“What’s your favorite fairy tale?” With this question, Spinning Straw Into Gold prompts us to look into the treasures stored within the least explored part of ourselves. Our spontaneous choice of a story – or better yet, a particular image in a story – tells us a great deal about our families, our experiences, our souls. Another way to put the question might be “What can fairy tales teach me about my life?”

The book follows the three traditional stages of a woman’s development as we move from Maiden to Matron to Crone, changing our inner as well as outer selves. Do we suppose that fairy tales always end with happily-ever-after, as the Maiden is transformed into a Matron? There are less commonly known stories that begin, rather than end, on the wedding day at the moment when the bride splits in two, torn between her desire for intimacy and tenderness on the one hand, and her contradictory yearning for the freedom and privacy of her single state.

Spinning Straw Into Gold ends with the rarely studied challenge of the Crone stage – the Age of the Spirit.

During the MAIDEN stage of life, a girl’s task is to break away from home and mother. At that point she discovers that her good mother has disappeared and been replaced by a wicked witch or stepmother, who just might be Mother Nature in disguise. Acting as the agent of growth, the stepmother propels her daughter out of the comfort of childhood and forward into sexuality and a family of her own - something the good mother could never do.

The Maiden’s story isn’t a simple trajectory from puberty to marriage, however. When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl is plunged into a period of darkness which she must go through in order to allow her emotions enough time to catch up with the changes in her body.

Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through her feelings of inferiority until her fairy godmother materializes from thin air, bearing a magic wand that turns a pumpkin into a golden coach and the opressed kitchen maid into a princess. Modern versions introduce a different image of transformation: In Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the transformer is a professor of speech who teaches the heroine the proper upperclass vowel sounds - and yet he is touched by magic, since he is the only person on earth who can teach the Ash Girl what she needs to know in order to move from squalor to splendor. He combines the roles of fairy godmother and prince. More recently, the heroine of Million Dollar Baby is transformed by a boxing coach. In our society of limitless faith in self-improvement, magic apparently consists of finding the right trainer.

Sleeping Beauty does nothing external but lie asleep behind a hedge of thorns. When she awakens miraculously changed into a full-blown woman, she reveals the deep creative energy released by sleep that is typically female. (Think of a woman’s drowsiness during the early months of pregnancy, her tranquility during nursing.) After being pricked by a spindle, Sleeping Beauty’s inner self is paralyzed until she has absorbed the emotional shock of puberty and matured sufficiently to face her new stage of life.

This phenomenon of a woman’s sleep, a symbolic death, isn’t limited to fairyland. In modern life, it appears with dismaying frequency as anorexia, bulimia, drugs, alcoholism or depression, all of them ways to fall asleep emotionally rather than physically, and avoid - or postpone – the decisions and experiences of adulthood.

Of all fairytale themes, “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST” is the one that has gone through the most vivid transformations as our attitude toward sex has changed, from the virgin’s dread of a hungry monster (King Kong, “Cupid and Psyche”), to the erotic appeal of the wild man, the brooding social outcast who adores the woman trapped in his lair (Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.) When the heroine enters the Beast’s castle, sex regains the intensity and secrecy – the shiver of fear - it has lost in our society, where it has been dulled by blatant overexposure.

Are fairytale heroines nothing more than passive creatures who wait to be rescued by a prince, as feminists claim?

Absolutely not. In old stories, sisters rescue brothers, daughters rescue fathers or lovers much more often than the other way round. Hansel scatters bread crumbs to mark the path home, but it’s Gretel who pushes the witch into her oven. Beauty goes into the Beast’s castle, prepared to die in order to save her father’s life. In every case, heroes – like St. George – rescue unknown maidens and then ride down the road in search of the next adventure, while heroines rescue those they love.

It’s Walt Disney who popularizes the idea of the helpless maiden, radically changing what used to be the heroine’s classic story of growth and transformation into the hero’s story of combat. In Disney films, the handsome prince battles the ugly old witch who is the Mistress of Evil for possession of the girl. While we wouldn’t want to miss the fun of Disney films, his patriarchal slant shifts the focus of the stories from the female to the male, leaving the maiden with nothing to do except sit on the sidelines, warbling “Some day my Prince will come.”

In the MATRON section of the book, Rapunzel and Jane Eyre reveal a bride’s ambivalence toward her impending marriage, which causes her to split into two people, Rapunzel and witch, or two Mrs. Rochesters, one living in the bedroom on top of the other. In another scenario, the marriage splits apart over a period of time. A woman may be a loyal wife and mother for many years before acknowledging that marriage wasn’t what she wanted in the first place, or that she has changed her mind and doesn’t want it any longer, even if she must abandon her children in order to escape to her native home (“The Seal Wife”, Kramer vs. Kramer).

The CRONE section of Spinning Straw Into Gold is the most challenging. In a woman’s later years, when her physical work in the world is done, she learns from the myth of Demeter and Persephone that a mother and daughter must separate painfully before they can find one another again. Their reunion expands the mother’s gift of spiritual as well as physical fertility, just when she thought she was displaced from her roles by old age.

It’s clear that we never outgrow our fairy tales. On the contrary, they grow with us.