The Snow Queen is a story which charters an heroic journey to redeem a traumatized and divided self resulting from a very specific kind of emotional wound.
Our story begins with an evil hobgoblin who is commissioned to create a terrible, magical, mirror. It’s special power is to reflect back distorted images, leading those who look into it to believe they are ugly and without worth. Worst of all, the mirror is broken by clumsy underlings who then inadvertently shower the world with enchanted shards and slivers which can get into your eye causing you to see everything in a negative light, or into your heart, turning it to ice.
Two splinters manage to get into the heart and eye of Kay, a young boy. He turns on his playmate Gerda, whom he had loved dearly up until that moment, making her cry with his sudden hostility. He announces rudely that he’s off to play with his sled in the square where the big boys hitch themselves onto passing farmer’s carts for a free ride.
Kay attaches himself to a pure white sleigh which immediately heads out of town. He tries to get free but cannot. The sleigh runs faster and faster, over hedges and ditches, while snow storms whistle and roar. Soon the boy is frozen with cold and fear.
Eventually the sleigh stops and out gets… the Snow Queen. She takes Kay under her fur, kisses his head, lulls him into deathly sleep and drives on.
” They flew over forests and lakes, over many a land and sea. Below them the wind blew cold, wolves howled, and black crows screamed as they skimmed across the glittering snow.”
Meantime, Gerda is beside herself with worry. Kay has been acting strangely and has now gone missing.
One morning Gerda goes down to the river to ask if it has seen Kay. She offers the river her red shoes if only it will help and throws them in. The shoes are washed back so she stands in the prow of a rowboat for a better go but the mooring works loose and she is carried off down stream.
What on earth has happened?
The Snow Queen and her devastating ice splinters are a representation of what M. Woodman calls the Death Mother whose icy look..
”kills the imagination and cuts off from metaphorical thinking, compromising the process of psychological integration.” M. Woodman.
Normally we think of symbiotic relationships as unhealthy but its actually a stage you have to go through, one which is bound to find problematic expression if you get stuck in it.
When the child emerges from identification with Mother, how budding autonomy is received will be crucial. If Mother needs the special bond of his dependence for her own purposes, needs him to be a repository for un-lived aspirations, then a bid for the child’s own destiny is going to be construed as betrayal.
This collision of interests is going to be traumatic. It’s the immovable injunction to hitch your sled to Mamma’s sleigh for all eternity vs. the unstoppable push for individuation. Rather than being encouraged to fly the nest it seems that spreading your wings is something shameful, a failure of sacred duty which will cost all you hold dear.
The shadow side of being special is that symbiosis can’t be worked through towards inter-dependence because of subterranean hatred at the child’s autonomy which now threatens a bond on which identity has been built.
Of course, hating your child for wanting to fulfill it’s own ambitions is completely taboo. It has to be driven underground where its expression may be limited to passive with-holding, euphemistically called ‘maternal deprivation’. These veiled attacks upon the child’s competence are internalized as the icy splinters, against which the child maintains going on being by splitting its reality and becoming dissociated. Kay, the wounded self, falls into a trance whilst Gerda, the healthy self, sets out to find him.
The first thing Gerda does is to offer the river her red shoes, ‘her dearest possession’, as a sacrifice for Kay’s sake. It seems the river responds directly and carries her off to the first part of an adventure which will eventually reunite them.
What does it mean for Gerda to sacrifice her red shoes?
The red shoes are an iconic symbol with a multitude of associations and meanings. Just four months after publishing ‘The Snow Queen’, Hans Christian Anderson wrote ‘The Red Shoes’, a story of a wayward girl who dances herself to destruction. So the meaning is ambiguous, though in this context they seem to have some positive resonance with Dorothy’s red shoes from the Wizard of Oz in that they are instrumental in revealing routes of self remembrance. As her most precious possession, something with which she is identified, she has to sacrifice an ideal which then initiates a journey into the unknown.
”The red shoes are treasures but they also separate the sole/ soul from the natural world. They are also a narcissistic object – ”oh look at my wonderful shoes – see how rich I am””. D. Mathers
This would seem to support the view of Clarissa Pinkola Estes who regards the red shoes as representative of a psychologically undervalued life, creating addictions. The red shoes are symbolic of a sophisticated persona which, though it might be very grand, is not the whole person and therefor have to be renounced as a nucleus of identity.
The magical mirror at the beginning of the story is a metaphor for what we learn about ourselves from others, the reflection/response to our own being from which we learn who we are. If mirrors can be either light or dark, bright or obscure, then that gives us four basic ways of being mirrored by the Great Mother; dark/obscure, dark/bright, light/obscure and light/bright.
In our story Gerda must encounter each of the four mirrors in the guise of four ancient crones in order to reconnect with Kay, her split off inner world.
The first is the Cherry Witch who, like the Snow Queen, is dark/obscure. She too pretends kindness, emerging from her riverside cottage to pull Gerda in to the bank with her crutch. Her motives are not to help Gerda but to satisfy her own loneliness. She invites her in and locks the door behind them….
Then she feeds the girl with endless cherries while combing her hair with a golden comb whose magic gradually makes Gerda forget about Kay. The witch also makes the roses in her garden shrivel up into the ground so that Gerda will not be reminded of the rose bower between their bedroom windows back home…
The cherries are interesting. Where I come from your cherry is your virginity, a symbol of innocence and unworldliness. Like Kay, Gerda is also drawn in to a make believe fantasy of how marvelous things are at the expense of her own quest, but unlike Kay she is able to respond. One day she notices a rose in the old lady’s colorful hat.
‘Where are all the roses?
And with that she remembers and grieves for Kay. Her hot tears fall upon the shriveled rose bushes which come back to life and reassure her that Kay still lives since, had he been in the ground, they would know about it.
The spell of the Dark/Obscure is broken. Not by being able to change circumstances but by paying the closest attention and letting herself ask the right question which leads straight to authentic grief and loss.
The flowers in the Witch’s garden try to beguile Gerda with cryptic stories to deflect from what the Dark/Obscure is actually doing, immuring the soul of the child, but Gerda has had a glimpse of her own separate destiny and knows it does not include the old lady’s woes..
“That’s nothing to me,” said little Gerda. “That does not concern me.” And then off she ran to the further end of the garden.
and out of the rusted garden gate into the great wide world.
With the misguided help of a precocious crow, Gerda tries to find Kay in a nearby castle. It comes to nothing but the Prince and Princess of the place are in good shape which bodes well for the next leg of the adventure, being captured by the Robber Queen.
The experience and remembrance of loss not only reduces the malign influence of a Dark/Obscure mother complex. It also transforms it. The Dark/Obscure becomes Dark/Bright in the form of this chaotic yet honest incarnation of the Great Mother.
The Robber Queen waylays Gerda as she rides along in her coach provided by the folk in the castle behind them. Her intention is murder and robbery with maybe a bit of tasty young girl to chew on at dinner. Only her daughter biting her ear prevents Gerda from going on the menu.
The Robber Queen seems worse than the Cherry Witch, but actually there is some improvement despite her ferocity..
and her beard…
which is that at least what you see is what you get. So even though she is a bitch from hell at least she doesn’t lie about it. Her licking her lips is at least congruent…
“How plump, how beautiful she is! She must have been fed on nut-kernels,” said the Robber Queen, who had bushy eyebrows that hung down over her eyes. “She is as good as a fatted lamb! How nice she will be!” And then she drew out a knife, the blade of which shone so that it was quite dreadful to behold.
The Robber Queen is an improvement on the Cherry Witch because the child does not have to sacrifice her integrity or perspective into the bargain. She doesn’t have to pretend or deal with distorted reality and so even though the old bag is horrible, Gerda is still permitted her own authentic response, which is that she really is in serious shit.
Luckily Gerda is befriended by the Robber Queen’s daughter, a girl of her own age who is almost entirely feral. She is the survival self, streetwise and handy with a knife. In order for poor Kay to be rescued, Gerda has to negotiate a relationship with her captor.
”The trauma self holds the split off and frozen experience; the healthy self is still there, but is ‘managed’ by our survival self which comes into being as a means of maintaining the split structure… ensuring that the trauma stays out of our consciousness.” V. Broughton.
The survival self holds life captive. Gerda is given a guided tour of all the caged creatures in the robber’s camp, particularly a reindeer whose neck the Robber Girl likes to tickle and torment with her knife.
Gerda and the Robber Girl get to know each other. When the wood pigeons corroborate Gerda’s story, saying they have seen Kay, the Robber Girl changes her mind and hatches a plan to help Gerda on her way. The survival self is made receptive by entering it’s world, acknowledging how it has protected you, being straight with it, but needing a different arrangement, all made possible by having the Cherry Witch out of the way.
The Robber Girl frees the Reindeer which carries Gerda to Lapland where the Snow Queen is holding Kay. On their way they stop at the humble cottage of the Lapp Woman who is the Great Mother in her Light/Obscure manifestation, a transformation achieved by Gerda’s managing to befriending the survival self.
The Lapp woman is an ample, salt of the earth matriarch, sympathetic but in a way that is still somehow in your face. She’s politically correct but able to argue for the validity of other points of view in a way that seems to be at the expense of your own point of view. She’s Polyanna crossed with Nursey from Blackadder. So even though she gives them shelter, feeds them and writes a note on a codfish for the final crone, the Finn Woman, she cannot help Gerda to find her way to Kay directly.
The Finn Woman is the fourth and most benevolent mirror of the Great Mother in our story. She is the Light/Bright mirror, brought into consciousness by Gerda forming a healthy symbiosis with her spirit animal, having had herself tied to Reindeer in order to make the difficult journey,
The Finn woman has no door to her cottage. Only a chimney. Inside it is so hot she goes about almost naked. Reindeer pleads for an elixir that will give Gerda the strength of twelve men but the old lady says that will not do.
“No power that I could give could be as great as that which she already has. Don’t you see how men and beasts are compelled to serve her, and how far she has come in the wide world since she started out in her naked feet?
The Finn Woman is Light/Bright because she has faith in the child. She both loves and believes in her, which gives Gerda the strength to endure. She tells Reindeer that Kay is indeed close by and what it is that ails him. When Gerda finds Kay her tears melt the ice in his heart. His own tears then wash out the splinter from his eye.
He has been trying to piece together icy shards at the Snow Queen’s behest, trying to spell ‘Eternity’, in order to gain his freedom, symbolically trying to make sense of that which does not and driving himself mad in the process. When Kay acknowledges Gerda the shards fall to the ground spelling out ‘Eternity’, all by themselves. Kay and Gerda leave the Snow Queen’s palace and are joined by the Robber Girl. Finally, all three aspects of the self are reunited.
The relationship between the personality and the Unconscious is dynamic. When we make strenuous efforts rooted in the desire for wholeness it is not just consciousness that is transformed. The face of the Deep Psyche also evolves, changing its adversarial attitude towards the personality into something life affirming and supportive. For this to happen you need Gerda’s longing, her willingness to sacrifice what is special, the courage to grieve her loss and the mystery of animal helpers.
Grateful acknowledgments to Dale Mathers for introducing me to the work of Steven Joseph on the four kinds of mirror and for first telling me the story of the Snow Queen thirty years ago.
