Handless Maidens: Grimm Tales in Contemporary Cinema
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.
[3] See also: http://www.nextquestion.org/maiden.htm.
[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.
