Women Who Run with the Wolves

A culture suppresses the inner Wild Woman by defining beauty in narrow terms. Women are pressured to conform to a specific set of physical attributes. The author recalls a time during her youth when she observed the behavior of individual wolves. Some were old, some young, some maimed or injured, some fat. All of them expressed the energy of their individual forms without self-consciousness.

Cultures that define a physical standard of beauty based on a particular height, skin color, body weight, or shape deny the rich physical inheritance that people receive from their ancestors. Rather than seeing the body as a collection of traits, Estés views the body as a dynamic being in its own right. “The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction” (198). The body expresses the spirit and enables the soul to experience material reality.

The author recalls a ceremony held in New Mexico each year in which the Butterfly Woman performs a ritual dance of blessing. The dancer is old and fat, which disturbs tourists who expect a culturally acceptable image of feminine beauty. The natives understand that cosmic blessing has nothing to do with body shape: “Wild Woman shows up in many sizes, shapes, colors, and conditions. Stay awake so you can recognize the wild soul in all its many guises” (212).

Traps and dangers lie ahead for any woman intent on asserting her wild creative nature. The first tale to illustrate this point is “The Red Shoes.” It begins with an orphaned girl who makes herself a pair of red shoes out of scraps. She loves these shoes and wears them everywhere. One day, as she is trudging along the side of the road, a rich old woman in a coach offers to adopt her. The girl is taken to the old lady’s home where she is given new clothes, and her old red shoes are burned. The girl learns to be obedient, and she follows all the old lady’s rules faithfully. When she is old enough for her confirmation in church, the girl is allowed to choose new shoes for the ceremony. She immediately falls in love with a pair of red leather shoes at the cobbler’s shop. The old lady’s eyesight isn’t good enough to see that the shoes are red and inappropriate for church, so the girl fools her benefactor into purchasing them.

When the old lady finally sees the color of the shoes, she admonishes the girl to put them away. The following week, the girl wears them to church anyway. An old soldier outside the church admires the shoes and bends down to brush the dust off them. He says they are perfect for dancing. As the girl twirls to show off her shoes for him, she begins to dance spontaneously and can’t stop. Eventually, the old lady and her coachman are able to wrestle the shoes off the girl’s feet. Again, the girl is warned never to wear the shoes.

When the old lady falls ill, the girl is tempted to take down the shoes and wear them. Once they are on her feet, she immediately begins to dance. This time, she can’t stop and goes on dancing into the night. A spirit in the graveyard prophesies that she will dance forever until she is nothing but entrails. Alarmed and exhausted, the girl begs an executioner with an axe to cut the shoes from her feet. When severing the straps does no good, she implores him to cut off her feet, which he does. The shoes and feet go dancing away, and the girl is left a crippled beggar for the rest of her life.

Estés analyzes this story as a caution against all the traps that steal authenticity from a Wild Woman. The girl in the story first fashions red shoes from scraps, symbolizing her true creative self. She later trades her creativity for security when the old woman adopts her and burns the crude shoes. Little by little, the girl’s wild nature is eroded until she conforms to behavior deemed acceptable by the old lady and society in general. Having been starved of her authentic self, which burned with her red shoes, the girl is hungry for anything that will bring her back in contact with her real nature. The author says, “There is something about famine that causes judgment to be blighted” (229).

The girl sneaks the store-bought shoes onto her feet in secret, but they eventually take complete control. The author sees the runaway shoes as a form of addiction, much like the drug and alcohol addictions that plague the lives of many renowned female artists in the real world. By asking the executioner to chop off her feet, the girl takes drastic measures to stop her addiction.

Although the fairy tale ends badly for the dancing girl, the real world allows new beginnings at every stage of a woman’s life. The Wild Woman can reconstitute herself at will. Estés cautions, “Dance in red shoes, but make sure they’re the ones you’ve made by hand” (254).