About those chicken legs….

Chapter Five begins with Sophie desperately wanting to stay.

The only thing to do, Sophie decided, was to show Howl that she was an excellent cleaning lady, a real treasure. She tied an old rag round her wispy white hair, she rolled the sleeves up her skinny old arms and wrapped an old tablecloth from the broom cupboard round her as an apron….She grabbed up a bucket and besom and got to work. [63]

In checking my notes and my favorite books of folk tale/fairy tale interpretation for this post, I got merrily caught up in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s chapter in Women Who Run With The Wolves on the story about the innocent girl Vasalisa and the chicken-legged house of the crone Baba Yaga. There are some compelling similarities between Vasalisa and Sophie, which once again I attribute not so much to any direct, intentional parallel, but rather to the “primordial sludge” — comprising everything she has known, learned, or read — which DWJ cited as inspiration in “The Profession of Science Fiction.”

Vasalisa began life with stepmother and stepsister problems, which in Sophie’s case are inverted/averted; however, she shares with Sophie a missing “positive mother,” the source of a girl’s self-esteem and ability to trust her own intuition. Although Fanny never abused Sophie in any wicked-stepmother way, there’s no denying that Sophie’s loss in infancy of her real mother, combined with her own tendency toward passivity, had in her hat shop days collapsed Sophie’s reality into practically nothing.

Vasalisa does the everyday chores without complaint. To submit without complaint is heroic-seeming, but in fact causes more and more pressure and conflict between the two oppositional natures, one too-good and the other too-demanding….At this point a woman begins to lose her psychic bearings. She may feel cold, alone, and willing to do anything to bring back the light again. This is just the jolt the too-nice woman needs to continue her induction into her own power. One might say that Vasalisa has to go meet the Great Wild Hag because she needs a good scare. [WWRWTW, p. 87]

We’ve already seen Sophie longing for something more to life as she dutifully trims hats all day and far into the night. We’ve seen her so deeply compliant and resigned that the Hag, the Witch of the Waste, finally had to come to her. Having been jolted from her passivity by the Witch’s curse, we’ve seen Sophie leave home and shop and set out into the Wild — willing, as night comes down cold and windy, to take her chances with Wizard Howl’s Castle because there’s fire and light inside.

(Miyazaki’s version even helpfully puts the castle on giant biomechanical chicken legs.)

At this point, DWJ begins departing from the old story, inverting it. In the folk tale, Vasalisa’s family send her to Baba Yaga seeking fire, an errand which they assumed and hoped would be the end of Vasalisa. Upon meeting her, Baby Yaga then strikes a Rumpelstiltskin-esque bargain with the girl — she will give Vasalisa the magical fire in return for impossible fairy-tale household chores such as sorting mounds of poppy-seeds from mounds of dirt before dawn. There will also be sweeping and laundry to do. But Baba Yaga doesn’t live in Howl’s Moving Castle. There is an enchanted fire at the heart of it, but rather than passively waiting to be stolen, this fire has drawn Sophie there and and allowed her to enter.

As far as the sweeping and washing go, the resident bachelors don’t demand it in return for lodging. In fact, they insist they don’t even want it. [62] Yet Sophie throws herself into it with a wild, mad joy. For now it’s what she is choosing to do, and for someone who for so long had felt so trapped, that means the world.

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The psychic key.

Before I move on, here’s a little more about Bluebeard from Clarissa Pinkola Estes:

Story is meant to set the inner life back into motion again. The Bluebeard story is a medicine which is particularly important to apply where the inner life of the woman has become frightened, or wedged or cornered. Story solutions lessen fear, give doses of adrenaline at just the right time, and most importantly for the captured naive self, cut doors into walls which were previously blank.[p. 65]

Stories are everything Estes describes, and more. They are powerful unblockers of dammed-up anger, grief, or fear. (I could give examples from my own experience, but I’ll do that some other time.) In this story Sophie has become, or at least appears to have become, less frightened since the witch’s spell transformed her into an old woman. Part of that is a defensive facade, of course. But there is no question that she felt wedged and cornered in her old life at the hat shop. A change, a confrontation with her own need for something more out of life, was probably inevitable. Sheltered and bookish, yet extremely intelligent, Sophie is an excellent candidate for the Bluebeard experience.

Here’s Estes again:

[T]he Bluebeard story raises to consciousness the psychic key, the ability to ask any and all questions about oneself, about one’s family, one’s endeavors, and about life all around.[p. 65]

In fact Sophie had already begun that questioning process. Her visit with Martha at Cesari’s caused her to question even more. All it needed the Witch’s curse to make it official. Now that she’s had that little nudge out the door, Sophie has no choice but to open those forbidden doors and ask those forbidden questions.

Many women…marry while they are yet naive about predators, and they choose someone who is destructive to their lives.[p. 50]

Without fully understanding what she is doing, Sophie has (by proxy, in her bargain with the fire demon), taken upon herself a heavy, life-altering choice: is Wizard Howl a predator?

Based upon what we know so far, it certainly would seem so. According to the fire demon with the long purple teeth, at best Howl is “heartless” [46] and an “exploiter” [45]. He’s also “pretty useless at most things” and “too wrapped up in himself to see beyond his nose half the time.” [47]

Whereas the poor demon, forced to propel the castle and to create special effects such as the May Day fireworks that are supposed to scare people off, is the exploitee (this gains him Sophie’s immediate attention and sympathy), despite his self-proclaimed willingness to honor a contract that has become a burden to both parties [46]. I have found his words in regard to his sense of honor to be significant and interesting in the light of later events in the novel:

“I do keep my word. The fact that I’m stuck here shows that I keep it.”

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Which will bring us back to Bluebeard

Back in Chapter One, if you recall, the Market Chipping gossips had the word on Wizard Howl, and the word was “Bluebeard.” So it’s not stretching the point in the least to say that Jones is calling attention to this character, one of the nastier pieces of work in all of fairy tale-dom.

In 100 words or less, here’s the story: the dashing yet sinister Bluebeard gives his young bride the run of his castle and goes off. There is only one door that she must not open. Egged on by her sisters, she opens it and finds it full of bones and blood. Worse, the key to that door starts drooling blood all over everything it touches. Bluebeard figures it out on his return and is about to add her to his collection, but she outsmarts him by sending for her brothers, who make short work of Bluebeard.

There are numberless good books about the archetypes, symbols, and metaphors in fairy tales, myths, and stories of all sorts. For exegesis of the Bluebeard story I particularly like Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who gives him an entire chapter in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves.” [Disclosure: I often find books by women about women to be either too strident or too New-Agey. Estes manages to be neither. Describing herself as “a middle-class mystic with delicate intestines [p. 25],” her down-to-earth sensibility reminds me a great deal of Diana Wynne Jones.]

Estes writes:

Bluebeard is one of the teaching tales which are important for women who are young, not necessarily in years, but in some part of their minds. It is a tale of psychic naivete, but also of powerfully breaching the injunction against ‘looking’ and finally cutting down and rendering the natural predator of the psyche. [65]

We meet that predator again and again, the pre-conscious inertial force of resistance and self-loathing in the core of our own souls. I’ve just spent nearly two months knocked out of commission by it. And writing, which for me is the one thing that will put the monster back to bed, is the hardest thing to do when it’s up and roaming around downstairs, hungry.

Significantly, Estes mentions that Bluebeard is “a failed magician.” [45] In his quest for power and domination he is like Icarus, who in his hubris soared too high and fell too hard. Bluebeard’s fate, unlike that of Icarus, is to be an outcast from redemption and wholeness, living in a “deep and inexplicable loneliness.” [45]

Those already familiar with Howl’s Moving Castle will see at once the similarity to Wizard Howl — and the difference.

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