New York’s corporate hierarchies, I did what many women do inside a story not written with us in mind: I learned the game. I polished the armor, mastered the rules, and learned when I could bend and sometimes break them. Perhaps because of my unconventional upbringing in Australia—with a radical mother who used the archetypal language of astrology as a parenting tool in raising her four daughters—on some level I knew corporate life was a game. And I played it to win.

But as I climbed the corporate ladder, my soul began to question, is this all there is? I had become a chameleon; fitting in, delivering what management required. But where was my own soul’s expression? That answer came later.

It came after I left the city when my husband had recovered from cancer (and the treatment!) and both of us wanted to take a year out; after I began studying the world’s religions; after many mornings of sitting in the silence of spiritual practice; after a clear, steady voice arose from a deeper place within and whispered, “You know you need to write.” I followed that voice into an MFA program where I took a deep dive into story and myth.

While writing memoir there, and studying the Hero’s Journey as an archetypal mythic structure, I tried to map my life onto this structural pattern. What I didn’t yet realize was that the very narrative I was trying to fit the story of my life into—the Hero’s Journey—was part of the same mythic scaffolding that had shaped my ambition. I’m grateful to have had a wise advisor to encourage me to look beyond that frame.

Only in retrospect do I see how I unconsciously believed the Hero’s Journey was the only structure that could make a story widely read. And it’s only now I can see that in a culture trained on the Hero’s Journey arc, we reward what we already recognize—creating a self-perpetuating loop.

In the Hero’s Journey, the “prize” so often is a woman: the beloved left at the hearth, the maiden asleep in a glass coffin, the queen to be won, the muse whose beauty fuels a man’s desire and destiny. She is the goal of the journey, not the journeyer. A pedestal resembles a tribute, but it is still a cage—you cannot walk very far from a pedestal.

When Maureen Murdock asked Joseph Campbell, “Where are the women in this journey?” Campbell famously answered by placing woman in relation to the hero: mother, protectress, goal. His answer was not random; it revealed the organizing logic of a patriarchal mythic frame. Within that frame, woman is a symbol that catalyzes a man’s growth, not a sovereign subject with a path of her own. If she is the destination, she cannot be the traveler. If she is the ground of devotion, she is denied the road.

This is not an academic quibble. The stories we repeat become the air that we breathe. They migrate from the page and screen into family systems, institutions, laws, and, finally, into the interior rooms of our psyche—for both women and men. The erasure of female agency in myth does not stay in books. It expresses itself in who is invited to speak, who is assumed to lead, whose grief counts, whose wisdom is called “soft,” whose body is treated as suspect, and perhaps most importantly, whose labor is called love and therefore unpaid.

Myth writes policy by unconscious stealth.

How the Prize Replaced the Protagonist

In treating “Prize” and “Protagonist” as symbolic roles, we can explore how one archetype has displaced another. Turning women from travelers into trophies shapes not only myth and literature, but also the social imagination that grows from them.

Historical examples that echo this architecture of patriarchy are plentiful. In the Greek epic of Homer’s Odyssey, while Odysseus is away fighting in the Trojan War and then wandering for ten more years on his perilous return voyage, his wife Penelope remains at home and holds Ithaca together. She is besieged by suitors who assume Odysseus is dead and press her to remarry so one of them can claim his throne.

Penelope’s genius lies in how she stalls them through cunning and patience. She promises she will choose a new husband once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father. By day she weaves diligently; by night she secretly unravels her work so the shroud is never complete. For three years she keeps the suitors at bay, until one of her maids betrays her.

Penelope embodies loyalty, cleverness, and endurance. But in the mythic structure, she is still cast as the woman who waits while the male hero earns his legend through action, conquest, and adventure. Odysseus returns celebrated as the heroic adventurer, while Penelope’s achievement is her fidelity and her ability to delay.

The entire legend depends on her endurance—her ability to hold everything together in his absence. Without her constancy, there would be no home to return to, no happy ending, no “hero’s triumph.” Her waiting becomes the invisible architecture that props up the myth—and by extension, the patriarchal world. Her endurance becomes the architecture of patriarchy—the hero’s legend depends on her stillness; his freedom on her containment.

This “architecture of patriarchy” points toward the structural framework of patriarchal storytelling—the invisible scaffolding that upholds male-centered myths. Penelope’s “stillness,” her passive virtue, is what that structure relies upon. The man gets motion, risk, and narrative growth; the woman’s virtue is to remain unchanged, to anchor the world he departs from and returns to. Her lack of motion is what allows him to move.

Patriarchy itself depends on women’s endurance—emotional labor, loyalty, waiting, holding families, institutions, or societies together while men pursue public power or glory. Her stillness, her patience, her silence—all these traits are idealized as “virtues,” but they also serve as the foundation that sustains a system built on unequal mobility and voice.

Where are we invited into her interiority? That absence itself is revealing. Penelope’s silence—her withheld thoughts, her waiting, her coded speech—becomes her form of power. She operates in the gaps of a patriarchal narrative.

Later writers—Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller, and many feminist critics—have treated that absence as creative space, the very void where women’s subjectivity can speak. Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) directly re-voices The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. When we hear the story told through Penelope’s voice, it prompts us to question how stories get told, who tells them, and whose version becomes “truth.” Atwood exposes how ancient stories naturalized hierarchy and gender violence. The way she tells the story reclaims agency for women relegated to the margins of epic history—and once again we can see the irony of the word history—it is exactly that: his story, not hers.

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) imagines Gilead, a theocracy that seizes a collapsing America and reduces women to roles—most brutally, Handmaids whose bodies are conscripted for reproduction. Told through Offred’s quiet, razor-edged interiority, the novel shows how power works through language, ritual, and the policing of memory. Atwood has famously noted that none of Gilead’s cruelties are “new”—they’re historical precedents reassembled into doctrine. It’s a parable of patriarchal myth made law: when the state authors the story, women become vessels; when a woman narrates from inside it, the story begins to crack.

I also recommend the TV series adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (at least the first season), which beautifully coincided with the first election of the 45^th president of the United States, whom shall not be named here, but who is also known as the orange one. And I feel particular glee in noticing how his election catalyzed new waves of feminist art and protest.

Atwood’s The Testaments (2019) returns to Gilead through three female narrators—a child of the regime, a girl born beyond its borders, and the infamous Aunt Lydia, now writing her own subversive confession. Together their voices reveal the machinery of a theocracy sustained by women’s complicity and courage. If The Handmaid’s Tale showed the cage, The Testaments shows how women—each in her own way—begin to pick the lock.

Madeline Miller, the American novelist, classicist, and teacher best known for her modern retellings of ancient Greek myths from a fresh, emotionally rich, and often feminist perspective, similarly re-centers the silenced. Circe (2018) gives the so-called sorceress her own arc of exile, craft, and sovereign becoming; and Galatea (2013/2022) overturns the Pygmalion myth from the statue’s point of view.

In the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor disillusioned by real women carves an ivory statue so flawless he falls in love with his own creation. The goddess Aphrodite, moved by his devotion, brings the statue—later called Galatea—to life, rewarding his fantasy with divine approval. In this myth, woman is literally shaped by male desire: created, idealized, and animated only through his gaze. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913) transposed the myth into class and gender politics—a man ‘remakes’ a woman into his ideal. This became the Broadway musical My Fair Lady and its 1964 film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Madeline Miller’s Galatea flips the perspective: Galatea narrates her own story, exposing the violence of being “created” for someone else’s perfection and reclaiming her agency and the right to shape her own story. These themes are also echoed in the brilliant 2023 movie, Poor Things.

What patriarchal storytelling leaves unsaid becomes fertile ground for women to write themselves into being. Dr. Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted (2016 UK; 2019 US) likewise invites us to reclaim, revisit, and reimagine stories of feminine power, place, myth, and connection long suppressed or distorted.

In Arthurian legend, Guinevere is written less as a sovereign agent than as a hinge on which male honor swings. Her love with Lancelot—fated or forbidden—fractures the Round Table and ignites wars of loyalty. In some tellings, she is sentenced to death for adultery but rescued by Lancelot, escalating the conflict further.

The key point: Guinevere’s role is less about her own inner life or sovereignty, and more about being the pivot of male honor, loyalty, and rivalry. She is written as the beautiful object whose choices (or even passive presence) catalyze the fall of Arthur’s realm, rather than as a moral agent whose own voice and vision shape the story. In short, Guinevere is not given the center of gravity; she is the fulcrum of a masculine tragedy. The epic drama plays out through Arthur and Lancelot, while her interiority—her loves, her griefs, her wisdom—is rarely explored.

More recently, women writers have reclaimed Guinevere as a fully realized protagonist rather than a plot device for Arthur and Lancelot. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1983) became a landmark in feminist reinterpretations of myth—retelling the Arthurian legends from the perspectives of its women, especially Morgaine (Morgan le Fay) and Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere). Its success helped spark a wave of late-20th-century retellings that centered female agency and spirituality within traditionally male-dominated myths.

In the decades since, a chorus of women novelists has continued to center Guinevere’s voice from strikingly different angles.¹ Together these retellings move Guinevere from trophy to tactician, from symbol to subject—granting her political agency, emotional complexity, and spiritual depth. Across them, she shifts from symbol of adultery to strategist, sovereign, mystic, and heroine, revealing how Arthurian myth can hold female-centered power, desire, and consequence. In reclaiming her story, the myth itself begins to heal its imbalance.

Across myth and literature, we can trace a slow tectonic shift—the Divine Feminine rising through story itself. Perhaps we are approaching a threshold where the next evolution of myth will not only center women’s voices and expose patriarchal toxicity, but also teach us how to create healthy partnerships, and model the sacred reciprocity required for a more Balanced Earth. When women are permitted to speak, the story itself changes shape. The moral is no longer obedience or redemption through another’s gaze or perspective—it becomes awakening, autonomy, and interdependence. In these retellings, the prize steps off the pedestal and begins to walk and journey herself.

And yet much of contemporary storytelling still runs on the hero’s engine: the “strong female character” is strong only insofar as she fuels his growth. In modern media, often if a woman claims protagonist status instead of playing support, she’s cast as a problem—sometimes even demonized. Yoko Ono comes to mind.

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1. Rosalind Miles’s trilogy plants us squarely in Guinevere’s point of view; Nancy McKenzie offers an intimate, psychologically nuanced queen; Persia Woolley grounds her in a plausibly historical Britain; Alice Borchardt envisions a mythic warrior-leader; Sarah Zettel’s Camelot romances foreground women’s choices within webs of alliance; Nicole Evelina’s indie trilogy follows Guinevere in first person from girlhood to legend; and Kiersten White’s YA (young adult) tale recasts her at the heart of a twisty, magic-laced intrigue.