*Telling a child the story of “Cinderella” and letting him fantasize himself into Cinderella’s role and use the story to imagine what his own delivery will be like is a very different matter from letting him act out the fantasy in all seriousness. The first is encouraging hope; the latter is creating delusions.
A father, rather than telling his little girl fairy tales, decided—out of his own emotional needs and as an escape through fantasy from his marital difficulties—that he would do better than fairy tales. Night after night he spun out for his daughter a Cinderella fantasy in which he was the prince who recognized that despite her rags and ashes she was the most wonderful girl in the world, and therefore she would henceforth—thanks to him—live the life of a fairy princess. The father did not tell this as a fairy tale, but as if it were something that was happening between the two of them in reality, and a valid promise of things to come. He did not understand that in depicting to his daughter her real-life conditions as those of Cinderella, he made her mother—his wife—out to be a malicious betrayer of her own daughter. Since it was not a fairy prince in never-never-land but he himself who chose Cinderella as his beloved, these nightly tales kept the girl fixated in the oedipal situation with her father.
This father certainly “hoped” for his daughter, but in a drastically unrealistic fashion. The result was that, as the child grew older, she got so much gratification from her nightly embarkation with her father on these fantasies that she did not want reality to interfere and refused to come to terms with it. For this and other, related reasons she did not function age-appropriately. She was examined psychiatrically, and the diagnosis was that she had lost contact with reality. Actually she had not “lost” contact with reality, but had failed to establish it, in order to protect her imaginary world. She did not want to have any truck with the everyday world, since her father’s behavior indicated to her that he did not wish her to, and that she did not need it. She lived all day in her fantasies and became schizophrenic.
Her story highlights the difference between fantasy playing in a never-never-land and falsely based predictions of what is about to happen in everyday reality. The promises of fairy tales are one thing; our hopes for our children are another, and these must remain rooted in reality. We ought to know that the frustrations children experience, the difficulties they have to master, are not more than what we all encounter under normal circumstances. But because in the child’s mind these difficulties are the greatest imaginable, he needs the encouragement of fantasies in which the hero, with whom he can identify, successfully finds his way out of incredibly difficult situations.
“THE GOOSE GIRL”
ACHIEVING AUTONOMY
Gaining autonomy from one’s parents is the topic of a once famous but now less well known Brothers Grimm story, “The Goose Girl.” In variations, this story can be found in nearly all European countries, as well as on other continents. In the Brothers Grimm’s version, the tale begins: “There once lived an old queen whose husband had died many years ago, and she had a beautiful daughter.… When the time came for her to be married and the child had to travel into the alien country,” the mother gave her precious jewelry and treasures. A chambermaid was assigned to accompany her. Each woman was given a horse to ride on, but the princess’ horse could talk, and was named Falada.41 “When the hour of parting had arrived, the old mother went into her bedchamber, took a small knife and cut her fingers until she bled; then she let three drops of blood fall onto a white handkerchief, gave it to her daughter and said, ‘Preserve this carefully, dear child, it will be of great service to you on your trip.’ ” After the two had been traveling for an hour, the princess got thirsty and asked the maid to fetch her some water from a stream in her golden cup. The maid refused, and seized the princess’ cup, telling her to get down and drink from the river; that she would no longer be her servant.
Later on, the same thing happened again, but this time as the princess bent over to drink, she dropped and lost the handkerchief with the three drops of blood; with this loss she became weak and powerless. The maid took advantage of this and forced the princess to change horses and dresses, making her swear to tell no person at the royal court of this exchange. On arrival, the maid was taken for the princess-bride. Asked about her companion, she told the old king that he should give her some work to do, and the princess was assigned to help a boy tend geese. Soon afterward the false bride asked the young king, her betrothed, the favor of having Falada’s head chopped off, because she feared the horse would reveal her evil deed. This was done, but the horse’s head, thanks to the pleading of the real princess, was nailed over a dark gateway through which the princess had to pass each day when she went out to tend the geese.
Each morning as the princess and the boy with whom she was herding geese passed through the gate, she greeted Falada’s head with great sorrow, to which it replied:
“If this your mother knew,
Her heart would break in two.”
Out in the pasture, the princess let her hair down. Since it was like pure gold, it tempted the boy to try to pluck some out, which the princess prevented by summoning a wind which blew away the boy’s hat so that he had to run after it. The same events were repeated on two consecutive days, which so greatly annoyed the boy that he complained to the old king. On the next day the old king hid at the gate and observed it all. In the evening, on the goose girl’s return to the castle, he inquired what these things meant. She told him that she was bound by a vow not to tell any human being. She resisted his pressure to reveal her story, but finally followed his suggestion to tell it to the hearth. The old king hid behind the hearth so that he could learn the goose girl’s story.
After this, the true princess was given royal garments, and everybody was invited to a great feast, at which the true bride sat on one side of the young king, the pretender on the other. At the end of the meal the old king asked the pretender what would be the right punishment for a person who had acted in a certain way—and he described to her the way she had in fact behaved. The pretender, not knowing she was found out, answered: “ ‘She deserves nothing better than to be stripped naked and to be put into a barrel studded inside with pointed nails; and two white horses should drag it up street and down until she is dead.’ ‘It’s you,’ said the old king, ‘and you have found your own sentence, and thus shall it happen to you.’ And when the sentence was carried out, the young king married his right bride, and both ruled their kingdom in peace and sanctity.”
At the very beginning of this tale, the problem of the succession of generations is projected as the old queen sends her daughter to be betrothed to a faraway prince—that is, to establish a life of her own, independent of her parents. Despite great hardship, the princess keeps her promise not to reveal to any human being what has happened to her; thus she proves her moral virtue, which finally brings about retribution and a happy ending. Here the dangers which the heroine must master are inner ones: not to give in to the temptation to reveal the secret. But the main theme of this tale is the usurpation of the hero’s place by a pretender.
The reason this story and motif are widely found among all cultures is their oedipal meaning. While the main figure is usually female, the story also appears with a male hero—as in the best-known English version of the story, “Roswal and Lillian,” in which a boy is sent to the court of another king to be educated, which makes it even clearer that the theme concerns the process of growing up, maturing, and coming into one’s own.42 As in “The Goose Girl,” on the boy’s trip his attendant forces him to change places with him. Arriving at the foreign court, the usurper is taken for the prince, who, though degraded to the role of a servant, nevertheless wins the heart of the princess. Through the help of benevolent figures, the usurper is unmasked and in the end severely punished, while the prince is restored to his rightful place. Since the pretender in this tale also tried to replace the hero in his marriage, the plot is essentially the same, with only the sex of th
e hero changed, which suggests that it is not important. This is because the story deals with an oedipal problem which occurs in the lives of girls and boys alike.
“The Goose Girl” gives symbolic body to two opposite facets of oedipal development. In the earlier stage a child believes that the parent of his own sex is a pretender who has wrongfully assumed the child’s place in the affections of the parent of the other sex, who would really much prefer having him as a marital partner. The child suspects that the parent of the same sex, through his cunning (he was around before the child arrived), has cheated him out of what ought to be his birthright, and hopes that through some higher intervention things will be righted and he will become the partner of the parent of the other sex.
This fairy tale also guides the child out of the early oedipal stage to the next higher one, when wishful thinking is replaced by a somewhat more correct view of the child’s true situation during the oedipal phase. As he grows in understanding and maturity, the child begins to comprehend that his thought that the parent of the same sex is arrogating the place which should be his does not accord with reality. He begins to realize that it is he who wishes to be the usurper, and he who desires to take the place of the parent of the same sex. “The Goose Girl” warns that one must give up such ideas because of the terrible retribution which is meted out to those who, for a time, succeed in replacing the rightful marital partner. The story shows it is better to accept one’s place as a child than to try to take that of a parent, much as one may desire to do so.
Some might wonder whether it makes any difference to children that this motif appears mainly in story versions having a heroine. But irrespective of the child’s sex, this story strongly impresses any child because on a preconscious level the child comprehends that the tale deals with oedipal problems which are very much his own. In one of his most famous poems, “Germany, a Winter Fairy Tale” (“Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen”), Heinrich Heine tells what a deep impression “The Goose Girl” made on him. He writes:
How my heart used to beat when the old nurse told how
The king’s daughter, in days now olden,
Sat alone on the desert heath
While glistened her tresses so golden.
Her business was to tend the geese
As a goose girl, and when at nightfall
She drove the geese home again through the gate
Her tears would in piteous plight fall.…43
“The Goose Girl” also contains the important lesson that the parent, even if she is as powerful as a queen, is helpless to assure her child’s development to maturity. To become himself, the child must face the trials of his life on his own; he cannot depend on the parent to rescue him from the consequences of his own weakness. Since all the treasure and jewels given the princess by her mother are of no help to her, this suggests that what a parent can give his child by way of earthly goods is of little aid if the child does not know how to use it well. As her last gift, and the most important one, the queen gives her daughter the handkerchief with the three drops of her own blood. But the princess loses even that through carelessness.
The three drops of blood as a symbol of achieving sexual maturity will be discussed more fully later in connection with “Snow White” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” Since the princess leaves to get married and thus is to change from a maiden to a woman and wife, and her mother stresses the importance of the gift of the handkerchief with the blood even over the talking horse, it does not seem farfetched to think that these drops of blood spilled onto a piece of white linen symbolize sexual maturity, a special bond forged by a mother who is preparing her daughter to become sexually active.*
Therefore, when the princess loses the fateful token which, if she had held on to it, would have protected her against the nefarious doings of the usurper, this suggests that deep down she was not yet mature enough to become a woman. One might think that her negligently losing the handkerchief was a “Freudian” slip, by means of which she avoided what she did not wish to be reminded of: the impending loss of her maidenhood. As a goose girl, her role reverted to being a young unmarried girl, an immaturity further emphasized by her having to join a little boy in herding the geese. But the story tells that hanging on to one’s immaturity when it is time to become mature brings about tragedy for oneself and those closest to one, such as the faithful horse Falada.
The verses Falada speaks three times—each time in response to the goose girl’s lament on encountering its head: “Oh, Falada, thou who hangest there”—do not so much bemoan the girl’s fate as express the helpless grief of her mother. Falada’s implied admonition is that not only for her own sake, but also for her mother’s, the princess should stop accepting passively whatever happens to her. It is also a subtle accusation that, had the princess not acted so immaturely in dropping and losing the handkerchief and in letting herself be pushed around by her maid, Falada would not have been killed. All the bad things that happen are the girl’s own fault because she fails to assert herself. Not even the talking horse can help her out of her predicament.
The story emphasizes the difficulties one encounters on life’s voyage: coming into sexual maturity, gaining independence and self-realization. Dangers must be overcome, ordeals endured, decisions made; but the story tells that if one remains true to oneself and one’s values, then, despite how desperate things may look for a while, there will be a happy ending. And, of course, in line with the resolution of the oedipal situation, the story stresses that to usurp another person’s place because one desires it so much will be the usurper’s destruction. The only way to come into one’s own is through one’s own doing.
One could compare once more the depth of this short fairy tale—it is barely five printed pages long—with a modern story mentioned before that has found very wide acceptance, The Little Engine That Could, which also encourages the child to believe that if he tries hard enough, he will finally succeed. This modern story and others like it do give the child hope and thus serve a good but very limited purpose. But the child’s deeper unconscious desires and anxieties remain untouched by them, and in the last analysis it is these unconscious elements that stand in the way of the child’s trusting himself in life. Such stories neither directly nor indirectly reveal to the child his deeper anxieties, nor offer relief at the level of these pressing feelings. Contrary to The Little Engine’s message, success does not, by itself, do away with inner difficulties. Otherwise there would not be so many adults who keep trying, who do not give up, and who finally succeed in achieving externals, but whose inner difficulties remain unrelieved by their “success.”
The child is not simply afraid of failure as such, though it is part of his anxiety. But this is what the authors of such stories seem to think, maybe because this is what adults’ fears center on: i.e., the disadvantages failure realistically brings about. The child’s anxiety over failure centers on the idea that if he should fail, he will be rejected, deserted, and utterly destroyed. Thus, only a story in which some ogre or other evil figure threatens the hero with destruction if he should fail to show himself strong enough to stand up to the usurper is correct according to the child’s psychological view of the consequences of his failure.
Final success is experienced as meaningless by the child if his underlying unconscious anxieties are not also resolved. In the fairy tale, this is symbolized by the destruction of the evildoer. Without that, the hero’s finally achieving his rightful place would not be complete, because if evil continued to exist, it would remain a permanent threat.
Adults often think that the cruel punishment of an evil person in fairy tales upsets and scares children unnecessarily. Quite the opposite is true: such retribution reassures the child that the punishment fits the crime. The child often feels unjustly treated by adults and the world in general, and it seems that nothing is done about it. On the basis of such experiences alone, he wants those who cheat and degrade him—as the imposter maid cheats the princess in this stor
y—most severely punished. If they are not, the child thinks that nobody is serious about protecting him; but the more severely those bad ones are dealt with, the more secure the child feels.
Here it is important to note that the usurper pronounces her own sentence. As the maid chose to take the place of the princess, so now she chooses the manner of her own destruction; both are the consequence of her viciousness which makes her invent such a cruel punishment—thus, it is not inflicted on her from the outside. The message is that evil intentions are the evil person’s own undoing. In choosing two white horses as executioners, the usurper reveals her unconscious guilt about having done away with Falada—since it was the horse on which a bride rode to her wedding, one assumes that Falada was white, the color standing for purity, so it seems fitting that white horses avenge Falada. The child appreciates this all on a preconscious level.
It was mentioned before that success in meeting external tasks is not sufficient to quiet inner anxieties. Therefore, a child needs to receive suggestions as to what else besides persevering is needed. It may seem on the surface that the Goose Girl does nothing to change her fate and is restored only thanks to the interference of benevolent powers or of chance, which sets the king’s discovery and her rescue going. But what may seem like nothing or very little to an adult is understood as a considerable achievement by a child, who also can do very little to change his fate at any moment. The fairy tale suggests that it is less impressive deeds which count, but an inner development must take place for the hero to gain true autonomy. Independence and transcending childhood require personality development, not becoming better at a particular task, or doing battle with external difficulties.
The Uses of Enchantment Page 19