Issue #6: Women Who Run With the Wolves
Forgotten tales and women's words, scripture dripping with wisdom from a cantadora story-teller
Book Review
Women Who Run with The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
From the book flap:
Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Though the gifts of wildish nature come to us at birth, society’s attempt to ‘civilize’ us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure, and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. Without Wild Woman, we become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller, shows how woman’s vitality can be restored through what she calls “psychic archeological digs” into the ruins of the female unconscious. [...S]he uses multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from twenty years of research that help women reconnect with the healthy, the instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. [...] We retrieve, examine, love, and understand [Wild Woman], and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. [...This is a] new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
Audio version: Kate reads this article to you!
Book information and ratings:
Women Who Run With the Wolves | by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 1992 | |
Genre: | Nonfiction |
|
Subject: | Myths, archetypal & Jungian analysis, women's psychology | |
Rating: | All-time favorite | |
Read as: | Print copy | |
Readability: | Moderate | |
Subject Weight: | Heavy | |
*Quick note: If you pick up the audio version of this book, it will be an abridged version–even if it isn’t marked as “abridged.” I have not found a complete professional audio version. Although, it is a marvelous experience listening to the author’s voice (with all the velvety depths of her inflection, intelligence, and intuition), it is only a small segment (maybe 20 percent?) of the material available.
How I found this book:
At a late-night, summer bonfire, Sara and I were perusing the potluck food selection that was piled on the flat-bed trailer–which actually worked quite well as an outdoor table. While looking through the chip bags in the orange light of the fire behind me, I started telling her about my latest book purchase: a new edition of Maya Anglou’s collected autobiographies–a big brick of a book with a magenta cover and delicate pages. So gorgeous on so many levels! I couldn’t wait to start working my way through it.
“Have you heard of Women Who Run with the WolvesI?” She asked. “It’s a big book, too–and you would love it! It would be awesome to have a book club where you discuss one chapter a month,” she said thoughtfully.
“Oh, come on, Sara! People can read big books!” I protested, squirting mustard on my hot dog. “No need to break it up and baby people along!”
Then, I bought it.
Hey, Sara: maybe this IS the type of book you would want to discuss one chapter at a time at a book club…!
About this book:
I’m not going to try to summarize this book–it speaks for itself, and I’m not about to pollute it with my own mucking about. That said, I will try to give you a taste of what it is.
***
Reading this book is unlike any other experience. At times it seems confusing and convoluted–what is she talking about?? Other times, intimate and true: Oh, I know EXACTLY what she is talking about. And still other times, I don’t know if I believe her…
But no matter my intellectual reaction, I always reach a place of resonance. At some point, a hum builds in my chest–buzzing and familiar–something strummed.
It’s uncanny. And ancient. And powerful.
This is a sacred text–
void of religious trappings and streaming with insight and direction.
This is scripture–
a book of truth to pick up again and again, to learn and apply anew.
The stories:
Each chapter recounts one main story, with added background and deep analysis. Most are NOT your usual fairy tales, but myths that have been lost through the absence of oral tradition and/or the whitewashing of history. Some are perfectly horrific on many levels, but the author always provides interesting introspection, expanding the lessons and meanings.
The cultural education offered here is priceless and includes an astounding array of influences, from Russian to Mexican to Native American and on. And, just the stories themselves have affected me in moving ways.
****
For example, I was excited to find the French/German story of “Bluebeard” retold in a collection of fairy tales I got for my kids. I was reading it aloud one evening, and I got to the end…
…but, the ending! The writer changed the last sentence! It read,
And that young lady completely lost all her sense of curiosity… (Holeinone 55)
In Estés' careful telling, “Bluebeard” highlights the necessity and value of curiosity as a powerful life-preserving force. But, I was holding the opposite message from the exact same story in my hand…in print…and tripping out of my mouth: the death and damning of a woman’s precious curiosity. I was stunned. Then I cringed, realizing how much of that same distorted message I have internalized throughout my life: that the curious woman is dangerous–the curious woman is cursed. (Eve, among others.)
Curiosity killed the cat–and almost killed the woman?
No. The curious woman seeks. She sees. She knows. This is how she frees herself from manipulation and illusion. And this truth was snatched away with one sentence; in ONE TINY SENTENCE, the writer unraveled all the story’s ancient weaving.
****
On the other hand, I was reading Spider Woman’s Web, a collection of traditional Native American tales, and I was surprised to find that one story, “Spider Woman Saves Ko-chin-ni-na-ko” was both “Bluebeard” and the Russian tale of “Vasalisa the Wise” put together. How did a tale from the Keresan Pueblos of New Mexico contain so many of the same narrative elements as other tales from Russia, France, and Germany?
I can see how and why the author spent decades of her life trailing and tracing human stories across the globe! It’s fascinating!
The wisdom:
Here are a few quotations I have posted by my desk:
Archetypally, to untangle something is to make a descent, to follow a labyrinth, to descend into the underworld or the place where things are revealed in an entirely new way, to be able to follow a convoluted process. In fairy tales, to loosen the girdle, undo the knot, untie, and untangle means to begin to understand its applications and uses, to become a mage, a knowing soul. (p 148)
To live a vibrant life, we must make sacrifices of various sorts. [...] If you want to create, you have to sacrifice some superficiality, some security, and often your desire to be liked, to draw upon your most intense insights, your most far-reaching visions. (p 222)
This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself. [...] The Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both; to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live. (p 33)
The men:
While this book leans heavy on the feminine side, there are several myths with important male characters and relationships–how could it be the whole telling otherwise?
In “Chapter 4: The Mate” under the subtitle, “Hymn for the Wild Man: Manawee,” she says:
If women want men to know them, really know them, they have to teach them some of the deep knowing. Some women say they are tired, already having done too much in this area. I humbly suggest they have been trying to teach a man who does not care to learn. Most men want to know, want to learn. When men show that willingness, then is the time to reveal things; not just because, but because another soul has asked. You will see. So, here are some of the things which will make it much easier for a man to understand, for him to meet a woman halfway; here is a language, our language.
[...T]here is no one a wildish woman loves better than a mate who can be her equal. (p115-116)
And, from the delightfully creepy chapter on “Skeleton Woman”:
There is probably nothing a woman wants more from a man than for him to dissolve his projections and face his own wound. When a man faces his wound, the tear comes naturally, and his loyalties within and without are made clearer and stronger. He becomes his own healer; he is no longer lonely for the deeper Self. He no longer applies to the woman to be his analgesic. (p 156)
In short:
So the wildish task of the man is to find her true names, and not to misuse that knowledge to seize power over her, but rather to apprehend and comprehend the numinous substance from which she is made, to let it wash over him, shock him, even spook him. And to stay with it. And to sing out her names over her. It will make her eyes shine. It will make his eyes shine. (p 129)
So, my masculine friends, do you want to know? Do you want to learn? The wildish task awaits. Here is your invitation.
****
This book is running in a stealthy undercurrent in our modern culture. Now that I am familiar with it, I find it resurfacing constantly. It is referenced in almost every feminist text I’ve read (written after 1992, of course), as well as quoted in other books and social media posts.
Last year, Sara took a vacation by herself to the other side of the country (she’s kind of a bad ass like that) and took this book with her. She was reading in the airport when a woman came up to her and commented on the book, giving her a knowing smile. Days later when eating alone in a restaurant, the same thing happened–another woman approached her, “It’s a great book, isn't it?”
There is a shared bond created in this text–wild woman to wild woman. It is a force, pushing at convention and pulling at our souls.
****
I did end up organizing a women’s book club (WWRWW for short) with my friend Camie. Some of my best friends (including Sara) meet once a month on a Sunday morning at a coffee shop downtown (and we only discuss one chapter at a time!). It is one of my favorite things–to dive into these nearly lost myths and into our own unfolding life stories. And, when we finish the book, we are planning a trip to The Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, MT.
So, just buy it already! Come, join the ranks of the knowing women, the wild women, the women who run with the wolves.
****
(P.S. I recommend getting the larger hardcover edition! You won’t regret it!)
Sources:
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1992, New York.
Hazen-Hammond, Susan. Spider Woman’s Web: Traditional Native American Tales About Women’s Power. Perigee Book, 1999, New York.
Holeinone, Peter. Great Fairy Tale Classics: The Story of Cinderella and Other Tales. Tormont Publications, Inc., Canada. Printed in Italy.
About the author:
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS (1945-Current) is an American poet, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist. [...] She is a first-generation American who grew up in a rural village, population 600, near the Great Lakes.
Dr. C.P. Estés' is a lifelong activist in service of the voiceless; as a post-trauma recovery specialist and psychoanalyst of 48 years clinical practice with the persons traumatized by war, exilos and torture victims; and as a journalist covering stories of human suffering and hope.
She is Mestiza Latina [Native American/Mexican Spanish], presently in her seventies. She grew up in the now vanished oral tradition of her war-torn immigrant, refugee families [...] for whom English was their third language overlying their ancient natal languages. As an older child she was adopted into an immigrant and refugee family of majority Magyar and minority Danau Swabian tribal people. Her families could not read or write, or did so haltingly. But they were wise in the ways of nature, planting, animals, making everything from scratch, from shoes to songs.
Thus she was raised immersed in the oral tradition of old mythos and stories, songs and chants, dances and ancient healing ways.
Her writing is deeply influenced by her family, people who were hands-on farmers, shepherds, hopsmeisters, wheelwrights, weavers, orchardists, tailors, cabinet makers, lacemakers, knitters, horsemen and horsewomen from their Old Countries. clarissapinkolaestes.com
*This is issue #6 of The Book Moth Newsletter
Visit katewebbwrites.com for more information and free resources. Thank you for your readership!