THE AVID READER
T H E A V ID
READER
w w w .Z a ra
H o ff m a
A v id R e a d e n .c o m /
r. h tm l
December 2012
Issue No. 4
Zara Hoffman is a young author of Romance, Fantasy, and
Literary YA Novels. She loves reading, giving and receiving
recommendations for books. If you have any, feel free to email
her at [email protected]
A Look Inside
"If you want your
children to be
intelligent, read them
fairy tales. If you want
them to be more
intelligent, read them
more fairy tales."
~Albert Einstein
SOURCE PAPERS
THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT
Bruno Bettelheim, a reputed child psychologist
famous for his book The Uses of Enchantment:
The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,
argues that fairy tales are cautionary tales
meant to dissuade children from giving into
their "uncontrolled cravings," such as œdipal
complexes and curiosity, because of potentially
dire consequences.
Continued on Page 2
THE HARD FACTS OF THE GRIMMS' FAIRY TALES
Maria Tatar, a folklore and children’s literature
professor at Harvard University, challenges
Bruno Bettelheim’s condemnation of children’s
troublesome curiosity, focusing instead on the
villainous adults who are always depicted within
the fairytales. She says that fairytales are meant
to be empowering to children by
subconsciously telling them they can defeat evil
and take on the scary adult world. She also
disagrees with Bettelheim's overemphasis on
sexual innuendos.
"Fairy tales are more than
true; not because they tell
us that dragons exist, but
because they tell us that
dragons can be beaten."
~Neil Gaiman
"The way to read
fairytales is to
throw yourself in."
~WH Auden
Continued on Page 4
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The Uses of Enchantment
By Bruno Bettelheim
THE MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF FAIRYTALES
In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim
which children could process their emotions. On page
dissects many common fairytales such as Snow White
5 of The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim quotes a
and Little Red Riding Hood in addition to some less well
German poet named Schiller to substantiate the
known tales like Bluebeard. He emphasizes messages
significant exclusive wisdom that only childhood
contained in all of these stories, both of the dangers
fairytales can provide: "Deeper meaning resides in the
of over-attachment to family members and having an
fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the
excess of curiosity. He also suggests that fairytales are
truth that is taught by life" (5). He then goes on to say
crucial in childhood development because they allow
children to experiment with feelings without any real
that it is important, and almost the duty of parents to
show their children that “real life is not all sunny" (7).
consequences.
"Part One: A Pocketful of Magic" further
Bettelheim promotes the idea that within
expands on the separate realms of reality and fantasy
these childhood fairytales also exist sexual innuendos
within a child's mind. Bettelheim speaks about how
designed to help transition children from their
children's external projection onto classic fairytales
perception of sex being disgusting to perceiving sex as
helps marry the two, giving children hope and the
something natural and beautiful. Bruno Bettelheim
perseverance to attain their goals, indirectly guiding
uses Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of sexual origins
them toward their life's purpose. He uses numerous
and Freud’s "œdipal complex" as a lens through
fairy tales to illustrate the pervasive archetypal themes
which to view fairytales. Bettelheim reiterates the
importance of fairytales as an outlet for children to
such as "Pleasure vs Reality," "Achieving Integration,"
and "Unifying Our Dual Nature." Throughout all of
play out their sexual fantasies.
these analyses, Bettelheim uses Freudian terms such as
The Uses of Enchantment has an Introduction
called "The Struggle for Meaning" and is then broken
"superego," "id," and so forth.
In "Part Two: In Fairy Land," Bettelheim
into two separate parts titled, "Part One: A Pocketful
goes into a more in depth analysis of specific fairytales
of Magic" and "Part Two: In Fairy Land." The
following the individual narratives. At the end, he
introduction heavily emphasizes the important role of
groups tales like The Frog King, The Enchanted Pig,
fairytales during childhood because they inspire
Bluebeard, and Beauty and the Beast, under the category
children by giving them a purpose in life and
of "animal grooms" and interprets them as tales of
simultaneously providing externalization, through
young girls who either try to deny sexuality, grow up
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The Uses of Enchantment
CONTINUED
too quickly,
or lose their virginity, and those who
enough for interpretation. Finally, given his focus on
patiently but surely weather the tumultuous nature of
Freud's psychoanalytic theories to frame his opinions,
a relationship in order to see it bloom into something
Bruno Bettelheim synthesizes and extrapolates on
beautiful.
many Freud-enthusiast opinions surrounding the
phenomena of "the superego," "the id," and most
Bettelheim uses a wide range of sources to
support the various arguments in his book, The Uses of
importantly "the œdipal complex."
Enchantment. First, he relies on different translations of
the fairytales that he interprets in order to illustrate
that across cultures and languages, certain motifs
consistently appear in specific stories. For instance,
Bruno Bettelheim employs both the English
translation of The Brother's Grimm by The Grimm
Brothers and Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm by
Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka as primary sources
to base his analyses and to show the deep-rooted ideas
that have continually captivated "child and adult
alike" (5). He also does the same for Charles Perrault's
tales. Second, he references many secondary sources
including books, journals, and encyclopedias on
fairytale interpretation to show that his views are not
idiosyncratic. For example, Bruno Bettelheim refers to
Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants by
Marian Roalfe Cox in his thorough analysis of
Cinderella in "Part Two: In Fairy Land." He also
draws from the tomes of Journal of American Folklore,
Motif Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson, and
uses Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary of Folklore to discern
which characteristics of the fairytales are significant
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The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales
By Maria Tatar
In her book, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairytales,
Maria Tatar analyzes some of the same topics as
Bettelheim such as family drama and animal grooms,
but her overall interpretation is more positive than her
contemporary’s. However, Tatar does not sugar coat the
Grimms’ Nursery and Household Tales. Even though Tatar
acknowledges the existence of morbid and twisted
motifs within fairytales, she believes the morals and
messages imparted to young audiences resonate with
hope and adventure. This is in contrast with the sexual
and more negative undertones perceived by Bettelheim
and other scholars. Broken down into three main parts,
The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales systematically
analyzes multiple facets of the Brothers Grimm
collection, Nursery and Household Tales.
In the section titled "Children's Literature?",
Tatar addresses the editorial liberties the Grimm
brothers took while transcribing the fairytales from
folkloric sources. The main idea explored in this section
is the irony of the original Grimms' Fairytales' having an
integral role in childhood literature, when most scholars
deem the material inappropriate for children. Maria
Tatar mentions Friedrich Rühs, who generally liked the
collection of stories, but strongly warned: "This book
was not to be put into the hands of children" (15).
The first subsection is titled "Sex and Violence:
The Hard Core of Fairy Tales." Within the first few
pages, Tatar immerses the reader in the gory details that
Disney ever-so-generously spared their young audiences.
On page 3, Tatar mentions three lesser-known tales that
were very popular in Germany, where parents kill
children and cooks commit cannibalism– no wonder no
one ever mentions them in the bedtime stories a parent
tells their three year olds. In short, Maria Tatar describes
how the Grimm Brothers adapted original versions and
oral variations to suit their ideal German morals of
celibacy before marriage and the perfect German family
by diluting sexual overtones and embellishing violent
episodes. This again brings up the question of why they
are called childhood tales.
In "Fact and Fantasy: The Art of Reading
Fairytales," Maria Tatar emphasizes the importance of
not projecting an interpretation onto the fairy tales. The
most striking example of this is when the Nazis
construed the meaning of Little Red Riding Hood as a
parable of the Germans escaping the evil clutches of the
Jews (41). However, the Grimms' fairytales weren't only
used for Nazi propaganda. They were also integrated
into Holocaust survivors stories such as Jane Yolen's Briar
Rose, based on Sleeping Beauty, and Lois Lowry's Number
the Stars. Lowry mirrors the tale of Little Red Riding
Hood as her protagonist, Annemarie, escapes a
concentration camp (xx-xxi). Tatar also invalidates some
sexually focused arguments. One of these examples is
Bruno Bettelheim and Ernest Jones' theory that the frog
in The Frog Prince was a metaphor for the male sexual
organ. Tatar argues this is completely misinformed due
to the countless number of folktales where it was the girl
who was a frog before being transformed into a beautiful
maiden (43). Maria Tatar further disapproves of
Bettelheim's preoccupation with attempting to find
sexual references within tales such as Bluebeard.
Bettelheim says the story is an example of female
curiosity and the loss of virginity. Maria Tatar argues
that one must not read too deeply into the story’s
imagery because it is more likely an example of
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The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales
CONTINUED
curiosity, and eventually wit, that saves the female
protagonist's life, similar to another tale called The
Robber-Bridegroom.
In Maria Tatar's last section, "Villains," she
emphasizes that the true function of fairytales is for
young heroes to learn to fight adult villains. She
addresses the reality-based origins of the most common
fairytale villains and tackles the prevalent theme of
animal grooms. An example of this is the Grimms’
attempt to preserve the “good mother” by making Snow
White’s originally evil birth mother, a step mother. This
shift creates an independent evil entity for Snow White
to combat without adulterating the purity of the
biological mother. Animal grooms, for the most part,
aren’t technically evil characters, but they are generally
initially portrayed as the villain. An example of this is
Beauty and the Beast, perhaps the most well-known animal
groom story. When Beauty first encounters the Beast, he
threatens to kill her father for trespassing on his lands,
but agrees to let Beauty take her father’s place. At first,
the Beast is savage toward her, shuns her, and keeps her
locked in a cell. However, when Beauty still shows him
kindness and attempts to learn about the Beast, the two
fall in love, revealing the Beast to be a beautiful prince.
The moral of the tale, and many others similar to it, is
that “it’s what is on the inside that counts,” “beauty is in
the eye of the beholder,” and that animosity can turn to
love– although, in the case of Beauty and the Beast,
falling in love with your captor (Stockholm Syndrome)
doesn’t seem like a good message to send to children–
I’m talking to you, Disney!
Maria Tatar draws her interpretations from
German translations, such as Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen
der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe in der Urfassung. She
also consults many books on fairytale interpretation, and
psychological journal articles on fairytales: Bruno
Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairytales, Once Upon A Time: On the
N a t u re o f F a i r y Ta l e s b y M a x L u t h i , a n d
“Psychoanalysis and Folklore” (Essays in Applied
Psychoanalysis) by Ernest Jones.
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