the legend
The frog is an amphibian . . . that is an animal with two types of life, a fishlike life as a tadpole and a (predominantly) land life as a frog. This animal, therefore, is an excellent symbol of the gradual metamorphosis from one world to another, or for a messenger from the sphere of the more fluid soul-world to the solid, material world.
--- Julius Heuscher, Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I’ll take a knife
and chop up frog.
Frog has no nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father’s genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob.
Frog is a soft bag of green . . .
At the feel of frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Slime will have him.
Slime has made him a house.
--- Anne Sexton, “The Frog Prince”
In a way this story tells that to be able to love, a person first has to become able to feel; even if the feelings are negative, that is better than not feeling. In the beginning the princess is entirely self-centered; all her interest is in her ball. She has no feelings when she plans to go back on her promise to the frog; gives no thought as to what this may mean for it. The closer the frog comes to her physically and personally, the stronger her feelings become, but with this she becomes more a person. For a long stretch of development she obeys her father, but feels ever more strongly; then at the end she asserts her independence in going against his orders. As she thus becomes herself, so does the frog; it turns into a prince.
--- Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Frogs appear in fairy tales with characteristic impertinence. As with snakes, their appearance usually provokes negative responses of fear, disgust and confusion, especially when they manifest humanlike capacities for communication and relatedness. The hero or heroine recoils from this cold-blooded, amphibian creature that emerges from bogs and ponds, all wet and slimy, and intruding itself in the normal run of things. In a fairy tale, the appearance of a frog is like the advent of a comet in the cosmos – it disturbs and alters the course of every planet or star in its path.
The most popular of the frog fairy tales is, of course, the story of The Frog Prince. In Grimm’s version (sometimes called The Frog King) a beautiful young princess plays with a golden ball which accidentally rolls into a pond. A frog tries to befriend her and retrieves her ball after he extracts a promise from her to allow him to play, eat and sleep with her. The princess soon forgets her pledge, and leaving the frog behind, returns to the castle. He follows her and demands that she honor her pledge. She is repelled, but her father, the king, insists that she keep her promise. The princess is progressively overcome with anger and disgust as the frog intrudes more and more in her life. When he demands to sleep with her, she rebels and in a fit of outrage and revulsion, she smashes the frog against the wall of her bedroom. In that moment, the spell is broken and the frog is transformed into a magnificent prince – a worthy spouse for the princess.
From a conventional point of view, the tale is a parable of puberty and the first experience of sexual encounter. The golden ball, like most “golden” things in fairy tales, represents the higher, spiritual aspect of the personality. In the context of this tale it is also an emblem of youth and innocence, of virginal freedom. The frog is symbolic of the impatient manifestation of physical instincts and the temporary submersion of the spiritual aspect in adolescence. At first the heroine is incapable of integrating the two dimensions of experience, the spiritual and physical. She tries to recapture the golden world while rejecting the ugly frog. The frog persists, grows progressively more intimate: first conversing with her, then playing with her, sitting with her, eating with her, and finally demanding to sleep with her.
The frog’s phallic, assertive qualities identify it as an obvious projection of male sexuality. In an earlier version of the tale, the significance is even more explicit: the princess must kiss the frog while it lies in bed with her, then they must sleep together for three weeks before the frog is transformed into a prince.
Feminists might well object that the conventional interpretation of the tale is a cautionary message to females to bear with the atavistic aspects of the male personality, to accommodate themselves to the abrasive, exploitative demands of a male partner. The patriarchal, androcentric bias of the tale is underscored by the fact that the heroine’s accommodation is prescribed by her father, the King. The all-too-familiar pattern of the battered women is evident: initial anxiety, anger and hatred are gradually pacified by the realization that she has nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Her isolation and dependency make her a prisoner of male will.
Another evidence of the veiled androcentric-misogynist bias of the fairy tale is the curious epilogue that is often added to the story, a brief passage that celebrates the loyal devotion of Iron Henry – the frog prince’s faithful servant – to his master, in spite of his changed form. Presumably, Henry’s faithful and heroic love is introduced as a deliberate contrast to the unfaithful princess who defaults in her promise of friendship to the frog. The male comrade provides the exemplary image of love, rather than the female consort.
But the denouement of the tale suggests a more universal meaning. Both the princess and the frog are destined to be changed. At first the princess obeys her father, but her anger and outrage intensify, finally liberating her personality from the father-image (superego) in an act of self-assertion. “As she thus becomes herself, so does the frog.”
The frog, too, must be liberated from his obvious need to achieve a symbiotic dependency on the princess. He must experience being thrown out of her bed and hurled against the wall. He must experience being reduced to nothing – ignored and finally annihilated. Only then is the frog “freed of bondage to an immature existence.”
Thus the tale of The Frog Prince celebrates not only the integration of the spiritual and the physical in the sexual encounter, but also the achievement of personal autonomy and the maturity of relatedness. The amphibious nature of the frog highlights its significance as an intermediary between two worlds; even as sexuality mediates the physical and spiritual dimensions of the personality and constitutes a crucial passage to psychological and spiritual maturity.
The fact that many variants of The Frog Prince reverse the sexual roles and focus on a “Frog Princess” suggests an even more universal symbolism. In the Russian tale I Know Not What of I Know Not Where, the Tsar’s archer can only retrieve his golden-haired wife by riding on the back of a huge frog that leaps across the river of fire into the “I Know Not Where Land,” and by finding there, “I Know Not What,” who helps him defeat his enemies. Likewise in The Frog Princess the hero finds his wife’s frog skin and burns it. For this impulsive act he is punished: the frog-princess leaves him and warns him that she can only be his again if he is willing to search for her “beyond the thrice ninth land, in the thrice tenth kingdom.” Ivan, the hero, seeks her in a land of darkness, mystery and oracle. After several years and much toil, he finds her and frees her from her enchantment.
The symbolism of fire in both of these tales represents an act of self-destruction, an assumption of absolute control over a vital dimension of one’s being that is subsequently punished by its loss and painstaking recovery. The juxtaposition of The Frog Prince and The Frog Princess tale suggests that what has been rejected or lost is some part of the soul or psyche that is integral to the whole person. Jungian psychology provides an apt, if somewhat particular, interpretation: in The Frog Prince the heroine has rejected her own animus qualities, and in The Frog Princess the hero has obliterated his anima. In a more universal context, the variants of the tale suggest that the frog-persona represents whatever has been suppressed by reason of social role. Only in the relationship of human love is the bond secure enough, elastic enough to withstand the eruption of those aspects of the person that have been muted by the tyranny of culturally imposed roles. Men and women need each other.
It comes first in her submission to the patriarchal authority of the masculine view of reality. In time, her own rage, anger and depression may free her from this father-ordered cosmos. She undergoes a metamorphosis of consciousness. She exorcises the patriarchal hegemony in her soul, discovers a new identity. Suddenly, her partner begins to resemble a frog. What has she done, what alchemy of the spirit has transformed him into an ugly, surly toad? But he does not see himself as a frog – he does not comprehend at all when she tries to explain how she sees him. She has no choice but to take the risk of rejecting him – of leaving him or throwing him out, reducing him to nothing. In that moment of truth, he has a choice. He can commit himself to the arduous pilgrimage of transformation, toward gaining a new vision of himself; or he can sink into self-pity and remain fixed in his blindness. He may go on forever mimicking the compulsive, false premises of that original relationship. He may never know that he is a frog. After all, the woman has cast off an alien image; he is being asked to murder his own self-image.
Metamorphosis cannot take place without the rupture and shedding of old shells and old skins – of conventional structures and traditional roles. But we are afflicted with a mortal inertia, men and women alike. The transformation may never come. Many will rot in their chrysalis and never know sunlight, airy winds and freedom.
epilogue
Exit the Frog Prince
Dearest Prince,
I have not quite decided whether I should leave you. I know you are confused and anxious. You keep looking at me with that “what-ever-happened-to-the-princess-I-married” look. Your confusion is understandable. In the past few months, years, I have literally self-destructed. Disintegrated my false self, in order to reassemble my true self. Your self, unfortunately, is tailor-made for that old, false self. You are accustomed to playing “hero”; suddenly you’re a “heavy.”
Like many other men, you have difficulty seeing yourself as an oppressor because you have difficulty seeing yourself as a member of a class. Men regard themselves as individuals and look to their own motives to justify or reprove their behavior. They suppress their symbolic role in an apolitical illusion of personal innocence: “I have never discriminated against women or bullied them, so why should I be accused?” They are blind to their participation in sustaining oppressive arrangements in human relations. They have accepted the way things are, and in that acceptance is an act of complicity – regardless of their own personal motives. Their individualistic view inevitably seduces them into interpreting efforts to redress the situation of women – “affirmative action” plans, etc. – as threats to their own individual rights. The hue and cry about “reverse discrimination” is a pathetic wail of self-centeredness as the last lifeboats on the Titanic are loaded.
In working through my own liberation I have experienced much anger and a great deal of fear. But I am beginning to emerge on the other side of that, now. I can begin to look beyond myself to be concerned in a new way about others. My anger has changed to anguish – anguish especially about you. In so many ways, your situation is worse than mine. Your self-deception is deeper and more profound.
I know you instinctively regard the “woman problem” as a question of giving them time and space enough to “catch up” with men. You don’t see yourself as having a problem, too. White, middle-class American males always think that everything is someone else’s problem – that blacks have a problem, women have a problem, Chicanos have a problem. You don’t recognize your own socialized masculinity as a problem, as the root of all the other problems.
In a sense everyone’s liberation depends on the liberation of white males, precisely because they have the power to prevent women and minorities from seeking a broader range of alternatives if they do not play the game by the rules of the masculine value system. Unless you can admit that you are the problem and begin the task of liberating yourself and dismantling the male-ordered system, many so-called “liberated” women will be seduced into a patriarchal, elitist, one-dimensional, masculine role. We will simply have a new set of “half-persons” who happen to be female.
In many ways, you are more fragile than I. I know if I leave you, it will crush you beyond anything I will suffer. By being a good wife, mother, mistress, servant, handmaid, Girl Friday – and little else – I’ve made you all the more dependent on me for your sense of wellbeing. The impression of autonomy that you project to others is a well-practiced reflex. But you are not a truly free person. The heteronomy I struggle with binds me primarily to persons and to the demands they make on me. The heteronomy you have to exorcise is more abstract, insidious and pervasive. Independence
As women, we are constantly made aware of our immanence, of our contingency, of the social and biological parameters that circumscribe our being – we need few reminders of what it means to be female. Men, on the other hand, enjoy a more individuated transcending role. Thus, their awareness of their masculinity – in a patriarchal society – requires the recognition and confirmation of their supremacy. One can’t be a Chief unless there are Indians who provide evidence of it, willingly or unwillingly.
The masculine role is at the same time more restrictive, more abstract and more artificial than the feminine role. Liberating yourself from it will perhaps be more difficult than my exodus from the feminine mystique. Girls grow up with a greater exposure to a same-sex parental model than boys. In the relative absence of his father and care-taking male models for direct imitation, a boy absorbs a culturally rather than concretely defined masculine role: from his mother and teachers, from his peers, from television and other sources of conventional stereotypes. Thus, the role is more abstract and more demanding, more total and more distorted. Deviations from it are more critical; dilemmas abound. Being a man demands independent, aggressive, physically active, ambitious behavior. Educational and societal values tend to be more feminine, emphasizing politeness, obedience, passivity, cleanliness, etc. These double-binds increase as a boy changes into a man, intensifying inner stress and conflict. Growing up male exacts a terrible price, ultimately requiring capitulation to the absolute heteronomy of the masculine ideal.
As a conditioned male you must undergo a mutilation of spirit that amputates some of your deepest human capacities. Feelings are perhaps the most serious threat to the masculine ideal. You are expected to play the role of the independent strong achiever, always in control, always deliberate, calculated. You are expected to be task-oriented, undistracted by personal matters. You are expected to repress any response that might impede your efficiency in achieving your goals. And so you listen neither to your feelings, nor to your body. You do not sense the approach of illness or register the whispers of your own mind. You often do not hear what others are trying to say; you translate non-verbal messages poorly. Your belief in your own self-sufficiency makes you resistant to the idea of seeking help from someone else. Physically and emotionally, you ignore the pain that signals your innermost desire for health and growth. Not surprising that some psychologists compare the behavior of many men to that of autistic children: the characteristic fear of being touched, of expressing feelings, of relating intimately, with a compensating fixation on inanimate objects.
Sometimes you show very little respect for words; you are impatient with the process of communication and reflection. Your muteness and your silence are often testimony to your worship of will and action. You say you thrive on competition. I’m not so sure. All I know is, it drives you to do things you wouldn’t do if you were in your right mind. Sometimes you even compete with your own kids.
In subtle ways you consistently invalidate the experience, the tasks of women. You play the “professional” and demand freedom from simple human tasks – at the cost of your humanity. You hide from life through “specialization.” You want your work to be an escalator to success with as few deviations as possible. Oh, I envy your confidence in yourself. But I know it’s only skin-deep. You’re sure of yourself in the few roles – jobs you’ve mastered. Left without them, you collapse like a jellyfish in a heap of inadequacy. You haven’t learned the art of living. You wear a public face easily, but you’re very insecure in intimate situations. You know what mask, what language to use when, but you’re out of sync with your inner self.
I would like to free you of your compulsive workaholism, your “breadwinner” fixation. But I can’t share that load unless you relieve me of some of the burden of homemaking and child rearing. Can you learn to work less, earn less, spend more time with the kids – and be happy? If you can’t, then I can’t be happy either. Can you stop measuring yourself by the size of your paycheck?
I want to be an equal partner with you in supporting our home and in building a world. I think I should work, but I don’t want to betray myself in “liberating” myself into the marketplace. I know I have to learn how to cope with competition. But I don’t want to be infected with it, as you are. If my professional advancement is going to depend on conforming to the male model of achievement (compulsive-accretive production, narrow specialization, manipulation of data, the ability to walk over others on the way up, “chutzpah” and hustling, a cool and stoic demeanor), then I would be a fool to remake myself in your image.
Your institutions are like your automobiles – extensions of your ego. So pervaded by the masculine consciousness that they have become lethal instruments, harmful to all forms of human life. Your hospitals, schools, universities, governments and churches are all corporations, factories. All in bondage to the idea of male supremacy, that might makes right and wealth dictates policy, where workers are excluded from ownership and decision making, and profit becomes synonymous with survival. Most of your institutions are still modeled on the plantation – a few privileged white-male professionals supported by a huge substructure of underpaid, underprivileged, largely female labor force.
When I work in these institutions, I have to endure high visibility as a woman and low visibility as a professional and as a person. My comments are frequently ignored at committee or board meetings. But if you make the same proposal a few minutes later, it’s accepted enthusiastically. You are conditioned to notice my face, figure, clothes, manner, but have very little talent for observing and judging capacity. In fact, you are exceptionally stupid when it comes to making judgments about women. Probably because you prefer to surround yourself with “safe” types who will not attempt to challenge or change anything. The fact that they often turn out to be incompetent or lacking in conviction seems to have escaped you.
I’m tired of cloaking my competence with a veneer of coyness – so as not to castrate my male peers. I’m tired of having to let you win – whether it’s in checkers or politics. Do I have to spend my entire life coddling male egos? (High school and college were a prolonged ordeal of this kind of dishonesty.) When are you going to recognize your paranoia of competent, assertive women for what it is? An infantile reflex against Mom. Look at me: I’m not your mother, your older sister, your baby sister, your first-grade teacher, your servant, or your pet – I’m your peer. I’m a person.
I’m tired of lobbying for shared responsibility, equal pay, promotions and job opportunities. Women have always wanted these things, unless they’ve been brainwashed beyond repair. We won’t get these things, however, until men realize that they have to give up something – power, advantage – in order for us to be equal. Until you promote women’s liberation, there won’t be any. It isn’t going to happen by natural evolution – your present position is too comfortable. You play the “anointed” role, as if authority always had to be given to the oldest son. It might be easier to take if you simply acknowledged the lust for power and the insecurity that underlies your need to be in charge. But you keep referring your status to some fundamental principle of cosmic order, or worse yet, as “God’s plan for the human species.” The possibilities of human destiny, human structure and human relationships are infinitely more varied than this. Stand back and let the future unfold.
But let us not be naïve. The mere presence of women in new jobs, in management positions – in greater numbers – is not necessarily going to make a difference. Misogyny and patriarchy run deep, in women as well as men. Much more fundamental changes in social structure are needed if human persons are to develop to their full spiritual maturity.
The look on your face tells me I am guilty, too. Yes, I hate myself for the subtle ways in which I seduce you into being a traditional male – how do we unlearn these old scripts? How can I begin to show you that your personhood means more to me than your masculinity? Will the world around us still convince you otherwise?
I am torn between my resentment of your protective paternalism and the real need I have of the security of your love, your help and your confidence in me. But please, no more Pygmalion postures. I’m trying to reclaim my responsibility for myself, for my own growth and maturity. If I fail, I fail. On the other hand, I don’t like being ignored either. You find it easy to promote, help and encourage – to nurture – other men. But you leave women to their own devices. Your distance forces me to work twice as hard to prove myself.
In countless ways we need each other as models for change. But I don’t want to be what you are, and you wouldn’t want to be what I have been. Can we become something new together?
I am perturbed by your isolation from other men. Oh, you maintain a certain easy acceptance of each other. You can always depend on your cronies for assistance, commiseration. But you have no really intimate male friends, one or two “soul friends,” to whom you could open your heart. Am I the only one you can achieve that kind of intimacy with? That’s too much for one person to have to provide.
You seem unwilling to admit the presence of “love” in your relationships with other men. Although I suppose if you did, I might instinctively reflect jealousy or suspicion – I’ve been conditioned too.
I’d like to have some friendships with otter men that don’t necessarily involve sex. I know I’m capable of this kind of relationship, but I can’t seem to find many men who are. Most of them assume that sex is the terminal point of all relationships. And then there’s the problems of your possessiveness and jealousy.
I worry about your influence on our children, on the young people we care for. You treat the boys so differently from the girls. Your hyperanxiety about your son is already affecting him. If you were around more, perhaps your daughter would be better off too.
All of these anxieties and frustrations have brought me to a point of decision about you. My own anger and depression finally forced me to transform my life. What will it take to transform yours? Is rejection the only way to open your eyes? Do I have to leave you, abandon you to your self-serving universe? If we go our separate ways, there will be pain and loss. The tapestry of relationships that we have woven with our lives will be rent. If we remain together, we may succumb to the bribes of our old way of life and be diminished that much more. Either way there is risk.
Change will no doubt be more precarious for you than for me. It will be a more lonely, more alienated path. In shedding the husk of your reflected masculine glory, you will discover what many women already know – what it means to be a no-thing. Women in the process of a consciousness breakthrough usually experience rage and frustration. Our behavior is often overtly anti-male. Men undergoing the same process will experience more of a feeling of loss. Anger and resolve motivate a woman to sustain her changed consciousness and evolve new relationship patterns. As she withdraws from male hegemony she will often discover the support and encouragement of other women who will reach out to her in her struggle. You, on the other hand, are likely to suffer the loss, not only of the women to whom you can longer relate in the old way, but also the loss of your male buddies – because you have betrayed the masculine code. You will be alone, you will be tempted to revert to the old patriarchal and macho scenarios. You have everything to lose by continuing the struggle; I have everything to lose by giving it up.
I want you to know that I understand what is at stake for you. I want you to know that I can support you in that death and rebirth process – it is the price of reclaiming your humanity and your own soul. I can be your companion. My conversion to feminism is an unfinished, and incomplete experience unless it leads to your liberation. We can walk beside each other and support each other. We need not be spouses – in fact, it might be better if we weren’t. Believe me when I say that I want you to be different (in spite of the fact that I sometimes behave instinctively to the contrary). If I give up my princess ways, will you give up your princedom?
I know I will have to steel myself to accept the consequences. If you begin to take on more responsibility for home and children, I will have to sacrifice some of my matriarchal prerogatives there. If you begin to shed the “team” mystique at work, take a stand on sensitive issues, work fewer hours, I will have to bear with the consequences in loss of promotions, lower pay, job changes, whatever may come. I’ll have to bear with insecurity and loss of status without putting guilt on you. You’ll have to stop putting guilt on me for abandoning the “imperial motherhood” role in the home and the Girl Friday role in the office.
Perhaps the most difficult change of all will be admitting that neither of us can be all things to the other. If we are married, we will have to allow others to be a part of our lives, individual and together. We will need more than other supportive couples, mirror images of our own dyad. I will need women and men as friends; you will need men and women as friends.
We have to be committed to this transformation. These changes will come slowly and painfully. We will have to bear with different rhythms of growth in each other. We will have to persevere in them in spite of the pressures of society. We will have to explode and upset our life together, occasionally, in order to find new ways to keep ourselves growing. This commitment to each other’s liberation and growth should be our best reason for being together. If that is not a part of our continuing compact, then even if I love you, I must leave you.
You came into my life once and awakened me from sleep, rescued me from servitude, led me through the forest safely. I can do nothing less for you. Can we walk out of the fairy tale into the future together?
With love and hope,
Sleeping Beauty,
Snow White,
Cinderella,
Goldilocks &
Beauty
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