Darnton vs. Bettelheim

In darkened nursery rooms everywhere, from Paris to Beijing to New York, they are told: bedside tales of princesses and withered crones and wily elves, softly uttered to some wide-eyed child, the speaker’s ancient words awakening a sense of timeless enchantment. For centuries, fairy tales have long evoked the imaginations of children and adults alike. They cast a spell of awe and wonderment; they enthrall and entertain; they teach us morals, inspire us to dream of happy endings. They even capture the interest of academics, who comb through these age-old tales searching for symbols, unconscious motifs, and psycho-analytical elements.

As to the question of how fairy tales should be used—how they should be treated, what purpose they serve—Bruno Bettelheim and Robert Darnton’s ideas differ greatly. On the one hand, we have Bettelheim, who seeks to employ fairy tales as moral and educational tools for children. Energetically applying psychoanalytical theory to his study of fairy tales, Bettelheim sees fairy tales as deliverers of crucial messages to the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. Furthermore, fairy tales provide a valve for satisfying the pressures of the id and ego. Because they squarely confront such “existential” issues as evil, death, and suffering, he deems folk tales the ideal literature for children.

Then, however, Darnton enters the picture and proceeds to swiftly dismiss all of Bettelheim’s ideas. Scoffing at the attempts of such psychoanalysts as Bettelheim to investigate the “hidden meanings” of fairy tales, Darnton is most concerned with preserving the historical integrity of fairy tales. He views fairy tales and folk tales as rich repositories of cultural history through which we can trace evolution of a people. In their pure, unadulterated forms—the way French peasants told them, huddled around their hearths on blue winter nights—most fairy tales are crude and blunt, rife with brutal details and erotic underpinnings. It was only as a result of changing cultural values that these fairy tales evolved into their present, “fluffy” forms, purged of all traces of explicit eroticism and violence. For this reason, psychoanalysis, Darnton maintains, blindly ignores the crucial origins of fairy tales. By subjecting folklore to a close study of the “hidden” symbols and meanings that didn’t even originally exist, psychoanalysts sully the role of fairy tales as historical documents.

Either way, however, whether we see them as intriguing troves of psycho-analytical thought, as important historical documents, or simply as light-hearted entertainment, fairy tales have permeated human culture for centuries and will surely continue to transcend the boundaries of time.