Girls as Heroes: Sailor Moon and Jason Campbell’s Monomyth
While the fashion industry had been buzzing over another pair of anime boots, a recent collection that caught my eye was Jimmy Choo’s collaboration with Sailor Moon which launched this Valentine’s Day. Since it’s nothing that I could afford, I got comfortable with Sailor Moon R: The Movie instead where I started thinking about it’s applicability to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory which I had been re-visiting thanks to HarperCollins’ Author Academy which I’ve been attending, and my amazingly sweet tutor, Anna Wilson.
According to Campbell, all heroic narratives go through the same cycle of departure, initiation and return. If this sounds dubious to you, fret not as this had been widely criticized with Sarah Nicholson claiming that it is predominantly male with no avenue for non-male engagement. An argument Nicholson makes in response to Campbell is that the monomyth defaults to the vantage point of the male hero as femininity is confined to the periphery through the Goddess or the Temptress archetypes, existing only in relation to the male hero. While it may seem like that’s the case if we take Campbell’s words at face value, I believe that Sailor Moon and her fellow guardians discredits these criticisms as they fights forces of evil in a capacity typically associated with male heroes without compromising their femininity. This is significant as unlike heroes such as Mulan and Joan of Arc who take on masculine personas, Sailor Moon embodies traditional concepts of femininity through her behaviour, actions, and even her powers, creating a heroic narrative that is distinctively female.
In demonstrating this, it is important to note that Jimmy Choo is of course just one of Sailor Moon’s many fashion collaborations and this is hardly surprising given that beauty crucially informs how her strength as a hero is constructed even though it is a trait that is commonly associated with women. Demonstrating this is the language used to articulate Sailor Moon’s powers. At the start of the film, she introduces herself as ‘the pretty soldier in a sailor suit’. The juxtaposition of ‘pretty’ and ‘soldier’ shows that Sailor Moon presents herself as both strength and femininity in a closely intertwined manner. Further supporting this is the way her attacks are laced with words like ‘Tiara’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Make Up’, language that is deeply associated with young girls, and the emphasis on elaborate details within the animation sequence for Moon Princess Halation, her signature move, as it features her twirling gracefully in a dynamic pose against a sparkly, dream-like backdrop. By taking away the tension from the battlefield to flaunt these elaborate sequences, beauty is shown to be an integral part of her power. As such, Sailor Moon can be said to be an example of how it is not necessary for heroes to embrace masculine ideals since her strength centers around beauty, a characteristic that is typically associated with the feminine.
By marrying heroism with femininity, complications nonetheless arise. Of note is Sailor Moon’s battle costume, an adaptation of the Japanese school uniform known as the seifuku. As the seifuku is often fetishsized and illustrated in Japanese pornographic manga, it brings to mind Nicholson’s argument that the feminine is often directed through the male gaze where women are seen as sexual objects. Nonetheless, Sailor Moon can be said to have subverted the male gaze as instead of being reduced into a mere object of lust, she asserts control and gains power and strength in her costume. This tension is best seen through her transformation where her clothes are magically removed and replaced with the costume. On top of that, her skirt flutters provocatively, giving the viewer a glimpse of her upper thigh. While this sequence may suggest that Sailor Moon had been sexualized and objectified, it is herein that she empowers herself such that she is able to move beyond a dichotomised notion of gender. Even though Sailor Moon can be said to parallel the Temptress in Campbell’s monomyth theory as they both draw their powers from their femininity, she distinguishes herself from the archetype as her allure is used for heroic purposes. Moreover, it is important to note that the seifuku is also a symbol of modernity in Japan, as it marked the emergence of a new social class, the Japanese Schoolgirl, where girls depart from the traditional roles of childhood and motherhood to develop socially and intellectually. By donning a seifuku, Sailor Moon thereby becomes an engine for change, pioneering the concept of female teenage super heroes in a genre that had been traditionally dominated by male narratives.
To further demonstrate how difficult it is to fit Sailor Moon within the monomyth’s archetypes that had been said to be reserved for women, it is apt to now look into Sailor Moon’s character. While Sailor Moon cannot be said to be submissive, she is also not dangerous and evil despite playing an active role in both her human and superhero form. Accordingly, she defies both the traditional passivity that girls are associated with and the stereotype of the dangerous, implicitly sexual, female power, such that she does not fit squarely within both tropes. A pivotal scene which demonstrates this occurs at the Jindai Botanical Garden where she attempts to create a romantic moment for herself as her human form, Usagi Tsukino. Upon explaining how forget-me-nots represent ‘true love’, she lifts her chin and puckers her lips, expecting a kiss from her boyfriend, Chiba Mamoru. While her attempt to elicit a kiss fails, she manages to balance herself between the polarized presentations of women as the humour by which her attempt is played off enables her to avoid the negative connotations that female characters who act in a more active manner are typically associated with.
Through her failure at being a Temptress, Usagi is presented as the desiring hero and while it is love that she is interest in, this does not put her at odds with being the active hero. After all, Sailor Moon’s greatest strength as a hero is love, and through love, healing. Given that a key concern of the movie is loneliness, it becomes clear why Sailor Moon, is the most powerful of all the Senshis as her power to love is the most potent cure for loneliness. Moreover, her power to love, is not exclusive to her superhero form but evident through Usagi as well. At the fight scene with the villain Fiore on the asteroid, the other Senshis reveal that Usagi had reached out to them when they have been shunned by their classmates for being different or strange through flashbacks. As a result, when she activates the Silver Crystals, at the risk of losing her own life, the other Senshis voluntarily joined hands in remembrance of their gratitude towards Usagi, for drawing them out of their loneliness with her love and friendship. Sailor Moon is therefore the most powerful as her power to love brought all of the Senshis together, such that they could achieve strength in unity. Using the Silver Crystal, she also redeems Fiore who only acted the way that he did as he was trying to seek revenge for the way mankind made him and Mamoru feel when they were younger.
Interestingly, even though this power to love echoes the Goddess’ role as the caretaker and the nurturer within the monomyth, it does not make Sailor Moon any less of a hero. By taking on the qualities of the archetypes that frame the hero’s journey and using these traits to add to her heroism, Sailor Moon enables us to understand strength in a broader and more inclusive manner without to reducing any particular features to the periphery. Campbell’s theory can thereby be said to have been nuanced as the lines drawn across the various archetypes are blurred. It is therefore not true that heroic narratives can only be told through masculine ideals since heroic feats can also be achieved through traits that had been typically associated with women.
Further supporting this is the context behind Sailor Moon’s creation. Part of the shoujo genre where narratives are articulated through a female voice, Sailor Moon’s heroic narrative is firmly located in a female-driven sphere. With teenage girls forming the key demographic of the shoujo genre, Deborah Shamoon argues that a hallmark of the genre is the way it carves out a private space for girls based on a separate set of rules and artistic conventions, distinct from mainstream manga, understood only by informed readers. That said, it is important to note that while Naoko Takeuchi, created the Sailor Moon manga as a work ‘written by a girl for girls’, the production of the anime was fronted by a team of men, tingeing the anime with a male perspective. Does this detract from the manga’s original purpose of being a platform for narratives with a female perspective then?
Given that Sailor Moon is presented as a girl who can fight in the same capacity as any superhero, such that the possibility of recounting a heroic narrative through a distinctively feminine voice is emphasized, I believe that the anime still remains as a platform for narratives with a female perspective despite its production background. Instead, what this factoid surfaces, as does its story, is how limiting it is to subscribe to strict notions of gender whereby gender roles are firmly ascribed. Perhaps our greatest failure is in believing that notions like beauty and love are intimately linked to gender roles when it is not necessarily the case. While Campbell’s theory is admittedly articulated through highly gendered tones due to his lack of research into feminine narratives (a field that had been expertly unpacked in Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces which I highly recommend), I believe that this film is useful for disproving Nicholson’s argument that women cannot fit into the heroic narrative of the monomyth through a broadening of how Campbell’s theory is to be understood. By taking on a distinctively female voice, without having to de-sexualize herself and abandon her femininity, Sailor Moon illustrates how heroic narrative as according to Campbell can be presented in a more sophisticated manner while also frustrating our understanding of gender roles and the expectations that had been pegged onto them. Heroic qualities and traits are thereby not gender exclusive as heroism can be achieved through femininity as well.
