Beyond the Sword: An Eco-Feminist Critique of the Hero’s Journey

Recently, after watching a grand cinematic retelling of The Odyssey, a familiar sensation settled in my chest as I wept. Standing at what feels unmistakably like the dusk of a civilisation, my heart was full of two things: a profound, aching grief, and a boundless, fierce love for this living Earth. We are not the first humans to watch an old world unravel, nor will we be the last to stand on the shore searching the horizon. But the stories we choose to tell about this twilight—and who gets to tell them—will shape how we meet the days ahead of us.

Beyond the Sword: An Eco- Feminist Critique of the Hero’s Journey

For centuries, Western culture has been obsessed with a single narrative arc: The Hero’s Journey.

In its classical form, this story is linear, individualistic, and deeply patriarchal. The hero leaves home to conquer foreign lands, slay monsters, subjugate nature, and extract glory before returning victorious. Nature in these myths is rarely a web of life to belong to; it is a backdrop of perils to be mastered or survived.

Even when modern cinema reimagines ancient epics with breathtaking visual scale, it often re-inscribes this same core premise: salvation comes through epic struggle, dominant leadership, and extraordinary individual heroism.

Many reviews of the film have noted Nolan’s explicit framing of the story around the Bronze Age collapse. Rather than a straightforward mythic adventure, the film treats Odysseus’s journey as a story of a world unraveling, lingering on the cost of war and the weight of what gets destroyed along the way.

But what happens when the hero’s tools—conquest, extraction, and dominance—are the very things that brought about the dusk in the first place?

In her seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, author Ursula K. Le Guin offered a radical alternative. She argued that the first human tool was not a weapon of attack—not the spear, the sword, or the hero’s blade—but a vessel. A bag, a basket, a net, a container.

“If you try to write a story about a basket,” Le Guin suggested, “it isn’t a story of killing... it’s a story of gathering, holding, preserving, and sharing.”

When we transform the Hero’s Spear with an Eco-Feminist angle, the Carrier Bag, our entire relationship to collapse changes. We stop looking for a singular saviour or an escape route like the moon, mars or artifical intelligence. Instead, we start asking: What do we need to gather, hold, and steward together as the shadows lengthen?

Anthropologists remind us that one of our species' most vital survival innovations wasn't a weapon, but a blanket. Long before recorded history, the transition from simply draping animal hides to piercing and sewing portable insulation allowed early humans to survive punishing ice ages and bitter windchills. In a very real sense, stitching together fabric to keep our babies warm was humanity's first great collaborative act of care against a harsh environment—a reminder that our ancestors survived through shelter, preservation, and ingenuity rather than sheer conquest.

As mythologist Sharon Blackie observes, the classical Hero’s Journey is a linear tale of conquest and individual dominance; what our unravelling world requires now is an "Eco-Heroine’s Journey"—a post-heroic path rooted not in saving or subduing the world, but in deep, relational belonging to it.

Merwin’s Odysseus: The Fatigue of Conquest

This is where W.S. Merwin’s 1960 poem, Odysseus, speaks so quietly across the decades. Merwin strips Homer’s hero of his glory, leaving us with a figure caught in the repetitive, exhausting cycles of human hubris:

Always the setting forth was the same, Same sea, same dangers waiting for him As though he had got nowhere but older...

Merwin’s Odysseus is not a triumphant conqueror; he is weary. His memory is fading, blurred by the weight of everything he has betrayed and lost along the way. He is a portrait of humanity caught in the endless loop of setting out to conquer the world, only to realise we have lost our way home.

Yet, despite the unravelling, Merwin writes: "Therefore he went." He keeps sailing not to win a war, but because of a quiet, persistent longing for something "improbable, remote, and true."

He is no longer a hero seeking triumph; he is simply a human trying to navigate back to center.

Eco-Dharma and The Work That Reconnects: Holding Grief as Love

In both Eco-Dharma and Joanna Macy’s framework of The Work That Reconnects, we recognise that the grief we feel for our unraveling world is not a weakness to be cured, nor is it a problem for a hero to fix.

Grief and love are two sides of the exact same coin. Two tributaries that flow into the same river through the human heart. We only grieve that which we deeply love.

When we view civilisational dusk through a contemplative lens, we step outside the panic of industrial culture. In nature, dusk is not a failure; it is a sacred transition. It is the time when energy draws inward, when seeds fall into the dark earth, and when the land rests.

Eco-Dharma reminds us of impermanence —that civilisations, like seasons, rise and fall. Joanna Macy would often be quoted as saying,"Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?" Our task is not to heroically shore up a dying structure, but to stay present within the transition. To hold space for the grief, to tend the soil, and to care deeply for what remains.

Who Tells the Story from the Shore?

A feminist reinterpretation of myth forces us to ask: Who was left out of the hero's story?

Who stayed behind on the receding shore while the ships sailed off to war? Who was left at home to raise the child that Buddha abandoned in search of enlightenment? Who held the community together, planted the crops, nursed the wounded, and wove time into fabric?

• Penelope at her loom, quietly unweaving the day's work to buy time.

• The land itself, bearing the scars of armies marching across her earthly body.

• The quiet stewards whose names never made it into the epic poetry and the countless history books.

Reclaiming narrative power means shifting our gaze away from the grand conquerors and toward the quiet weavers, healers, and earth-keepers.

Many of their words were not recorded in writing but rather passed on in oral tradition and through family stories. It means recognising that history is not just made on battlefields or in cinematic spectacles—it is carried in the daily, relational acts of care, reciprocity, and presence with what matters most.

I recall when I wanted to understand the stories of my own maternal ancestors looking back for clues I found a book at Munich airport called, The Shortest History of Germany, by James Hawes. He describes how migrating Germanic tribesmen—such as the Vandals or Lombards—would invade new territories, slay the native men, and claim the local women and lands for themselves. Yet, this military conquest contained a quiet, ironic undoing: because the conquerors left the daily work of home-building and child-rearing entirely to the local women, those mothers raised the next generation in their own native languages, customs, and beliefs. Within a single generation, the fierce conquerors had effectively been culturally absorbed by the very people they claimed to have subdued—a striking historical reminder that while men may take land by the sword, it is women who shape the enduring culture of the future.

We do not need more heroes to save us from the twilight that is this meta-crisis.

We need weavers. We need holders of grief, gatherers of seed, and stewards of presence.

As we stand in the uncertainty of this era, Merwin’s words and the ancient myths remind us that even when the old world is unraveling around us, the invitation remains simple and profound:

To feel it all. To refuse to harden our hearts. To hold both the sorrow and the boundless love for life in the very same breath—and to keep navigating, together, toward what is true.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), Penelope and the Suitors. Oil on canvas, 1912.