SPINNING STRAW INTO GOLD, by Joan Gould; Random House, 401 pages, $25.95.
It's been 10 years since Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote "Women Who Run With the Wolves." If you liked that book, you'll be ready, after this span of time, for something similar. Something rich in metaphor and symbolism. Something to acknowledge the creativity and splendor within the life of even the most average woman.
You'll welcome "Spinning Straw Into Gold; What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life," by Joan Gould.
Gould begins her homage to fairy tales with a reminder: It was women — mothers, actually — who passed the stories down. These were cautionary tales. (They told children to be careful when they walked through the woods to Granny's house.) Yet they were more than cautions, they were also descriptions of a woman's psyche.
Before Freud, before Jung, before people made appointments with psychologists, there were mothers telling their children stories and, in the process, revealing their deepest fears and joys. Fairy tales take on the topics of abandoned babies, of girls escaping into a deep sleep until they are ready for marriage, of young women being transformed into birds, of motherless beauties willing to trade their lives as a ransom for their father's happiness.
These tales are rich precisely because they are psychodramas. Even today, Gould tells us, fairy tales offer us advice about how to be women.
She does not believe fairy tales tell us to wait for Prince Charming. Nor do they tell us to sacrifice our lives for our fathers' happiness. No, Gould makes it clear that Walt Disney took a lot of liberties with the original versions of these stories.
Gould goes back to the versions of the stories that were transcribed by the Grimms and by Charles Perrault, who wrote the Mother Goose stories. Occasionally she goes back even further, into folk tales of other countries, and into Greek mythology.
For starters, she urges us to see more deeply into "Sleeping Beauty" and "Rapunzel." Gould says it takes wisdom to withdraw. Maybe it isn't possible to hang out in your room for 100 years, but you can wait until the time is right to fall in love. It takes courage to wait until our emotions catch up with our physical maturity. It takes courage to ignore the pressures from the world around us.
Or conversely, Gould shows us that fairy tales encourage us to take risks. Take a second look at "Rumplestiltskin," "Snow White" and "Beauty and the Beast." They tell children that not just men, but women also, can explore new places, even places they've been forbidden to explore.
Fairy tales also show us we can transform our lives through hard work. In the pre-Mother Goose versions of "Cinderella," Gould reminds us, Cinderella didn't have a fairy godmother, she was responsible for her own magic. She cared for a calf or a tree or a fish and it was one of those creatures who gave her what she needed to go to the ball. Also, she was strong enough to know what she wanted and to ask for it.
Gould suggests, "Cinderella let loose the energy of her own transformation, which she has been nurturing for years . . . she works her way up from the soil." And in the story of "Pygmalion" Gould suggests that the hard work that transforms the woman also transforms the man who has taught her.
In Gould's final chapters, her comments about death are less convincing than her earlier insights. The women who told these fairy tales, down through the generations, didn't know what to expect after death. Gould doesn't have any real answers either.
However, her insights into aging are good. She writes about the Greek myths of Demeter and Persephone, and of the Egyptian goddess, Isis. "In each case the goddess was thrust out of her earlier role in life, as if she were no more than human. Isis became a childless widow. . . . Demeter, a mother past childbearing who is robbed of her only child. Human or divine, the mortal part of a female clings to her period of fertility and motherhood, and if that is unavailable, then to a job where she can use her spiritual fertility to nurture those who are not her biological offspring."
In a touching conclusion, Gould meditates on her role in her granddaughters' lives. She is not only the teller of fairy tales but, by her mere presence, is yet another female role model.
"I am difference and separation and possibility, a binocular view of life. I am risk and strangeness, while your parents offer only identity and safety," she writes. Parents may be grounded in the demands of the present, but "I am the past, which is mythical, which shifts every time you look at it."
E-mail: susan@desnews.com