The Heroine's Journey. Or not?

One of the joys of participating in this blog is that I so often find inspiration in the posts of my fellow hoydens. "Yes," I'll find myself thinking as I read this or that post in the weeks preceding my turn. "Yes, that's true and interesting. But for my purposes, I'd like to look at it this way..."

So, for example, qua Leslie's post about the Duchess of Windsor, her fabulous shoes and horrendous politics, some time I'd like to think more about the roots of today's romance (and mystery) genres in the Tory-ish habits of minds of writers like Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers, even P.G. Wodehouse, during the period between the wars -- the comforts (take that as you like) of class inequality in a period of political instability. For readers and writers of historical romance today, how much of the Regency England we've come to feel so much at home in actually got its polish and perfection during (and in the image of the high life of) 1930s Britain?

But that's a post that'll take more work and reading than I have time for here and now.

And anyway, this week I've been mulling over some thoughts sparked by Tracy's post about unlikeable heroines. Or my response to it, anyway, when I realized with particular emphasis and pathos how very little geographical distance Emma Woodhouse ever covers, and how unusual that is for a romance heroine.

I don't have any statistics here (and of course there are all sorts of variations and exceptions). But still, it seems to me central to the romance genre that its heroines very often embark upon journeys before they (literally and figuratively) find their ways home. In a genre that tells the story of its heroine's quest for her self and simultaneously for her ultimate home in the world, very often that heroine has to leave home, abandon the familiar and the familial in order to see herself (and others, and of course most particularly the hero) outside the accustomed map of understandings she's grown up with.

The first romances (written by second-century AD Greeks during the era when Greece had become the Roman Empire's artsy outpost -- its Tribeca, say, or perhaps its Hollywood) are almost comically clear about their stories' need for voyages, often to the ends of the known world. According to my own summary (in The Edge of Impropriety):

...most of the ancient novels were full of adventures — shipwrecks, slavery, pirate raids, lovers parted under duress. Sometimes the lovers' benighted parents even sent them off to sea — as though to make sure events would have every opportunity to separate them.

Of course the Regency hero quite often has had his war adventures. But in the heroine-centered romance tradition that began, I think, with Richardson and got its turbo charge from Jane Austen, it's the heroine in particular whom we accompany upon her voyage out into the world in order to make her own personal sense of it, herself, and others.

And yet, what does it mean to voyage out in the world? For a protected young woman of the middle classes (unlike, say, Charlotte Bronte's heroines like Lucy Snowe in Villette, who works in a school), where could she go but to someone else's home? The home might be paradisal (like Pemberley) or hellish (like Northanger Abbey), but it always hides and ultimately reveals secrets of human relationships and past suffering -- the unraveling of which is deeply interwoven with the young woman's growth beyond the familiar and familial patterns she started with.

The form, of course, reached a kind of perfection in Pride and Prejudice. The best kind of perfection, I think -- because we have three more Jane Austen novels to explore the theme in fascinating, quirky, and perhaps less romanticized variation: think of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who journeys back to her childhood home in Portsmouth to find that it isn't home any more. Or Anne Elliot in Persuasion, who (as critic Tony Tanner points out) quite radically rejects the entirety of home and family she grew up with... to find a completely new home and family as far-flung as the British Navy (and Empire) will allow.

And then there's Emma, who never leaves Hartfield (which estate, as Jane Austen points out, is just a little "notch" cut out of Donwell Abbey -- by the end of the book returned to its rightful owner). Emma is a novel of charm and brio, but it's also a story that takes place within a very tight set of limitations (perhaps even tighter than those constraining the sometimes doleful Mansfield Park).

Does a girl whose personal maturation has been so limited by the needs of an inadequate father really get to mature under the tutelage of a husband/father figure she says she will call "my Mr. Knightley"?

Emma has never even seen the sea (no mean feat for a resident of a small island nation whose middle and upper classes delighted in visits to watering places). Yes, she and her Mr. Knightley will finally go there on their honeymoon. But is this an entirely happy ending? Has Emma ever really made the sort of journey we want for our heroines?

What do you think?

And what meanings do you draw from the inner and outer voyages of your favorite romance heroines?