Maleficent & the Wings That Were Taken

A conversation with Julie Schmidt of Walking the Liminal reminded me why this story matters so much.

 

Julie said something during our conversation that I have been sitting with ever since.

She wondered aloud whether Maleficent was the original story, the one passed down in the oral tradition before the written word hardened everything into canon. Whether Sleeping Beauty was the tamed-down version, the one crafted to put the woman in her place, to make her beautiful and passive and waiting to be saved.

And this changes everything about how you watch the film.

She Was Not Born Wrathful

Before any of it, there is a girl.

She lives in the moors, a creature of wild and open places, tending to the land and its creatures with a kind of free and joyful power that the film spends almost no time on, because we are not meant to remember that she was once this. We are meant to meet her in her darkness and forget that the darkness was given to her.

Stefan comes in and takes her wings while she sleeps.

Let that sit for a moment.

Not in a battle. Not in a fair fight. While she is unconscious and trusting, the person she loved most in the world takes the thing that made her free.

Julie named it clearly. What Stefan did to Maleficent is a violation of the body. It belongs in the same category as every wound that has ever been inflicted on a woman who trusted someone she should have been safe with. And the rage that follows is not a character flaw. It is not proof that she is the villain. It is the only honest response to what was done to her.

The dark feminine does not ask us to be gracious about our wounds before we are ready.

She asks us to feel them fully first.

The Wound Becomes the Curse Becomes the Turning Point

Maleficent curses baby Aurora because she wants to reach Stefan where he can be reached. She has lost her wings. She has lost her innocence. She has nothing left to offer him except the thing he loves most, and she takes it, not permanently, but conditionally, which is its own kind of power.

It is not her finest moment. It is a very human moment.

And then something unexpected begins to happen.

She watches Aurora. She cannot seem to stop herself. The child is not Stefan. The child is just a child, open and luminous and entirely undeserving of what was placed over her before she could even walk. Maleficent begins to care for her in secret, drawn back again and again to something in Aurora that she recognizes. Something she thought she had lost.

Julie described it as the dark feminine finding the protector within herself. The destructor and the nurturer are not opposites. They are the same energy moving in different directions. Maleficent does not stop being wrathful. She simply finds something worth protecting inside the wrath.

That is what shadow integration actually looks like. Not the removal of darkness. The expansion of what the darkness is capable of.

The Wound Is Not Meant to Be Carried Alone Forever

There is a spiral quality to the way women meet their deepest wounds.

You do not go down into them once and come back healed. You circle. You return. Each time you arrive at the same sorrow, you are arriving from a different height, and so what you see when you look into it has changed, even when it looks the same.

Julie spoke about this so gently. The wound has to be met. It has to be allowed to be present without turning away. And in the meeting of it, something shifts. Not all at once. Not in a straight line. But each time you face it, you reclaim a little more of what was taken.

Maleficent's journey across the film is exactly this spiral. She does not transform in a single moment. She circles Aurora for years, drawn closer, then pulling back, then closer still. The wound is working on her the whole time, softening what needed to soften, clarifying what she actually wants, which was never really revenge. It was always the return of what was stolen.

True Love's Kiss and the Prince Who Couldn't

When Aurora falls into her sleep and the prince tries to wake her, it doesn't work.

Julie's response when she talked about this scene was immediate and direct. She is tired of that trope. The beautiful girl, the handsome prince, the kiss that saves everything because she was only ever waiting for the right man to come along.

Disney gave us that story for decades. Maleficent dismantles it quietly, in a single scene.

The prince's kiss does nothing.

Maleficent leans down, not to wake Aurora, but simply because she loves her. She presses her lips to her forehead the way a mother does. And Aurora opens her eyes.

It is the love that was never contractual, never transactional, never dependent on Aurora being beautiful or pure or grateful. It is the love Maleficent grew toward her in spite of every reason not to, love that cost her something, love forged in the complicated territory between curse and protection, between wrath and tenderness.

That is the love that wakes the sleeping girl.

It always has been.

The Wings Come Home

Aurora finds them locked in a cage. She frees them. And they fly, on their own, back to Maleficent, back to the woman they were taken from, and in the middle of a battle she is losing, exhausted and nearly overcome, they find her and attach.

She rises.

Julie said something I want to hold exactly as she said it. She became whole again.

The wings are not a power that was added to Maleficent. They are a power that was always hers, that was stolen and locked away, that survived the years of captivity and found its way home the moment the cage was opened by someone who loved her enough to look for it.

You can read that as a fairy tale.

You can also read it as a map.

Because most of what the dark feminine is recovering is not new. It is not something we need to acquire or earn or be given. It is something that was taken, or hidden, or slowly convinced out of us until we forgot it ever existed.

The work is not becoming more.

It is remembering what was always there.

Light and Dark, Coming Together

The film ends with Maleficent as both. Protector and destroyer. Sovereign and tender. The woman who cursed the child and the woman who woke her. She does not have to choose between these. She contains them both and is diminished by neither.

Julie called it the coming together of the light and the dark within her. And she said it the way someone says a thing they have also lived, not as analysis but as recognition.

That is what we are working toward.

Not the eradication of our darkness in favor of something more palatable. Not the performance of light while the shadow runs the show from underneath. But the full integration of both, the kind of wholeness that can curse and protect, can rage and forgive, can lose everything and still, when the moment comes, rise.

The wings always knew the way back.

So do yours.

I sat with Julie Schmidt for this conversation and came away with a renewed empowerment in my body. Her writing on the dark feminine and the liminal spaces is some of the most important work being done right now.

You can find her at Walking the Liminal Substack.

Watch the conversation on YouTube:

What has been taken from you that is still waiting to find its way back? Share in the comments.

For my own dark tales, visit my author Substack, Moonrise Mystic.

~Alysia Moonrise