Stages of the Hero Journey (ch6-10) - The Ordeal

The Ordeal stage of the Hero Journey occurs on pages 84-87, and is made up of Janie's confrontation of Joe when he is about to die; this is her confrontation with death, although she is not herself threatened by death. After the incident in the store, Janie has been pushed away by Joe since she inflicted such damage to his pride. He now lays in his deathbed with his kidneys failing, and Janie takes advantage of this to finally confront him. Janie has made it all the way into the Special World, into the Eatonville her husband helped create, but feels subjugated by him, treated as an inferior. Joe's degraded state gives Janie a chance to rises up above him and teach him as a last lesson his follies. Says Janie to Joe: "All dis bowin' down, all dis obedience under yo' voice--dat ain't whut Ah rushed off down de road tuh find out about you."(87). In a final blow to Joe's pride and ego, his wife repudiates the control he had over her; with him stripped of all his powers, he dies.

In this sense, the novel does not exactly follow the Hero Journey. Janie herself is not faced with death, nor is she faced with her greatest fear. She faces death in the loosest sense, the death of her husband; her Ordeal was her final rejection of the bonds Joe had placed upon her. It is made clear that this is the Ordeal stage of the Hero Journey, as it is followed by a sort of Reward: "Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. [...] She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there"(87). With the Ordeal complete, she is free once more from the sort of servitude Joe had placed upon her; he had ordered her to always wear a kerchief to keep her hair hidden. In the earlier quote, it is clear that she did not approve of how Joe had subjugated her in these ways. Thus, by facing death she had acquired her reward: freedom.