To spin a yarn, weave a plot,untangle a tale; the web has been ametaphor for narrative structuresince stories began. Now it evokesimages of a worldwide network ofwriters and words, a gossamer gridof electronic connections andintersections; but the web idea wasthere before we ever put fingers tokeyboard…

Using Clio’s needle, then,let’s trace a literary historyof spinners and weaversand find the beginning ofthe thread.

In the creation myths of theHopi, Sioux and PuebloIndians ‘Spiderwoman’ madethe world. Authoress of TheDreaming, she wove herbeautiful but deadly webwith the same skill as thestorytelling mothers andgrandmothers who spun thesilk of culture and continuitythroughout aboriginal Indiancommunities .

Her twentieth centuryoffspring is famouslymale; it’s Spiderman whosaves the western world.

The result of a scientificexperiment gone wrong,Peter Parker can claim aneight-legged father figurein Anansi the Spider, anarchetypal tricksterfrom the stories of WestAfrica and the Caribbean.

This character stars in novelist Neil Gaiman’s hitAnansi Boys as the spider god reappears in modern America.

We must follow the female line of descent from Spiderwoman,though, for that is where we find, in images of spinning and weaving,some inaugural metaphors for writing.

In ancient Greek myth, Arachne is turned into a spider forboasting that her creative powers are greater than those ofthe goddess of embroidery herself, Athena. She warns thegirl against showing off; but, encouraged by friends andfans, Arachne challenges the goddess to a competition.

Her admirers gather round and gaspin delight as scenery and characterscome to life. Arachne isn’t wrong;she is the world’s best weaver. ButAthena is not of this world, and herskill is superhuman. When they stopat the end of the day, Arachne onlyhas to take one look at the goddess’sloom to realise she could never beatthe creator at her own game.In her shame, Arachne crawls away,and stringing up a length of her silkprepares to hang herself. Athenatakes pity on the girl who is, after all,the image of her; and turns her into aspider, so that she can spin andweave till the end of time.

In a 1980s recounting by Anthony Horrowitz it is not insympathy but a jealous rage that the Goddess turns Arachneinto a spider.Even ‘the oldest stories in the book’ have alternative endings;and morality tales can give mixed messages.

For the full referencesAPA-styleSee my essay to ClioA click awayPages 8 - 18

The arachnid’s thread leads to another weaving woman ofGreek mythology.

Penelope. In Homer’s epic poem, the wife of Odysseuswaits twenty years for him to return from the siege of Troy.Her palace is full of admirers, all trying to persuade her he’s never coming backand she should choose one of them to be her husband instead.

The men wait patiently till thefuneral shroud she’s weavingfor her husband is finished,but what they don’t know isthat every night, by candlelight, she undoes the workcompleted each day,unravelling the rows ofintricate colour, buying thetime for her husband to makehis way back to her.

Here we see the spinnersand spinsters, gossips andgrandmothers, epitomisedby the figure of MotherGoose, as keepers of thereceived wisdom of thepast, unfolding the plots ofthe future.

Mother Goose is the museof Charles Perrault, theFrench scholar whose 1697volume of fairy talescontain the first writtenversions of many classicplots (Contes de ma MereL’Oye). She is picturedwith the distaff, often seenas a phallic symbol, on thefrontispiece of earlyeditions of these tales .

Perhaps the most famousof the spinningprincesses is SleepingBeauty. In her story ajealous ‘fate’ puts a curseon the privileged child: atthe age of sixteen shewill prick her finger on aspindle and die.

Our word ‘fairy’ comesfrom the Latin fata, the fateswho spun the thread of time;from distaff to spindle,as from past to future…

The spindle: what if it doesn’trepresent a penis, but a pen? Theinjunction would then be againstliterary representation, theGrimm’s own written interventionin an oral tradition. The musesCalliope and Clio, with theirscrolls and books, have alreadystarted to celebrate the word on thepage; so must be guilty of this‘phallogocentricity’, too . Theystand accused by another ofGrimms’ spindle-wieldingprincesses, the heroine ofRumplestiltskin.

It is another boast that ends thisplot just as one began it. The goblinis overheard gloating that she’llnever guess his name isRumplestiltskin.Divine inspiration is seized by theindelible pen of representation, inthe hands of this dwarf with a giantego. Now the spindle of oralstorytelling is set against that inkypenis of the literary canon.

(This is an extract from my essay toClio; one click away, will clearup any confusion.)

This Platonic formula forthe making of art has beenfamiliar to poets andphilosophers alike sincebefore the spinning-wheelwas invented. Not the authorof her own fate, or theoriginator of the curse, theLady’s job is simply totranslate the world outsideher window into stitches inher tapestry, the matrix of thereal into the warp and weftof her colourful fabrication;but ‘I am half sick ofshadows’ said The Lady ofShalott.

It’s Sleeping Beauty syndrome, asshe waits to be woken from thedream with a kiss. Then one day inher mirror the Lady of Shalott seesSir Lancelot, a knight in shiningarmour, riding past on his whitehorse. She turns from the looking-glass to see him for real, to lookthrough the window to see him inthe flesh. In this move fromreflection to fact, the lady breaksthe spell, the mirror, the structuredsupport of the loom, with its cross-beams and correct tension.

It is tempting to see, too, in theunstrung loom and unravellingthreads of the Lady of Shallot, acrisis point in the history ofstorytelling. Mother Goose, themuse with a distaff, was spinningthe tales from ancient times;Spiderwoman created the world.But in those last moments beforemodernism does the web ofrepresentation actually rupture?Does divine inspiration die?

Perhaps the worst thing about the web is the spider; but the act ofspinning evokes some deeper fear than arachnophobia in men. InH.G. Wells The Valley of the Spiders, giant malignant arachnidsattack his hero. Overwhelmed by the gossamer threads, it might bea threat of emasculation, of being trapped in the feminine net.

Spiderwoman threatensmen, much as the Sirensdid and the sibyls.There are positive‘spinster’ role models inchildren’s stories,though. The 1950’sclassic Charlotte’s Webshows a spider savingthe life of a piglet bywriting messages in herweb.

And the earlier Marigold inGodmother’s House (by JoyceLankester Brisley, who maybe better remembered forMilly Molly Mandy) portraysa magical world reachedthrough spider web gates.While she stays with hergodmother Marigold isallowed to wander at will inthe enchanted grounds so longas she doesn’t go through agate; but the garden layout isdisorientating and the littlegirl gets lost:

She is a postmodern sister of the Lady of Shalot as the boundariesof her story break down. For a moment, Marigold doesn’t know ifshe is on the inside or the outside of the garden gate. A crisis ofinteriority and exteriority is marked by this web.

In her poem, ‘TheSpider’, EmilyDickinson refers to the‘neglected son ofgenius’; but we haveseen its silky connectionto women writers andtheir writing, its steelylinks to the femalefounders of the oralstorytelling tradition.

The thread used here is mostlike Ariadne’s in the story ofTheseus and the Minotaur,though: having tied itsecurely to the openingimage it will lead us safelyback out of a maze.(Though in some versions ofAriadne’s tale she ends uphanging herself by her ownthread… when jilted by herlover, Bacchus.)