Authors: Rollo May
The Cry for Myth (23 page)
For the “briar” is a form of feminine protection and assertion. It is a statement that even the girl child’s “briars” are present as a warning against anybody who seeks to break in when she is not yet ready. We may take “rose” as a symbol of the vagina—a rose is lovely with its exquisite folds, its secret promises, and its unknown depths and joys for the chosen suitor. This symbol of the rose leads to the many vaginal-like creations, such as rose windows in cathedrals, which are regularly accepted as symbols leading into such great adventure. The tale is not at all a picture of passivity but an assertive statement which requires what I call later in this chapter “creative waiting.”
In America and Western Europe we are living in the age of women’s assertion after centuries in which women were passive responders to male desires and biologically prisoners of their own bodies. Now with contraceptives women can achieve pleasure of the body without the age-old penalty of pregnancy. And with abortion, apart from the difficult moral questions involved, women have some choice about whose child they will carry. Women nowadays can choose to have families on their own—single-parent families, with the woman impregnated by a man of her choice or by semen from a sperm bank, or by adoption of an orphan.
Briar Rose
had her natural protections by virtue of thorns; these briars were the protection the girl child possessed as she moved into adulthood.
The same is true concerning women’s reactions to their men’s affairs. Time was when men had a multitude of affairs, like the bee in the song in
The King and I
which goes into as many flowers as it can, whereas the flower must stay put in the ground. Nowadays women as well have choice about their sexual partners. In this sense “Briar Rose” was always the fitting
title for this myth and was changed, we venture to suggest, in late centuries to fit the well-known cliches of women’s passivity.
We turn to this tale “Briar Rose,” which has not yet been infused with consciousness. As we read it literally in Grimms’ fairy tales, it has a happy ending, and nobody has to work anything through—which is one distinction between a fairy tale and a myth.
Fairy tales are our myths before we become conscious of ourselves
. Only fairy tales were present in the Garden of Eden before the mythic “fall” of Adam and Eve. The myth, then, adds the existential dimensions to the fairy tale. Myths challenge us to confront our destiny, our death, our love, our joy. The myth adds the universal dimension because every adult has to confront his or her fate in love and death. Fairy tales can become myths, as does this one about passivity and freedom in a love which applies to all of us, male as well as female. But though “Briar Rose” is still a fairy tale, we see pushing through some aspects of human struggle and consciousness.
Students in my classes always take care to point out (and I agree) that there are many men in our culture who exemplify Briar Rose, and conversely not a few women who are Peer Gynts. We all confront the problems of our own freedom and our responsibility for our own selves, whether by active escape like Peer Gynt or by fortifying ourselves against the opposite sex like Briar Rose.
As a tale of awakening, Briar Rose begins as a description of the vicissitudes of emerging femininity. It is the presentation of the problem and dynamics which inevitably accompany this development. The contradiction and the conflict in the story are that this growing girl, Briar Rose, wishes to develop, but the motive power for her development is given over to another,
namely, the prince who shall come and kiss her into womanhood.
If we see this in psychological terms, it is not unlike Peer Gynt. Briar Rose moves toward the emerging of her own powers, particularly her sexual capacities, but the movement is dependent upon some creature, some force outside herself, namely, the imagined prince. I believe this phenomenon—now taking the story as a myth rather than a fairy tale—reflects a profound contradiction in modem women and in the development of their femininity. In decades past, they have been expected by the culture to seek their development by exactly the process which no longer produces it—namely, making one’s self dependent on the prince, who will suddenly come, riding on a white horse to hack with his sword a swath through the thorns.
Before we go into the fairy tale of Briar Rose itself, I will present some vignettes from a case of a patient in psychoanalysis who represents this dilemma. This woman of thirty, whom I shall call Sylvia, was married and had a daughter of three and a son just born at the time of her consultations. Her chief difficulties, which had hounded her for her whole life, were a lack of spontaneity, a lack of feeling in social relationships, and a general difficulty in experiencing herself as a woman. Along with these went a specific sexual problem—she had no sexual passion—and understandably a general feeling of profound emotional inadequacy. Her husband had affairs outside the marriage and was considering divorce because of her coldness and disinterest in sex. Indeed, she came for psychoanalytic treatment originally at the insistence of her husband and his family.
Like Briar Rose in the tale she had developed late, menstruation not coming till seventeen, her breasts and other feminine aspects of her body developing proportionately late. She had three older brothers, and in her position in the family she had had plenty of reason to experience herself as a little princess. As is often the case in this kind of configuration, her mother was a
seemingly ineffectual person who controlled the father by masochistic behavior.
The pattern of Sylvia showed itself by a very great passivity, an inertia, and a tendency to go literally to sleep. Particularly on trains she would assume a fetal position as nearly as possible whenever she was faced with a problem. This tendency came out dramatically in her literal grogginess during psychoanalytical hours. One enlightening session she brought a dream which was a dream within a dream: she was explaining to me the following words, “I haven’t come to terms with Orville Johnson.” Orville Johnson was a boyfriend when she was seven or eight.
During that hour she described falling asleep as a “curling up and being like a fetus.” “Going to sleep is a way of going back to the beginning, to be reborn—reborn not warped.” At a later time she had dreams of herself and her daughter both in the kitchen, and she was afraid “I will grow old before I grow up,” which is exactly what happens with women in this pattern. The night following that dream came one in which I was present: “You and I were sleeping in the same room. We were snowbound. You were on the couch and I was on the cot. You complimented me when we woke up that 1 slept with such serenity.” This dream, she stated, refers to her therapy, as a womb in which she was waiting to be born, and she is complimented by the therapist for being so “child-like.”
We see already in these simple terms a scene with the dramatic personae of the Briar Rose tale: she sleeps sweetly, the man (myself) is present, though she ostensibly has me sleeping too rather than awakening her. My complimenting her has the effect of constituting her biologically. What is especially important is that being passive also can have a positive function; it may be a method of transformation.
Sylvia had an extensive feeling of being “transported” by men, being lifted up and experiencing sexual feeling at the same time. She used “transport” as meaning to carry, and to carry her away; one is “transported” by love and sex and ecstasy.
We are also transported by trains, and Sylvia had the same feeling of pleasure and sexual excitement when riding on a train as she had had when she, as a little girl, had been lifted up and carried by her father. When I asked about her feelings when such experiences occurred, she retorted, “I don’t want to talk about it or dissect it, I’m afraid I’ll lose it.” Through this portion of the therapy, she was often prickly; I could often feel the “briar” without the rose.
Let us pause at this point to go directly to the Briar Rose tale and later return to Sylvia to discover the dynamics that underlie this tale.
The fairy tale goes as follows:
A long time ago there were a king and queen who said every day: “Ah, if only we had a child!” but they never had one. But it happened that once when the queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the land, and said to her: “Your wish shall be fulfilled; before a year has gone by, you shall have a daughter.”
*
What the frog had said came true, and the queen had a little girl who was so pretty that the king could not contain himself for joy, and ordered a great feast. He invited not only his kindred, friends and acquaintances, but also the Wise Women, in order that they might be kind and well-disposed towards the child. There were thirteen of them in his kingdom, but, as he had only twelve golden plates for them to eat out of, one of them had to be left at home.
The Wise Women bestowed their magic gifts upon the baby: one gave virtue, another beauty, a third riches, and so on with everything in the world that one can wish for.
When eleven of them had made their promises, suddenly the thirteenth came in. She wished to avenge herself for not having been invited, and without greeting, or even looking at anyone, she cried with a loud voice: “The king’s daughter shall in her fifteenth year prick herself with a spindle, and fall down dead.” And, without saying a word more, she turned round and left the room.
They were all shocked; but the twelfth, whose good wish still remained unspoken, came forward, and as she could not undo the evil sentence, but only soften it, she said: “It shall not be death, but a deep sleep of a hundred years, into which the princess shall fall.”
So far we recognize a tale that we already have long known. Many readers will be familiar with the usual biological and psychoanalytic interpretation of this tale, namely, that it has to do with the onset of menstruation symbolized in the princess pricking her finger, after which there comes a latency period and then she is awakened into sexual awareness and sexual excitement by the kiss of the man. There is validity, albeit oversimplification, in this biological interpretation; it can be accepted from a biological point of view.
But our concern here is to see this tale as a myth, putting it into a broader perspective, and to ask not only how this child develops as a biological organism but how she becomes a
human
being. It is the story of a
being
, Briar Rose, in the process of
becoming
. It is a tale of the girl caught in passivity but needing to act responsibly for her own life. Our search is to clarify the problem of the affirmation of her freedom and responsibility.
The story begins with a wish. In one sense every tale, every myth, every emergence of a new element in one’s development starts with a wish, a yearning for some new element of being, a longing for some fulfillment. Here it is, also appropriately, a
conceiving
. We conceive many different things: an idea, a plan, a work of art, a baby.
The birth is predicted by an archaic element, namely, the frog. Appearing in many of Grimms’ fairy tales and in mythology of all sorts since, the frog is that creature with one foot in our previous evolutionary development, the water, and another foot on land. It represents the archaic element in its cold and slimy qualities, and also in its big eyes, primitive as they are, which can at least peer powerfully. The frog here stands for the point in evolution when our human forebears crawled out of
the swamps and slime but kept the possibility of living in water as well.
*
Some persons regard the frog as symbolic for intercourse and thus conclude that the queen met a man at her bathing spot and cuckolded the king. This is entirely possible since frogs in Grimms’ tales often have this sexual role.
Then come the wise women, highly significant figures. We may see them as the women with whom this growing baby girl will have to identify. The developing child will be helped to get virtues and abilities from identifying with her mother, aunts, schoolteachers, and, as it turns out in this myth later, grandmother. These and other women—hopefully women of wisdom in real life—will be there living out certain virtues and abilities which have an educational (
e-ducere
—to draw out) effect upon the girl-child. The identification that goes on is a normal and healthy part of all development.
But there are two cautions to be made about it. One is that identification should be as much in awareness as possible. That is, one should know what and whom one is identifying with. Identification will always go on; but our autonomy and future growth are protected by the fact that it is not blind and compulsive but occurs in the subject’s awareness as well as in unconsciousness.
Another point which becomes critical later in this tale is that the little girl-child must not only identify with these women but also get free from them. The identifying
with
and getting free
from
is the ever recurring paradox of the umbilical cord as it comes out in tales and myths of every kind. It is the fundamental problem of all human individual development: each person must negotiate the biological tie in order
to gain his or her being, and then to go beyond it
to more highly differentiated dimensions of consciousness.
There enters the evil element at exactly the dramatic time, for while we are taking the new steps, we are most vulnerable to
evil. It was easier to describe this in the older religious myths of Satan’s tempting us most strongly at exactly the time when we are achieving some spiritual good. The thirteenth old woman embodies a particular kind of evil,
spite
and
envy
, which often go together, as we will presently see. In her curse that Briar Rose will die at the age of fifteen, it is important that she will die before she has come into her full femininity.
Now enters the twelfth good woman—those numbers, twelve and thirteen, are obviously symbolically significant—who can commute this ultimate fate from death into the sleep of one hundred years. One hundred years is a century: we take it as meaning the girl will sleep from one age to another in the sense of one age of hers to another. In other words, Sylvia must “come to terms with Orville Johnson.”