A few months ago, I assigned my feminist book club Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. We’d just read The Princess Saves Herself In This One (a book I’m still figuring out how to review), and honestly, I wanted a book that would provide us with some real, feminist insights. Something we could sink our teeth into.
Good news: if what we wanted was a meaty book, we got it.
Bad news: the book was so meaty, that it was almost inaccessible. At 562 pages of densely packed, narrow-margined text, we got way more than we could chew or swallow all at once. I’d opened it twice before I decided that if I wanted anyone to attend the club meeting, I’d better cut down the reading materials. I cut the discussion to half of the book, and a third of my way into that, I contacted all the members and advised them to try to get through just chapters one and two. Maybe you’re part of a scholarly book club that would look down on this. Good for you. We’re not like that.
With that in mind, I finished most of the half of the book I assigned, then went to the club meeting, where I found that every person who’d read Women who Run with the Wolves reflected an opinion I’d had about the book. We had the following range:
- “This book was incredibly pretentious. I hated it so much that I gave up after the intro and decided to read something else.”
- “Was she high while she was writing this? Some of this was incomprehensible.”
- “I liked some of it. I related to some of it”
- “I loved it. It felt so spiritual.”
So let’s talk about why I shared all of those opinions and whether this book, which, to be fair, was published in the early nineties, is still applicable to today’s feminists.
It Was Pretentious
To begin with my biggest criticism of the book, Estés writes this book from the perspective of a storyteller who has collected all the myths and stories women supposedly need to understand themselves. Then, for every story she tells, she breaks up every single part of the story and tells us what they mean. Not what they might mean, mind you. What they do mean.
Now, it crossed my mind while I was reading that Estés might not have meant to come across as writing the end-all, be-all definition of every story for every woman. Maybe she assumed we would all know we were reading her interpretation. But even if you can get by that, she spends a great deal of time talking about what “every” woman feels. Every woman apparently feels the wild in her bones, and every woman has certain experiences, too. Such as a dream in which a “dark man” is chasing her. Or an experience where she learns she has been naive for many years. Or a secret that she’s kept from herself.
Was that kind of egotism acceptable in the early nineties? If it was, it isn’t in 2019. The last thirty years have been three decades of feminists coming to grips with the idea that feminist doesn’t mean the same thing to every feminist.
You might want to be a mother whose primary vocation is staying home with and raising her kids. I might want to be a teacher who never has kids. She might want to be a businesswoman who waits until her forties to even think about kids. To today’s feminist, not only are all three of those positions valid, but they only represent a teeny tiny sliver of all the choices that make up a woman’s identity.
Feminists of today hardly ever speak in terms of what we must ALL be, think, believe, do. The feminist mantra is one of openness. What we want is not for women to have the right to act like men, per se, or for women to have the right to act like a particular kind of woman either, but for every woman to have the right to choose to be the kind of woman she wants to be. Equity for us means “equal right to choose.”
So a storyteller coming at us with “every woman does X” and “it is typical of women to do Y” is hard to swallow for us. It comes across as an extremely pretentious, distasteful thing to say, especially since the whole tone of the book also feels extremely academic. Lots of big words and metaphors. Lots of times when an editor should have cut a chapter in half. Or maybe into a third of what it was originally.
And that leads me to my second main criticism of the book:
Incomprehensible Language
AKA: Was she high?
There’s this story Estés tells about four spiritual leaders who are granted access to some special, universal wisdom that changes them. Here’s the story for you, courtesy of another blogger who copied this down from Estés book before I did!
The Four Rabbinim
http://rrzbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2009/10/four-rabbinim.html
One night four Rabbinim were visted by an angel who awakened them and carried them to the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven. There they beheld the sacred Wheel of Ezekiel.
Somewhere in the descent from Pardes, Paradise, to Earth, one Rabbi, having seen such splendor, lost his mind and wandered frothing and foaming until the end of his days. The second Rabbi was extremely cynical: “Oh, I just dreamed Ezekiel’s Wheel, that was all. Nothing really happened.” The third Rabbi carried on and on about what he had seen, for he was totally obsessed. He lectured and would not stop with how it was all constructed and what it all meant…and in this way he went astray and betrayed his faith. The fourth Rabbi, who was a poet, took a paper in hand and a reed and sat near the window writing song after song praising the evening dove, his daughter in her cradle, and all the stars in the sky. And he lived his life better than before.
Beautiful story, no? But the point is that only the fourth Rabbi figured out what he should do with the information he’d received. He wrote songs praising everything around him and lived his life better than before.
He praised and he lived.
I think Estés should have looked at the story a little longer and asked her how it applied to herself. I’m sure she thinks a book like Women who Run with the Wolves is her “praising” all the knowledge she gets from these stories, but to be totally honest, she rambles so much and so often makes points that never get to the point that she sounds more like the third Rabbi, who carried on and on because he was totally obsessed, lecturing and not stopping with how it was all constructed and what it all meant.
The parallel is so obvious that I half-expected her to call herself out in the book. But she didn’t. She spent that whole 500+ page book obsessing and lecturing and carrying on and on and on, sometimes to the point where her words didn’t seem to have any meaning, and I can’t even imagine what that draft looked like before an editor found it.
Truly, this is the part that makes this book seem the least applicable. In the age of twitter, are we capable of digesting that many thoughts at once any more? I’m not sure we are. Or at least it was very difficult for me to handle it.
But Then There Were Moments When I Related
Alright, if I had not chosen Women who Run with the Wolves and been forced to lead the discussion, I don’t think I’d have finished even the first chapter. But…I was the discussion leader. So I kept reading, and surprisingly when I started sort of holding my nose at the pretention and trying to look for meaning in an overload of words, I found something.
I found stories I related to. More often than not, I related exactly the way Estés said I should. Sometimes it was almost even painful to see myself in those stories, such as in the story of Bluebeard, which Estés says is a story about how we fall for naive charm when we’re young. I have been that naive. I have learned not to be. Or the story of the Little Matchbox Girl, which Estés says is a story about how we give away our creativity for little flickers of flame until we die without any matches left to light.
I saw myself. In face, I saw so much of myself, that I wanted to read more, slowly, and find myself again. I got slowed down on particular chapters because they were so very much written about me. Isn’t that something? Reading a book that you really think you don’t like only to find that you have to slow down to appreciate it more? If I could only look the other way at the style of the book, I could enjoy it quite a bit.
And I think that leads me to the last opinion my club had on this book.
A Feminist’s Spiritual Bible
Ultimately, I believe Women Who Run with the Wolves is very applicable to some of us today. At least it was applicable to me. Maybe it would be applicable to you. But to get something out of it, you have to treat it the way I suspect Estés wants us to treat it.
The book isn’t meant to be read straight through. Don’t do that to yourself. Wait until you are facing a particular challenge. You’re afraid of something you know you want. Your creativity is sluggish. You’re at odds with your own body. You’re going through relationship struggles. You feel like a loner. Then go and see if there’s a chapter that is relevant to you. There might very well be one. And then there might be a story for you.
And then you might find Estés telling you a story about yourself, and it will all feel very much like something that came to you at the right time. Or at least that’s what I’m going to do with this book.
So conclusion?
It wasn’t my favorite, and yet, it still has legs! I’m really pleased to have it on my shelf, and I think this book is going to age well with time. In other words:
Yes. It’s still applicable.
