The stories in an old photograph

By: Gillian Valladares Castellino

This post is not about extracting the medicine in a story. It is about helping us realise how we often unconsciously use objects - in this case a photograph - as a resource and a starting point for story-telling. It is about understanding the process and appreciating the fact that the stories we choose to 'read' from objects are never objective. They are coloured by our own personalities and histories as much as they are by the object's content. It is also about recognising that the stories that inform our lives are not just about what we hear, or read, or see, but the meaning we choose to give these sensory inputs. What follows below is a record of some of the processes by which interpretation could occur...

How often do we think about the stories a single photograph can suggest to us about the people in it and ourselves? I chanced upon the photograph below which made me stop and think about this.

What can a faded photo in a time-mottled old book have to say? Well, let us start by examining the photo itself.

If I were to examine the photo with the idea of using it as a resource for planning a painting, I would focus on the different compositional elements, the interplay of lights and darks, the position of the different 'shapes' and their relationship to each other. The people in the photograph, the buildings, landscape and historical context would be irrelevant to my focus outside of these parameters and I would safely ignore them.

If I were to view the photograph from the point of view of examining it's historical context, I would look at it in quite another way.

In the foreground are 28 men and five women, in the best Victorian finery, on the grounds of what looks like a colonial bungalow under construction, in a landscape which could be anywhere on Earth, except, for the fact that:
(1) the information provided with the photo specifies that it was taken in 1892 in Lucknow, India. (A date which more-or-less coincides with the "high noon" of the Raj) and
(2) the background contains five figures who are in traditional Indian clothes of the time.

If one of the people in the foreground were a beloved ancestor I would have a very different perspective from if the beloved ancestor was one of the five figures "contained" behind two sets of "fences", in the background. I would have yet another approach if both the background and the foreground contained beloved ancestors.

If I were to attempt a 'content analysis' on the photograph I would have yet another approach.

Each standpoint would suggest different interpretations and consequently different stories.

To illustrate, I will launch into the 'content analysis' approach and allow the story which this focus suggests to unfold.

Let us start with the obvious - the group in the foreground, who are carefully positioned in rows, decked out in their Sunday best and positioned to show them off to the best advantage. All, save four men have luxuriant moustaches  and every one of the women has a large, distinctive hat - fashion statements at the time.  Hats, canes, suits and boots appear to be de rigueur for membership of this group, though all these items of clothing are obviously inappropriate and uncomfortable for the tropics. Yet why do they wear them? Clearly to mark their membership of the ruling group, the fact that they were "up-to-date" for the time, as the imagined audience for the photograph would have been their families and peers back in England and in other parts of the Empire who would read the implied message as intended. Would those who posed for the photo ever have imagined that their images would be analysed by the "eyes of the future" - ie those of us who would view them long after their 'world' was gone? Chances are their imaginations never went that far, or if they did, nothing in the photograph suggests that they would have thought they would be judged from the standpoint of a world view other than their own. 

Why is one of the background figures on the 'outer' though he is appropriately dressed?  The obvious fact of the matter is that he, like the other four background figures, is not white. He is what they would have viewed as a 'marginal man', caught between two widely different cultures and belonging in neither. Why that interpretation? His body language suggests that though he is grouped in the background, with other men of his 'race' (a loaded term which nonetheless formed the basis for society during the Raj) he clearly set himself apart from them and was facing in a different direction.

The positioning of all five background figures seems to suggest that they were sent to there to exclude them from the photo and failing that to ensure that their images would be small enough to be unrecognisable and blend in with the landscape. Unless this photo is magnified to its original size, two of these five figures are almost 'invisible'.

Two of the other four 'background' figures looked directly at the camera. One had positioned himself squarely in the middle, while the other, a child, looked on with interest as if he knew that there was something of importance going on, but did not know how it worked. A third figure, stood patiently in the background, waiting, his attention arrested by something in another direction, while the fifth was pre-occupied with some concern of his own and showed no interest at all in what was happening around him or in the fact that he was positioned to be 'invisible'. Can the body language of each of these background figures be taken as representative of different attitudes among Indians of the day? Is it valid to ask such a question, or is the mere act of asking such a question telling us something about ourselves?

Well to repeat a cliche - a picture speaks a thousand words. Every figure in that photograph is a product of its time. Yet each represents a human being, whose legacy - whether it be attitudes or offspring or anything else, live on. If each of those people were to get a contemporary makeover and we were to meet them in the street, at work, or somewhere else in the course of our own lives, we would probably smile and say 'hello'.

So, having said all this, what is the purpose of this exercise, of spending so much time and effort examining an unremarkable scrap from the past? Well for me personally, it makes the past come 'alive' in ways that social history, novels, artefacts and written documents can never compare. It is a chance to 'see' and in a limited way, engage with the human face and stories of the past. It provides me with a mechanism for uncovering how stories may have crept into my subconscious and quietly nestled there affecting my emotional responses to people and situations. The exercise itself gave me an opportunity to uncover and examine my attitudes towards the past and how they inform my present.

It also affords me an opportunity to demonstrate how depending on our focus, we see different stories in the same situation or artefact. Being aware of the viewpoints and how they operate within us, allows me to develop a deeper understanding of what it meant and what it means to be human.

Bluebeard - the natural predator in us all

By: Gillian Valladares Castellino

The Bluebeard story is a frightening and fascinating tale. Believed to have been inspired by the 15th century Breton serial killer, Gilles de Rais, the story has been retold by Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and Henri Pourrat.  Variations of the tale exist in the folklore France, Germany, Estonia, Tuscany and even the United States while comparable tales have been recorded in Indian and Pueblo cultures. Similar stories containing the central motif of a secret room which must not enter exist in Russian and Scandinavian folklore.  In centuries past, the Bluebeard figure represented a thinly disguised racist stereotyping of 'unfamiliar' men, but for the tale to be meaningful today, it needs to been seen to have dimensions which address the challenges and understandings of our times.

  

Modern versions include the movie The Piano and comparable tales by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Anatole France and Eudora Welty among others. A feminist version of the story is Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebead's Egg', set in Canada and featured in Jack Zipes Don't bet on the Prince, it illustrates just how difficult it is for contemporary women to develop the consciousness they need. However, to focus on the fact that the protagonist in the story is female, is to lose an opportunity to benefit from its gifts. The story is about powerful forces at play in the psyche of all human beings.

An annotated version of the story can be read at SurLaLune Fairy Tales website. The purpose of this post is not to repeat the tale or variations of it, but to examine three interpretations of the tale and in doing so, distil out the 'medicine' it can offer to readers today.

So who and what does the "Bluebeard" leitmotif represent?

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Penguin Books, p. 301, suggests that Bluebeard is a tale about sexual temptation, more specifically about the destructive aspects of sexuality. From his point of view, it is a cautionary tale introducing mainly child listeners to two related emotions, jealous love (on the part of Bluebeard) and "dangerous" sexual attraction (culminating in  infidelity) on the part of his wife. The "weeping key" is seen as a metaphor for sexual indiscretion.  In Bettleheim's view, there are two morals to this tale - the first, simply stated is "Women do not give in to sexual curiosity", the second, "Men, do not permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed." Reducing the tale to this kind of simplistic interpretation robs it of its real potency and polarises its audience.

Another more intriguing interpretation is suggested by Marie Louise Von Franz, the doyenne of Jungian analysis who in her Anima and Animus in Fairy Tales, dismisses Bluebeard as "a wonderful image of the destructive, murderous animus." She elaborates on the symbolic meaning of the beard, explaining that hair on the head represents involuntary unconscious thoughts and fantasies which have a bewitching or numinous quality. As we can influence our environment much more by our unconscious assumptions than by our conscious thoughts, the symbol "hair" underlines the spiritual power of our unconscious thoughts.  The beard, then represents the flow of unconscious talk that animus possessed women are given to.  This talk contains both thrash and pearls. The way a woman can deal with the animus is not by killing it (as a man might), but escaping it.  To state things more clearly, "If a woman hasn't gone through the experience of being trapped by a demon animus she has only unconscious thoughts.  It is the demon who provides her with the ladder to escape" (to consciousness).

By far the most comprehensive, meaningful and poetic analysis of the Bluebeard story is suggested by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women who Run with the Wolves.  She names Bluebeard as 'the natural predator' of the psyche - an inner entity in both men and women, that requires our awareness and containment.  Though the story centres around a female character, it should be noted that this 'young woman' represents the inexperienced or immature natural aspect of everyone regardless of gender. The inner predatory force represented by Bluebeard, attempts to "turn all crossroads into closed roads" by severing our intuitive nature.  It is a malignant force at odds with the instincts of the natural self.

Our task on the way to maturity is to recognise this predator and protect ourselves from it.  The Bluebeard story tells us how to do this.

The youngest sister in the story represents the creative potential within the psyche which when 'naive' or 'undeveloped' can be captured by the inner predator.  This occurs by surrendering to the whims of the ego rather than heeding the inner knowing that intuition gifts us.  The price of "marrying" the predator is a life of living falsely.

There is a way our of this, but one must have the key.  The key is "both permission and endorsement to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche".  The door in the story is a psychic barrier, a kind of guard placed in front of a secret.  Asking the 'key' question unlocks this barrier by causing a germination of consciousness. Asking it is "the central action of transformation" in fairy tales, analysis and in individuation.

Once the key unlocks the door, the young, untried aspect of the self sees the shocking carnage done to some part of our deep life.  The next step is to stand and face it for what it is, without fear or denial or shame, to just see it for what it is, for in doing so, the innocent instinctual self regains its soul power.  The step after that is to manouver to regain sovereignty over one's life and to do so one might have to stall, back-track and employ whatever coping strategies one needs to keep the predator at bay until one can escape.  Pinkola Estes specifies that analysis, dream interpretation, self-knowledge and exploration of non-conventional ways of knowing can enable us to see a situation from widely different perspectives and these multiple views empower us.

To escape however, we have to call upon our psychic 'brothers', those aspects of our psyches which are more 'muscled' ie more naturally aggressive than our feminine consciousness.  They provide us with focussed determination to act and represent the blessing of strength and action.

Ultimately, this interpretation of the Bluebeard story is about the regaining of consciousness, the heeding of intuition and the asking of key questions as a road-map to a meaning-filled life.