By Heather Herrman
Imagine someone you really hate. Write down this person’s worst qualities. Describe, in detail, the characteristics that annoy you most. Now, reread everything that you’ve just written and realize that you are really talking about yourself.
If that feels uncomfortable it should. But I’m here to tell you that it can also be empowering.
This simple exercise was one of my earliest introductions to psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. Jung believed that we all have one—an amalgamation of the parts of ourselves that we seek to repress. But just because we hide what we deem undesirable, does not mean it does not exist. By not acknowledging our shadow, we often project it onto others.
We become triggered when someone else dares to express the very thing that we are trying to hide. Without recognizing and integrating our shadow, it will act as a kind of malignant cancer, seeking expression and growth by any means possible—sometimes even destroying us. But the truth is, we need our shadow just as much as we need our light. Without it, we can never be whole.
And shadows aren’t just personal, they’re cultural. Especially as pertains to women and girls. For a very, very long time Western society has asked them to repress certain aspects of themselves deemed undesirable—what Jungian psychologist Lisa Marchiano dubs our “outlaw energies.”
Traditionally, women and the “feminine” have been associated with positive traits like beauty, kindness, gentleness, and love. In more modern times, new names have been erected. Girl-boss (capable AND hot). Bad Bitch (impossibly cool and righteously angry. Also hot). Trad wife (self-sacrificing and hot). The list goes on and on, these sexualized caricatures presented for other’s pleasure and not her own.
Progress has certainly been made through the women’s movement giving us more freedom of choice, but girls and women are still very much limited in how they are seen and how we see ourselves. If we are angry, it must be in service to a cause. If we are strong it is to lift a team or family to victory.
What is still so rarely portrayed is our shadow. A woman’s selfishness. Her unrighteous anger. Even her greed or lust for power. While male anti-heroes exist a plenty and are even celebrated (think Breaking Bad, Dexter, Sopranos), complex females are far more rare, especially in Young Adult literature. There, the expectations seem only to have grown. Now young women aren’t just expected to get the guy (or girl) but save the world too.
Once upon a time, scholars like Merlin Stone tell us, the deities of our world were largely women. And they were all-encompassing and all powerful. The moon in its many phases from blackest sky to brightest night. Mother nature destroying so that she might create. Fertile chaos instead of sterile order.
But eventually, as new patriarchal religions replaced pagan ones, the goddess was split. All her dark parts cast off into the night. Lilith became a demon–the first unholy wife of Adam who refused to lie beneath him and so was banished and replaced. Mary, the eternal mother, became Mary the virgin and Mary the whore. Women with power became witches, not gods. Succubi, seeking to claim men’s souls, were devils instead of skilled and satisfied lovers. All that was left to women was a washed-out perfection, a struggling daylight star with no darkness upon which to press itself.
Powerful women, complicated girls, became fearsome. Half of our very nature became, instead, our shadow, forced underground.
I am simplifying, of course. The topic is a rich and complex one and there are some goddesses still left with teeth (think Kali). But for the sake of brevity, the question I want to raise still stands. What stories is our culture telling us and what stories are we telling our young women?
What parts of ourselves are we being taught to hate? Or, worse, not even allowing to exist? What are we calling masculine when it has been inside girls and women all along?
Social media is abuzz with influencers claiming one facet or the other for themselves. Girls are carved up and stuffed into neat little boxes. Where do you fit? Here? No? Chop off that piece of yourself and stick it into the shadows. Become something else. Something neat and pretty and with no untidy edges. A perfect member of a perfectly righteous (and limited) tribe. Be angry, but only if it serves a cause. Never, ever be selfish. Never be wrong or unrepentant or unpresentable. Don’t you dare say that your feelings matter more than someone else’s. More than serving and saving the world.
But that is not a human, that is a paper doll. And unless we are allowed to express and recognize our negative qualities we will never be allowed to be whole. Until we claim our darkness we can never fully claim our light.
Girls deserve to see themselves presented as complex people, shadows and all. Because what Jung also said was that it’s not just our negative qualities that hide in the shadows, it’s often our best ones. “The shadow,” said Jung, “is ninety percent pure gold.” Qualities like rage and creativity and power hide in its darkness, just waiting to be unleashed. Once claimed these forbidden powers transform into personal strength.
In my own work, I have been inspired to create female characters that aren’t always likeable. Belle King, the heroine of my newest book ‘Lady or the Tiger’, is not a good person. And she’s not a bad one either. She is complicated. A teenaged serial killer in the Wild West who chooses herself with absolutely no apologies. Who doesn’t save the world but saves herself.
Because of all the messages young women are exposed to, that is one I don’t think they hear enough these days. Girls deserve their outlaws too. Because sometimes, it’s not about pleasing anyone else. Sometimes it really is about pleasing yourself. Choosing yourself. And if you look hard enough into those dark corners that everyone else insists you keep hidden, you might just find pure gold.
Heather Herrman’s fiction blends beauty and the macabre. She loves prairie winds, tales of wicked women, and landscapes that look like they could eat you. She holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and is an active member of the Horror Writers Association. Heather currently lives outside Dallas, Texas. You can find her at www.heatherherrman.com, @heatherherrmanauthor on Instagram, and @heatherherrman on tiktok.
ABOUT THE BOOK: A twisty, darkly seductive anti-hero origin story, starring a teenage killer whose trial in the Wild West is upended when her first victim, her husband, arrives alive with a story to tell.
Summer 1886—When nineteen-year-old Belle King turns herself in for murder, the last thing she expects to see is her abusive husband Reginald standing outside her Dodge City jail cell, impossibly alive. He’s there to take her back, but Belle is not going without a fight. Reginald was the first man she ever meant to kill, but certainly not the last . . .
Now, while there are still bars between them, Belle is forced to resort to all the tricks in her arsenal to prevent her husband from ever being in control of her again. But in the 1880s, the last soul anyone will believe is a girl—even when she confesses to her own crimes. With the seductive horror of a fairy tale, ‘Lady or the Tiger’ is the dark, twisty story of how one mountain girl from Kentucky became the wickedest woman in the Wild West and an ode to girls with tigers in their hearts who can save themselves.
