Two of the most common themes explored in the narrative worlds of fiction, film, and television are the hero's quest for identity and the search for love. The difficulty in successfully resolving both the quest for identity and the search for love, attaining union without sacrificing independence, is a central concern of many works featuring female heroes. In criticism, in fiction, and often in real life, it seems almost impossible for a woman to enter into a romantic bond with a man without taking on a submissive role in a relationship founded on hierarchies of power rather than on equality and balance. After an exhaustive exploration of hundreds of texts, two noted feminist critics conclude that "even when male and female characters love each other with the same commitment and intensity, there is an inherent imbalance of power in the relationship" (Pearson and Pope 34), in part because of the ways in which concepts of romantic love and the soulmate have been used to make women complicit in their own oppression. (1) For the female hero, conditioned to submit to patriarchal authority and encouraged to be dependent, the "quest for a relationship in which a hero can achieve equity, authenticity, and Eros" (Pratt 44) often seems impossible. And yet these same critics acknowledge that their overwhelmingly negative conclusion is not necessarily true in the case of the female hero of fantastic fiction. In the quest fantasies of Patricia McKillip, for example, the female hero, after undertaking a journey towards identity no less difficult than that of her male counterpart, realizes both a sense of her own power within the community and a loving relationship in which both are equal partners. Over the last three decades, McKillip, one of the most respected authors of fantasy, has produced many complex and lyrical works. One of her earliest works, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, published in 1974, and the more recent The Sorceress and the Cygnet, published in 1991, feature female wizards, unusual when many wizards are still depicted as the stereotypical white-bearded male. Several short stories and a number of increasingly intricate works of fantasy make use of the quest structure, including the fairytale fantasy Winter Rose, published in 1996, an enigmatic version of the Psyche tale with sources in Andersen's "Snow Queen" and the ballad of Tam Lin, and In the Forest of Serre, published in 2003. Perhaps her best known work is the trilogy known collectively as Riddle-Master and published originally in three volumes in the late 1970s, about a reluctant farmer-prince's quest to unriddle the truth of his destiny in a powerfully conceived secondary world of myth and magic. In all of these works and others, the quest is shared equally between a male and a female hero who together achieve not only a sense of selfhood and autonomy but also a loving union with the other. Such a resolution is possible in part because the underlying structure of many of McKillip's quest fantasies is the duomyth rather than the monomyth, allowing for the redefinition of not only the roles of the hero and love object but also the concept of marriage with which the quest often ends.
