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Home > Issue 6: November 2006 > Criticism

Handless Maidens: Grimm Tales in Contemporary Cinema
by Margot Miller

Sexual abuse of children was not so much discovered in the mid-twentieth century as exposed and, for the first time, repudiated. For many centuries, possibly since the dawn of time, men have sexually abused little girls and young women. Perhaps they have also done this to boys, but we don’t see the evidence of it in fairy tale and myth the way we do for girls, for whom it is almost, if myths are to be believed, a rite of passage. Many stories now considered children’s fare were originally transmitted as code around a campfire, and later in parlor and salon, to convey “truths” that acculturate and perpetuate patriarchal society.

In The Feminine in Fairy Tales (Boston, Shambhala, 1993), Marie-Louise von Franz [1] makes a comprehensive study of “The Handless Maiden” also called “The Girl Without Hands,” as recounted by the Brothers Grimm, as well as several other versions, including a Russian one. In all of them, a young woman is rendered helpless by the father, representing patriarchal culture, who “cuts off her hands,” thereby refusing to recognize the feminine and value it in the daughter as a part of himself. Beneath the Christian overlay of the eighteenth century Grimm version, the tale explains how the young woman must go deeply into her own unconscious in order to take care of herself and, in Jungian terms, become individuated.

“The Handles Maiden” appears to have inspired two recent Australian-directed films. The first is The Piano, directed by Jane Campion, 1993, which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and starred Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin. The second is Niki Caro’s North Country, 2005, starring Charlize Theron (nominated for Best Actress, Academy Awards) and Frances McDormand (nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Academy Awards), with Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson,andSean Bean.

Before getting into the films and what they offer contemporary cinema-goers, it is useful to have the text of ‘The Handless Maiden.” [2] For a comprehensive Jungian analysis, space limitations require that I recommend the von Franz and Robert A. Johnson (see note 1, above) discussions. [3] I will, however, after quoting the tale itself, offer a brief cognitive interpretation central to my analysis of the films.

The Handless Maiden

A miller fell slowly but surely into poverty, until finally he had nothing more than his mill and a large apple tree which stood behind it. One day he went into the forest to gather wood, where he was approached by an old man who said, “Why do you torment yourself with chopping wood? I will make you rich if you will promise me that which is standing behind your mill.”

Thinking only of the apple tree, the miller agreed and signed it over to the strange man. The latter, however, laughed mockingly and said, "I will come in three years and get what belongs to me," then went away.

When he arrived home, he told his wife about the deal he had made.

"Oh, husband!" she said, terrified. "He didn't mean the apple tree, but our daughter, who was behind the mill sweeping the yard."

When the old man was to get her, she washed herself clean and drew a circle around herself with chalk. The old man appeared but he could not approach her. He spoke angrily: "Keep water away from her, so she cannot wash herself any more. Otherwise I have no power over her."

The miller was frightened and did what he was told. The next morning the devil returned, but the girl’s hands were washed clean from her tears. “Chop off her hands,” he said. “Otherwise I cannot get to her."

The miller cried "How could I chop off my own child's hands!" But the man replied, "If you do not do it, then you will be mine, and I will take you yourself."

The father he went to the girl and said, "My child, if I do not chop off both of your hands, then the devil will take me away. Help me in my need, and forgive me of the evil that I am going to do to you."

She answered, "Dear father, do with me what you will. I am your child," and with that she let her father chop off her hands.

The man came a third time, but she had wept so long and so much onto the stumps, that they were entirely clean. Then he had to give up, for he had lost all claim to her.

The miller spoke to her, "I have gained great wealth through you. I shall take care of you in splendor as long as you live."

But she answered, "I cannot remain here. I will go away. Compassionate people will give me as much as I need."

With her mutilated arms tied to her back, she set forth, walking the entire day until she came to a royal garden, and by the light of the moon she saw that inside there were fruit trees. But she could not get inside, for it was surrounded by water.

Suddenly an angel appeared. He closed a head gate, so that the moat dried up, and she could walk through, and the angel went with her. She saw a pear tree. She stepped up to the tree and ate from it with her mouth, enough to satisfy her hunger, but no more. The gardener saw it happen, but because the angel was standing by her he was afraid and thought that the girl was a spirit.

The king who owned this garden came the next morning. He counted the fruit and saw that one of the pears was missing. He asked the gardener what had happened to it. The gardener answered told him about the handless girl, whom he called a spirit, and the angel.

The king said, "If what you said is true, I will keep watch with you tonight."

That night, the king entered the garden, with a priest who was to talk to the spirit. At midnight the girl stepped up to the tree, and again ate off a pear with her mouth. An angel dressed in white was standing next to her.

The priest walked up to them and said, "Have you come from God, or from the world? Are you a spirit or a human?"

She answered, "I am not a spirit, but a poor human who has been abandoned by everyone except God."

The king said, "Even if you have been abandoned by the whole world, I will not abandon you."

He took her home with him and because she was so beautiful and pure he loved her with all his heart; he had silver hands made for her, and took her as his wife.

After a year the king had to go out into the battlefield, and he left the young queen in the care of his mother, saying, "If she has a child, support her and take good care of her, and immediately send me the news in a letter." She gave birth to a beautiful son. The old mother quickly wrote this in a letter, giving the joyful news to the king.

Meanwhile, the old man wanted to harm the girl and he took the letter from the messenger, putting in its place one that stated that the queen had brought a changeling into the world. When the king read this letter he was frightened and saddened, but nevertheless he wrote an answer that they should take good care of the queen until his return. The messenger returned with this letter, but he rested at the same place, and again fell asleep. The old man came again and placed a different letter in his bag. This letter said that they should kill the queen with her child.

The old mother could not believe it, and wrote to the king again, but she got back the same answer, because each time the devil substituted a false letter. She said to the queen, "I cannot have you killed as the king has ordered, but you can no longer stay here. Go out into the wide world with your child, and never come back."

The old mother tied the queen's child onto her back, and the poor woman went away with weeping eyes. She came to a great, wild forest where she got onto her knees and prayed to God. Then the angel of the Lord appeared to her and led her to a small house. On it was a small sign with the words, "Here anyone can live free."

She was welcomed by the white virgin and she stayed in this house for seven years, and was well taken care of. And through the grace of God and her own goodness her chopped-off hands grew back. [4]

The king finally came back home from the battlefield, and the first thing he wanted to do was to see his wife and their child.

Then the old mother began to weep, saying, "You wicked man, why did you write to me that I was to put two innocent souls to death," and she showed him the two letters that the evil one had counterfeited.

Then the king began to weep bitterly for his poor wife and his little son, until the old woman said, "Be satisfied that she is still alive. I tied your wife's child onto her back and told her to go out into the wide world, and she had to promise never to come back here, because you were so angry with her."

Then the king traveled about for nearly seven years, searching in all the stone cliffs and caves. Finally he came to a great forest, where he found a little house with a sign containing the words, "Here anyone can live free."

The white virgin came out, took him by the hand, led him inside, and said, "Welcome, King," then asked him where he had come from.

He answered, "I have been traveling about for nearly seven years looking for my wife and her child, but I cannot find them."

The angel offered him something to eat and drink, but he did not take it, wanting only to rest a little. He lay down to sleep, covering his face with a cloth.

Then the angel went into the room where the queen was sitting with her son, whom she had named "Filled-with-Grief."

The angel said to her, "Go into the next room with your child. Your husband has come."

She went to where he was lying, and the cloth fell from his face.

Then she said, "Filled-with-Grief, pick up the cloth for your father and put it over his face again."

The child picked it up and put it over his face again. The king heard this, arose, and asked who she was.

She said, "I am your wife, and this is your son Filled-with-Grief."

He saw her living hands and said, "My wife had silver hands."

She answered, "Our merciful God has caused my natural hands to grow back."

The angel went into the other room, brought back the silver hands, and showed them to him. Now he saw for sure that it was his dear wife and his dear child, and he kissed them, and rejoiced, and said, "A heavy stone has fallen from my heart."

Then they went back home to his old mother. There was great joy everywhere, and the king and the queen conducted their wedding ceremony once again, and they lived happily until their blessed end.

In cognitive understanding of literary convention, we often equate material poverty with a poverty of the soul and richness with generosity and goodness in the soul. [5] Thus the poor miller is devoid of something important in his life (the feminine, since he values his daughter so little) and the rich king, although he assiduously counts his pears, is nevertheless open to what the maiden represents, even if she has no hands. The handlessness is itself a literalization of the inability to feel, as well as to care for oneself. The miller stands for the part of masculine dominated culture that is declining as a result of its tendency to value the feminine less and less. The king has a certain richness of spirit, representing a part of masculine culture that has not slipped into the miller’s form of disaffection, but he has no one with whom to share it. The maiden must compensate for her disability, which she does admirably, as a veil of disguise over the loss of the abstract function of feeling. The quest the king makes to relocate her in time and space is the male journey that must be made to recognize the feminine. If we compare “The Handless Maiden” to the “Quest for the Holy Grail”, analyzed by Robert A. Johnson as illustrative of the male search for individuation, we can see that the king’s quest to find his wife is similar to the search Parsifal sets out on but does not complete until the latter is much older and wiser. The king in “The Handless Maiden” is already “rich” in years and in pears. The king has the maturity Parsifal lacks and his pear-tree garden represents intuitive appreciation of the Feminine. [6] His mother is both rich and benevolent, representing a wisdom available only to the Feminine. It is with her help in the end that he is able to find his wife and complete the integration she has worked so hard to achieve but which remains unfinished until she and her son are reunited with the king and the mother.

The Piano

The principal character of The Piano, Ada (Holly Hunter), an apparently unwed mother in the mid-to-late19th century and her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) travel to New Zealand to meet a husband Ada has been married to by her father in a proxy ceremony. Ada narrates the story herself, in her child’s voice (the only voice she has, from the time before she stopped speaking at age six). Here is the opening narration:

The voice you hear is not my speaking voice---but my mind's voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why---not even me. My father says it is a dark talent, and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. Today he married me to a man I have not yet met. Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband writes that my muteness does not bother him--and hark this! He says, "God loves dumb creatures, so why not I?" 'Twere good he had God's patience, for silence affects us all in the end. The strange thing is, I don't think myself silent. That is because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey.

Given the setting and time, it is impossible not to conclude that the daughter, Flora, is the offspring of an incestuous relationship with Ada’s father, which probably began when Ada was six years old. Ada refuses to tell her daughter who the child’s real father is and makes up stories to entertain her, a habit Flora has picked up as well. Her version of how her mother came to be dumb is telling and the careful reader/viewer will see in this story the implication of incest:

One day when my mother and father were singing together in the forest, a great storm blew up out of nowhere. But so passionate was their singing that they did not notice, nor did they stop as the rain began to fall, and when their voices rose for the final bars of the duet a great bolt of lighting came out of the sky and struck my father so that he lit up like a torch. And at the same moment my father was struck dead my mother was struck dumb! She never spoke another word.

The incest is virtually confirmed in the explicit references to the fairy tale tradition, including the performance at a community pageant of “Bluebeard,” retold along the lines of Perrault’s French version, as the story of a man who kills his wives one after another as they fail a test, stashes their bodies in a small chamber, and marries again. In the original tale, the main character (Bluebeard's current wife) escapes her psychopathic husband and finds happiness elsewhere. As is often the case in fairy tales, the “bride” is married to the “wrong” man and must be “rescued” by the “right” man, but in the case of “Bluebeard” and “The Handless Maiden,” it is the maiden herself who must be in charge of her own rescue.

In The Piano, there is also a physical replication of “The Handless Maiden”; Ada’s husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) chops the index finger off of Ada’s right hand when he discovers she is in love with George Baines (Harvey Keitel), his neighbor, a man who has been compassionate toward Ada from the first time he set eyes on her.

Baines, not a landowner like Stewart, is perceptive and sensitive to the environment around him, as his relationship to the Maoris confirms. He notices that Ada, upon her arrival, looks tired, while Stewart notices only that she is small. Stewart refuses to have the piano carried from the beachhead landing to his interior dwelling, deep in the woods, where he works at cutting wood and repairing fences in a rainy climate filmed almost entirely in the blue light contemporary cinema often uses to signal diminished sensation in a world of unconscious pain.

Baines, however, on the pretext of wanting to learn to play the piano, has the instrument brought through the woods to his own house and asks Stewart to let Ada teach him. He begins to ask favors of Ada, a touch, a look, in addition to simply listening to her play. In this way he awakens in her a kind of intimacy she has never known, and when he can stand his longing no more, he sends the piano to her house, hoping to release her from the veiled prostitution he has coerced her into and himself from the constant tension of wanting her.

In all their “lessons,” he has never actually consummated the love act, but Ada is devastated that the lessons are terminated and realizes she loves him as much as he loves her. She goes to his house and gives herself freely to him. Her husband sees her going to Baines’s cottage, however, and follows. He watches at first, then listens with an aching heart from underneath the floor, but he does not go in.

While Stewart and his family are temporarily boarded into their own house to escape an aboriginal uprising, Ada begins to touch her husband, but refuses to let him touch her. She has discovered her own desire, but she wishes to control this aspect herself as well as to restrain the male expression upon her body, as Baines has done voluntarily, and she continues to develop her sensuality with her husband, but, since he has shown no compassion for her, she does not permit satisfying intimacy between them.

When the revolt is over and the house is reopened she hears from neighbors that Baines is planning to move away. In what turns out to be proleptic, Ada cuts a single key from her piano, her only instrument of expression. She sends Flora, who is still wearing her angel wings from the Bluebeard pageant as a dress-up, with a note written on the key she has sacrificed, telling Baines he has her heart. Flora, however, betrays her mother and takes it to Stewart.

Stewart returns enraged, heaves his axe into the piano and then drags Ada out and whacks off her finger. He makes Flora take the bloody digit to Baines, further exploiting the child who has both participated in and witnessed the violent violation of her mother’s hand and all that it represents. While Ada is delirious with fever, Stewart feels tenderness and passion for her, and is aroused by his love for her. He opens his belt, in preparation to take her, thinking she is unconscious. But she awakens and the look she gives him lets him (and the viewer) know why she has never allowed him to touch her. He stands for the father who abused the six-year-old Ada. To admit Stewart into her body would be to permit the replication of her father’s guilty act. The next day Stewart goes to see Baines, who is not afraid of him, and Stewart understands, finally, that he has not only lost Ada; he has had no knowledge of her at all.

Baines, Ada, and Flora then depart for another island, taking the piano with them. In mid crossing, Ada demands they jettison the piano and deliberately puts her foot in the loop of rope that insures she will be pulled after it into the sea. As she is plummeting to the bottom of the ocean, which readers of fairy tale and myth understand as the necessary voyage into deep unconsciousness, she finds her narrating voice again, this time an adult voice, and says, “What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life! Still it has had me spooked and many others besides!”

In the final scene Ada and Baines are together. In another reference to the source tale, Baines has made her a silver prosthetic finger and she is learning to speak. We see her walking on a porch with her head covered in a dark handkerchief, practicing phonemes in a self-imposed darkness. Baines lifts the cover from her head and kisses her, but we know that, although she is out of the woods, she is not entirely out of the darkness, and she will remain in this condition as she reclaims her voice in spoken language.

In Campion’s rendering of the “Handless Maiden” the heroine has been abused by her father, has chosen a stubborn mutism as self-protection, and is then married to the same sort of man as her father, chosen by her father. She refuses to have anything to do with him physically. The man who understands her, Baines, is the “king” who provides her with the means of continuing to play the piano (the fake lessons and then the prosthetic finger), but she herself covers her head in the handkerchief of semi-consciousness. Ada is growing up in expression, but she is still not entirely capable of individuation. This does not surprise us, given the time and setting of mid-19th century colonial New Zealand, neither of which can be said to require or permit the emancipation of the female soul. Ada and the Feminine are, however, taken into the masculine as necessary to it through the figure of Baines. In this sense it is the masculine that is “completed” and the tale remains a masculine rendering of the female journey. We see this film as complete within its context because of the “happy ending” since this is the traditional masculine story line, even though it is not as complete as it might be for modern feminist viewers. For that we turn to North Country.

North Country

In Niki Caro’s film, we must start with the title and the setting. “North Country” means the place of the dead in myth and fairy tale. The cold, frozen earth is deadness itself. The south, usually the Mediterranean in European lore, is the land of life and warmth, as it is in the United States. It is worth noting that there is no sunshine in Caro’s film and much of it is filmed in the blue light technique seen in The Piano.

In North Country, Josie Aimes (Charlize Theron) has been raped as a teen and rejected by her father as a source of shame for the family. Josie is one part of the self that can be constructed, following Jungian dream analysis, by thinking of Josie, Glory (Frances McDormond), and Josie’s parents as parts of the self. Josie, who has been repeatedly abused or abandoned by men, including her father and the fathers of her two children, is the part that is trying to learn to take care of herself and her children through her own effort. To do this she takes a job at the mine where her father works and where women are few and only barely tolerated. All the women at the mine except for Glory, the union representative, are constantly harassed, berated, and intimidated, if not attacked. Josie’s father is the “miller” who does not value his daughter. The mother, at first sympathetic to the status quo, eventually sees that her husband is losing his humanity by pouring his bitterness into his daughter’s struggle. She eventually shows him how to stand up for their daughter.

While Josie is “handless” in the sense that she is the originally raped and abandoned Self, Glory is the (almost) literally handless part. We first see her ill with Lou Gherig's disease as she is binding up her own hands so she can continue to work in the mine. She is very capable, like the maiden in the myth, and manages quite well, especially with the kind attention of her adoring husband. She is not harassed at the mine because she doesn't make waves, yet she is not afraid to demand everything that is accorded by law for union members. The men at the mine respect her.

Josie’s father, Hank (Sean Bean), and most of the men (except for Glory’s husband), resent the women who work at the mine. Their bitterness projected onto the feminine has been passed to the next generation, including Josie’s son, Sammy, who is the product of the original rape. Sammy is tormented on his ice hockey team because of his mother’s activism at the mine. He carries the “Filled-With-Grief” identity of the child in the original tale, who grows up without a father. The men are like the wounded Fisher King in Chrétien de Troye’s “Parsifal” and in the 1991 film, The Fisher King with Robin Williams. They cannot be healed until man values the Grail (symbol of the Feminine) enough to inquire into it and go in search of it.

Hank doesn't realize his own poverty of spirit until his wife, Alice (Sissy Spacek), leaves him and checks into a motel. He is now isolated from the Feminine (a genderless notion equating to being-in-relationship represented by Alice). But, at the union meeting when Josie tries to speak, he stands up for her. He stands up for the dignity of his daughter as a union member and as a human being; he demands that she be heard, whether anyone agrees with her or not, and in so doing he stands up for the dignity of everyone in the room. This act results in - and here critics might say we are in the realm of fairy tale - the entire room coming around to the requirements of civility. In a matter of moments, Hank begins to heal himself by valuing the Feminine, and as a result he has begun to heal the community.

At the hearing to initiate a class action suit, Josie tells for the first time how she was raped by a high school teacher. A classmate, Bobby Sharp, witnessed but did not report the rape or try to help Josie. He works at the mine and had harassed her there but backed off without injuring her physically. Bobby Sharp can be seen as embodying a part of “Parsifal le chetif”— Parsifal “the puny” or stunted, meaning “the cowardly, poor in spirit, pitiful,” as the latter is named in the Grail legend after he misses his opportunity to inquire about the significance of the Grail and cure the Fisher King.

We see that Hank is changed when he attacks the rapist who has been brought into court as a witness meant to degrade Josie and discredit her demands for the suit. Hank finally acts to protect his daughter, the embodiment of the innocent Feminine, and redeem himself by attacking this perverted masculine figure.

At this point in the courtroom drama, Glory, now wheelchair bound, uses her hand to knock on the metal of her chair to get the court’s attention. It is significant that she uses her bound-up hand to “speak” before her husband actually reads her declaration, stating that she wishes to join the class action suit and “stand with Josie.” We can thus see Josie and Glory as separated parts of the “handless maiden” now reunited.

The father’s speech at the union meeting is the first healing moment in the story, and Glory’s chair-rattling racket with her hand is the second. No doubt critics will suggest that the women remain dependent on men taking their part, but such an argument seems to ignore the fact that we are not only in the story of how women achieve individuation, but of how men achieve it. Men must recognize and value the Feminine and the Feminine, though she may demand recognition, if the Masculine does not value her, the self and civilization are impoverished by the loss.

Immediately after Glory’s speech is read, two women who work at the mine stand up, followed by Josie’s mother (not a union member) and her father. Alice, who has not intervened for her daughter since the time of the rape, has come to understand her part in not valuing the daughter and all she represents. We thus see the negative or repressed father and the previously passive mother as diminished parts of the culture that permit sexual harassment of women, or more generally, devaluation of the innocent Feminine. Josie’s son, who has been furious with his mother, is reconciled as he learns who his father was and that the rape need not affect who he becomes. In this way, we see that future generations need not be tormented by the legacy of an indigent soul.

Certainly, North Country is about literal sexual harassment in the corporate world, but it is much bigger than the first case in the United States against an industry found criminally responsible for violence against women. It is about patriarchal culture, represented by the mining complex, that dark pit in the North Country devoid of all access to the Feminine. It is in taking the Feminine into itself that the masculine community is healed, just as in The Piano, but in North Country it is the actions of the women that prompt all the actions of the men. The men are prodded by “handless” maidens quite capable of managing on their own, but who don't want to function without the masculine in their world, who don’t want to live without feeling the connection to the other that makes us know what it means to be alive.

Women create the space in which community and life are possible, but men must participate in the discovery and valuing of that space to make community truly vibrant. North Country is “The Handless Maiden” retold in a way that completes the healing process begun in The Piano by extending it into feminine experience and bringing the masculine and feminine worlds together.

[1] See also Robert A. Johnson, 1993.

[2] I have shortened this version from the website: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm031.html (also available at: http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~wbarker/fairies/grimm/g031.html) and have removed a little of the Christian overlay, which equates the old man, the negative masculine/father in Jungian terms, with the Devil. These versions also insist on the piety of the maiden/queen, which is irrelevant in the broader reading I propose. The maiden/queen remains innocent yet grows in wisdom and capability without this heavy vocabulary.

[4] In the Russian version the hands grow back when she extends them into the river to save her infant son, thus, in their employment for the good of another (Johnson).

[5] It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that materially poor subjects became acceptable heroes and heroines in fiction, and even then, they achieve wealth along with self-growth.

[6] “In dreams the fruit is ‘a typically erotic symbol, fraught with sensuality. This is probably due to its sweet taste, juiciness and also to its shape which has a suggestion of the feminine abut it.’ ” Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1957.

Works Cited

Blair, Emily and M. Michelle Illuminato. "The Handless Maiden." Next Question. Ed. Emily Blair. 1996. 9 Oct. 2006. <http://www.nextquestion.org/maiden.htm>

Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, translated by John Buchanan-Brown, citing Aeppli, Ernest, Les rêves et leur interprétation, Paris, 1957

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Das Mädchen ohne Hände, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales — Grimms' Fairy Tales), final edition (Berlin, 1857), no. 31.

Johnson, Robert A., The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology, San Francisco, Harper, 1993.

North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Perf. Charlize Theron , Frances McDormand , Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson,andSean Bean. Participant 2005

The Piano. Dir Jane Campen. Perf. Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin. Miramax/Hyperion 1993.