Beyoncé as The Wild Woman Archetype on 'Cowboy Carter'
From “Spaghetti” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
Ayy, howl to the moon (howl to the moon)
Howl to the moon
Outlaws with me, they gon' shoot
Keep the code, break the rules (break the rules)
We gon' ride for every member that we lose (yeah)
I. How Cowboy Carter Channels the Wild Woman Archetype
"It is told that there is a place in the desert where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolves meet across time." — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, (Ballantine Books, 1992)
On Cowboy Carter, like scores of women have done before her, Beyoncé meets her wildish nature and becomes the Wild Woman. The singer's descent into feral sensuality and soulful savagery is marked by the album's dense, textured journey from the Western edge of the Deep South to America’s final frontier. Here, in the desert, where ahistorical narratives about freedom, self-determination and cowboys have created some of America's most enduring mythologies, Beyoncé personifies the Wild Woman as a series of rough women howling, hunting and roving through the male-dominated and masculine-identified landscapes.
Using psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés' seminal exploration of the Wild Woman archetype from her 1992 book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, we can better understand this ancient archetype while identifying the telltale markings of the Wild Woman's presence and what she represents on Cowboy Carter.
From “II Hands II Heaven” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
Toxic roses chased by wolves and carnivores
Lost virgins with broken wings that will regrow
I'm a stallion runnin', no candle in the wind
You won't ever see me comin' or goin' but you'll know whenever I'm here
Dancin' in the moonlight, catchin' every breeze
My feet on the dashboard, now go really fast, boy
Ever since I went to Marfa
Ain't no trouble on my mind (on my mind, on my mind)
Singin' sweet songs to Las Vegas
II. Who is the Wild Woman?
"This wilderwoman is the prototypical woman…no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change." — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, (Ballantine Books, 1992)
The Wild Woman archetype, also known as The Wild One or The She-Wolf, is a representation of our intuition and innermost wisdom. She encompasses a broader, deeper and less recognizable part of femininity than most popular archetypes, like the Huntress or the Mother. The Wild Woman is the core Self of a woman, and how she shows up in each woman differs based on her individual life purpose.
The Wild Woman can be understood as a woman's animating Life Force, her unique power from her one-of-a-kind ancestry and makeup, and she drives women to look deeply at themselves and discover who they really are and what they really want.
Kim Krans calls this archetype "The Animal" in her Wild Unknown Archetypes deck and guidebook, writing that,
We try hard to deny our unrefined animalistic nature—yet through this archetype we tap into power and direction. Activating The Animal within means reawakening our relationship to nature in the most broad and embodied sense. The Animal longs for breath, food, procreation, and physicality.
This wilder self isn't out-of-control or crazed; rather, her wildness is characterized by a strong connection to and appreciation for the cycles of life and nature. Her razor-sharp intuition makes her an astute observer of nature's cycles and her feminine wisdom allows her to find meaning in her own cycles, both physical and emotional.
For this reason, the Wild Woman archetype is often evoked in comparisons to animals that humans have long both feared and admired: wild horses, gray wolves, venomous snakes and predatory owls — animals that Beyoncé constantly references on Cowboy Carter.
From “Tyrant” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
When the sun goes down (it's night-night, hey)
Can hear her body howl (in the moonlight, hey)
I feel her eyein' me like owls (it's on sight, hey)
Estés directly lines up the traits of this archetype with those of wolves, writing,
“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack.”
In pop culture, you'll find slivers of the Wild Woman anytime a woman begins to find herself, often taking a literal journey. It's no coincidence that road trips and travel to faraway lands frequently show up in music, TV and movies about self-discovery and radical acceptance. The act of traveling and the marvels of exotic landscapes are neat stand-ins for the soul's journey a woman must take to find the Wild Woman archetype in herself.
This soul's journey can be messy, disorienting, sad, lonely, glorious, pleasurable and satiating — but at its core, it's freeing. To walk the Wild Woman's path to soul retrieval is to be fully embodied — to feel, to taste, to swim, to fuck, to birth, and to bury — without the shame of the tight reins society often disproportionately places on women and girls. Estés wrote that,
“When a life is too controlled, there becomes less and less life to control.“
And this is an apt idea for Cowboy Carter's protagonist, Beyoncé, an avid consumer of story and myth who has previously channeled the Queen and the Mother archetypes in her most famous works. Both the Good Queen and the Good Mother require discipline, selflessness and a tightly controlled public image — qualities she roundly dismissed on this album.
(If you're interested in the most prominent feminine archetypes on TV, I have a four part series —right here! — which explores the Queen, the Mother, the Sage and the Lover archetypes through television from the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 2010s. And if you want to go deep on how specifically Beyoncé has channeled the Queen archetype in her previous works, I made a video on the myths and archetypes that inspire her public relationship narrative — click here for that one.)
The women on Cowboy Carter, like the ladies in many country and blues songs, are rough-around-the-edges, hard-working, hard-partying and have long since given up trying to fit into society's tight feminine bodice.
From “Daughter” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
This alcohol and smell of regret
Allured my catch
Outfit too small to hide my scars
Feelin' bottled up like bottle service broads
How long can he hold his breath before his death?
III. Death + Violence, Grief + Loss
"Without [The Wild Woman archetype], women lose the sureness of their soul footing. Without her, they forget why they're here, they hold on when they would best hold out." — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, (Ballantine Books, 1992)
Perhaps the most striking way that Cowboy Carter evokes the Wild Woman is the cyclical design of the album itself — the ouroboros-like opening and closing chorus tracks — and in its dedication to death, grief, loss and, ultimately, new life.
Laying out the album's ethos on "Ameriican Requiem," we hear the beginnings of a prayer.
From “Ameriican Requiem” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
Nothing' really ends
For things to stay the same, they have to change again
Hello, my old friends
You change your name but not the ways you play pretend
American Requiem
Them big ideas (yeah) are buried here (yeah)
Amen
With references to angels guiding her, a funeral, buried ideas and ending with Amen, there's a clear image painted of the desire to bury old ideas with the men who dreamed them up so that new ideas can grow and take root.
Another example: When we look deeply at the hauntingly sweet and sing-songy "Tyrant," we have to deal directly with loss, grief and the need for reparations.
From “Tyrant” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
One-one-one by one, you hang them high
Your hands are steady and you sleep at night
How did you turn your heart to stone?
I don't want him back, but I can't let go
Hangman, answer me now
You owe me a debt, you stole him from me
I hated you once, I envy you now
To me, there's an undercurrent of loss throughout Cowboy Carter that fits with the idea that this project is an act of racial and cultural repatriation for folk music styles and instruments like the banjo that were created by enslaved Black Americans but later stripped of their Black origins.
And the Wild Woman is intensely focused on losing, death and grief, along with the opportunities and gifts they bring to a woman attuned to their meanings.
Estés writes that,
"Rather than seeing the archetypes of Death and Life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought. When one breath runs out, another begins."
She calls this cycle Life/Death/Life and spends a chapter of Women Who Run With the Wolves extolling the virtues of women getting more intimate with this idea as a way to routinely clear out what no longer serves the Wild Woman in her.
When women make the Life/Death/Life cycle a daily practice, Estés writes,
"Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only, all this dies. Because love always causes a descent into the Death nature, we can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment."
Death is also, always, a supporting character in rural America's stories. Though farming, cattle herding, mining and other frontier work are sometimes idealized, the reality of both the American South and the American West is that to live close to the land is to face death on a near-daily basis.
From Mudbound (Netflix, 2017):
“Violence is part and parcel of country life. You're forever being assailed by dead things: dead mice, dead rabbits, dead possums. You find them in the yard, you smell them rotting under the house. And then there are the creatures you kill for food: chickens, hogs, deer, frogs, squirrels, pluck, skin, disembowel, debone, fry, eat, start again, kill.”
Cowboy Carter nods at these harsh realities and centers the labor that her characters perform in songs like "16 Carriages," "Ya Ya," "Alligator Tears" and very subtly, in "My Rose."
From “My Rose” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
So many roses but none to be picked without thorns
So be fond of your flaws, dear
This song is another callback to the singer's Texas roots — Tyler, Texas is nicknamed the "Rose Capital of America" and "Rose City" because of its staggering export of the flower. Planting, cultivating and picking roses is also a grueling exercise, made more miserable in the sticky East Texas heat. Hardtack, a photography book from Austin-based Rahim Fortune, explores much of the same terrain as Cowboy Carter, as writer Imani Perry describes in The Atlantic:
"Poverty persists in East Texas today, and folks still must scuffle to stay free. In this state, you find some of the highest incarceration rates in the world. And the work has stayed hard: working cattle for milk and meat, harvesting big bunches of roses for other people’s beloveds in far-flung places, laboring over cotton and oil. Sacrifice is built into living. Residents must be prepared for tornadoes and floods that can feel biblical."
From “Texas Hold 'Em” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
There's a tornado in my city
Hit the basement
That shit ain't pretty
IV. The Story of the Land
"For this women's labor of finding and singing the creation hymn is a solitary work, a work carried out in the desert of the psyche." — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, (Ballantine Books, 1992)
We can also interrogate the significance of the land in Cowboy Carter's Western gaze with Heather Cox Richardson's 2020 odyssey, How the South Won the Civil War. The history text draws a compelling line from the slave-holding oligarchs of the Confederate South to the American settling of the Western frontier, making the argument that the same racist, profit-hoarding ideas fueled both economies.
Beyond references to Western towns like Marfa, Texas and Las Vegas, Nevada on songs like "II Hands II Heaven," the desert and the idea of going west is a persistent theme throughout the album.
From “Spaghetti” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
Know the lawman watchin' me every time I move (move)
Bounty on my head, can't go west, they on my shoes
No matter what the charges is, we ain't gon' tell the truth
The Western plains and the desert landscape therein loom large and ever present in the American cultural imagination — and this is completely by design. Cox details in How the South Won the Civil War that the rugged image of the American West and its inhabitants was, at least partially, a fabrication constructed by 19th-century politicians to win over voters.
“Democrats contrasted what they saw as a system of race-based wealth redistribution taking hold in the East with an image of the American West where hardworking men asked nothing of the government but to be left alone.
They promoted the image of the Western cowboy as a hearty individualist, carving his way in the world on his own, ignoring the reality that American soldiers and cowboys were often men of color and that the government provided settlers with land, protected them from Indians and helped develop the Western economy.”
“Democrats celebrated cowboys as brave heroes who worked their way to prosperity as they fought for freedom and American civilization against barbaric Indians, Chinese and Mexicans.
Although in reality the West also depended on women, in the male-dominated world of the cowboy myth, they were depicted as either submissive wives or prostitutes.”
— Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Throughout Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé alternates between promoting, interrogating and subverting the conventions of the cowboy myth. On songs like "Texas Hold 'Em" and "Spaghetti," she employs classic cowboy and Western imagery but turns these traditional images on their heads by placing herself — a woman of color — at the center of these stories. The book-ending album opening and closing tracks, "Ameriican Requiem" and "Amen," along with "Tyrant," directly confront this myth - astutely pointing out the hypocrisies baked into a freedman's land where only a select few enjoy that freedom.
From “Amen” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
This house was built with blood and bone
And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled
The statues they made were beautiful
But, they were lies of stone, they were lies of stone
The image of an arid, desolate frontier — whether in the West or the South — is integral to the album's personification of the Wild Woman archetype. The cowboy in the American imagination is a still and contemplative figure, a strong and silent man often believed to have a near-spiritual connection to the land and its creatures. And this is eerily similar to the Wild Woman in her quest for inner knowing and spiritual purpose. Estés writes that,
“Life in the desert is small but brilliant and most of what occurs goes on underground. Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.”
Cowboy Carter marries these two images — one of the stoic cowboy and the other of an introspective Wild Woman seeking purpose — beautifully on "Just for Fun."
From “Just For Fun” | Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024):
From the cowboys in Clovis, and the rodeo circus
I came here for a reason, but I don't know the purpose
It's all under the surface
Arguably, the deity Beyoncé prays to for guidance and healing is the Wild Woman in herself.
But time heals everything
I don't need anything
Hallelujah
I pray to her
V. Cowboy Carter's Mythology
Cowboy Carter masterfully weaves mythology into its lyrics, underscoring and elevating its core messages about Black Southern history, freedom and cultural reclamation. These two sets of mythology — the ancient, multicultural Wild Woman and the newer, American Cowboy Myth — are among the albums most defining features. Beyoncé purposefully sets these stories in a desert landscape to further critique long-held assumptions or outright myths about the men and women who created America. By insisting on centering women of color, Black women and small town folks, Cowboy Carter helps to give voice to some of the country's most influential, but oft-erased people.
Watch this essay on YouTube! ⬇️