Excerpts

 

From the Introduction: What’s Your Favorite Fairy Tale?

This is a book about women, specifically about fairy tales and the extraordinary light they throw on the metamorphoses at each stage of a woman’s life: those shifts in consciousness as well as biology that propel women from one level of being to another.

We are born to be changed, the stories tell us; we are always on the move from one transformation to the next, whether we want to be transformed or not.

In folklore, there are a few male Cinderella figures (“The Ugly Duckling”, Harry Potter) and male Sleeping Beauties, but in general the hero, bent on conquests, wants nothing so much as to remain himself once he reaches adulthood, simply growing more powerful and widely recognized. The heroine, on the other hand, lives a life of transformations in a body that passes through inevitable metamorphoses. A teenage girl longs for curves in order to be seen as a fertile maiden. A fertile maiden wants to become a lover or wife. (She may change her partner later on, but not the step she has taken, which has carried her from one level of existence to another.) A wife wants the big belly that carries her future child. A new mother expects her breasts to become fountains of milk. But the crone, past her child-feeding years, becomes flat and barren as a prepubescent girl again.

Maybe this is why the witch builds a gingerbread house in the woods, to feed her flesh on the vigor of two hungry children so that she can start her cycle all over again.

Then what's transformation? All we know for sure is that it’s a process that can’t be stopped or reversed once it has started. It’s a constant transit from the known to the unknown, including death as well as birth. In everyday life, we rely on the deceptive fantasy that we will always be whatever we are now, while fairy tales strip away this illusion, or narcotic, and point us toward the underlying truth. To be fully alive and aware of our human fate, we must do our best to wake up to the transformations – which mean the transience – of our lives.

But one thing transformation is not: It's not a magic wand that changes a poor girl's rags to riches - that trick can be done by winning the state lottery, which is extremely good luck but only external. True transformation, which is never reversible, happens internally and involves rising (or falling) from one level of consciousness to the next, gaining a new sense of where we are in our lives and what must come next.

THE MAIDEN STAGE and Sexuality: “Cinderella”

The clock strikes twelve on the night of the final ball. The French Cinderella leaves behind a scrap of clothing as she dashes away. The German Cinderella runs down a staircase that the prince has smeared with pitch to trap her.

Never mind how it happens. In each case, the heroine loses a shoe: a slipper embroidered with silver thread, the sandal of an Egyptian courtesan - whatever is most dazzling wherever and whenever the story is told, but in every case a foot covering that twinkles like a firefly when a prince holds it in his hand.

Perrault's was the first Cinderella to wear slippers made of glass, "the prettiest in the world", but for a century and a half certain scholars - including Balzac - argued that this footwear was not an inspired fancy but a mistake. An oral storyteller must have described "une pantoufle de vair," meaning a fur slipper, and Perrault wrote down "une pantoufle de verre," a glass slipper, which would be impossible to dance in.

If a mistake was made, Perrault's subconscious served him well. The lost slipper sparkles on the prince's palm because it represents the owner herself, or to be more exact, it represents her sexuality, roaming the countryside to find the only foot that slides into it. After all, what can a woman's slipper, which is a smooth casing that fits snugly over a projecting part of the body, suggest except a vagina, which is shaped by nature to fit around a penis? "The shoe or slipper is a ... symbol of the female genitals," Sigmund Freud wrote in a footnote to the first of his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, which implies that the foot slipping in and out of the shoe (and in and out again, all over the countryside while the prince searches for his mate) represents the eager penis on the prowl. But fur?

A fur-covered foot may be a fantasy suitable for scholars, but it's not to the taste of fairy godmothers and their authors. Fairies prefer a slipper made of glass, since glass is cool, incapable of stretching, fragile, and impossible to repair once shattered, which is why it's the symbol of virginity in general and the hymen in particular. At traditional Jewish weddings today, the bridegroom still crushes a glass underfoot to symbolize rupturing his bride's hymen, while his relatives and friends let out an exuberant cheer of "Mazel tov! Congratulations!" at the sound of shattering. As a matter of fact, so important is the requirement that the groom break the glass on the first try that prudent families substitute a light bulb hidden in a napkin for the traditional goblet.

Shoe and vagina. Shoe and sex. We know this without knowing we know it.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

Of course she didn't know what to do. With her whole life focussed on her genitals, so that metaphorically she lived in her shoe, she was bound to have so many children that she had no recourse except to "give them some broth, without any bread," whip them all soundly, and put them to bed.

Nowadays we have Christmas tree ornaments shaped like shoes from the 1920's, bracelet bangles, refrigerator magnets, enamel earrings - all made like elegant shoes in our national mania to display our most overt totem of female sexuality. And what was hung behind newlyweds' cars until a couple of generations ago? Old shoes, which we might not have treated so cavalierly had we realized what they stood for.

In Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) has only one enduring passion: shoes. On the verge of being evicted from her apartment because she hasn’t the money for a down payment to buy it, she visits a shoe store with her friend Miranda. She picks up a sample and sniffs it adoringly. She picks up more shoes and hands them to a salesman. “Size seven and a half. But whatever you do, don’t let me buy them,” she orders him. “I’m just trying them on for fun.”

“Where did all my money go?” she asks plaintively as she sits down.

“At four hundred bucks a pop, how many of these do you own?” Miranda wants to know. “Fifty?”

“C’mon.”

“A hundred?”

“Would that be wrong?” Carrie sounds defensive.

“ A hundred times four hundred dollars – there’s your down payment.”

Carrie recoils. “I spent forty thousand dollars on shoes, and I have no place to live?” she asks in disbelief. “I’ll literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes.”

THE MAIDEN STAGE and Sleep: “Sleeping Beauty”, “Snow White”

Two kinds of energy are available to each of us, whether male or female. Reaching out for what's beyond us. Or awakening something inside ourselves that never existed until now. In fairy-tale terms, we pass through the stories of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, usually both by turns.

But how can we compare these two figures? Cinderella is the all-American girl who works from dawn to dark, just like us, while she waits for something wonderful to happen in her life: "watchful waiting," we called it in the previous chapters. Hers is the optimistic story of a girl who is convinced, without proof, that her future is bound to be better than her present.

Sleeping Beauty is the opposite: an overprotected Princess for whom transformation carries a sting she has to absorb. Suddenly made aware of the responsibility, grief, danger, joy, helplessness and passion that await her in a future that can't be resisted, she does nothing for the rest of the story except lie back and keep her eyes shut, the one completely passive heroine in fairytales, amoral and erotic.

We call her sleep unconsciousness, but that isn't wholly true. Her mind and emotions may be numb, her body may be paralyzed, but some form of learning, some digestive process, goes on inside her, so that by the time she wakes up she has been transformed every bit as definitively as Cinderella.

Confronting "Sleeping Beauty", this most spiritual of all fairy tales, we have to ask why sleep overtook the princess when it did, and what part of her self was so frightened that it lay dormant for what must have seemed to her family like a hundred years. Could there be something that we gain in sleep that can't be gained elsewhere?

Leapfrogging to the end of the story, we have to ask why she wakes up when she does, which may not be as simple as the fact that she has been kissed. Has she been transformed because the right time has come, and so the first prince who shows up has to be the right one for her? Or is it because only the right man knows how to pass through the brambles to reach her and rouse her with a kiss?

Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Brunhilde: In each case, the virgin falls unconscious – maybe asleep, maybe dead, who can tell? - on the day when she’s no longer her parents' protected child. She has broken their law by favoring the one man she isn't supposed to favor, or reaching out for the spindle she isn't supposed to touch, or taking a bite from the poisoned apple offered by the false mother. On the other side of parental law lies sexuality, which may mean death but in any case means that childhood has ended, even though she isn't ready for the next step yet. If she wakes, it can only be in the arms of a man of her own, at which point she will have to become a lover, wife, mother. Mortal. Heading for decay. Giving birth to others who will in turn decay. This seems like a sad comedown in the eyes of her father, but it will do him no good to banish spindles from his kingdom, as Sleeping Beauty's father is about to find out.

Are we half asleep in our daily lives without knowing it? We can't understand these stories of virgins who ripen into women ready for sex while they seem to be dead to the world unless we understand that we, too, are often half asleep while we go about our daily routines.

In a state of semi-sleep, we hurry to the office, stalk through the supermarket aisles, lie in bed with our lovers. Do I doubt that I sleep the years away? Then let me try to remember what I was doing a month ago, a decade ago. Let me try to remember my children when they were little, not in the form of well-worked anecdotes, as composed as photos, that I tell myself about them, but as they actually were, the touch and smell of them, and myself in my many moods when I was with them; and I find that I'm left with nothing but shadows except for a few small patches of light.

While we are doing one thing we think of a dozen others, but without purpose. Thoughts tumble around in our minds in no particular order, like clothes tumbling past the window of a washing machine, while we wonder how soon this chore will be over.

In another form of sleep, our will-power crumples. We lose track of our purpose. At the most ordinary level, I see myself going to the kitchen to take something out of the freezer for dinner. The phone rings. I answer. I pause for a snack. An hour later, while sitting at my desk, I realize that I never took the food out of the freezer. Nothing to fuss about. Absent-minded, I say. But if my mind is mine and my will is absent, where can it be if not asleep? Is my excuse that I was lost in thought? Then what great thought did I carry out of the kitchen?

Despite our resistance to the idea that we aren't fully awake, we have to bear in mind that sleep is a positive force that makes life and creative work, as well as transformation, possible. In the "Sleeping Beauty" story, it's the period of incubation that the heroine's soul needs in order to absorb what we so blithely call "the facts of life", and gather the strength for new growth in spite of them, but for all of us, the ultimate fact of life is death. We couldn't go about our business if we kept thinking of that all the time.

This is what happens in sleep: One part of us knows a secret that the other parts don't know yet, and tells it in our sleep. If we fail to understand this, if we don't realize that all of us play the Sleeping Beauty role from time to time, we can't understand the story or sympathize with the heroine, who seems as lifeless as a codfish stretched out on a bed of ice in the fish store.

 

THE MATRON STAGE and Secrets: “Bluebeard”

“Here,” said Bluebeard to his last wife, “are the keys of the two
great rooms that hold my best and richest furniture…and this is
the master-key that opens all my apartments. But for this little
one here, it is the key of the closet at the end of the great gallery
on the ground floor. Open them all, go into all…except that little
closet, which I forbid you in such a manner, that if you happen to
open it, there is nothing but what you may expect from my just
anger and resentment.”

At the heart of every marriage, this story tells us, lies a secret - a bloody and often dangerous secret overlaid by the details of daily life. We marry without knowing who we are and without knowing who our partner is. From the wedding day on, we walk past closed doors to which we carry the key. This is why marriage is so much riskier as well as richer than friendship or romance.

But what can be hidden in the litle closet that must on no account be opened? Whatever we don't want known. More to the point, whatever we don't want to know. Whatever tears a hole in the intimacy of man and woman. Needless to say, a wife may have secrets of her own, but a woman has more at stake in marriage than a man does, and so she is generally more willing to bend and more skillful at concealing than he is.

But revealed it is, sooner or later, often through some accident that the wife would have given a great deal to avoid. The phone rings on the day before Christmas, and the unsuspecting wife (in this real-life case Katharine Graham, who later became publisher of the Washington Post) innocently picks up an extension in another room in time to hear her husband talking to his lover "in words that made the situation plain". In another family, a bill is erroneously mailed to the home address from an unknown jewelry store where the husband has made purchases, or the husband's car is spotted by his mother-in-law parked outside his secretary's home during the lunch hour. Adultery is the common scenario, the bones of past lovers strewn on the floor of the Bloody Chamber, because adultery is emblematic of all other betrayals, and yet it's more often a result than a cause of domestic trouble.

These days the secret of the little closet is often homosexuality, when a husband doesn't understand his own sexual orientation until well into the marriage, or suspects it but keeps quiet. (Which is more devastating for a wife? To have her husband and the father of her children leave her for another woman, which means he has found someone who beats her at her own game, or to have him leave her for a man, which means that she never made him happy in the first place, whether he realized what the trouble was or not? Right from the beginning, she never had an inkling of what he was suffering or thinking during the nights they spent in the same bed.)

If not adultery or sexuality, the taboo subject may be gambling, alcoholism, drugs, anxiety, depression, brutality, impotence, irresponsibility. Nay-saying to life: A long-time bachelor tells the woman he's involved with that he wants to marry her but doesn't want to have children because he's Catholic and she's not, but later, when she brings up the subject of family again, he doesn't object. She erroneously takes his silence as a signal that he has changed.

In whatever fashion the revelation comes about, the wife can’t understand how she could have been so naive. There were signs. Plain as day. There was every reason to ask questions. (While Bluebeard's last wife waits for the knife blade to fall on her neck, does she marvel that she never asked what happened to those previous wives who vanished without a trace?) She was blindfolded by nature during those years while she was busy setting up a home, bearing children and raising them: carrying out nature's orders.

The pity would be if later on, after she discovers her ignorance, she rejects those years of early happiness, thinking they must have been delusory. Happiness that comes from delusion can be as real and nourishing as happiness from a sounder source.

Seeing what she sees, the wife may go to pieces emotionally and physically, and never recover. Or she may come out of the Bloody Chamber transformed, gristly as a weathered bone, in which case a reversal of power takes place between husband and wife. She is the stronger one now, toughened by experience, as happened with Eleanor Roosevelt.

In any case, a human being, male or female, is too complex to enter into anything whole-heartedly, marriage least of all.

 

THE CRONE STAGE and Living With Passion: “Hansel and Gretel”

On a certain morning, the woman, who has been a matron for a good many years now, looks in the mirror and says to herself "God, I look old." At that moment she sees the lines of mortality carved on her face. The angel of the Annunciation has flown into her bedroom once again, carrying news of the advent of death this time rather than childbirth.

Life isn't a gift, it's a loan repayable on demand, the woman reads in her mirror. For the first time since childhood, she feels the urgencies that lie behind her days like a horizon beyond a seascape. She fears death - specifically, she fears dying as a lonely old woman, the fall down the cellar stairs and no one to hear her call for help. But fear is the essential part of the angel's gift, the root of consciousness. In response to fear, she is overcome by love for life and for her body, still wonderfully intact, which so cleverly poises one foot at a time in midair and bends the other knee while she descends a step. That requires faith in the knees.

A divine duty has been laid on her without her consent, a duty she couldn’t face earlier in life. As a Maiden, she had no interest in abstractions like age and death. Her idea of the future was strictly short-term, beckoning brightly.

By the time she became a Matron, she hadn’t an ounce of energy to spare from the work of starting a career, or bearing and raising a family, or both. A young mother rushing down the street behind a stroller is terrible in her beauty: Beautiful whenever she bends over her child to fill a need, because all mothers are beautiful in their concern. Terrible because she doesn’t see that the moment of need and fulfillment, effort and exhaustion is evaporating already, the apex of her life, but she won’t recognize that until it’s over, by which time she will have forgotten what it felt like and who she was, so young and sleep-deprived to be in charge of another life. All that matters at the moment is getting the grocery shopping done in time pick up her older child from nursery school. “No time to think” is the anesthetic life gives both men and women in the middle years to make sure that we stay focused on our assigned task of keeping the species going.

At last she faces the question worth asking: How can I go on living a meaningful life when I know that I’m going to die?

Could the answer (could my answer) be this? “With passion. For this world, not the next. I don’t care about the stars, any more than they care about me. What I crave is the human scale – nothing grander than a window seen from the street at night, a golden rectangle framed in the darkness, with a stranger’s life beating inside it. That wrings my heart.

I say that I can’t bear to leave the world - and yet I’ve been granted ten thousand nights as clear as this one, with thousands of windows lighting the dark, framing strangers busy with their own lives, but how many of them have I actually looked at? Am I only now learning how to see? Becoming a seer? Only when I learn that I’m powerless to change what I see, or to hang on to it, am I ready for a transformation of the spirit.

Consciousness is too much to bear for more than a few minutes. The woman in front of the mirror breaks the spell, looks in the mirror again, puts on her makeup with the hand of an art restorer, and goes out into the street as a middle-aged matron with highlights in her hair.

All the same, she has caught a whiff of mortality in the air, like the smell of salt before reaching the sea.