Wild Man as Alter Ego

I'd like to take this week to do a psychoanalytical reading of Grimms' "The Wild Man" and other related tales. It seems that the strange anonymity of the Wild Man - we don't know where he came from, why he was under a spell, etc. - and the fact that the only person who really engages with the Wild Man is the boy enables the possibility that the Wild Man is really just an internalized outlet for the boy as he copes with becoming an adult.

The story begins with the Wild Man harassing the village and causing chaos. The Wild Man's outward acts of aggression and violence are manifestations of adolescents' anxious sexuality and confusion over where and who they are and what their role is as they begin to metamorphose into an adult. The Wild Man is, then, captured after imbibing too much alcohol. Because drinking/getting drunk is a right of passage, the Wild Man's inability to handle his alcohol signifies that the boy is not ready to be fully adult, and therefore must be constrained to childhood by his symbolic parents, the king and queen.

The spectacle of the caged Wild Man can then be understood as the boy's role as a passive agent. He is only the prince and cannot act fully nor have full power over anything. Rather, he is looked to and examined as the future heir to the throne, with the cage restricting the boy from acquiring his active kingly duties. The boy releases the Wild Man in order to free his own caged masculinity or caged adulthood - with the ball - a child's plaything - being lost, the boy therefore has room to become an adult.

The Wild Man and boy go off together and go straight to court. There is none of the time spent in the wild as we see in "Iron Hans" (the wild being a symbol for the hormonal instability of puberty). Instead, "The Wild Man" establishes the boy in a courtly space as the gardener. The very occupation of gardener parallels this concept of growth and change. The boy must blossom, and the Wild Man here becomes the cultivator. So we see the boy becoming extremely passive and almost lost as a character in that the Wild Man - the mad adolescent energy starts to become the primary agent contributing to growth (growth of the flowers and growth of himself into an adult).

When the boy goes off to war, he saves the kingdom, but only with the help of the Wild Man. His victory in battle is yet another rite of passage into adulthood - "war turns boys into men" - and it was only accomplished because the boy and the Wild Man merge into one, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of one another. So, the boy gets the princess and then the kingdom, and the Wild Man has the spell broken (the spell being his adolescent frenzied energy) and is able to reign his kingdom. Essentially, both boy and Wild Man end at the same place/on the same level because they are the same person. Thus, this story can be read as a coming of age in which the boy negotiates his boyhood with the increasing rise toward adulthood and is educated/indoctrinated by the Wild Man in order to become adult.