#psychanalysis of fairytales

[adarkrainbow]

I thought your post about Bruno Bettelheim was really interesting, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on something you mentioned. You said that the psychological aspect exists but doesn't explain fairytales. How do you see the psychological/psychoanalytic aspect? What is it useful for and what is it not able to do?

Wow, now that's a question I can't really answer! X)

So I am a literature student, a folklore enthusiast, a fairytale fan, and as such I am well versed in all of these things. I am not at all part of studies or intimate knowledge concerning psychology, psychanalysis or psychiatry.

That being said, what I mean by this is such... Psychanalytic and psychological analysis of fairytales do exist, can be perform and can be fun, entertaining and interesting. The same way socio-political analysis of fairytales also exist and can be fun and interesting. Just like myths or literary works, you can take one thing and analyze it under almost all the domains possible, you will always get a new meaning and a new interpretation, and discover more depths or possible continuities in the tale/myth/work/symbol. This is part of the process of survival, reuse and ultimately rewrite/adaptation of these works. Think a bit of the various theories and angles of attack one can take when it comes to analyzing a novel. Some think the work should be treated all alone in its own literary merit ; others think it should be taken as part of a greater wave or movement in the history of literature ; some voices think a book should only be judged at the light of the author's biography and personal opinions ; other rather focus on when and how the book was released, or what was the audience that received it at the time ; and even if it is just a romance novel or a children's tale or some comedy play you can always find political or esoteric or sociological meaning in them. Because that's the strength of great, famous or powerful works of art/stories - they are almost infinite wells for interpretations. A weak work is one that doesn't allow for any interesting interpretation or bizarre analysis.

That being said - it is not because a psychanalytic or psychological analysis of a fairytale can be made that it means this analysis is USEFUL in studying the tale. Due to the success of the "psycho-reading" of fairytales around the publication of Bettelheim's book, many people wrote books about the psychology or psychanalysis of fairytales. Fine. But some claimed to be able to find the "real meaning" and the "primal truth" about these tales thanks to these readings, and... that is incorrect. Fairytales are of two kinds - the oral, collected, "folkloric" fairytales, which are products of folklore, mythology and culture, and can be interpreted by thinks such as folkloric analysis, socio-historical analysis, cultural analysis, because that's what MADE these stories. On the other hand you have literary fairytales, crafted as literary works - and as such to truly understand them, one needs to perform a literary reading first, folkloric reading second. That's the reason Perrault's fairytales were so wildly misunderstood for centuries - people had replaced the literary reading of his stories with a folkloric one, which makes no sense when you know Perrault invented and rewrote many things in his tales for the sake of cultural references, puns, social critique and other wordplays. To try to claim that the "psychological" interpretation or reading of a tale allows one to get its "truth" is nonsense, because these stories and tales were not born out of an effort to perform psychological deed or be reflective of the state of one's mind or internal growth. Basile and Straparole's fairytales were grotesque farces ; Perrault and d'Aulnoy's fairytales were literary games ; the Grimm fairytales were morally-edited folktales reflecting German culture. A psychological reading can be maybe more interesting for fairytales where an author put a lot of themselves - like Andersen's fairytales. But for a lot of fairytales, psychological reading is useless for when it comes to "understanding" the "truth" of the work.

But it doesn not mean psychological reading is useless at all! The thing is that whereas this reading is dubious if not completely empty for understanding the formation, creation or "true meaning" of fairytales ; this analysis is instead massively useful and fascinating and revealing when it comes to the RECEPTION of the fairytales. An "understanding" yes, but by the AUDIENCE and this is where things gets delightful. Take Bettelheim's work and other books in the same line - it deals with how children receive fairytales, how they consciously or unconscously perceive and interpret them, how these tales resonate with their being and experiences, and how it ultimately helps them deal with things such as fears, desires, growth. This study doesn't reveal what the story is truly about in an unbiased way - unlike how many people received it - but what it is about in the head and heart of children, and that is another "face" of the fairytale that can be useful to know. But to try to take this reading as a tool to understand the creation of the fairytale is like trying to talk about the creation of a movie by basing yourself of critics' reviews rather than interviewers with the director or writers.

Psychosexual reading of fairytales can also be deeply fascinating - just to give another example outside of pedopsychology. It is well known that fairytales became the objects of not just sexual discourse, but also sexual fixations, obsessions, frustrations or reinterpretations. From a wave of erotic and libidinous fairytales that was actually part of the "golden age" of fairytales in France, to the 80s and 70s porn-fairytale movies, passing by the Italian fairytales' sex comedies, and the fin-de-siècle perversions of the fairytales, and the strange fetishes surrounding the Disney movies - fairytales have been one of the strong crystalizing points of sexuality, eroticism and fetichism. And as such, interpreting in a psychological or psychiatric way the sexual reception and interpretation of these tales is very relevant and very interesting - the focalisation around the erotic power of Cinderella's shoe, or the sexual charge of the mysterious sleep of Sleeping Beauty and her "love awakaning", and the sexual reading of cannibalistic devouring powers such as the Big Bad Wolf or ogres... There is truly something there to be dug up - but digging this means understanding what came AFTER and "with" the fairytales, and not what came before or within the fairytale.

I hope this explanation makes sense!

For example, as a final note - when I was doing my paper about ogres, I came upon a psychological interpretation of madame d'Aulnoy's fairytale "Cunning Cinders" insisting that the sisters' stay at the ogres house and them dealing with the male ogre was meant to reflect sexual abuse. And while there are definitively possible erotic jokes in this tale (the tree growing in the desert for example can be read as a slight sexual joke by madame d'Aulnoy), most of the elements brought forward by the person doing the analysis were completely wacky. Ranging from the dubious and misinformed (the nature of ogres as "sexual predatos" which is not true in French literary fairytales of the time, where ogres are parental figures and destructive parenthood - their sexual connotation only came in MUCH later literature) to the "out of nowhere". Supposedly the oven in which Cunning pushes the ogre is supposed to represent the female sexual organ? And so killing the ogre by pushing him in his own oven means she uses her sexuality to destroy him? That's a ridiculous explanation of the tale, given an oven did NOT have any sexual tones in the French culture of the time, and this was just madame d'Aulnoy reusing a very common and widespread folkloric trope illustrated by famous stories such as "Hansel and Gretel".

So yeah it is bonkers and insane. But if you take this not as an attempt to "explain the story", but as someone trying to offer a new perspective and erotic interpretation, THEN it becomes interestng especially if you take into account the way Cunning Cinders dispatches the two ogres. If we accept that the oven is to be read as a sexual organ of the female kind, then it can draw a good parallel with how Cunning uses an axe (a typically phallic symbol) to behead the ogress - female sexuality destroying the male predator, male sexuality destroying the female predator, and ultimately Cunning Cinders becoming herself an ambiguous, hermaphrodite or androgynous figure uniting both sexual symbols in herself. That could be a very cool idea for a reinterpretation of the tale. But to claim that it is the "truth" of the tale or what madame d'Aulnoy intended is to clearly be in some need to go outside touch grass, and think about how time flows, and realizing that projecting your personal ideas and your modern concepts onto a centuries-old fairytales written by someone living in an entirely different society is NOT a good way to try to "explain" it.

And that's I think the main difference between those readings. Folkloric and literary readings are their most useful when they are objective, and fail when they try to be entirely subjective or biased ; "psycho" readings are at their strongest when they are personal and intimate, and fail miserably when they try to establish themselves as objective and universal truths. At least, for the domain of fairytales.

[scopeandhorror]

Carl Jung

Founder of analytic psychology, Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875. Carl Jung, 1910

[adarkrainbow]

Since I am on the topic of these people that get a lot of criticism for their take on fairytales but still deserve to be kept around due to their influence, I want to briefly evoke Bruno Bettelheim's book "The Uses of Enchantment", known in France as "Psychanalysis of fairytales".

Note that I will not speak of the book itself or the reception of the book in English-speaking countries, but I want to talk about its reception in France and an impact it had on France. Today, numerous elements of the book have been debunked or criticized, coupled with many people misunderstanding the intentions of Bettelheim or misinforming about the context of the book or how it had to be read. As a result, today there is a tendency to crap on this book or laugh about it when we talk about fairytales analysis. However this book had a great importance in France when it came to "save" fairytales.

Before going into the general, as a brief piece of personal experience - which isn't exclusive to me, as others also shared this. This book actually was what got me into the analysis and study of fairytale. Or rather, when I read it as a pre-teen, it made me discover that... fairytales could have depths. Fairytales could have hidden meanings behind being simple children stories. It made me consider how these stories could be taken and reinterpreted as so many allegories and metaphors, it opened my eyes to a certain visceral, psychic, social aspect of these tales, and without this book I certainly would not have been into fairytales as I am today.

Not that this book is the ultimate resource of fairytale analysis - and the entire process of a psychological reading of fairytales is someting that exists but should not be taken into account when trying to explain them (fairytales being the produce of the encounter between literature and folklore). However, this book stayed a door-opening key for me, outdated maybe, overthinking stuff I guess, but that at least allowed me to glimpse into the "great beyond" behind these stories.

And now for my actual point... How Bettelheim's book saved fairytales in France. This is something I learned when studying the life and work of Pierre Gripari - in a book called "Pierre Gripari, un passeur d'écritures" by Inna Saranovska.

When Bettelheim's book reached France in the late 70s, fairytales were in a bad spot when it came to cultural authorities. Already fairytales had been reduced in people's mind to simple, naive children stories only good for making American cartoons (cough cough, Disney). But those of Perrault were still evoked and studied in schools (little schools for little children) because it was part of the heritage of France, of French culture, and the evolution of French literatue...

However what happened in the 70s? The very serious project of just burying fairytales was brought forward. The talks by politics and school authorities were simple: let us stop teaching fairytales to children in school, let's remove fairytales from school libraries, we do not have any use for them anymore, let them be forgotten. On one side, as I said, there was a discredit due to them being seen as silly children story, and thus no real pedagogic or "useful" chilren literature. But on the other side, there were very concrete and serious political business involved - fairytales were seen as antithetic, and opposed, to the principles of the modern Republic of France. Fairytales were seen as backward antiquities that went against what a great democratic nation should be. For example, people really did took issue in the fact that fairytales depicted monarchies, with kings as absolute authorities, and where a happy ending meant to end up prince or princess. For them, it was literaly teaching children to favor and idealize monarchy when they should rather learn about democracies and republics, and while it might seem silly today, it was serious back then and what almost led to the complete erasure of fairytales from school programs.

But then came Bettelheim's book. A book which proved to these folks that fairytales could be of a deep, psychological, social use to children. A book which taught these authorities to see beyond the "silliness" of these children stories or the "backward social message", and which told them how these stories could contain and express the deep fears, the secret desires of children, and help them grow up and deal with familial, social relationships. The book was a best-seller in France, and it completely changed the higher-ups opinion, and convinced tem fairytales should indeed be maintained in school - because fairytales were now "serious" due to being part of the very serious and praised domains of psychology and psychanalysis (which was all the fad and rage in the second half of the 20th century France).

And as such - no matter what you might say about the book's uality today - it can still be thanked for actually "saving" fairytales in France.

[adarkrainbow]

Tales from Broca Street: Intro (1)

A long time ago I started a series of posts about the Fairy Tales of Broca Street. I never got very far with them but now that time has passed, I want to give it a new try, because these modern-day fairy tales are a big part of the current French fairytale heritage.

In 1967, a not-so-well-known author named Pierre Gripari published a collection of humoristic fairy tales he had written himself called "Les Contes de la rue Broca" (The Tales/Fairytales of Broca street). Some were traditional fairytales retold in a new way, others were modern-day parodies of classic folktales, and others were pure inventions of Gripari.

To publish such a book was not at all a sure key to success, because in the France of the 60s and 70s, fairy tales were knowing their "dark age". Authorities thought of them as useless or ridicule (worse: they promoted monarchy, something unacceptable in a day of democracy and Republic!) ; parents thought of them as outdated and absurd, too old and uninteresting for their kids to enjoy ; and in term of media, Disney movies were basically the main thing we had around. Long story short: fairy tales were little obscure things that was on its way to disappear from mainstream culture... Until the 80s arrived and with them came Bruno Bettelheim's "The Psychanalysis of Fairy Tales" (the French name of his book The Uses of Enchantment).

I talked about this before in a post you can find right here, but for all the flaws and problems Bettelheim's study of fairytales might have had, they are what "saved" fairytales in France, as it proved to the political authorities in charge of the culture, and to the parents buying stuff for their kids, that fairytales could be "useful" and "meaningful" (in this case, as psychological tools for growth and development). That's the fairytale boom: suddenly every buys fairytale books for their kids, fairytales are put on the national school program... and the Tales of Broca Street are re-discovered.

The Tales of Broca Street were already doing quite well before, but from the 80s onward they became a cult classic - and then a classic, period. They were re-edited (and still have recent re-edition from the 2010s) ; several authors imitated their style or tried to do their own take on it ; they can still be found today in every kids section of bookshops ; they have been for several decades on school programs (to the point I myself performed in a puppet-theater performance of Broca Street Tales organized by my school, when I was a kid) ; they have been adapted several times for the television, AND they are regularly leading to stage adaptations and other children musicals...

Long story short: they are a dominating part of the late 20th century children literature in France, and they are a milestone in the modern manifestation of fairy tales in France. Most French kids heard about them one way or another, wether they saw it stores or on TV, borrowed it at the library, or were forced to study it in school.

And given this is a blog about fairy tales... Well you know, I'm going to be sharing and talking about them.

[adarkrainbow]

Some Brothers Grimm fairytales facts (1)

So, my mother has this old copy of the Brothers Grimm fairytales published in the 70s - a selection of Grimm fairytales translated by Marthe Robert. If you do not know Marthe Robert, she is one of the famous French literary critics of the 20th century, known for her many translations of German works (she is recognized as one of the experts of Kafka in France), as well for her numerous works about the psychanalitic interpretation of literature. 

And this edition also has a preface where she points out some things that are quite interesting... Now, I need to precise, I wouldn’t advise you to take everything in this preface. As I said, Marthe Robert had a psychanalysis-approach to fairytales (which was the one popularized and widespread by Bruno Bettelheim’s work). And while I, for myself, enjoy those interpretations (Bruno Bettelheim was actually how I got to first discover the depths and complexity of the fairytales), I also came to realize, by studying fairytales, that they are not the best to ACTUALLY understand fairytales. Mostly because psychanalytic readings and interpretations of fairytales are strongly intertwined with the folklorist reading of fairytales, and... as I keep pointing out, the folklorist point of view has been discovered to be quite flawed in several aspects. It doesn’t remove the beauty or poetry of these readings and interpretations, which provide a new richness and new meanings to the tales... But to be taken with a grain of salt.

However we are here talking about the Grimm fairytales, which due to being folktales in nature (though slightly edited to fit an ideology), are much more fitted for folklorist and psychanalytic readings. And as a translator of the works of Grimm, Robert brings some interestng points... So let’s see them.

(This is the painting on the cover of the book, so I’ll add it for a bit of illustration)

1) One thing that is very true, and that we should never forget - the Grimms might be criticized any way you like, but what can’t be robbed for them, is the fact that thanks to their hard-work and dedication they managed to survive and restore an entire oral folklore that was slowly dying out and about to be lost forever. Without the Brothers, we would have never have so many tales that are classics of our culture today. 

2)  A good illustration of the literary VS folklorist point of view. Marthe Robert, having written this preface in the 70s, was heavily influenced by the folklorist studies, and this shows in the text. Most notably, already at the beginning, we see the presence of a HUGE misconception spread by the folklorists. This misconception is that “While Perrault made the fairytales popular among scholars and people of taste, nobody until the Brothers Grimm thought of these stories as something more than just the charming, naive and simple products of a popular imagination, only fully enjoyable by old women and children”. This is a HUGE misconception. The thing is that the whole “These stories are just humble folk-tales told by old nurses, by the fireside during evenings are peasant homes” or “These tales were written and told with a child-like mind, and are just little nonsense for your entertainment” was present in the literary texts of fairytales we had (such as Perrault’s tales)... But it was a narrative and publishing strategy. Fairytales, as a literary genre, was a whole aesthetic, and Perrault, like others, were trying to imitate the folktales they took inspiration from - so of course they were going to add elements defending the “childishness” or “simple-mindedness” of their tales. It was also an excellent way to avoid censorship (which was strong, back in the days) and to deal with the very harsh world of critics and literary feuds at the time (you don’t know how strong it was back in 17th century France, worst than Internet dramas these days). By pretending that these tales were just “simple folktales of foolish old women and naive children”, the authors could avoid a lot of things that would have raised the ire of the censorship. But these things, half-hidden, were clearly spot-on by those in the known...

Because, I can’t tell it enough, while the pre-Grimm fairytales, especially the French fairytales, Perrault and others, were PRESENTED as simple folktales, they were not at all simple folktales written hastily. They were literary works, carefully planned, with several drafts. They were stories written by adults for adults, part of games, entertainments, discussions and debates in intellectual circles. They were filled with jokes, and wordplays, and innuendos, and dark undertones, and there were layers of hidden meanings and symbolism everywhere. Because it was part of the “game” of the fairytales back then. They weren’t just about “Who can invent the wackiest tale?”. The pleasure was also to try to understand what the author hid and wrapped under the costume of a “poor, naive folktale”. The way Little Red Riding Hood was an obvious metaphor for ill-intentioned seducers, the way that Diamonds and Toads is in truth a praise of flattery and politeness (which were key elements when living at the royal court), the way that Puss in Boots was an humoristic critique of the ascension to power of some and of the system of inheritance and rewards at the time, in Louis XIV′s France... 

All that being said, take the next sentence of Marthe Robert and you’ll understand what is wrong with it: “While people had fun reading them, or sometimes writing them, nobody actually wondered why they came to be, and their meaning was clear enough to be resumed in a short morality that, while making these tales useful, also justified their weirdness”. It is true that the Moralities were here as a “safety measure”, to justify the nonsense and bizareness of these tales (in late 17th century France, nonsense was considered garbage, and every literary work needed to have a reason to be and a usefulness to it, you didn’t actually just wrote something because you felt like it - if you did that, you were not perceived as a true author, or even as a writer, but just a scribbler). But the mistake here is to believe that these “Moralities” hold the entire, simplified meaning of the tales. Far, far from it, as French fairytales were purposefully designed to have a game of meaning and complex senses: the fun was all about decyphering them. 

3) Marthe Rober then proceeds to describe the thought-process that led to the rise of the “folklorist reading” of fairytales, and which was the point of view that dominated ever since the Grimms’ work became popular. And this thought process is: Let’s collect folktales and stories from all around the world, from various countries and continents. Then, let’s compare them, in how similar they are. Now, we see that they have a common structure, common narratives, with elements that are sometimes described and placed in identical fashons - except for a few exceptions. But beyond them, these striking similarities and identicalities prove a continuity of themes beyond countries and cultures. How to explain this? It can only be explained by a common source, a common origin: all the tales have a common ancestor.

[Note by me: This is the folklorist point of view. But the literary point of view that is now contradicting this one, if you are ever interested, is that maybe the “story-ancestor of all the tales” is a myth that never truly existed ; maybe these similarities and continuities are due to stories feeding of each other, and blooming and spreading from each other, due to an intertextuality and cross-cultural influence rather than a so-called “common ancestor” that had “children” everywhere - and unlike the folklorist viewpoint, which casts aside the unusual and pattern-breaking variations as “exceptions to the rules” or “one time weirdness”, the literary point of view considers that, on the contrary, they should be considered with as much importance as the stories that deviate from the “main mold”.] 

Marthe Robert even mentions the theory held by the Grimms themselves (though she doesn’t seem to fully adhere to it?), that the common ancestor of these stories was... Aryan stories. For them, the “aryan tribes” were the ancestors of the Hindus, the Persians, the Greek, the Romans, and the other people of Europe, and thus the common ancestor of all those folktales and fairytales were none other than the “ancient Aryan tales”... [Did I mention the Nazis had a huge liking of the Brothers Grimm and reinterpreted their books and works in perverse ways? Well, if I hadn’t before, now you’re warned.]

4) Moving on, Marthe Rober then explains that, once the origin of the tales are explained in this way, all that is left is to interpret these tales and get their meaning. And she offers us something she calls the “natural reading” of these tales. A type of interpretation that was REALLY popular for a time, that is quite poetic in itself I’ll admit, but that also gets really wacky and wonky sometimes, when pushed to its extreme limits. This “natural reading” is simply the interpretation of fairytales as descriptions and allegories of natural events and phenomenon. The first example she gives, and which is the one that is invoked a lot even today, and perhaps the most “solid” of them all, is Sleeping Beauty: the asleep princess represents spring or summer, her hundred-years sleep is winter, and the young prince that wakes her up must be the sun “waking up” nature in spring (Marthe Robert notes that this interpretation still has leftovers in the tale of Perrault, where the princess two children are “Day” and “Dawn”). Okay, so far so good... But then Robert adds two more “natural readings” which, for me, are completely off, and just stretching the concept heavily. There is the “natural reading” of Cinderella, where the titular heroine is the “hidden light”, some sort of solar figure whose light and shine is clouded or obscured by the ashes covering her - and who gets to only shine bright again by marrying her prince. Quite a stretch of a reading, but at least I get where it’s coming from. And then... Then there’s the worst offender. The natural reading of “Donkey Skin/A Hundred-Furs”. The reading where “the girl fleeing her father’s incestuous desires by hidng in a beast skin” is actually “dawn, hunted by the sun, of which she fears the burn”... Poetic, but really wacky. And not solid enough to hold what Marthe Robert adds - that “with this reading, all these tales come to have roughly the same meaning”, aka a description of a battle to restore light. 

5) Hopefully the “natural reading” paragraph was purposefully presented in a not-so-good light by Marthe Robert, since she immediately adds that this subject has been debated, discussed and debunked for a long time now - and is just a “historical fact”. She notably invokes how these theories, be it the “aryan theory” of the Grimm or the “natural readings”, only work for European folktales, and completely break down when it comes to fairytales from other continents. Comparing them to the European tales completely debunks the idea that all these stories have a supposedly common ancestor whose influence spans worldwide. (That’s something I enjoy with psychoanalysis interpretations of fairytales, while they completely miss the literary aspect, they are also detached enough from the folklorist one to see its most obvious flaws. Of course, then they go sometimes into far-fetched places themselves, but nothing is perfect). In Robert’s own words, the theory of the brothers Grimm was “far too narrow and yet far too large”, but it had the praise to actually make people realize and understand that the fairytales were actually just as important and meaningful as the myths of old. 

6) Marthe Robert then goes on to describe how, despite social and religious changes, the continuing fairytales keep carrying the same meanings behind the allegories, and the same “human experience” hidden by its images - she notably points out that, despite being developed in Christian cultures, fairytales still hold on dearly to many elements of paganism, through depictions of various rites, practices and customs - for her, these are more than just memories carried on by the tales, but rather instructions making the fairytales didactic, turning them into manuals and teachers. 

7) So, while she rejects the Grimm-brought idea that the “true meaning” of all fairytales is a mythological description of the cycles of nature and weather or astral phenomenon, she, as a psychanalyst-influenced literary critic, still believes in a “general meaning” behind fairytales, a “recurring sense”. And for her, the fairytales are all about a passage, a transition. A needed passages, a difficult transition, with a thousand obstacles on the way, preceeded by seemingly unbeatable trials, but that always ends up happily concluded. “Under all of the most incomprehensible fantasies, a real fact keeps appearing: the necessity for an individual to go from one state to another, to transition from one age to another, and to shape themselves through painful metamorphosis, that will only end when they reach a true maturity”. For her, in the “archaic” culture that the fairytale preserved, the rite of age-passage, be it from children to teenager, or from a teen to an adult, is a perilous transition, a trial that can only be won by an initiation beforehand. So this is why the child or the young man of the fairytale, finds suddely himself lost in a deep forest with no way out, and there meets a wise person, often older than him, whose advice will help him find his way back. [Note: You can see here that she is very influenced by the Märchen, of which she is writing a preface of and that she just translated. But this is a common thing with psychanalist readings of fairytales, they usually focused exclusively on the Grimms and Perrault, with a tiny bit of Basile on the aside, but that’s it.]

8) Another typical “folkorist slander” of French fairytales: “If the French tradition weakened the initiatic aspect of the fairytale to replace it by a barely-disguised eroticism and a conformist morality, the German fairytale, less “civilized”, keeps all of its strength”. Urg. “A barely-disguised eroticism”, I guess when you want to denounce the dangers the sexual abusers, you need to add some sexual elements lady! And have you seen Basile’s story? They are sex comedies, and scatological too, true medieval tales of Reynard! As for the “conformist moralities”, I talked about it before - the Moralities of Perrault (and she is clearly referring Perrault because he was the only one to put Moralities in all of his fairytales) only looked “conformist”, but the minute you pay attention to them, you realize they are in truth subversive moralities. 

9) Now, while she uses this element to exemplify her slander above, this part is deeply interesting, because she describes there one of the major differences between French fairytales and German fairytales, hightlighted by the comparison of duets (the two Cinderellas, the two Sleeping Beauty, the two Donkey Skins): the treatment of the “fairy” character. The French fairytale fairy, for Robert, is this “character with a shining dress, a star on her forehead and a magic wand in her hand, who arrives exactly when she is needed to solve the love problems of young people”. (This is a bit of a caricature, but that’s also kind of true...). But in the German fairytales? No fairies. They are rather replaced by... “the wise women”. 

An old woman, that doesn’t get any description, and who is very ambiguous - when she shows up, the reader can’t tell if she is a protective spirit, or an evil witch. This frightening hag does not have the “shine” of the fairies - she is not admired, she is not beloved. Even whe she is here to bring happiness, she is gaunt and dry. She is the very opposite of the “radiant fairy who, in front of orphans, fuses herself with the figure of the dead mother”. The “old woman” here appears briefly, when all hope is lost, and she is the godmother of no one. If she sometimes assists the birth of those she helps, she never appears for their wedding, and as soon as her task is done she disappears. And in German fairytales, this character is called the “wise-women”. A name with two meanings. She is of course a literal “wise woman”, a woman full of wisdom, but she is also a “midwife” - because “midwives” were traditionally called “wise women”, since it was believed that one needed to know the “rules of wisdom”, aka the strict obediance to the rites presiding over birth, to be able to deliver a baby safely. This is why the “old women” of the Grimms are guardians of rites and taditions, hence why they are feared but respected - before being witches or enchantresses, they were the Greek Moirai and the Germanic Norns, these embodiments of Fate presiding over the destiny of humans (which is why the märchen old woman is often seen weaving). Between the fairy and the witch, the “wise woman” can be good or bad depending on the situations, while neither fully eing one or the other - she only responds to the customs and rites of the great events of life, and is here to highlight their meaning.

To place an example behind her development, Marthe Robert takes the Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty, “Briar-Rose”. In this story, there are thirteen wise-women in the kingdom that the king knows of, but he cannot actually invite them all due to him only having twelve golden plates - and apparently wise-women can only eat in this kind of plates. So the thirteenth wise-woman is purposefully “forgotten”, and this omission is a breaching of the rules of the rituals. This fault leads to the imposition of a serious ban over the baby girl: the prohibition to ever use a spindle. Which means, the inability to live a normal and regular young girl’s life. This prohibition leads to another omission, since all the spindles are destroyed except for one - one that stays in the hands of an old weaver-woman (in which one could reconize the thirteenth wise-woman, according to Robert). And from this second omission comes the last trial: an attenuated form of death, the Hundred-Years Sleep, which will only end with a nuptial rite. “Wrongly birthed”, since her birth is tied to a flawed act, the Beauty cannot develop herself without fearing death at every instant - her transition into teenagehood can only be done through a deep lethargy, and it is with great lateness that she finally “wakes up” through love. [Note: this is a REAL psychanalytic-reading. Having read Bettelheim, thus is pure psychanalysis-interpretation.]

A midwife, a scholar, a wizardess, the “wise-woman” is, for Marthe Robert, a better ancestor of her “ancestor from Antiquity”, than the romantic fairy of French fairytales: her role is to transmit to the individuals who need it the most (aka the children and teenagers) the knowledge of religious and social practices through which man becomes part of the “order of things”, through which man truly “comes into the world” and finds there his “place”. Once we understand that this is the function of the fairytale, it becomes very clear (again, all of this is Marthe Robert’s point of view) why the fairytale is such a paradoxical genre. It becomes clear for example why these stories supposedly for children keep treating a theme that is far away from being childish in nature: the erotic quest of the beloved, through a thousand painful trials. In truth, for Robert, this contradiction only exists for our modern eyes, according to the criteria of a moral pedagogy - but it disappears once we understand that the “wise-woman” character is the one causing the initiation, the advisor of the protagonist, and the keeper of rites. 

And this is also why fairytales are, at the same time, so innocents... and so cruel.

[More in my following post!]