The Girl Who Drank the Moon: A reflection on our culture’s approach to madness
In The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill presented a city, called the Protectorate, in which each year the male Elders took the youngest child from the village on the Day of Sacrifice from their parents and left the child in the woods for a witch in the forest so as to satisfy the witch. The fate was almost universally accepted and comprehended as the necessary sacrifice among the people of the Protectorate. However, Luna’s mother went mad upon the taking of Luna and broke into uncontained horrific wails and uncontained grief,
“Sacrifice one or sacrifice all. That is the way of the world.” is what a mother teaches her child that it is futile challenging the traditions of sacrificing their children in the Protectorate. However, there is meaning and understanding of what a mother’s outcry about the Protectorate’s sacrificing brings to light. This is telling for understanding healing individuals and our world.
Luna’s mother was locked away in a tower by The Elders, designated as a mad person……
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Luna’s mother or anyone else at The Protectorate, the baby, Luna, was found by a witch who had no understanding of why the Protectorate abandoned children in the forest yearly. Instead of harming these children, the witch would come to get the children each year and find them a loving and care-taking home where they would have a good life with another family in cities separated from The Protectorate. The Witch would initially calm the children by giving them starlight. However, the witch mistakenly enchanted Luna by giving her moonlight to drink, and upon doing so had to raise her herself and took on being her Grandmother because Luna now had magical abilities.
It comes about that the Witch of the forest had nothing to do with the story of the Protectorate’s sacrifice. The Elders and a head spiritual leader, who was a harmful witch, reinforced the story to maintain control. The fear and pain of widespread loss was an unmanaged weight for the people of the protectorate, enabling their compliance and it kept them from questioning the story and belief in the witch in the forest. More significant is that the head sister, unknowingly a witch who maintained her power to stay alive off of people’s powerlessness and misery.
Luna’s magic was hidden from her as every time magic was talked about Luna would pass out, came to full power at the age of 13. At the same time her grandmother’s magic was to drain out of her, causing her to die. Luna eventually went looking for her mother, and her mother for her. Her mother’s lunacy also involved untamed magic and she made paper birds that helped her to escape the isolated tower she was kept in) and encountered the Head Sister. Luna was able to use her magic in order to see into the losses that the Head Sister had boxed away and the Head Sister begins to die and lose her power, which is based on feeding off of others’ misery and pain.
The idea of lunacy makes one wonder about madness as it was that Luna had a strong ability to connect to feelings, both her own and others’. Meanwhile, the origin of lunacy as terminology stems from 15th century beliefs of craziness coming out of a persons due to the impact from the changes in the moon. There was no connection made to the personal meanings of someone’s madness and observably irrational behavior. Perhaps there is a warning about this perspective on madness as increasingly blamed for all of society’s dangers matching a parallel commonality to avoid reflecting on our world and the voluminous impact of its problems. This story should make us reflect about whether we, as in the Protectorate, can make mental illness a mission of which to isolate and lock away in order to mistakenly rid of unknown dangers and to reflect on what truths of destructive elements are in the world today.
In an interconnected world, we can understand pain and care for one another’s needs and ways to connect to their unbearable feeling states. If mental illness represents a person’s experiences of one or more aspects of society’s ill along with the inability to contain the ills into a box, a crying out of painful experience that is in need of coming to light, perhaps one that also reflects a theme within a culture or society?
The outcry and expression of madness has the potential of the crescent moon’s waxing. As the moon’s fullness appears, so can we help illuminate people to start a process of understanding the darker parts of experiences and the world, rather than warding off the reality for dislike of pains investments in false beliefs. And what for the reward? Possibly, that could be a future of children that believe in taking in the universe and believe in their own power to impact their world….