True myth, according to Le Guin, ‘arises only in the process of connecting the conscious and the unconscious realms’. From this ‘unconscious realm’, myth releases ‘the common darkness’, familiar archetypal images: ‘dragons, heroes, quests; objects of power, voyages at night and under sea’. And we tell myths, stories, she says, ‘for the purpose of gaining understanding’ of what it means to be fully human. But human experience, while personally a constant, as almost every human experiences birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity and death, is, for the species, in flux. We travel by air where we once walked or rode on horseback. The descendants of slaves are professors, doctors, lawyers and politicians. Instead of handwritten letters that took days to cross a continent, e-mail messages flicker across phone lines in seconds. Female astronauts, telephone lineworkers, lumberjacks and university chancellors are no longer novelties. Openly gay men and women serve in political and diplomatic posts. Those silenced a generation ago now speak loud and clear.

Because of this constancy and because of this change, myths need to be retold, over and over, to be useful. The needs and wants of the audience must be accounted for, as well as the purpose of the speaker. For each generation then ‘the myths and tales we learned as children – fables, folktales, legends, hero-stories, god-stories’ must be retold, rethought, revisioned. This revisioning may be a shift in point of view, or bringing to the foreground people and things and creatures on the periphery, or in the background.

It is Le Guin's revisioning, reimagining, that I am interested in exploring here, especially what she does with the monomyth, the story of the Hero and the Quest, in The Dispossessed and the Earthsea tetralogy. It is my argument here that the reshaping of the Monomyth is progressive and increasingly more radical in form. Le Guin's progressive reshaping makes rhetorical use of the monomyth. By inverting the monomyth and redefining its hero, Le Guin both validates the ancient truths of the myth and asks the myth to be revisioned. To go from Shevek, the physicist as hero, who is the protagonist of The Dispossessed, to Tenar, a farmer's widow and the protagonist of Tehanu, is a statement of this revisioning, in terms of gender, social class and the nature of what a quest should be.