The Child And The Shadow Analysis

In Ursula LeGuin's essay titled “The Child and the Shadow,” LeGuin dives into the realm of how humans and he/she’s shadow divides them into the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness. LeGuin begins her dissertation by recalling an Hans Christian Andersen fiction novel she read as a child. The main character from the novel is too bashful to confront an attractive lady that lives across the street. He then allows his shadow to take on this courageous task by going across the street and entering the lady’s home without any restrictions or supervision. The man ends up not seeing his shadow for years, thus losing that part of him all together. When the man and his shadow finally reunite the man comes to find that he is no longer

LeGuin conveys that “His strength, his subtlety, his creative genius, come precisely from his acceptance of and cooperation with the dark side of his own soul.” I connect it to a small child, specifically and child and a mother. The child starts out as a tiny entity inside the mom, eventually it grows until the child is born. In this context think of the child as being the shadow. The child then grows up and becomes his/hers own person, no longer dependent on their mother/father figure to tell them what to do or what is morally right. Parents a great deal of the time see qualities of themselves within their child, but alas there are things that differ within them. The shadow figure grows inside of you just like a child grows inside his/hers mother until it cannot stay any longer, then it is born and set free into the world for everyone to see; not always accepted by society, that is why we as a society habitually hide this part of ourselves and conceal it from anyone who might see it. But, without coming to terms with this dark shadow we cannot truly accept ourselves, or initially be accepted as one. We must come to terms with the