ABSTRACT
The popularity of the linear adventure story is unlikely to decline. The pleasure it provides-repeated arousal and satisfaction of the desire to know what will happen next-is primitive and powerful. But if the traditional patriarchal values of Western culture are to be modified to allow the development of more genuinely humane attitudes we need different hero stories, stories which do not assert the natural mastery of the European patriarchy over all other living things. As Val Plumwood points out the inevitable final stage of the culture of mastery is the global Rational Economy and the assimilation of all planetary life to the needs of the masters (Plumwood 1993:192-6). In this ultimate scenario all the remaining space on earth is gradually appropriated to the needs of the economy according to the dictates of Platonic and Cartesian ‘reason’ which sees nature as the inferior opposite of civilization, a resource to be exploited. Resources are increasingly withdrawn from those who refuse to be incorporated into the Rational Economy. Thus biodiversity dwindles and indigenous cultures are destroyed. Within the dominant culture space for love, friendship, contemplation, art, the development of psychic wholeness, is sacrificed to the needs of economic rationalism. Those who cannot conform to the demands of economic rationalism-the poor, the disabled and the old-are increasingly marginalized, and women, the irreducibly ‘other’, are either suborned or alienated. The final result, the last triumph of the hero, can only be the collapse of the culture of mastery, since nature is not an endlessly exploitable resource. We urgently need hero stories which, while retaining action and excitement, subvert the traditional dualisms and so do not impose the values of the culture of mastery upon the reader.
