The Black Serpent and the Beautiful Young Girl
Inherited Views of the Feminine
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell
Are you nobody, too?
They’d banish us, you know. —Emily Dickinson
The title of this chapter comes from an Active Imagination or vision that Jung recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
In the Active Imagination or vision, Jung sees a wise old man whom he trusts, and then he sees a blind but beautiful young girl and a snake, both of whom raise his suspicions.
Of the girl, Jung says, “I was distinctly suspicious.”1
Jung’s reaction recalls our inherited cultural anxiety about the feminine.
People of Jung’s era often found themselves ignorant of, or ill at ease with, feminine nature.
Their perceptions, like ours, tended to overvalue, undervalue, or distrust the feminine and muddled their outlook with projections.
As women have entered the discourse and, partly thanks to innovators like Jung, have had a chance to examine and to reclaim themselves, men and women alike are growing more comfortable with the feminine part of their nature and valuing it
more highly.
I will return to the figures of the snake and the girl at the close of this chapter but will start by exploring our inherited views of the feminine and how they are mirrored in the personal experience and education of a woman growing up during the twentieth century.
As a young mother in the mid-1950s, when I first became interested n psychology, and later, when I was in training, I often found what I read or was taught about the feminine limiting, oppressive even, and so alien that it made me ashamed to be a woman.
I had been taught to accept what the scientists and experts told me and took them for my guides.
I knew nothing then of the archetypal Old Woman’s wisdom.
Most older women I knew still acted girlish and often discounted women, themselves included, as devious (snakelike) or blindly emotional.
They lacked confi dence in themselves and had an ambivalent relationship, at best, with their authority.
What authority they wielded often came more from an off-putting, know-it-all, and vehement bossiness—what Jung calls the negative animus.
This bossiness was, nonetheless, a step toward reclaiming some power, but defi nitely nothing I could use as a guide.
From what the experts described, or even from women’s magazines, it was impossible to gain a sense of how to be an adult female, much less a mother.
I soon turned to books on animal behavior instead, not of laboratory animals but observations of animals in the wild.
In my studies as a special student in ethology at Dartmouth College (special
because I was a woman, and women had no formal standing there at that time), I had a chance to spend many hours observing beaver colonies in our local ponds or watching families of river otters.
I took a great interest, as well, in others’ fi eld studies of wolves, which seemed—male and female alike—expert in mothering and nurturing their young.
The options presented to a woman in the middle of the twentieth century were amazingly limited.
Rather than straying too far from my subject, a Louise Bogan poem of that era (from a collection that I inherited from my mother) captures the way women internalized what they were taught about themselves:
women
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.
They cannot think of so many crops to a fi eld
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.
They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.2
This “tight hot cell of their hearts” reminds me of a cage and the way many of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and great-greatgrandmothers were encaged.
I have no inclination to travel to medieval times or before, or to recall the teachings of the early Christian church fathers, Jewish rabbis, or Islamic imams on the “natural” defi ciencies of women, or to review the sometimes-tragic worldwide
limitations placed on women and their slow and often-painful struggles to surmount them.
Religions centered on a father god, and social policies created and enforced by men, justifi ed and reinforced the subjugation of women.
Women came to be considered morally inferior to men and dependent on them.
With the exception of a few indigenous cultures, it has been a long road to even imagining a time when women would be as free as men.
This is partly due to the patriarchy itself and its system of hierarchy, violence, and control.
For ages, Western civilization ignored, subjugated, romanticized, or demonized the other—anyone who was not white, male, and of a certain class. Charles Darwin, for example, wrote,
“It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”3
Western civilization, in its development, repressed all in itself that it considered unmanly.
Perhaps as a consequence of what it denied itself, it then created fantastic projections onto this alien other.4
As a white, highly educated female, my interest is in women’s experience of being treated as other, though equally cogent discourse could be made about any of the other supposedly “lower races.”
Part of my concern comes from what I see and have learned from my patients, but part is also a desire to learn more about myself and my history.
This chapter, therefore, starts with a brief overview of views of feminine nature we have inherited from our forefathers (and, rarely, our foremothers).
It is brief for three reasons: the constraints of time and space; the fact that there are already many studies that cover this subject; 5 and because I am more interested in recovering less-pathological and more-hopeful views of the feminine than those with which I was brought up and educated.
In about the mid-nineteenth century, emerging from the rigidity of centuries of patriarchy, some intellectuals at the forefront of romantic philosophy started to concern themselves with the study of that unknown and fascinatingly mysterious other, even if their view was clouded by the thick lens of unexamined projections and of romanticism itself.
James Hillman refers to this as a search not for the disallowed feminine—which is the sense I make of it—but for lost gods:
“These depths were projected as we now say into the remote past, into mythology, into foreign dark tribes and exotic customs, into the simple folk and their lore and into the mentally alienated.”6
Rather than as naturally sinful and inferior, women at this time started to be seen as the opposite of the rational male mysterious to some, wiltingly fragile to others, more noble and virtuous than men, uninterested in sex, darkly sensual and alluring, or as “the angel in the house” and “the guardian of the race.”7
Whatever was proclaimed about her, this other was rarely viewed with an objective eye.
In 1869, however, John Stuart Mill examined what he observed of the character
of women of his own social class, who were mostly kept at home, barely educated, and not allowed meaningful work; he also examined his contemporaries’ projections on women.
Mill found the behavior ascribed to women not innate but a product of their treatment and conditioning—what happened to them in the hot cells of their cages.
My 1990 book, The Woman in the Mirror, deals with this subject in some depth. In it, I quote a passage from Mill’s The Subjection of Women that is too apt not to quote again:
In the case of women, a hothouse and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefi t and pleasure of their masters.
Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriantly and
reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintery air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fi re and disappear; men, with their inability to recognize their own work . . . believe that the tree grows itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half were not kept in the vapor bath and the other half in the snow.8 ~Claire Douglas, The Old Woman’s Daughter, Page 33-37
