Via Justine De fant

Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (Abridged Audiobook)

By Clarissa Pinkola Estés

November 27, 1996 • Audible • 2h 18m

2.5/5 stars

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

I first saw this book on a TikTok where a woman was raving about how this WWRWW changed her life. I should have done my own research. Maybe I misunderstood the title. I had thought this would be a literary analysis of “wild women” in literature, but instead I got feminist manifesto that felt… cheesy and pretentious.

I feel as if this book is riddled with assumptions of who deserves to be a “wild woman.” If you’re unbearably artistic, “untamed”, robust, have an urge to run into the forest barefoot and naked, and are ever-angry, then you are a wild woman. In its effort to liberate women from their current cage of oppression, it ended up trapping us in another. She was very definitive in the way she portrayed women, their desires and feelings and what they should want for themselves. She is this. She is that. But what if a woman does not want to paint? Or sculpt? Or be raw and loud and raucous? What if it’s a woman outside the context of Western idealogies? Estés also talks about wild women being a “mistaken zygote,” unsure of how they were born into their family of origin, who she often feels estrange from or different to. This felt very “pick-me.”

I also could not get past Estés’s narration of her own writing. Her pauses are unnecessarily long and the tone of the narrating is akin to a talk show where the author is both interviewer and interviewee. There’s no doubt that Estés is an intelligent and strong woman herself, but she comes off self-important and pretentious. Her writing repetitive and cyclical. 

Part 1 of this audiobook lost me. Part 2 felt more substantial and made some great points about how to productively store anger or exchange it for patience. The stories she shares of mythical women, like the witch who conjures a woman from the skeleton of a wolf, La Llarona, and the wife seeking a tiger’s eyelashes were enjoyable, but I’ve heard more intriguing and insightful analyses of wild women in my discussion courses in grad school. 

Perhaps this abridged audiobook version is worlds apart from the physical book, or perhaps it’s outdated and fits the ideals of feminism fitting for when it was first written. Maybe it came into my life when I didn’t need to reconnect to the “Wild Woman” inside me or maybe I. just. didn’t. get it. Whatever the case, I can’t say I left very inspired nor any better than before having read it.