Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (32 page)

In this segment of the tale, the child is to be confirmed and is taken to the shoemaker for new shoes. The confirmation motif is a relatively modem addition to this story. Archetypally, it is likely that “The Red Shoes” is a many times overlaid fragment of a far older story or myth a
bout the onset of menarche and th
e taking on of a less-mother-protected life, a young woman having been taught awareness and response to the outer world by her own female elders in previous years.
¹⁰

It is said that in the matriarchal cultures of ancient India, Egypt, parts of Asia, and Turkey—which are believed to have influenced our concept of the feminine soul for thousands of miles in all directions—the bequeathing of henna and other red pigments to young girls, so that they could stain their feet with it, was a central

feature in threshold rites.
¹¹
One of the most important threshold rites regarded first menstruation. This rite celebrated the crossing from childhood into the profound ability to bring forth life from one’s own belly, to cany the attendant sexual power and all peripheral womanly powers. The ceremony was
concerned
with red blood in all its stages: the uterine blood of menstruation, delivery of a child, miscarriage, all running downward toward the feet. As you can see, the original red shoes had many meanings.

The reference to the Day of The Innocents is also a later overlay. It refers to a Christian feast day that, in Europe, eventually eclipsed winter solstice celebrations from the old Pagan world. During the older Pagan celebrations, women practiced ritual cleansing of the feminine body and the feminine soul/spirit in preparation for figurative and literal new life in the coming spring. These rites might have included group grieving for child- bearing loss,
¹²
including the death of a child, or miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, and other important events in women’s sexual and reproductive lives from the old year.
¹³

Now in the tale occurs one of the most revealing episodes of psychic repression. The child’s voracious desire for soul ruptures the battens of her dried-out behaviors. At the shoemaker’s, she sneaks the strange red shoes past the old woman.
A
ravening hunger for the soul-life has rushed to the surface of the psyche, taking whatever it can lay its hands on, for it knows it will soon be repressed again.

This explosive psychological “sneaking” occurs when a woman suppresses large parts of self into the shadows of the psyche. In the view of analytical psychology, the repression of both negative and positive instincts, urges, and feelings into the unconscious causes them to inhabit a shadow realm. While the ego and superego attempt to continue to censor the shadow impulses, the very pressure that repression causes is rather like a bubble in the sidewall of a tire. Eventually, as the tire revolves and heats up, the pressure behind the bubble intensifies, causing it to explode outward, releasing all the inner content.

The shadow acts similarly. That is why a Scrooge-like person may amaze everyone and suddenly give millions of dollars to an orphans' home. Or why a normally sweet person is capable of

throwing a fit, temporarily acting like a Roman candle gone berserk. We find that by opening the door to the shadow realm a little, and letting out various elements a few at a time, relating to them, finding use for them, negotiating, we can reduce being surprised by shadow sneak attacks and unexpected explosions.

Though the values may change from culture to culture, thereby positing different “negatives” and “positives” in the shadow, typical impulses that are considered negative and therefore relegated to the shadowlands are those that encourage a person to steal, cheat, murder, act excessively in various ways, and so forth in that vein. The negative shadow aspects tend to be oddly exciting and yet entropic in nature, stealing balance and equanimity of mood and life from individuals, relationships, and larger groups.

The shadow also, however, can contain the divine, the luscious, beautiful, and powerful aspects of personhood. For women especially, the shadow almost always contains
very
fine aspects of being that are forbidden or given little support by her culture. At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.

These discarded, devalued, and “unacceptable” aspects of soul and self do not just lie there in the dark, but rather conspire about how and when they shall make a break for freedom. They burble down there in the unconscious, they seethe, they boil, till one day, no matter how well the lid over them is sealed, they explode outward and upward in an unchanneled torrent and with a will of their own.

Then it is, as we say up in the backwoods, like trying to put ten pounds of mud back into a five-pound sack. What has erupted from shadow is hard to cap once it has been detonated. Though it would have been far better to have found an integral way to consciously live out one’s joy in the creative spirit than to have buried it at all, sometimes a woman is pushed to the wall, and this is the outcome.

The shadow life occurs when writers, painters, dancers, mothers, seekers, mystics, students, or journeywomen stop writing, painting, dancing, mothering, looking, peering, learning, practicing. They might stop because whatever they just spent long with did not come out the way they had hoped, or did not receive the recognition it deserved, or countless other reasons. When the maker stops for whatever reason, the energy that naturally flows to her is diverted underground, where it surfaces whenever and wherever it can. Because a woman feels she cannot in daylight go full-bore at whatever it is she wants, she begins to lead a strange double life, pretending one thing in daylight hours, acting another way when she gets a chance.

When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice tidy little package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital energy down into shadow. “Fine, I’m fine,” such a woman says. We look at her across the room or in the mirror. We know she is not fine. Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe to be a pool hall queen. And we wonder what happened, because we know she hates piccolo players and always wanted to live on
Oreas
Island, not in Tippicanoe, and she never before mentioned anything about pool halls.

Like Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen’s play, the wildish woman can pretend to live “an ordinary life” while gritting her teeth, but there is always a price to pay. Hedda sneaks a passionate and dangerous life, playing games with an ex-lover and with Death. Outwardly, she pretends to be content wearing bonnets and listening to her dry husband cavil about his dusty life. A woman can be outwardly polite and even cynical, but inwardly hemorrhaging.

Or, like Janis Joplin, a woman can try to comply until she can’t stand it any longer, and then her creative nature, corroded and sickened by being forced into the shadow, erupts violently to rebel against the tenets of “breeding” in reckless ways that disregard one’s gifts and one’s very life.

You can call it anything you like, but sneaking a life because the real one is not given room enough to thrive is hard on women’s vitality. Captured and starved women sneak all kinds of things: they sneak unsanctioned books and music, they sneak friendships, sexual feeling, religious affiliation. They sneak furtive thinking, dreams of revolution. They sneak time away from their mates and families. They sneak a
treasure into the house. They sneak their writing time, their thinking time, their soul-time. They sneak a spirit into the bedroom, a poem before work, they sneak a skip or an embrace when no one’s looking.

To detour off this polarized path, a woman has to surrender the pretense. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works. It always blows out the sidewall when you’re least expecting it. Then it’s misery all around. It’s better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo the sneaking of counterfeits. Hold out for what has real meaning and health for you.

In the tale, the child ducks the shoes past the old woman with failing eyesight. Here, it is affirmed that the dry and perfectionistic value system itself is devoid of the ability to see closely, to be alert to what is going on all around. It is typical of the injured inner psyche and culture as well, to not notice the person
al distress of the self. So th
e young girl makes one more rotten choice in a long line of several.

Let us surmise that her first step to entrapment, entering the gilded carriage, was made out of ignorance. Let us say letting go of her own handiwork was thoughtless but typical of those who are inexperienced at life. But now she wants those shoes in the shoemaker’s case, and paradoxically, that impulse toward new life is right and proper, but she
has
spent too much time at the old woman’s, and her instincts do not cry out in alarm as she chooses this deadly potential. In fact
, the shoemaker conspires with th
e child. He winks and smiles about her poor choice. Together they sneak the red shoes by.

Women trick themselves this way. They’ve thrown away the treasure, whatever it might be, but they’re sneaking bits and pieces any way they can. Are they writing? Yes, but secretly, so they have no support, no feedback. The student, is she going for her edge? Yes, but secretly so that she can have no help and no mentor. Is the performer risking putting out completely original work or is she presenting pale imitations so that she becomes mime instead of exemplar? What about the ambitious woman who is pretending to be not ambitious, but who is heartfelt toward accomplishments for herself, her people, her world? She is the

powerful dreamer, yet consigns herself to struggle forward in silence. It is deadly to be without a confidante, without a guide, without even a tiny cheering section.

It is difficult to sneak little shreds of life this way but women do it every day. When a woman feels compelled to sneak life, she is in minimal subsistence mode. She sneaks life away from the hearing of “them,” whoever the “them” is in her life. She acts disinterested and calm on the surface, but whenever there is a crack of light, her starved self leaps out, runs for the nearest life form, lights up, kicks back, charges madly, dances herself silly, exhausts herself, then tries to creep back to the black cell before anyone notices she is gone.

Women with poor marriages do this. Women made to feel inferior do this. Women filled with shame, women fearing punishment, ridicule, or humiliation do this. Instinct-injured women do this. Sneaking is good for a captured woman only
if
she sneaks the right thing, only if that thing leads to her liberation. In essence, sneaking good and filling and brave pieces of life causes the soul to be even more determined that the sneaking stop, and that it be free to lead life out in the open as it sees fit.

You see, there is something in the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever on piecemeal intake. Because in actuality, it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then be content with no more. Remember when you were a child and you found out that you couldn’t do yourself in by holding your breath? Though you might try to get by on just a little air or no air at all, some big fist bellows takes over, something fierce and demanding that makes you eventually shovel the air in as fast as you can. You gulp it, bite it down until you are breathing fully again.

Blessedly, there is something like that in the soul/psyche as well. It takes us over and forces us to take full breaths of good air. Truly, we know that we cannot really subsist on sneaking little sips of life. The wild force in a woman’s soul demands that she have access to it all. We can stay alert and take in the things that are right for us.

The shoemaker in the tale foreshadows the old soldier who brings the dance-yourself-crazy shoes to life later in the story.

There are too many coincidences between this character and what we know of ancient symbolism to think he is just an innocent bystander. The natural predator: within the psyche (and that of the culture as well) is a shapechanger, a force that is able to disguise itself, just as traps, cages, and poisoned bait are disguised in order to lure the unaware. We must take into account that he makes a joke out of tricking the old woman.

No, it is likely that he is in league with the soldier, who of course is a depiction of the devil in disguise.
¹⁴
In olden times, the devil, the soldier, the shoemaker, the hunchback, and other images were used to portray the negative forces in both earth nature and human nature.
¹⁵

While we could rightfully be proud of the soul brave enough to try to sneak a something, an anything, under such drought conditions, the fact remains that that alone cannot be the sole issue. A whole psychology has to include not only body, mind, and spirit, but also, equally, culture and environ. And in this light, it must be asked at each level how it came to be that any individual woman feels she has to cringe, flinch, grovel, and plead for a life that is her own to begin with. What is in any culture that demands such? Inquiring into the pressures created by each layer of the inner and outer worlds will preclude a woman from thinking that sneaking the devil shoes is, in any way, a constructive choice at all.

Trap
#6:
Cringing Before the Collective,
Shadow Rebellion

The child sneaks on the red shoes, marches off to church, pays no attention to what swirls around her, is reviled by the community. Members of the village “tell” on her. She is chastised. The red shoes are taken away. But it is too late, she is hooked. The issue is not yet obsession, rather that the collective inspires and strengthens her inner starvation by demanding capitulation to its narrow values.

Vou can try to have a secret life, but sooner or later the superego, a negative complex, and/or the culture itself, will hail down. It is hard to hide an unsanctioned something that you are ravenous

about. It is hard to hide stolen pleasures even when they are not nourishing ones.

The nature of negative complexes and cultures is to pounce upon any discrepancy between the consensus about what is acceptable behavior and the individual’s differing impulse. Just as some people go mad to see a single leaf upon their walkway, negative judgment draws out its saws to amputate any member that does not conform.

Sometimes the collective pressures a woman to be “a saint,” to be enlightened, to be politically correct, to “have it together,” in order for each of her endeavors to amount to an opus. If we cringe before the collective and acquiesce to pressures for mindless conformity, we are protected from exile, but at the same time also treacherously endanger our wildish lives.

Some think that the times are past when if a woman was called wild she was being cursed. If she was wild, meaning acting her natural soul-self, she was labeled “wrong” and “bad.” It is not so that these times are over. What has changed are the types of behaviors that are considered “out of control” for women. For instance, in various parts of the world today, if a woman takes a stand politically, socially, spiritually, familially, environmentally, if she points out that some particular emperor has no clothes, or if she speaks for those who are hurt or who are without voice, too often her motives are examined to see if she has “gone wild,” that is, crazy.

For a wild child born
into a rigid community, the usual outcome is to experience the ignominy of being shunned. Shunning treats the victim as if she does not exist. It withdraws spiritual concern, love, and other psychic necessities from that person. The idea is to force her to conform, or else to kill her spiritually and/or to drive her from the village to languish and die in the outback.

If a woman is shunned, it is almost always because she has done or is about to do something in the wildish range, oftentimes something as simple as expressing a slightly different belief or wearing an unapproved color—small, small things as well as large ones. It must be remembered that an oppressed woman not so much refuses to fit as she
cannot fit
without also dying. Her spiritual

integrity is at stake, and she will try to be free in whatever ways are available, even if they put her at risk.

Here is a recent example. According to CNN, at the onset of the Gulf War, Moslem women from Saudi Arabia, forbidden to drive by religious stricture, climbed into cars and drove. After the war, the women were brought before tribunals that condemned their behavior and, finally, after much interrogation and condemnation, released the women to the custody of their fathers, brothers, or husbands, who had to promise to keep the women in line in the future.

This is a case of a woman’s life-giving and life-thriving mark on a crazy world being defined as scandalous, insane, and out of control. Unlike the child in the tale, who allows the culture surrounding her to press her into even more dryness, sometimes the only alternative to cringing before a parched collective is to commit an act drenched in courage. This act need not necessarily be of the earthshaking variety. Courage means to follow the heart. There are millions of women who commit acts of great heart every day. It is not only the singular act that reshapes a dry collective, but also the continuation of those acts. As a young Buddhist nun once told me, ‘Water drips through stone.”

In addition, there is a very hidden aspect to most collectives that encourages oppression of women’s wild, soulful, and creative lives, and that is the encouragement within the culture for women themselves to “tell on” one another and to sacrifice their sisters (or brothers) to strictures that do not reflect the relatedness found in the familial values of the feminine nature. These include not only the encouraging of one woman to inform on another and therefore expose her to punishment for behaving in a feminine and integral manner, for registering appropriate horror or dissension to injustice, but also the encouraging of older women to collude in the physical, mental, and spiritual abuse of women who are younger, less powerful, or helpless, and the encouraging of young women to dismiss and neglect the needs of women who are far older than they.

When a woman refuses to support the dry collective, she refuses to stop her wild thinking, and her actions follow accordingly. “The Red Shoes” in essence teaches us that the wild psyche must be properly protected—by unequivocally valuing it ourselves, by speaking out in its interest, by refusing to submit to psychic unhealth. We also learn that the wild, because of its energy and beauty, is
always
eyed by somebody or other, something or other, some group or other, for trophy purposes or as a thing to be reduced, altered, ruled on, murdered, redesigned, or controlled. The wild always needs a guardian at the gate, or it will be misused.

When the collective is hostile to a woman's natural life, rather
han
accept the derogatory or disrespectful labels that are placed upon her, she can and must, like the ugly duckling, hold on, hold
out,
and search for that which she belongs to—and preferably outlive, out-thrive, and out-create those who vilified her.

The problem with the girl in the red shoes is that instead of becoming strong for the fight, she is off in la-la land, captured by the romance of those red shoes. The important thing about rebellion is that the form it takes be effective. The girl’s fascination with the red shoes actually keeps her from a meaningful rebellion, one that would promote change, give a message, cause an
awakening

1 wish we could say that by now all the traps for women ao longer exist, or that women are so wise that they can spot the traps from far off. But it is not so. We still have the predator in the culture, and it still tries to undercut and destroy all consciousness and all bids for wholeness. There is much truth to the saying that freedoms have to be fought for anew every twenty years. Sometimes it seems that they have to be fought for every five minutes.

But the wild nature teaches that we meet challenges as they occur. When wolves are badgered, they don’t say, “Oh, no! Not
againl
” They bound, pounce, run, dive, scramble, play dead, go for the throat, whatever needs to be done. So we cannot be shocked that there is entropy, deterioration, hard times. Let us understand that the issues that entrap women’s joy will always shift and shape-change, but in our own essential natures we find the absolute stamina, the necessary libido for all necessary acts of heart.