Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
In the modem technological world, the brutal episodes of fairy tales have been replaced by images in television commercials, such as those showing a family snapshot with one member blotted out and a trail of blood over the photograph to show what happens when a person drives while drunk, or attempting to dissuade people from using illegal drugs by showing an egg bubbling in a frying pan and pointing out that this is what happens to the brain on drugs. The brutal motif is an ancient way of causing the emotive self to pay attention to a very serious message.
The psychological truth in “The Red Shoes” is that a woman’s meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed, or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth. The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take onto ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul. Without a firm participation with the wild nature, a woman starves and falls into an obsession of “feel betters,” “leave me
alones”
and “love me—please.”
When she is starved, a woman will take any substitutes offered, including those that, like dead placebos, do absolutely nothing for her, as well as destructive and life-threatening ones that hideously waste her time and talents or expose her life to physical danger. It is a famine of the soul that makes a woman choose things that will cause her to dance madly out of control—then too, too near the executioner’s door.
So in order to understand this tale further, we have to see how a woman can so drastically lose her way by losing her instinctual and wild life. The way to hold on to what we have, the way to find our way back to the wild feminine, is to see what mistakes a woman so trapped can make. Then we can backtrack and repair. Then we can have reunion.
As we shall see, the loss of the handmade red shoes represents the loss of a woman’s self-designed life and passionate vitality, and the taking on of a too-tame life. This eventually leads to loss of accurate perception, which leads to excess, which leads to loss of the feet, the platform on which we stand, our basis, a deep part of our instinctual nature that supports our freedom.
“The Red Shoes” shows us how a deterioration begins and what state we come to if we make no intervention in our own wildish behalf. Let there be no mistake, when a woman makes efforts to intervene and fight her demon, whatever that demon may be, it is one of the most worthy battles known, both archetypally and in consensual reality. Even though she might, as in the tale, hit ground-zero-minus-five bottom via famine, capture, injured instinct, destructive choices, and all the rest, remember, at bottom is where the living roots of psyche are. It is there that a woman's wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremel
y painful, is also th
e sowing ground.
Though we would never wish the poisonous red shoes and the subsequent decrease of life onto ourselves or others, there is in its fiery and destructive center a something that fuses fierceness to wisdom in the woman who has danced the cursed d
ance, who has lost herself and h
er creative life, who has driven herself to hell m a cheap
{or
expensive) handbasket, and yet who has somehow held cm to a word, a thought,
an idea until she could escape h
er demon through a crack in time and live to tell about it.
So the woman who has danced out of control, who
has lost her footing and lost h
er feet and understands that bereft state at the end of the fairy tale, has a special and valuable wisdom. She is like a saguaro, a fine and beautiful cactus that lives in the desert. Saguaros can be shot full of holes, carved upon, knocked over, stepped on, and still they live, still they store life-giving water, still they grow wild and repair themselves over time.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and bum, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. That is what we are doing with this tale. We are listening to its ancient message. We are learning about deteriorative patterns so we can go on with the strength of one who can sense the traps and cages and baits before we are upon them or caught in them.
Let us begin to unravel this very important tale by understanding what happens when the vital life we value most, no
matter what it might look like to others, the life we love most, is devalued and turned to ashes.
The Handmade Red Shoes
In the tale we see that the child loses the red shoes she has fashioned for herself, those that made her feel rich in her own special way. She was poor, but she was innovative; she was finding her way. She had progressed from having no shoes to having shoes that gave her a sense of soul in spite of the difficulties of her outer life. The handmade shoes are marks of her rising out of a mean psychic existence into a passionate life of her own design. Her shoes represent an enormous and literal step toward integration of her resourceful feminine nature in day-to-day life. It does not matter that her life is imperfect. She has her joy. She will evolve.
In fairy tales, we can understand this typically poor but inventive character as a psychological motif for one who is rich in spirit and who slowly becomes more conscious and more powerful over a long period of time. It could be said that this character exactly portrays all of us, for we all make progress slowly but surely.
Socially, shoes send a signal, a way of recognizing one type of person horn another. Artists often wear shoes that are quite different from those worn by, say, engineers. Shoes can tell something about what we are like, sometimes even who we are aspiring to be, the persona we are trying out
The archetypal symbolism of the shoe goes back to ancient times, when shoes were a mark of authority: rulers had them, slaves didn't. Even today, much of the modem world is taught to make immoderate judgments about a person’s intelligence and abilities based on whether he or she wears shoes or not, as well as whether those who wear shoes are “well-heeled” or not.
This version of the tale grows out of our having lived in the cold north countries where shoes are understood as instruments of survival. Keeping the feet dry and warm keeps a person alive in bitter cold and wet I can remember my aunt telling me that to steal someone’s only pair of shoes in winter was a crime equal to
Self-preservation: Identifying Leg Traps
murder. A woman's creative and passionate nature is at the same risk if she cannot hold on to her sources of growth and joy. These are her warmth, her protection.
The symbol of shoes can be understood as a psychological metaphor, they protect and defend what we stand on—our feet. In archetypal symbolism, feet represent mobility and freedom. In that sense to have shoes to cover the feet is to have the conviction of our beliefs and the wherewithal to act on them. Without psychic shoes a woman is unable to negotiate inner or outer environs that require acuity, sense, caution, and toughness.
Life and sacrifice go together. Red is the color of life and of sacrifice. To live a vibrant life, we must make sacrifices of various sorts. If you want to go to university, you must sacrifice time and money and give intense concentration to the venture. If you want to create, you have to sacrifice superficiality, some security, and often your desire to be liked, to draw up your most intense insights, your most far-reaching visions.
Problems arise when there is much sacrifice but no life forthcoming from it all. Then red is the color of blood-loss rather than blood-life. This is exactly what occur
s in the tale. One sort of vibrant and beloved red is lost when the child’s handmade red shoes are burned. This sets up a yearning, an obsession, and finally an addiction to another kind of red: the one of fast-breaking, c
heap thrills; sex without soul; the one that leads to a life without meaning.
So, understanding all aspects of the fairy tale as components of a single woman’s psyche, we can see that the child’s making of the red shoes accomplishes a major feat: she takes life from shoeless/slave status—just going on one’s way, nose to the road, looking neither left nor right—to a consciousness that pauses to create, that notices beauty and feels joy, that has passion and registers satiation ... and all the things that make up the integral nature we call wild.
The fact that the shoes are red indicates that the process is going to be one of vibrant life, which includes sacrifice. This is right and proper. The fact that these shoes are handmade and pieced from scraps points to the child symbolizing the creative spirit, who, being motherless and untaught for whatever reasons, has pieced
this all together for herself using native perception. And
brava!
what a fine and soulful accomplishment
If well enough could only be left alone, this situation would progress nicely for the creative self. In the tale, the child is delighted by her handiwork; the fact that she could manage it, the fact that she had the patience to search and gather, to design, to piece and fit, to make her ideas manifest. No matter that at first the product is crude; many of the creation Gods through all cultures and through all time did not create perfectly the first time. The first try can always stand improvement, and the second and often the third and fourth as well. That has nothing to do with one’s goodness and skill. It is just life, evocative and evolving.
But if the child is left alone, she will make another pair of red shoes, and another, and another, until they are not so crude. She will progress. But even beyond her wondrous display of ingenuity and thriving in difficult circumstances, the shining fact for her is that these shoes she has made cause her enormous joy, and joy is her life’s blood, spirit-food and soul-life all in one.
Joy is the kind of feeling a woman has when she lays the words down
on the paper just so, or hits th
e notes
al punto
, right on the head, the first time. Whew. Unbelievable. It is the kind of feeling a woman has when she finds she is pregnant and wants to be. It is the kind of joy a woman feels when she looks at people she loves enjoying themselves. It is the kind of joy a woman feels when she has done something that she feels dogged about, that she feels intense about, something that took risk, something that made her stretch, best herself, and succeed—maybe gracefully, maybe not, but she did it, created the something, the someone, the art, the battle, the moment; her life. That is a woman’s natural and instinctive state of being. Wild Woman emanates up through that kind of joy. That sort of soulful situation summons her by name.
But, in the story, as fate would have it, one day, in direct opposition to the simple red shoes pieced from scraps, the simple joy for life, along comes a gilded carriage creaking and rolling into the child’s life.
The Traps
Trap
#1;
The Gilded Carriage, the Devalued Life
In archetypal symbolism, the carriage is a literal image, a conveyance that carries something from one place to another. In modem dream material and contemporary folklore it has been mostly supplanted by the automobile, which has the same archetypal “feel” to it. Classically, this sort of “carrying” conveyance is understood as the central mood of the psyche that transports us from one place in the psyche to another, from one idea to another, from one thought to another, and from one endeavor to another.
Climbing into the old woman's gilded carriage here is very similar to entering the gilded cage; it supposedly offers something more comfortable, less stressful, but in effect it captures instead. It entraps in a way that is not immediately perceivable, since gilt tends to be so dazzling at first. So imagine we are going down the road of our own lives, in our handmade shoes, and a mood comes over us, something like this: “Maybe something else would be better; something that isn't so difficult, something that takes less time, energy, and striving.”
It often happens in women’s lives. We are in the midst of an endeavor, and feeling anywhere from bad to good about it. We are just making up our lives as we go along and doing the best we can. But soon something washes over us, something that says, This is pretty hard. But look at that beautiful something-or-other over there. That gussied-up thing looks easier, finer, more compelling. All of a sudden the gilded carriage rolls up, the door opens, the little stairs drop down, and we step in. We have been seduced. This temptation occurs on a regular and sometimes daily basis. Sometimes it is hard to say no.
So we many the wrong person because it makes our economic lives easier. We give up on the new piece we’re working on and go back to using the easier but old tired-out one we’ve been pushing around the floor for the last ten years. We don’t take that good poem into the finer-than-fine range but leave it in its third draft instead of raking through it one more time.
The gilded carriage scenario overwhelms the simple joy of red shoes. While we could interpret this as a woman’s quest for
material goods and comforts, more often it expresses a simple psychological desire to not have to toil so at the basic matters of creative life. The desire to have it easier is not the trap; that is something the ego naturally desires. Ah, but the price. The price is the trap. The trap is sprung when the child goes to live with the rich old woman. There she must remain proper and silent... no overt yearning allowed, and more specifically, no fulfillment of that yearning. This is the beginning of soul famine for the creative spirit.
Classical Jungian psychology emphasizes that the loss of soul occurs particularly at mid-life, somewhere at, or after, age thirty- five. But for women in modem culture, soul loss is a danger every single day, whether you are eighteen or eighty, married or not, regardless of your bloodline, education, or economics. Many “educated” people smile indulgently when they hear that “primitive” people have endless lists of experiences and events they feel can steal their souls away from them—from sighting a bear at the wrong time of year to entering a house that has not yet been blessed after a death occurred there.
Though much in modem culture is wondrous and life-giving, it also has more wrong-time bears and unblessed places of the dead in a square block than throughout a thousand square miles of outback. The central psychic fact remains that our connection to meaning, passion, soulfulness, and the deep nature is something we have to keep watch over. There are many things that try to force, sweep, seduce away those handmade shoes, seeming simple things like saying, “Later, I’ll do that dance, planting, hugging, finding, planning, learning, peace-making, cleansing ... later.” Traps, all.
Trap
#2;
The Dry Old Woman
,
the Senescent F
orce
In dream and fairy-tale interpretation, whoever owns the “conveyor of attitudes,” the gilded carriage, is understood as the main value pressing down upon the psyche, forcing it forward, locomoting it in the direction it pleases. In this case, the values of the old woman who owns the carriage begin to drive the psyche.
In classical Jungian psychology the archetypal figure of the
elder is sometimes called a “senex” force. In Latin,
senex
means “old man.” More properly, and without the gender attribution, the symbol of the eider can be understood as the
senescent force
: that which acts in a way that is peculiar to the aged.
1
In fairy tales, this aged force is personified by an old person who is often portrayed as one-sided in some way, indicating that one’s psychic process is also developing in a one-sided manner. Ideally, an old woman symbolizes dignity, mentoring, wisdom, self-knowledge, tradition-bearing, well-defined boundaries, and experience... with a good dose of crabby, long-toothed, straight- talking, flirtatious sass thrown in for good measure.
But when an old fairy-tale woman uses these attributes negatively, as in “The Red Shoes,” we are forewarned that aspects of psyche that should remain warm are about to be frozen in time. Something normally vibrant within the psyche is about to be starched flat, given a drubbing, or distorted beyond recognition. When the child enters the old woman’s gilded carriage and subsequently her household, she is captured just as surely as if she purposely stuck her paw into a double DD fang-hanger trap.
As we see in the tale, being taken in by the old woman, rather than dignifying the new, allows the senescent attitude to destroy
innovation.
Rather than mentoring her ward, the old woman will attempt to calcify, her. The old woman in this tale is not a sage, but rather is dedicated to repetition of a single value without experimentation or renewal.
By way of all the scenes at church, we see that the single value is that the opinion of the collective matters more than anything, and should eclipse the needs of the individual wild soul. A collective is often thought of as the culture
2
that surrounds an individual. While this is true, Jung’s definition was “the many as compared to the one.” We are influenced by many collectives, both groups with which we affiliate and those of which we are not members. Whether the collectives surrounding us are academic, spiritual, financial, work-world, familial, or otherwise, they enact powerful rewards and punishments to their members and non-members alike. They work to influence and control all manner of things— from our thoughts to our choice of lovers to our life’s work. They
may also demean or discourage efforts that are not concomitant with their preferences.
In this tale, the old woman is a symbol of the rigid keeper of collective tradition, an enforcer of the unquestioned status quo, the “behave yourself; don’t make waves; don’t think too hard; don’t get big ideas; just keep a low profile; be a carbon copy; be nice; say ‘yes’ even though you don’t like it, it doesn’t fit, it’s not the right size, and it hurts.” And so on.
To follow such a lifeless value system causes loss of soul- linkage in the extreme. Regardless of collective affiliations or influences, our challenge in behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is to
not
merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose. We decide which bridges will become strong and well traveled, and which will remain sketchy and empty. And the collectives we favor with relationship will be those that offer the most support for our soul and creative life.
If a woman works at a university, she is in an academic collective. She is not to merge with whatever this collective environ may put forth, but add her own special flavor to it. As an integral creature, unless she has created other strong things in her life to offset this, she cannot afford to deteriorate into a one-sided, peevish, “I do my job, go home, come back ...” kind of person. If a woman attempts to be a part of an organization, association, or family that neglects to peer into her to see what she is made of, one that fails to ask “What makes this person run?” and one that does not put forth effort to challenge or encourage her in any positive manner ... then her ability to thrive and create is diminished. The more harsh the circumstances, the more she is exiled to a salted barrens where nothing is allowed to grow.
The separation of a woman’s life and mind from flattened-out collective thinking and the development of her unique talents are among the most important accomplishments a woman can fashion, for these acts prevent both soul and psyche from sliding into enslavement A culture that authentically promotes individual development will never make a slave class of any group or gender.
However, in the tale, the child acquiesces to the old woman’s dry values. The child becomes feral then, moving from a natural state to a captured one. Soon she will be tossed into the wilds of the diabolical red shoes, but without innate sensing and unable to perceive the dangers.
If we remove ourselves from our real and passionate lives and enter the gilded carriage of the dry old woman, in effect we adopt the persona and ambitions of the brittle old perfectionist Then, like all captured creatures, we fall into a sadness that leads to an obsessive yearning, often characterized in my practice as “the restlessness with no name.” Thereafter, we are at risk of seizing the first thing that promises to make us feel alive again.
It is important to keep our eyes open and to carefully weigh offers of an easier existence, a trouble-free path, especially if, in exchange, we are asked to surrender our personal creative joy to a cremating fire rather than enkindling one of our own making.
Trap
#3:
Burning the Treasure
,
Hambre
del Alma,
Soul Famine
There’s burning that goes with joy, and there’s burning that goes with annihilation. One is the fire of transformation, the other is the fire of decimation only. It is the fire of transformation we want. But many women give up the red shoes and agree to become too cleaned up, too nice, too compliant with someone else’s way of seeing the world. We give our joyful red shoes to the destructive fire when we digest values, propagandas, and philosophies wholesale, psychological ones included. The red shoes are burned to ashes when we paint, act, write, do, be in any way that causes our lives to be diminished, weakening our vision, breaking our spirit bones.
Then a woman’s life is overcome by pallor, for she is
hambre
del alma
, a starved soul. All she wants is her deep life back. All she wants are those handmade red shoes. The wild joy that these represent might have been burnt in the fire of disuse, or the fire of devaluing one’s own work. They might have been burnt in the flames of self-imposed silence.
Too, too many women made a terrible vow years before they knew any better. As young women, they were starved of basic encouragement and support, and
so
filled with sorrow and