DANIELLE WOOD Mothers Grimm. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
Inspired by the famous fairy tales, these stories are a shocking joy to read.
This wonderful title has been lurking in the zeitgeist for over 200 years. I don’t think it’s been used before and that is perhaps because it was waiting for this book. It’s a title that is almost magically apt – four stories and one wicked prologue go to make a motherhood statement that is like a slap.
Mikhail Bahktin, linguist and philosopher, used the phrase ‘sideways glance’ to describe a form of language-use in a novel. I would like to borrow it and use it differently because it seems so perfect a description of how Danielle Wood uses fairy tales. She takes a very oblique, indeed forensic, look at the old stories and then makes them very much her own; just a sideways glance that adds a frame but does not overwhelm. She references the traditional tales, but her own are really fresh, emotionally painful and illuminating explorations of motherhood. Written with a gifted style, they are a shocking joy to read.
When people rediscover fairy tales they are often amazed at their power, but of course since the burst of psychological understanding of the 19th and 20th centuries that power has been well documented. Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, Levi-Strauss and others all knew what a library of emotional truth these tales held.
The first story in Mothers Grimm, ‘Lettuce’, glances at Rapunzel. It is the story of Meg, wife and mother, friend of an ordinary, happy-enough group of young women, who encounters a seemingly cherished princess, so perfect that her own life is thrown into banality and her lack of freedom highlighted:
Once and only ever once, Meg caught a glimpse of Treasure. Meg was driving through the city and had stopped at some traffic lights, and there she was, sitting on a high stool at the bench seat in the window of a café. Visible beneath the bench was the soft leather of a pair of tan high-heeled boots. Above it were dark blonde curls falling onto the frilled collar of a houndstooth trench coat. Meg could easily imagine how, in the middle, the belt of the coat would cinch a perfectly retracted waist. But it wasn’t any of those things that made Meg turn the radio news up louder and clutch the steering wheel harder. It was the solitary coffee and the leisurely newspaper spread out on the countertop.
The second story, ‘Cottage’, plays with the problems of debt and difficult parenting and the painfulness of rejection. Nina believes that a stay-at-home mother is the best. Her friend Genevieve says she’s a better mother because her daughter goes to childcare, but Nina doesn’t believe her:
She and the baby would entertain themselves by going to the museum and the library; they would walk on the foreshore and spend slow afternoons with their hands in the earth of their own backyard.
However this dream of mothering doesn’t happen because she becomes pregnant with a second child and her husband becomes insolvent. Henry, her little boy, has to go into care at the ‘Cottage’ and all the relationship tragedies that result hover sadly over their lives. There is a decided whiff of wicked witch here, a forest, even some little bones.
‘Sleep’ and ‘Nag’ are the remaining stories; depicting startling and alienating views of mothering, both are powerful evocations of emotional truths.
The epigraph at the beginning of ‘Sleep’ reads: ‘You reach womanhood and although there may not be a spindle, there will still be blood, a curse and some little prick’.
This story looks at the notion of sleep as a form of escape. Liv is the eldest daughter of a family with social pretentions. She is talented:
… And she had the kind of posture that spoke quite accurately of family money. Liv never intended to appear imperious but with her ballerina neck and the way she pulled her long hair over her neatly moulded skull, she did.
Liv seems like a perfect young woman suited to her station in life but she has a quirky and strange set of impulses and these lead her into an unplanned pregnancy. Danielle Wood takes us through her experiences with a delicately wielded scalpel.
‘Nag’ frames the idea of ‘The Goose Girl’, with its emphasis on the intense relationship between mothers and daughters and the power of mothers to shape their children. Stella is a young nurse who moves away to a part of the country far from her intensely loving mother:
I didn’t want to cause her any hurt, and I wouldn’t, I thought, just so long as I kept from smiling on the outside of my face and just so long as I didn’t lean into the bends. That way there would be no need for my mother to be sad, or even to know, that in my heart I was already on tomorrow’s train, upright through two days and a night with the other girls, all of us speeding west, away to new lives.
But Stella doesn’t understand how powerfully emotional tethers can bind and recreate themselves.
The stories all take a sharp-eyed view of motherhood, but they are often witty and so very, very perceptive. I don’t want to suggest unrelenting gloom, as each story rests very carefully on a wave of compassion and each is honest in a way that liberates the reader from any kind of schmaltz associated with magazine images of maternity. Expect to recognise some painful truths, pleasurably.
Danielle Wood Mothers Grimm Allen & Unwin 2014 PB 224pp $27.49
Folly Gleeson was a lecturer in Communication Studies. At present she enjoys her book club and reading history and fiction.
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