Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (23 page)

leaving just us ... and the springtime ... and down by the river, another mother duck begins to brood on her nest of eggs.

The problem of the exiled one is primeval. Many fairy tales and myths center around the theme of the outcast. In such tales, the central figure is tortured by events outside her venue, often due to a poignant oversight. In “The Sleeping Beauty” the thirteenth fairy is overlooked and not invited to the christening, which results in a curse being placed upon the child, effectively exiling everyone in one way or another. Sometimes exile is enforced through sheer meanness, as when the stepmother casts her stepdaughter out into the dark wood in “Vasalisa the Wise.”

Other times exile comes about as the result of a naive error. The Greek God Hephaestus took his mother’s, Hera’s, side in an argument with Zeus, her husband. Zeus became infuriated and hurled Hephaestus off Mount Olympus, banishing and crippling him.

Sometimes exile comes from striking a bargain one does not understand, such as in the tale of a man who agrees to wander as a beast for a certain number of years in order to win some gold, and later discovers he’s given his soul to the devil in disguise.

“The Ugly Duckling” theme is universal. All stories of “the exile” contain the same nucleus of meaning, but each is surrounded by different frills and furbelows reflecting the cultural background of the story as well as the poetry of the individual teller.

The core meanings we are concerned with are these: The duckling of the story is symbolic of the wild nature, which, when pressed into circumstances of little nurture, instinctively strives to continue no matter what. The wild nature instinctively holds on and holds out, sometimes with style, other times with little grace, but holds on nevertheless. And thank goodness for that. For the wildish woman, duration is one of her greatest strengths.

The other important aspect of the story is that when an individual’s particular kind of soulfulness, which is both an instinctual and a spiritual identity, is surrounded by psychic acknowledgment and acceptance, that person feels life and power as never before.

Ascertaining one’s own psychic family brings a person vitality and belongingness.

Exile of the Unmatched Child

In the story, the various creatures of the village peer at the “ugly” duckling and one way or another pronounce him unacceptable. He is not ugly in reality, but he does not match the others. He is so different that he looks like a black bean in a bushel of green peas. The mother duck at first tries to defend this duckling whom she believes to be her offspring. But finally she is profoundly divided emotionally and withdraws from caring for the alien child.

His siblings and others of his community fly at him, peck at him, torment him. They mean to chase him away. And the ugly duckling is heartbroken really, to be rejected by his own. It is a terrible thing, especially since he really did nothing to warrant it other than look different and act a little different. If truth be told, we have here, before the creature is even half grown, a duckling with a massive psychological complex.

Girl children who display a strong instinctive nature often experience significant suffering in early life. From the time they are babies, they are taken Captive, domesticated, told they are wrongheaded and improper. Their wildish natures show up early. They are curious, artful, and have gentle eccentricities of various sorts, ones that, if developed, will constitute the basis for their creativity for the rest of their lives. Considering that the creative life is the soul’s food and water, this basic development is excruciatingly critical.

Generally, early exile begins through no fault of one’s own and is exacerbated by the misunderstanding, the cruelty of ignorance, or through the intentional meanness of others. Then, the basic self of the psyche is wounded early on. When this happens, a girl begins to believe that the negative images her family and culture reflect back to her about herself are not only totally true but are also totally free of bias, opinion, and personal preference. The girl begins to believe that she is weak, ugly, unacceptable, and that this will continue to be true no matter how hard she tries to reverse it

A girl is banished for the e
xact reasons we see in “The Ugly
Duckling.’ In many cultures, there is an expectation when the female child is born that she is or will become a certain type of person, acting in a certain time-honored way, that she will have a certain set of values, which if not identical to the family’s, then at least based on the family’s values, and which at any rate will not rock the boat. These expectations are defined very narrowly when one or both parents suffer from a desire for “the angel child,” that is, the “perfect” conforming child.

In some parents’ fantasy whatever child they have will be perfect, and will reflect only the parents' ways and means. If the child is wildish, she may, unfortunately, be subjected to her parents’ attempts at psychic surgeiy over and over again, for they are trying to re-make the child, and more so trying to change what her soul requires of her. Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.

Neither the child’s soul nor her psyche can accommodate this. Pressure to be “adequate,” in whatever manner authority defines
it,
can chase the child away, or underground, or set her to wander for a long time looking for a place of nourishment and peace.

When culture narrowly defines what constitutes success or desirable perfection in anything—looks, height, strength, form, acquisitive power, economics, manliness, womanliness, good children, good behavior, religious belief—then corresponding mandates to measure oneself against these criteria are introjected into the psyches of all the members of that culture. So the issues of the exiled wildish woman are usually twofold: inner and personal, and outer and cultural.

Let us attend here to the inner issues of the exile, for when one develops adequate strength—not perfect strength, but moderate and serviceable strength—in being oneself and finding what one belongs to, one can then influence the outer community and cultural consciousness in masterful ways. What is moderate strength?

It is when the internal mother who mothers you isn’t one hundred percent confident about what to do next Seventy-five percent confident will do nicely. Seventy-five percent is a goodly amount. Remember, we say that a flower is blooming whether it is in half, three-quarters, or full bloom.

While we can interpret the mother in the story as symbolic of one’s externa
l mother, most who are grown up
now have as a legacy from their actual mother, an internal mother. This is an aspect of psyche that acts and responds in a manner identical to a woman’s experience in childhood with her own mother. Further, this internal mother is made from not only the experience of the personal mother but also other mothering figures in our lives, as well as the images held out as the good mother and the bad mother in the culture at the time of our childhoods.

For most adults, if there was trouble with the mother once but there is no more, there is still a duplicate mother in the psyche who sounds, acts, responds the same as in early childhood. Even though a woman’s culture may have evolved into more conscious reasoning about the role of mothers, the internal mother will have the same values and ideas about what a mother should look like, act like, as those in one’s childhood culture.
³

In depth psychology, this entire maze is called
the mother complex.
It is one of the core aspects of a woman’s psyche, and it is important to recognize its condition, strengthening certain aspects, alighting some, dismantling others, and beginning over again if necessary.

The duck mother in the story has several qualities, which we’ll analyze one by one. She is representative of, all at the same time, an ambivalent mother, a collapsed mother, and an unmothered mother. By examining these mothering structures, we can begin to assess whether, our own internal mother complex staunchly sustains our unique qualities, or whether it needs a long overdue adjustment.

THE AMBIVALENT MOTHER

In our story the duck mother is cut away, forced away from her instincts. She is taunted for having a child who is different She is divided emotionally, and as a result collapses, and withdraws her caring from the alien child. Although initially she tries to stand firm, the duckling’s “otherness” begins to jeopardize the mother’s safety in her own community, and she tucks her head and dives.

Have you not witnessed a mother forced to such a decision, if not fully, then partially? The mother bends to the desires of her village, rather than aligning herself with her child. Right into the present, mothers still act out the well-founded fears of centuries of women before them; to be shut out of the community is to be ignored and regarded with suspicion at the least, and to be hunted down and destroyed at the worst. A woman in such environs will often try to mold her daughter so that she acts “properly” in the outer world—thereby hoping to save her daughter and herself from attack.

This is a mother and a child who are then both divided. In “The Ugly Duckling,” the duck mother is psychically divided and this causes her to be pulled in several different directions, which is what ambivalence is all about. Any mother who has ever been under fire will recognize her. One pull is her own desire to be accepted by her village. Another is for self-preservation. The third pull is to respond to the fear that she and her child will be punished, persecuted, or killed by the village. This fear is a normal response to an abnormal threat of psychic or physical violence. The fourth pull is the mother’s instinctual love for her child and the preservation of that child.

It is not uncommon in punitive cultures for women to be tom between being accepted by the ruling class (her village) and loving her child, be it a symbolic child, creative child, or biological child. This is an old, old story. Women have died psychically and spiritually for trying to protect the unsanctioned child, whether it be their art, their lover, their politics, their offspring, or their soul life. At the extreme, women have been hanged, burned, and murdered for defying the village proscriptions and sheltering the unsanctioned child.

A mother with a child who is different must have the endurance of Sisyphus, the fearsomeness of the Cyclops, and the tough hide of Caliban
⁴
to go against a mean-spirited culture. The most destructive cultural
conditions for a woman to be born
into and to live under are those that insist on obedience without consultation with one’s soul, those with no loving forgiveness rituals, those that force a woman to choose between soul and society, those where compassion for others is walled off by economic tiers or caste

systems, where the body is seen as something needing to be “cleaned” or as a shrine to be regulated by
fíat,
where the new, the unusual, or the different engenders no delight, and where curiosity and creativity are punished and denigrated instead of rewarded, or rewarded only if one is not a woman, where painful acts are perpetrated on the body and called holy, or whenever a woman is punished unjustly, as Alice Miller puts it succinctly, “for her own good,”
⁵
where the soul is not recognized as a being in its own right

When a woman has this ambivalent mother construct in her own psyche, she may find herself giving in too easily; she may find herself afraid to take a stand, to demand respect, to assert her right to do it, leam it, live it in her own way.

Whether these issues derive from an internal construct or an external culture, in order for the mothering function to withstand such constraints, she must have some very fierce qualities, qualities that, in many cultures, are considered masculine. For generations, sadly, the mother who wanted to engender esteem in herself and her offspring needed the very qualities that were expressly forbidden to her vehemence, fearlessness, and fearsomeness.

For a mother to happily raise a child who is slightly or largely different in psyche and soul needs from that of the mainstream culture, she must have a start on some heroic qualities herself. She must be able, like the heroines of myths, to find and obtain these qualities if they are not allowed, to shelter them, unleash them at the right time, and stand for herself and what she
believe
s.
There is almost no way to make oneself ready for this, other than to take a deep draft of courage, and then act. Since time out of mind a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.

THE COLLAPSED MOTHER

Finally, the duck mother can no longer stand the harassment of the child she has helped into the world. But what is even more telling is that she can no longer tolerate the torment she herself experiences from her community as she attempts to protect her “alien” child. So she collapses. She cries to the little duckling, “I wish you were far away.” And the tortured duckling runs away.

When a mother collapses psychologically, it means she has lost her sense of herself. She may be a malignantly narcissistic mother who feels entitled to be a child herself. More likely she has been severed from the wildish Self and has been frightened into the collapse by some real threat, psychic or physical.

When people collapse, they usually slide into one of three feeling states: a muddle (they are confused), a wallow (they feel no one adequately sympathizes with their travail), or a pit (an emotional replay of an old wounding, often an uncorrected and unaccounted-for injustice done to them when they themselves were children).

The way to cause a mother to collapse is to divide her emotionally. The most common way, time out of mind, has been to force her to choose between loving her child and fearing what harm the village will visit on her and the child if she does not comply with the rules. In
Sophie's Choice
by William Styron, the heroine, Sophie, is a prisoner in a Nazi extermination camp. She stands before the Nazi commandant with her two children in her arms. The commandant forces her to choose which of the two children will live and which will die by telling Sophie that if she refuses to make a choice both children will be killed.

While to be forced to make such a choice is unthinkable, it is a psychic choice that mothers have been forced to make for eons. Obey the rules and kill off your children, or else. It goes on. When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture. A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed. This “culture” can be the one a woman lives in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind.

There are countless literal examples of this throughout the world,
⁶
some of the most heinous examples being found in America where it has been traditional to force women away from their loved ones and from the things they love. There was the long and ugly history of breaking families forced into slavery in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. There is in the last many centuries the proscription that mothers should surrender

their sons to the nation for the sake of war, and be glad of it.
Hiere
are the forced “repatriations” that continue yet today.
⁷

There have been various fashions at various times throughout the world that proscribe that a woman should not be allowed to love and shelter whomever she loves and in whichever way she wishes.

One of the least-spoken-about oppressions of women’s soul lives concerns millions of unmarried mothers or never-married mothers throughout the world, including the United States, who, in this century alone, were pressured by cultural mores to hide their condition or their children, or else to kill or surrender their offspring, or to live a half-life under assumed identities and as reviled and disempowered citizens.
⁸

For generations women accepted the role of legitimizing humans through marriage to a man. They agreed that a human was not acceptable unless a man said so. Without that “masculine” protection, the mother is vulnerable. It is ironic then that in “The Ugly Duckling” the father is mentioned only once. That is when the duck mother is brooding on the ugly duckling egg. She laments about the father of her offspring: “That scoundrel hasn’t come to visit me once.” For a long time in our culture, the father— unfortunately, and for whatever reasons
⁹
—was unable or unwilling to “be there” for anyone, most sorely, even himself. One could easily say that for many, many wildish girl children, the father was a collapsed man, just a shade who hung himself along with his coat in the closet every night.

When a woman has a collapsing mother construct within her psyche and/or her culture, she is wobbly about her worth. She may feel that choices between fulfilling outer demands and the demands of soul are life-and-death issues. She may feel like a tormented outsider who belongs nowhere—which is relatively normal for the exile—but what is not normal is to sit down and cry about it and do nothing. One is supposed to get to one’s feet and go off in search of what one belongs to. For the exile, that is always the next step, and for a woman with an internalized collapsing mother, it is the quintessential step. If a woman has a collapsing mother, she must refuse to become one to herself also.