The Road of Trials

I married late in life. I was 36 before I met my now-husband, and was married just weeks before my 39^th birthday. Part of my reluctance to marry was my inability to “settle” for less than what I thought I deserved. Ultimately, all of my relationships turned sour, each man proving to be either a disappointment or running for the hills at the first emergence of my rather intense nature. The last relationship I had before meeting my husband was with a handsome man who was an accomplished drummer and audio engineer. After that went belly-up, I was talking to a friend about it, telling her that I was bummed because he was a drummer and I liked drummers. She asked me why. I stopped and realized that the reason I found drummers attractive was because I had always wanted to learn how to play drums. It had nothing to do with any quality playing the drums actually gave him and everything to do with living vicariously through his accomplishments. He did the things that society had told me were things I could not do. This prompted a deeper reflection on my life and my values when it came to my relationships with men. It dawned on me that I needed to visualize my ideal man and become him, rather than try to date him.

So I did. Although, to be honest, the drum thing never really panned out, I changed my self-perception to one that incorporated this male figure as already being a part of me, not someone I had to search for. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I found that I had to look no further than my own backyard for self-fulfillment. It was only a few short months after this that I met my husband. Had I not had this revelation, I never would have been at the right place and time and in the right frame of mind to meet him. Because I was no longer seeking someone to complete me I found some one who could be my accomplice in life.

In many heroine stories, the heroine accomplishes her journey with the assistance of an entourage of helpers. These sidekicks are usually magical or alien in nature, and are interestingly most often male. In these stories, the heroine often encounters her sidekicks in a state of distress. After rescuing them, they become part of her world, incorporated into her quest. Dorothy had The Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion, and even Toto. Snow White had her dwarfs. These helpers often swoop in to assist the heroine with a task or peril that is perfectly suited to their abilities. It is possible that these male figures are the manifestations of her animus. They are aspects of herself that she needs to acknowledge in order to succeed in her quest. Although they come to her aid throughout her quest, they are not her saviors. They are tools at her disposal. She must warmly embrace them before she can call upon them. It is only through uniting with her animus that she can tap into her full potential.

In the movie The Cell, the main character Catherine is a child psychologist who is able to enter the dreams of her patients via a technological breakthrough. When a serial killer is found in a catatonic state, she is forced to use this ability to help police uncover where is latest victim is being held captive before time runs out. Because this film is literally set in the realm of the subconscious, her trials are primarily psychological but carry the potential for her demise in the real world (as they say, if you die in your dreams, you die in real life.) Our heroine is confronted with scenarios designed to fill her with fear or self-doubt. She is even captured at one point and subjected to the “Dark Princess” transformation as the killer’s love slave. In this film, the symbolism of the trials themselves is what matters, because it is through these symbols the secrets of the killer are revealed. The trials of the heroine as symbols for the clandestine theme of the quest are often present in the journey, as we see in the myth of Eros and Psyche. When Aphrodite charges Psyche with a series of trials to prove her love for Eros, they begin with the impossible task of sorting a multitude of seeds before dawn. Her final task is to travel to the Underworld and retrieve Persephone’s beauty treatment for Aphrodite, which ends with Psyche falling into a death-like torpor before being rescued by Eros. The symbolic progression from seed to death is evident, as is the entropy of life from chaos to order and back to chaos again. The secrets of the nature of romantic love, the combining of psyche and the state of eros, is the fuel of the mechanism of life.

The film The Descent is a trial of a much different nature, symbolically going from death to rebirth from the underworld. The heroine, Sarah, is spelunking with a group of women in Appalachia when they become trapped in an unmapped cave system. They encounter a group of horrific cannibalistic humanoid monsters that proceed to reduce the films cast by attrition. In the beginning of the film, Sarah is in mourning for her husband and daughter, who died a year previously in an unfortunate accident. She is fragile, broken, and unable to cope with much of what life has handed her. As she is presented with increasingly perilous situations, she becomes more and more adept at survival, and becomes more like the monsters she is hiding from. The final scene of her clawing her way out of the earth, bloody and gasping, after enduring hours of pain and torment might be an obvious symbolic choice, but is no less powerful to the viewer. It is made even more poignant when it is revealed that this is potentially her hallucination to escape the hellish underworld she is trapped in. This act of rebirth could be seen as representing the character’s need to live again after the profound loss of her family.

SPOILER WARNING: This is the end of the movie, needless to say it will ruin the film for you if you haven’t seen it.
VIOLENCE WARNING: The following clip is pretty gory.

For all of these heroines, their trials are not just a means to an end. In fact, we often see that these trials are almost a distraction from their overtly intended goal (e.g. to get home, free their loved one, escape from monsters.) These trials are commonly symbolic situations she finds herself in that often require her to call upon the skills of her animus to survive, usually in the form of enchanted companions.

References

Singh, T. (Director). (2000). The Cell [Motion picture on DVD]. New Line Cinema.

Marshall, N. (Director). (2006). The descent [Motion picture on DVD]. England: Celador Films.
Baum, L. F., Denslow, W. W., & Hearn, M. P. (2000). The annotated Wizard of Oz: The wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Norton.

Carroll, L., Carroll, L., Gardner, M., & Tenniel, J. (1960). The annotated Alice: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland & Through the looking glass. New York: C.N. Potter.

A., & Neumann, E. (1956). Amor and Psyche; the psychic development of the feminine; a commentary on the tale by Apuleius. New York: Pantheon Books.

Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. New York: Knopf.

Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.