By Dr. Denise Renye
Spoiler alert: This essay discusses major plot developments, including the film's ending.
I recently saw Wicker, a film based on Ursula Wills-Jones's short story The Wicker Husband, and found myself thinking about it long after leaving the theater. There is so much happening psychologically beneath its rather bizarre premise. What initially appears to be a darkly humorous story about a woman who commissions a husband made of wicker becomes an exploration of some uncomfortable aspects of human nature, particularly envy and our difficulty tolerating another person's happiness.
What interested me most was not simply the way the villagers treated the Fisherwoman, although their cruelty was striking. It was how convinced they seemed to be of their own moral superiority. They had collectively decided that she was undesirable and somehow less deserving of love or respect. Yet when she found a husband who adored her and took genuine interest in her sexual pleasure, their contempt became increasingly difficult to distinguish from envy.
I kept thinking about Melanie Klein's writing on envy, especially her understanding of the wish to spoil something good that another person possesses. The villagers weren't simply unhappy in their own marriages. They seemed unable to tolerate the Fisherwoman having a different experience, particularly because she was someone they had already decided was beneath them. Her happiness challenged their understanding of themselves and the lives they had constructed.
There is something deeply human about this, even if it is uncomfortable to acknowledge. Sometimes another person's freedom brings us into contact with compromises we have made in our own lives. We may have convinced ourselves that certain sacrifices were necessary or that relationships inevitably involve particular disappointments. Encountering someone who has chosen differently can disturb those assumptions, especially when we have invested years in defending them.
The Cost of Being Respectable
The Tailor's Wife is a particularly interesting character in this regard. She has followed the rules and occupies a socially acceptable position within the village, yet she is deeply dissatisfied. Her husband receives recognition for work she has contributed to, and her marriage offers little of the mutuality she witnesses between the Fisherwoman and her wicker husband. Rather than acknowledging what she longs for, she becomes increasingly hostile toward the woman whose life has made those longings difficult to ignore.
I think there is something particularly painful about recognizing that we have participated in maintaining the very circumstances that leave us unhappy. The Tailor's Wife has invested in a social order that offers her status while limiting her autonomy. To acknowledge the possibility of another kind of life would mean confronting what she has given up and perhaps questioning the meaning she has assigned to those sacrifices.
Envy can protect us from this kind of recognition. When another person possesses something we have denied ourselves, resentment can feel more manageable than grief. We may find reasons to criticize their choices or convince ourselves that what they have is somehow less meaningful than it appears. In doing so, we can continue defending arrangements that have kept our own desires out of reach.
The Tailor's Wife is not simply someone who resents another woman's happiness. She is also someone who has adapted to a restrictive environment and become invested in preserving it. Her hostility reveals how difficult it can be to acknowledge the emotional cost of belonging, particularly when belonging has required us to abandon parts of ourselves.
Sex, Shame, and the Fantasy of an Ideal Partner
The sexual dynamics in Wicker are especially revealing. Marriage in the village appears organized around obligation and established gender roles rather than mutual pleasure. The collars worn by wives make the connection between marriage and ownership quite explicit. Women's desires receive relatively little attention within relationships that appear more concerned with maintaining convention than understanding one another.
Against this backdrop, the Fisherwoman's marriage is almost radical. Her husband is interested in her pleasure and seems genuinely delighted by her. He does not require that she change her appearance or become more conventionally feminine before finding her desirable. Their intimacy challenges the village's assumptions about what women should expect from marriage and whose sexual satisfaction matters.
As a clinical psychologist and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, I am especially interested in the relationship between sexual desire and the conditions in which people come to understand themselves. Our erotic lives are shaped by far more than physical attraction. The messages we receive about our bodies and our worth influence what we allow ourselves to want. Shame can become so familiar that we no longer recognize the ways it limits our capacity for pleasure or our willingness to ask for what we need.
What is particularly striking is that the Fisherwoman does not have to transform herself to become desirable. Her husband loves her as she is, including the qualities that have made her unacceptable to the village. Yet for someone who has lived with rejection, receiving love can be as unsettling as longing for it. The defenses that have helped us tolerate loneliness may not easily accommodate the vulnerability that comes with allowing another person to matter.
The Wicker Husband also raises questions about our fantasies of an ideal partner. He is affectionate and attentive, seemingly free from many of the defenses that complicate ordinary intimacy. Yet he has been constructed specifically to become the Fisherwoman's husband. In this sense, he might represent the wish for a relationship that could finally repair earlier experiences of deprivation.
Relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has written about mutual recognition, the capacity to experience another person as a subject whose inner world exists independently of our needs. This becomes particularly relevant when the Fisherwoman believes her husband has betrayed her. Her response suggests how difficult it can be to tolerate the separateness of someone whose love has become central to our sense of worth.
Love, Aggression, and the Inner Marriage
When the Fisherwoman believes her husband has been unfaithful, her reaction is devastating. The person who has allowed her to feel loved and desired suddenly becomes the source of profound humiliation. Her aggression seems to emerge from something deeper than jealousy alone, perhaps touching earlier experiences of rejection and the fear that she was never truly worthy of love.
Klein's work is helpful here as well. She described the difficulty of integrating loving and hostile feelings toward the same person, particularly when disappointment threatens an idealized relationship. The Fisherwoman temporarily loses this capacity and attacks the person she loves. Although understanding the unconscious origins of aggression does not excuse violence, it can illuminate how shame and the fear of loss become entangled with destructive impulses.
What happens afterward is important. Believing she has destroyed her husband, she is confronted with grief and the consequences of her actions. She must recognize her own capacity to injure someone she loves. Her care for the wicker child becomes especially meaningful because the child's existence initially appears to represent her husband's betrayal. Yet she begins to care for this vulnerable being despite her own pain.
Klein understood the capacity for concern and the wish to repair damage to the loved object as central to the depressive position. The Fisherwoman's movement toward caring for the child suggests that something within her has changed. She is becoming capable of extending love beyond her immediate need to be loved in return.
There is another dimension to this relationship that I find particularly compelling through a Jungian lens. Jung's concept of the coniunctio, often represented as the sacred or inner marriage, concerns the union of previously divided aspects of the psyche. This is not simply a matter of bringing masculine and feminine qualities together. It involves developing a relationship between aspects of ourselves that may have remained unconscious or in conflict.
I found myself thinking about this in relation to the Fisherwoman and her husband. She has learned to survive through independence and a certain toughness, yet their relationship seems to awaken qualities that have perhaps been difficult for her to experience. She becomes more receptive to tenderness and more willing to depend upon another person. The Wicker Husband might be understood as representing an aspect of her inner masculine, although reducing him to an animus figure alone would overlook the complexity of their relationship.
Their marriage can therefore be understood as something taking place within the Fisherwoman as much as between two characters. Through the relationship, different aspects of her psychological life begin to come into contact. This process is not without conflict, as her aggression toward her husband makes painfully clear.
What makes this interpretation especially interesting is the presence of the wicker baby. In Jungian and alchemical symbolism, the union of opposites may give rise to a third, sometimes represented by a child. The child symbolizes the emergence of something new that could not have developed while those opposing elements remained separate.
The baby is not literally conceived by the Fisherwoman and her husband. It has been created separately, and its arrival is initially associated with the possibility of betrayal. Yet she chooses to care for it while still believing she has lost her husband. By the time they reunite, they are able to receive the child together. What began as a longing for companionship has become capable of sustaining something beyond the two of them.
I wonder whether this is one of the film's more subtle expressions of the inner marriage. The emergence of the third suggests that something new becomes possible when previously divided aspects of ourselves begin to find a relationship with one another. The Fisherwoman has not resolved every conflict within herself, but she has begun to develop a different capacity for love.
The Collective Shadow and the Exposure of Hypocrisy
The villagers' behavior can also be understood through Jung's concept of the shadow. The shadow includes aspects of ourselves that we have difficulty acknowledging because they do not fit the identity we have constructed. These may involve aggression or selfishness, but they can also include desires and qualities that have been suppressed to maintain acceptance.
The Fisherwoman embodies much of what the village has collectively rejected. Her independence and sexual expression challenge its understanding of respectability. Rather than becoming curious about what her life reveals, the villagers make her the object of their contempt.
Scapegoating can serve an important psychological function for a group. By identifying someone as unacceptable, its members preserve a shared sense of righteousness without examining the contradictions within their own lives. Their agreement about the Fisherwoman reinforces their belonging to one another, even as their individual relationships appear increasingly unsatisfying.
The ending of Wicker brings these unconscious dynamics into particularly sharp focus. When the opportunity to obtain another wicker partner emerges, the social conventions the villagers have defended so fiercely begin to collapse. Suddenly, the very thing they condemned in the Fisherwoman becomes something they desperately want for themselves.
What interested me about this was not simply that the villagers received consequences for their cruelty. There is a deeper satisfaction in seeing the truth of their motivations become visible. Their contempt has allowed them to avoid acknowledging their own desires, but their behavior at the end reveals how much they have wanted what the Fisherwoman possesses.
The Tailor's Wife is especially revealing. Her wish to acquire the Wicker Wife is connected to her desire to escape the limitations of her marriage. She hopes that someone else might take her place, freeing her to pursue a different life. Beneath her investment in conventional marriage has been a longing for something entirely different.
The Butcher's acquisition of the thorn-covered Wicker Wife offers a darker version of this reckoning. He imagines obtaining a partner who will satisfy his wishes, only to encounter someone whose embrace literally wounds him. The fantasy of possession becomes painful, as though the aggression embedded in his understanding of intimacy has taken physical form.
I think the ending works because it allows the villagers' unconscious conflicts to become visible without requiring anyone to explain them. Their attempts to obtain what they have condemned expose the contradictions they have spent the film avoiding. Yet exposure is not necessarily the same as insight. People can experience considerable suffering while continuing to repeat the patterns that contribute to it, particularly when those patterns protect against feelings they are not prepared to recognize.
The Unlived Life Beneath Envy
The Fisherwoman's departure offers a different kind of resolution. She leaves with her husband and the child rather than remaining in the village to seek acknowledgment from those who have mistreated her. There is something psychologically significant about this choice because she no longer appears to need the community to recognize her worth.
Defiance can be an important form of self-protection, particularly when someone has experienced rejection or humiliation. Yet there is a difference between resisting another person's judgment and no longer organizing one's identity around it. Sometimes our determination to prove others wrong keeps us psychologically attached to their opinions long after we have separated from them.
What stayed with me most about Wicker was its portrayal of envy as something that can conceal grief for an unlived life. The villagers have organized their relationships around expectations they rarely question. Some have relinquished the possibility of sexual pleasure, while others have surrendered independence or recognition in exchange for belonging. Their resentment toward the Fisherwoman emerges when her happiness makes these compromises difficult to ignore.
In clinical work, we encounter versions of these dynamics in many forms. People may remain committed to relational patterns that have caused considerable suffering, even when they consciously wish for something different. The familiar can feel safer than the unknown, particularly when change would require grieving aspects of a life that have already passed.
The Tailor's Wife embodies this conflict particularly well. She has become invested in preserving a social order that denies her many of the things she wants. Her hostility toward the Fisherwoman prevents her from considering that another woman's freedom might reveal something important about her own longing. Instead of examining the source of her dissatisfaction, she directs her resentment toward the person whose life has brought it into focus.
Perhaps this is what makes the film's ending so satisfying. The villagers can no longer hide behind the conventions they have used to justify their judgments. Their behavior reveals what they have spent the film denying, although we are left uncertain whether they will ever understand what has been exposed.
The Fisherwoman's happiness did not deprive them of anything. It confronted them with desires they had learned to dismiss and with the possibility that their own lives might have been different. Rather than allowing themselves to become curious about those feelings, they attempted to undermine the person who had awakened them.
There is something unsettling about how easily we can become invested in defending the lives we have constructed, even when those lives no longer reflect what we want. Another person's freedom may then feel threatening because it asks us to consider what we have sacrificed in order to remain acceptable.
And perhaps this is where the film leaves us with its most uncomfortable question. How much of what we condemn in others reflects something we have not yet been willing to recognize within ourselves, and what might become possible if we could bear to look?
For readers interested in exploring intimacy more deeply
Our capacity for intimacy is shaped by unconscious relational patterns as well as the ways we have learned to experience safety and vulnerability in our bodies. My course, Embodied Intimacy: Nervous System–Informed Practices, offers an opportunity to explore these experiences through embodied practices and a greater awareness of how we relate to ourselves and others.