belly of the whale | Beauty and the Bodhisattva

Library Fountain, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

The Initiation/The Belly of the Whale

In this week’s reading, both Campbell and Estes discuss the concept of the Belly of the Whale, or the place where the the hero/heroine is finally severed from their mundane life and reborn as the hero. This place or state is the chrysalis where our caterpillar becomes a butterfly. An interesting fact about the metamorphosis of butterflies: most people think that the worm goes into its cocoon, grows a pair of wings, etc. and then comes out transformed. In actuality, the caterpillar dissolves completely into cellular sludge and its raw biological material is used to build a completely new creature. The Belly of the Whale is not a friendly place, it is often violent and bloody. These stories demonstrate that personal transformation for the hero/heroine is psychic wetwork. It is terrifying to experience. What I found most interesting about the specific stories I read and watched this week was that in most of them it was the heroine’s world or those around her who were transformed more than she was.

Estes discusses the story of Bluebeard and claims that the bride detests Bluebeard initially because her inner wolf nature instinctively knows that he is a villain, but that her culturally coaxed “good girl” nature convinces her not to trust her instincts. This hit a flat note with me. I would argue that this interpretation of the bride as a naive pawn is the path of least resistance. In this scenario, the bride is either condemned to marry a murderous psychopath because of her culturally conditioned accommodating nature or her inner wild woman snarls and cowers from the journey like a beaten dog. For some reason we can accept the notion that the male hero can be pulled toward adventure by deliberately marching towards the danger, but a woman must be tricked or misled toward hers. The true heroine does not hide from her journey, no matter what her misgivings. Without her willing participation, we have no story.

Bluebeard is often told as a cautionary tale to woman against what our society considers to be some of their more undesirable female traits: curiosity, disobedience, and treachery. However, it is her inner animal instinct that actually draws her to Bluebeard, not the blundering wonder of a woman-child. Our heroine willingly seeks adventure rather than shying away from it. She can smell the evil within him and senses that he is a worthy opponent. Her exploration of the house and subsequent entering of the bloody chamber is a literal crossing of the threshold into the belly of the beast. She is not randomly nosing about, her senses are guiding her towards her discovery. She must reveal the villain before she can vanquish him. And in the end, he is indeed vanquished. She is the predator in this story, subconsciously hunting and eliminating a dark blight upon the land thanks to her feral nature. Bluebeard’s heroine isn’t so much transformed as she is awakened. She already has these skills and this knowledge at her disposal, but she seems to be realizing this as the story unfolds.

In the animated film Coraline, our heroine is also presented with a secret room and distinctive key. This tiny door in the parlor of her new house is a huge temptation to the curious and neglected girl. When she finally opens the door and travels to the otherworld to meet her “Other Mother”, everything seems to be her greatest wish come true. The Other Mother cooks and takes an interest in her activities, the yard is planted with hundreds of flowers, just like she had been begging her parents for, and everything is warm and filled with whimsy and light. Eventually, things turn sour, and the Other Mother is revealed to be a monster. Coraline eventually returns to her original family having slain the beast and saved the souls of the Other Mothers victims. Unlike many heroines, Coraline does not just return home more accepting of her circumstances, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz coming to terms with a dreary existence in Depression-era Kansas. Coraline brings some of the “Belly of the Beast” with her, convincing her parents to plant the garden she wants and building an extended family from the eccentric characters that live in the apartments around them. Her transformation is not into a more accepting and passive creature, but into someone who is more capable of seeing what works in her world and changing the things that don’t.

In Mirrormask, Helena is a young girl who lives and works in her parents circus. After a particularly cruel argument her mother collapses and falls ill with what appears to be a brain tumor. Eventually, Helena enters the otherworld, a disturbingly phantasmagorical place where everyone wears a mask and shadows threaten to destroy everything. At one point, we bear witness to what has become a common theme in many heroine stories: the literal transformation of the heroine into the dark counterpart. We see her ritually dressed and transformed into The Princess, her sinister analogue from the otherworld who has taken her place in the real world. She briefly takes her place next to the Dark Queen until her companion reminds her of her true identity. In most of these stories this transformation seems to resolve itself when something or someone reminds the heroine what her true nature is. We see this happen to Lily in the film Legend, Willow from TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Katherine from the horror movie The Cell, to name a few. The heroine then has to decide which path she should take, and invariably decided to return to her true self. To remain in her negatively transformed state is to remain trapped in the otherworld and literally lose her self.

Because I was focused on getting caught up, I did not have much of an opportunity this week to explore Campbell’s Guardian of the Threshold, but it is a subject that I know will come back around in future readings. Hopefully I can address it then. I also would like to return to the “Nega-Heroine/Mother” concept as well.