Handless Maidens: Grimm Tales in Contemporary Cinema
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.
