People make choices every day; In the space of a single day, we can make hundreds of choices without even realizing it. Some of these choices are made for the better and others for the worse. But in reality, many of these choices are small and insignificant, like what to eat for breakfast or what shoes to wear that day. These menial choices, for the most part, do not have a major effect on our everyday lives. However, sometimes we are faced with a choice that places us at a crossroads in our life. These choices force us to think about who we are as people and who we could become. They represent the boundary between the safe and comfortable world we have always known and the unknown adventure that awaits us. Making this life-defining choice was a very important theme in Victorian poetry and remains a constant theme in many young adult novels to this day. By following the hero's journey as set out in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it can be shown that the choice made by the protagonist can set him on the path to beginning his own heroic journey. The result is the freedom to become master of your own identity and your future. The choice that is made by the protagonist is that of reformation, of becoming a different person by entering the realm of the unknown. In the case of Victorian era works, this choice can be seen in the breakdown of women's traditional gender roles in which they are controlled by societal pressures to submit to the male presence in their lives. Comparing the choice made by the Lady of Shalott in Alfred Tennyson's Victorian poem "The Lady of Shalott" with that made by the young adult character Pippa of the 2003 Victorian era......mid paper.... .. acceptance of the call also results from the destruction of a supernatural object; in this case, it is the power of the Realms. However, in this case, Pippa's defeat of the threshold guardian does not prompt her to make the choice to leave the confined and isolated gendered world, but rather provokes her refusal to return to it. When the power of the Realms becomes too much for the girls to handle, because they lack knowledge of the nature of the Realms, they accidentally unleash the evil of the Realm and almost allow it to escape into the real world. As the Kingdom collapses around her and her friends, Pippa is separated from the group and during the time she waits for them, she realizes that if she returns to the real world, all she has to hope for is to become “Mrs”. Bartley Bumble” (Bray 395). The Infinite Possibilities of the Kingdom