a gallimaufry

Hansel and Gretel

(Eleanor Davis, Witch House, 2007, 3-D model in cloth, wood, and acrylic; from here; the artist’s website is here)

You all know the story of Hansel and Gretel, don’t you? But you can read it here, if you like. Because in fact, on rereading it, I found there were elements I hadn’t remembered. That their mother was a stepmother, and that she was the moving force behind the abandoning of the children. That both parents had taken the children into the woods, not just the father. That each time, Hansel had pretended he was looking back to see something on the roof of the house – his little white cat, his dove – to hide his dropping of the trail of white stones or crumbs. That the parents had tied a bough to a tree to make a tapping noise like the tapping of an axe on a trunk and convince the children that they were still nearby when in fact they had crept home and left them alone in the forest. That after Gretel had killed the witch, a white duck carried them safely over ‘a great stretch of water’. That the stepmother had died while the children were in the forest. That the story ends thus:

Then all their cares were at an end and they lived in sheer joy together. My story’s done. See a mouse run. And whoever catches it can make a great big furry hood from it. (Joyce Crick’s translation from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Selected Tales.)

Joyce Crick’s note to the story explains that this ending was added in the fifth edition (1843) of the tales, when Wilhelm Grimm revised ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to reflect a version written by August Stöber (in Elsässisches Volksbüchlein). Crick writes:

In phrase after phrase the story now offers more purchase for moral judgement than the laconic discretion of the version in the first edition did. The stepmother is made harsher, the father more plagued by conscience, Gretel more weepy, Hansel more confident.

The famine which drives the family to the brink of starvation, the explanations and motivations for the characters’ behaviour, the white duck, these were all elaborations on the original story. There is a comparison of the first and fifth editions here, so you can judge the extent of the changes for yourself.

The stepmother was, until the fourth edition (1840), the mother. Marina Warner argued, as far as I recall since I don’t have a copy of From the Beast to the Blonde here, that the Grimms systematically turned the ‘bad mothers’ of their tales into stepmothers: this reflects a social fact – stepmothers often were harsher to their stepchildren and, in a world where food and other resources might be scarce and survival a struggle, often did favour their own children – and an emotional one – mothers must be nurturing and kind, they may not hate or kill their offspring, it’s an idea we simply do not like to entertain, even now.

In the woods lurks another maternal figure: the witch. If the stepmother is the Bad Mother, the witch is the Very Bad Mother Indeed. The delicious gingerbread house, the supper of ‘milk and pancakes with sugar, and apples and nuts’ and the ‘two lovely little beds with white sheets’ appear to be the attributes of a kind and loving parent, but alas, by the next day the old woman has locked Hansel in a cage to fatten him up and forced Gretel to be her skivvy.

The tale very clearly links hunger for physical food with hunger for maternal love. When Hansel and Gretel devour the gingerbread house, they’re not simply being gluttonous but desperately attempting to satisfy their craving for their mother. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in connexion with this story (in The Uses of Enchantment), the gingerbread house is in one sense the mother’s body, which literally feeds the infant. But the inhabitant of the house plans to feed upon the children. In this respect she is like the fairies I am reading about in Diane Purkiss’ Troublesome Things, fairies descended from Sumerian child-eating demons and lamia, who drain babies of life even as they appear to suckle them. In my family, adults – including me – often talk about ‘eating’ children: ‘I could gobble you up!’ But we’re not Sumerian child-eating demons: it’s a way of expressing our love. And this seems not freakishness on our part, but something quite common; well, between mothers and babies at least. And Maurice Sendak described his aunts and uncles as saying they would ‘eat him up’ when they visited him (they inspired the wild things in Where the Wild Things Are). And in your family?

Certain motifs in the story are connected by their colour, white: Hansel’s little cat and dove, who may be sitting on the roof; the shining white pebbles and the moon by whose light Hansel gathers them; the duck who carries the children safely over the water. These are the children’s helpers. But in the deceitful world of the gingerbread house, the milk and the white sheets on the little beds are part of the illusion of aid.

Despite its cheery themes of attempted infanticide and cannibalism, if any of the Grimms’ tales can be said to be for children, it is ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The children triumph through their own resourcefulness, they begin as powerless and abused but end the tale in control of their destinies and bringing home wealth to sustain the family. And they push their ‘mother’ into the oven! What could be more enjoyable for a child than vicariously doing that?

(Albert Weisgerber, illustration from Kinder- und Hausmärchen nach Sammlung der Brüder Grimm, retold by Hans Fraungruber; Wien & Leipzig: Martin Gerlach & Co., ca. 1900, from here; you can see the whole book here)

Illustration in text: Paul Meyerheim, illustration from Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1893; from here)

The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear

(Karl Fahringer, ‘The Boy who Went Forth to Learn Fear’; I don’t know the edition it originally appeared in but I found it here)

I’m sorry – this is appearing a day late! The teacher-training course has crashed over my head like a monster Flemish-language wave and I am floundering. I’m also teaching English one evening a week and that’s turned out to be hard work too. So, writing time is short here at a gallimaufry these days. 

But onward! There are two brothers, the younger of whom is stupid, unable to learn anything and unable to experience fear: ‘They keep on saying, “It makes my flesh creep! It makes my flesh creep!” My flesh doesn’t creep: likely it’s another of those skills I don’t understand.’ When his father asks him what trade he would like to learn, the boy answers that he’d like to learn ‘flesh-creeping’. The father complains about this to the sexton, who offers to take the boy on and teach him flesh-creeping, which he attempts to do by pretending to be a ghost: the boy mistakes him for a ne’er-de-well and kicks him down the stairs, breaking his leg. Deeply embarrassed and annoyed, the father gives his son fifty thalers and turns him out of the house to seek his fortune, warning him never to mention from where he comes or whom his father is. A man on the road offers to teach him flesh-creeping by instructing him to spend the night beneath a gibbet, but the boy is unafraid and even takes the corpses down and sits them by the fire so they can warm themselves. At an inn he learns of a haunted castle: anyone who can spend three nights there will win the hand of the king’s daughter. As yet no-one has emerged alive.

The boy takes up the challenge, asking only for ‘a fire, a turner’s bench and a wood-carver’s bench with a knife’. On the first night he encounters black cats who wish to play cards with him, black cats and dogs on red-hot chains who stamp on his fire and a moving bed which whisks him round the castle. The boy remains imperturbable. He kills the animals and taunts the bed before settling down to sleep by his fire. On the second night, a fearful racket in the chimney precedes half a man, who drops down it, followed a little later by the second half; he is followed by more men who start playing bowls with nine shinbones and two skulls. The boy joins in their game after using the turner’s lathe to smoothe the skulls into spheres. On the third night six tall men bring in a coffin which the boy opens; thinking the corpse is just cold he tries to warm him and then climbs into bed with him. The corpse revives and tries to throttle him, so the boy pushes him back into the coffin. Then a terrifying old man enters and tells him he will die, but the boy traps him and beats him until the old man offers him great riches. He takes him to three large chests brimming with gold, one for the poor, one for the king and one for himself. Midnight strikes and the old man disappears. The king is delighted and gives him his daughter to marry. ‘That’s all fine and good [...] but I still don’t know what flesh-creeping is’, objects the boy.

(David Hockney, ‘Inside the Castle’, etching, 1969,  from ‘The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear’ in Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (London, Petersburg Press, 1970; reprinted London: Royal Academy of Art, 2012), found here)

Once married, the boy is happy but still whinges on that he wishes he knew what flesh-creeping was, to the point where his wife becomes understandably annoyed. Her chambermaid brings her a bucketful of little fishes, and instructs her to pull aside the coverlet and pour them over the boy one night when he’s asleep: this she does and thus he finally learns what flesh-creeping (or ‘shuddering’ in other translations) really is.

Like many fairy tales, this one takes an apparent outsider or person without much power to be its a hero. The boy is explicitly referred to as ‘stupid’ by the narrator and by other characters in the story; however, as it unfolds he is shown not to be lacking in advantages. He is resourceful in the face of trials, cheery, kind (albeit to corpses) and physically strong. The innkeeper’s wife notes his ‘pretty eyes’ and the king calls him ‘a handsome boy’. Forced to discard his identity, his old self, when he leaves home, he manages without magical helpers and endures his ordeals alone. It is probably stretching a point too far to bring Asperger’s Syndrome into this, but I will anyway because I felt that the boy did display the Aspie ability to interpret the world differently to others and very literally; his father cannot accept this difference nor perceive the strengths it gives his son.

My friend Joyce writes that ‘The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear’ appeared in the first edition of the tales as ‘Good Bowling and Card Playing’, with just the triple test of the cats, the game of bowls and the scary old man: ‘the important mythical element of learning fear was only introduced in the extensive rewriting for the second edition’ which drew on at least four other variants of the story. The hero of the first edition was a standard bold hero. Joyce further points out:

[I]t is essentially a comedy on two levels: on one, the boy remains cheerfully and stupidly proof against three times three horrors; on another, like Wagner’s equally sanguine Siegfried, he does learn fear – from his bride; at least, as a figure in the Märchen, he does not learn fear within himself. But it is characteristic of the Märchen genre that the inward experience – fear, and with it becoming an adult – is represented by the wholly external episode of the shudder-making bucket of fishes.

And there is another sort of joke going on here. The external experience of shuddering or flesh-creeping is for most of the story linked with expressing fear and, moreover, fear of the supernatural and the undead. But the boy’s flesh finally creeps not through fear but through disgust at the cold little wriggling fishes. (I do wish that Emily were still posting as I would love to know her thoughts about this.) Different elements of fear are being conflated to end comically – spending the night fighting enormous black cats is as nothing compared to your wife tipping gudgeon over your head. The marital bed is the counterpoint of the moving bed in the haunted castle, which tries to terrify the boy but fails to provoke him. Or is it disgust that he feels at the end? Marina Warner (From the Beast to the Blonde) and Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment), considering that the shudders are occurring in bed with the queen, interpret them as physical passion. Bettelheim reads the tale as that of a young man who learns to feel, whether it be fear or something else. What do you think?

Next week: The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.

Our Lady’s Child

One sunny day a good frau was preparing the morning story for her children. But every tale she pulled out of the cupboard was somehow unsatisfactory, lacking in nutrition and moral fibre. Liberally sprinkled with elves and talking animals and very dubious behaviour, they would not sustain her offspring through a rigorous day at school. Fortunately the frau was resourceful; she whipped out her cooking pot, hung it over the fire and began to make a delicious soup. In she threw a handful of ‘Bluebeard’, a spoonful of ‘Six Swans’ and a dash of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, perhaps even a dusting of ‘Genesis’, and she simmered it all in a delicious broth of Catholicism.

I believe that’s the origin of this tale. A poor woodcutter and his wife have a lovely daughter; alas they’re poor and starving but Our Lady appears to the man while he’s working in the woods one day and tells him to bring his child to her and she will care for her as a mother. So he fetches the little girl, and Our Lady takes her up to heaven and it’s just great: ‘She had cake to eat and sweet milk to drink, and clothes made of gold, and the little angels to play with.’ When the girl is fourteen years old, Our Lady has to leave on unspecified business and hands over the keys to the thirteen doors of heaven; she may open all but one. Of course, the girl disobeys:

Now the forbidden door was the only one left, and she felt a great longing to know what was hidden behind it and she said to the little angels: ‘I won’t open it all the way, and I won’t go in, but I will unlock it, so that we can see through the crack just a little.’ ‘Oh no,’ said the little angels, ‘that would be a sin; the Virgin Mary has forbidden it, and it could well be your misfortune.’

(My friend Joyce writes that all the dialogue was added by the Grimms and I love the way the girl minimises her naughtiness – ‘I won’t open it all the way...’ – and involves her friends, assuming that they will want to have a peek too, there’s a real flavour of children’s behaviour there; I also love the prissiness of the little angels’ response.)

Behind the thirteenth door is the Trinity, ‘radiant and fiery’, and the girl not only gazes at it in wonder but puts out her finger and touches it, staining her finger indelibly gold. When Our Lady returns and asks for the keys, she asks the girl three times if she has disobeyed her – the evidence of the gold finger is pretty damning – but the girl persists in denying this. So she’s cast out of heaven into the wilderness and rendered mute. Life is miserable and involves a lot of eating of berries and lacking of clothes, but after a few years a king rides by, falls in love with her and takes her home to be his queen. Each year for the following three years she is brought to bed with child, and shortly after she has given birth Our Lady appears to her, returns to her the power of speech briefly and asks her to confess her sin – otherwise Our Lady will take her baby away. And each time the queen denies that she opened the third room and loses her child. Unpleasant rumours about cannibalism circulate and after the third occasion the king’s counsellors prevail upon him to have her burned at the stake. But the flames melt ‘the hard ice of her pride’ and in the nick of time she repents and shouts out, ‘Yes, Mary, I did open the door!’ A sudden cloudburst extinguishes the flames and Our Lady pops down with the three children and tells everyone, ‘Whosoever repents of their sin and confesses it is forgiven.’

What I find striking about this tale is the role of Our Lady. The villains – the witch in the gingerbread cottage, Bluebeard/Fitcher, the queen mother from many stories including ‘The Six Swans’ and some versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – are replaced by the Virgin Mary, not usually noted for her cruelty. (Or child-snatching.) Acts which are evil in the other stories are used to good ends here, but it is perhaps a risky narrative strategy to associate Mary with the abuse of power. But I think you can also reflect them back and see ‘Our Lady’s Child’ as commenting on, interpreting, the stories from which it cherry-picks. By using these elements* as moral trials and just punishments, the storyteller implicitly points to their use in the original tales as testing experiences which spur some sort of emotional or moral growth. It’s a story that understands the power of other stories and does not make the mistake of dismissing them as ‘fairy tales’ of no worth.

The Catholic framework connects ‘Our Lady’s Child’, a story of a fall from grace through disobedience, pride and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, with Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. In the tale’s Christian age, of course, salvation is possible (with the help of the Church) through repentance. It’s a retelling of the Fall of Man with the happy ending of the New Testament tacked onto it. Suffering and even being burned at the stake are unimportant in the face of eternity. Yet it can also perhaps be read as the enactment of a mother–daughter conflict: the girl reaching adolescence and needing to assert her independence, which she chooses to do through disobedience and lying. (There are better ways to prove you are your own person, but then I imagine that Mary might be a little overwhelming as a mother.) Other stories which dramatise power struggles between (step)mothers and daughters tend to end with the daughter triumphant; here the mother’s potency is challenged but not overthrown. Fitting, of course, as a vehicle for a Church which emphasised the importance of obedience in Christian life.

Next week: The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear

* Admittedly the correspondence of Mary with the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ isn’t used in this way, but she is the witch’s direct opposite, a nurturing rather than a devouring mother, as Bettelheim might put it.

(First illustration above: Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban, ‘Marienkind’, in Grimm’s Märchen, Vienna: M. Munk, 1905; found here. Second illustration, O. Herrfurth [?], found here; for a properly Catholic flavour!)

The Frog King, or Iron Henry

something came crawling splish, splash, splish, splash, up the marble stairs...

‘In the old days, when wishing still helped’ is a wonderful first line but one which, according to Joyce Crick in the notes to my edition, was conventional and introduced by the Grimms to the story. Certainly there’s no indication in this story that wishing may be helpful: it doesn’t save the prince from enchantment as a frog or the princess from keeping her promise, much as she tries to wriggle out of it.

The first great surprise to me was that nobody kisses any frogs. This variation was introduced by early English translations of variants of the tale, in which the princess has (reluctantly) to share her bed for three nights with the frog and then he turns into the handsome prince. I suppose the kiss is a more decorous echo of that sexual implication. In the version given by the Grimms, the princess shouts ‘Now take your rest, you nasty frog’ and hurls him against the wall ‘with all her strength’. For this display of temper, she is rewarded with ‘a king’s son with beautiful, kind eyes’.

The second great surprise is Faithful Henry, the prince’s loyal servant, who appears at the end standing at the rear of a carriage drawn by eight white horses with ostrich plumes which will carry the king’s son back to his kingdom with his new bride. As the carriage travels along, the king’s son hears three times a snapping sound, which he mistakes for the carriage breaking; Faithful Henry explains that it’s the cracking of the bands around his heart now that it is once more filling with joy because his master has been delivered. This put me in mind of the story of Odysseus’s faithful dog Argus, although admittedly Argus did actually die when he once more laid eyes on his master. There was a poem about him I had to learn as a child, I can’t remember anything except (roughly) the last line: ‘Wagged his tail, laid down and died.’ Cheerful stuff.

(Charles Folkard, illustration for Grimm's Fairy Tales, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911; found here; all the illustrations I have found of this tale make the frog look rather sweet and cuddly and this one is no exception, but I think it does give a flavour of the princess’s wilfulness)

Anyway. This tale is one of those which tend to be grouped as ‘Animal Bridegroom Tales’, another being Beauty and the Beast. I seem to remember that Marina Warner writes interestingly about it, but alas I had to give my mother back her copy of From the Beast to the Blonde some time ago so cannot check. Bettelheim, with his insistence that all fairy tales were for children, reads this as a tale which teaches acceptance of sexual relations and encourages young girls to overcome their natural distaste for them. Naturally he discards the Iron Henry part of the story since it does not fit with his theory. To be fair, a lot of editors of fairy tale collections do the same. This strikes me as a pity as Iron Henry’s loyalty, joy and devotion provide a counterweight to the princess’s unreliability and hostility; his reaction is the reaction the story wants us to have to its outcome.

Interpretations of the tale as embodying some sort of psychological and moral journey, such as Bettelheim’s, only work if one reads the king, who insists on the princess’s keeping her word, as the super ego. The princess herself undergoes no obvious transformation into a ‘better’ person; she is rude to the courteous frog from the outset (‘old paddle-puddle’) and agrees to his conditions for retrieving the ball with no intention of fulfilling her side of the bargain. Still, her thought, ‘he can’t be a companion for any human’, is not unreasonable even bearing in mind he’s a talking frog, and the frog demands a high price for a simple act of retrieval:

if you will love me and have you for your companion and playfellow, if you will let me sit next to you at your little table, and eat from your little golden plate, and drink from your little goblet, and sleep in your little bed, if you promise me this, I will go down and fetch your golden ball back up for you again.

While I don’t actually care for Bettelheim’s reading of the story, I do think that ‘The Frog King’ concerns anxiety over sex and specifically from the female’s point of view. The physical repulsiveness of the ‘clammy’ frog who is ‘now supposed to sleep in her beautiful clean little bed’ inclines to this. The princess, surrounded by her beautiful ‘little’ things, seems very young and when she hears the frog splish-splashing up the steps to the palace dining-room she feels not guilt or anger but fear. I found that part of the tale very powerful. Without the Iron Henry episode to emphasise it, I find the ‘happy ending’ too weak to balance the panic and revulsion the princess experiences here – and what makes it uncomfortable after the discomfort of the frog’s imposition of himself on the princess’s lap, dinner, bed, is that it’s a happy ending which is external to the princess, who never speaks again.

The story’s oral origins must always remain unclear, but it is likely that it retained its appeal because it reflected a fact of life for many girls who heard it – that they might not have a choice, or much of a choice, in whom they married (the higher-born they were, the more likely that they would be married off for dynastic or economic reasons) and that once married their husbands would have sexual authority over them. For me, ‘The Frog King’ dramatises this fact. The king and Iron Henry tell the princess what she should be doing, feeling, but she seems to have very different ideas. When the princess has agency, she is rebelling. It is not a neat tale with a pleasing resolution. (You know, this might well be Warner’s interpretation of the tale now I think about it.)

What do you think?

(Next tale: ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’, not a story which I think is going to end well for both parties...)

The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) grew, Bruno Bettelheim writes in his introduction, out of his therapeutic work with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties:

This work made it obvious to me that if children were reared so that life was meaningful to them, they would not need special help. I was confronted with the problem of deducing what experiences in a child’s life are most suited to promote his ability to find meaning in his life; to endow life in general with more meaning.

Our cultural heritage, Bettelheim continues, is second only to our parents in importance when it comes to developing this meaning, which is conveyed best to young children as literature. Bettelheim explains that he has found fairy tales to be perfect for this task:

This book attempts to show how fairy stories represent in imaginative form what the process of healthy human development consists of, and how the tales make such development attractive for the child to engage in. This growth process begins with the resistance against the parents and fear of growing up, and ends when youth has truly found itself, achieved psychological independence and moral maturity, and no longer views the other sex as threatening or demonic, but is able to relate positively to it. In short, this book explicates why fairy tales make such great and positive psychological contributions to the child’s inner growth.

He then divides his book into two parts, in the first of which he argues fairy tales’ importance to his purpose and outlines how they fit with child development and in the second of which he takes a handful of tales and explores them, teasing out their underlying messages. He argues that fairy tales proceed by image and symbol; these account for their richness, lending them to many sorts of interpretation which need not be exclusive of any other. For Bettelheim, a Freudian psycho-analyst, fairy tales’ images operate in the listener’s (and presumably the teller’s) mind at an unconscious level. This makes them very powerful educative vehicles and also allows the child to understand only so much of the story as he (the child is always male in this book) is ready to accept. Thus a child may interpret the fitting of Cinderella’s slipper onto her foot as symbolic of the prince identifying the ‘correct’ bride; adults may perceive the slipper as representing the vagina and the offering of it to Cinderella as the prince's acceptance of the vagina and her penis envy.

So, ‘The Three Little Pigs’ explains to the child that he must turn from the Pleasure Principle (quickly rigging up a frail straw shack so that you can rush off and play) to the Reality Principle (building a solid brick house and going out early in the morning to do your business); ‘The Goose Girl’ tells the story of a princess who must learn to be responsible and autonomous from her parents; ‘The Frog King’ teaches that sex might seem disgusting but can be beautiful. Oedipal conflicts are represented for boys in stories which describe heroes slaying giants and monsters and rescuing maidens, and for girls in those which feature good mothers and wicked stepmothers (two sides of the same mother figure). ‘Snow White’ explores narcissism, both of the (step)mother who cannot bear the daughter to surpass her and of the daughter herself, so easily tempted by the laces and the comb (and the dwarves are trapped in a ‘phallic existence’, a detail of interpretation I loved).

‘Hansel and Gretel’ centres around oral anxiety, the fear of starvation and the need to curb one’s destructive desires. It begins with the children overhearing their parents deciding to abandon them. In the version Bettelheim uses, it is the mother who proposes leaving the children in the forest and thus the mother who is experienced as the betrayer. Knowing that they need their parents desperately, the children successfully return home.

Before a child has the courage to embark on the voyage of finding himself, of becoming an independent person through meeting the world, he can develop initiative only in trying to return to passivity, to secure for himself eternally dependent gratification... The story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ gives body to the anxieties and learning tasks of the young child who must overcome and sublimate his primitive incorporative and hence destructive desires.

Relying on food for safety is the children’s undoing when the creatures of the forest gobble up the trail of crumbs and then again when they see the gingerbread house which they immediately fall to devouring rather than understanding may offer shelter and safety. When they hear the little voice, ‘Who is nibbling at my little house?’, they lie to themselves that it is the wind who speaks (Bettelheim suggests the voice represents their consciences). The witch is both ‘a personification of the destructive aspects of orality’ and the ‘bad, destructive’ mother. Once the children defeat the witch by ‘exchang[ing] subservience to the pressures of the id for acting in accordance with the ego’ and develop initiative and planning, the good mother is once again revealed and the house offers them jewels which will then benefit all the family. Hansel and Gretel’s experience has purged them of their orality and they arrive home as ‘mature’ children.

(Michael Foreman, 'Hansel and Gretel at the House in the Woods', illustration from Brian Alderson (trans.), The Brothers Grimm: Popular Folk Tales  (1978), poorly photographed by me. Of all the illustrations of this tale I've seen, this is the one which stays with me. Bruno Bettelheim would not approve at all since illustrating fairy tales robs the child of imaginative autonomy – his monsters are no longer his own)

It might not be apparent from what I’m about to write, but The Uses of Enchantment illuminated for me a whole new way of reading fairy tales and was generally convincing. Sometimes though I did feel that Bettelheim was distorting stories to fit them into the framework of his analysis. For instance, he sees ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ as being a warning against female adultery and male vengefulness; for me the story is weighted much more against Bluebeard/the sorcerer as vicious murderers and since they give the heroines the keys to the forbidden chambers they are in fact complicit in what happens, which makes it more complex than a straightforward warning to women not to stray from the marital bed. But on the whole I felt that his writing was very persuasive.

All the same, I did have quite a few problems with it too. First, Bettelheim has a habit of presenting theory and opinion as fact, with no hard evidence to back it up. This is suggested in the first passage I quoted, concerning the importance of a meaning to life for the ‘disturbed children’ with whom Bettelheim worked. Some of these children had autism, and would still need ‘special help’ regardless of how they were reared (Bettelheim was the originator of the thankfully discredited ‘refrigerator mother’ theory – that autism was caused by a mother being cold or distant), but Bettelheim leaves no room for dissent. This is tricky when he is writing about how a person subconsciously reacts to or understands something. I constantly wanted to ask him how he knew that’s what was going on in a child’s mind if the child him- or herself doesn’t know. I wondered how much was based on himself and then generalised out from that.

Second, Bettelheim has a strict definition of a fairy tale: it should be optimistic, consolatory and transformative of its hero(ine). Several of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, including ‘The Little Mermaid’, are discarded as not fairy tales because they have sad endings. Charles Perrault’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is also dismissed as Red Riding Hood climbs into bed with the wolf and is subsequently eaten and not saved; she learns nothing from the experience. Perrault is something of a bête noire to Bettelheim, who loathes his tendency to ‘prettify’ and moralise and accuses him of inventing some of the details in his stories.

Third, Bettelheim has an uncertain relationship with the actual texts he uses. He is clearly very widely read and mentions many obscure versions of fairy tales, he accepts that they circulated in oral form long before they were written down and thus were subject to change – he even advises parents to adapt fairy tales to the child to which they’re told. Yet at the same time he deplores some versions, usually Perrault’s, as not being echt or not fulfilling his criteria. In particular he rails about Perrault’s ‘Cinderella’ (the one most of us know – fairy godmother, pumpkin, glass slipper) as inferior to the Grimms’ ‘Aschenputtel’ (hazel twig, doves, gold slipper), which has a more empowered heroine and a more central relationship with her dead mother. Bettelheim does discuss the hated version but because his theoretical frame has become constricting he is unable to allow that it may have a value for other than didactic reasons. Furthermore, he occasionally allows himself to analyse particular phrases in tales – this seems to me questionable since those words may have been added by a collector like the Grimms or may exist in one version of a tale but not another. It seems better to evaluate motifs, which will remain more stable across many retellings.

These reservations did not detract from Bettelheim’s interpretations but they did remind me of their limits. Still, he did render fairy tales a great service by trumpeting their importance and his interpretations of them are always clever and challenging. I hugely enjoyed reading this book even though I did smile at it occasionally, sorry Bruno but I did find the Freudianism relentless at times, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in fairy tales. O, and he definitely raised the bar on bedtime stories – can I hope ever to live up to this?

If, as we tell the story, the agonies of sibling rivalry do not reverberate within us, as well as the desperate feeling of rejection the child has when he doesn’t feel he is thought the best; his feelings of inferiority when his body fails him; his dismal sense of inadequacy if he or others expect the performance of tasks that seem Herculean; his anxiety about the ‘animal’ aspects of sex; and how all this and so much more can be transcended – then we fail the child.