I have already discussed how “The Goose Girl” projects the two aspects of the oedipal situation: feeling that a usurper has taken one’s rightful place, and the later recognition that the child wishes to usurp a position that in reality belongs to his parent. The story also highlights the dangers of a childish dependence clung to for too long a time. The heroine at first transfers her dependence from her parent to her attendant, and does as she is told, without using her own judgment. As a child does not wish to give up dependence, so does the Goose Girl fail to respond to the change in her situation; this, the story tells, is her undoing. Holding on to dependence will not gain her higher humanity. If she goes out into the world—as symbolized by the princess’s leaving home to gain her kingdom somewhere else—she must become independent. This is the lesson the Goose Girl learns while tending geese.
The boy who is her partner in herding the geese tries to rule her, as the maid had done on the trip to her new home. Motivated only by his own desires, he disregards the princess’ autonomy. On the trip away from her childhood home, she let the maid get away with taking her golden drinking cup. Now as the princess sits down in the pasture and combs her hair (the tresses that “glistened … so golden” in Heine’s poem), the boy wants to get hold of her hair, to usurp, so to say, part of her body. This she does not permit; now she knows how to ward him off. Where she was too fearful of the maid’s anger to resist her, now she knows better than to permit herself to be pushed around by the boy’s anger at her for not giving in to his desires. The stress in the story that both the cup and the girl’s hair are golden alerts the listener to the importance of the girl’s different reactions to similar situations.
It is his anger at the Goose Girl’s refusal to do his bidding which leads the boy to complain to the king about her, and thus brings about the denouement. It is the heroine’s assertion of herself when degraded by the boy which is the turning point in her life. She, who dared no opposition when the maid had degraded her, has learned what autonomy requires. This is confirmed by her not going against her sworn statement, unlawfully though it had been extracted from her. She realizes that she should not have permitted herself to make this promise, but once it is made, she must keep it. But this does not preclude her telling the secret to an object, as a child will feel free to pour out his grief to some toy. The hearth, which stands for the sanctity of the home, is an apt object to confess her sad fate to. In the Brothers Grimm’s story the hearth has become an oven or stove, which, as the place where food is prepared, also stands for basic security. But the essential is that by asserting her dignity and the inviolability of her body—the girl’s refusal to let the boy pull off some of her hair against her will—the happy solution came about. The evildoer could think only of trying to be—or appear to be—somebody she was not. The Goose Girl learned that it is much harder to be truly oneself, but that this alone will gain her true autonomy and change her fate.
*How important an element these three drops of blood are in this fairy tale can be seen from the fact that one German version of the story, found in Lorraine, is titled “The Cloth with the Three Drops of Blood.” In a French story the gift with the magic power is a golden apple, reminiscent of the apple given to Eve in paradise, which signifies sexual knowledge.44
FANTASY, RECOVERY,
ESCAPE, AND CONSOLATION
The shortcomings of modern fairy stories highlight the elements which are most enduring in traditional fairy tales. Tolkien describes the facets which are necessary in a good fairy tale as fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation—recovery from deep despair, escape from some great danger, but, most of all, consolation. Speaking of the happy ending, Tolkien stresses that all complete fairy stories must have it. It is “a sudden joyous ‘turn.’ … However fantastic or terrible the adventure, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to tears.”45
How understandable, then, that when children are asked to name their favorite fairy tales, hardly any modern tales are among their choices.46 Many of these new tales have sad endings, which fail to provide the escape and consolation which the fearsome events in the fairy tale make necessary, to strengthen the child for meeting the vagaries of his life. Without such encouraging conclusions, the child, after listening to the story, would feel that there is indeed no hope of extricating himself from the despairs of his life.
In the traditional fairy tale, the hero is rewarded and the evil person meets his well-deserved fate, thus satisfying the child’s deep need for justice to prevail. How else can a child hope that justice will be done to him, who so often feels unfairly treated? And how else can he convince himself that he must act correctly, when he is so sorely tempted to give in to the asocial proddings of his desires? Chesterton once remarked that some children with whom he saw Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird were dissatisfied “because it did not end with a Day of Judgment, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”47
One may rightly question Chesterton’s belief in the innocence of children, but he is absolutely correct in observing that the appreciation of mercy for the unjust, while characteristic of a mature mind, baffles the child. Furthermore, consolation not only requires, but is the direct result of, justice (or, in the case of adult listeners, mercy) being done.
It seems particularly appropriate to a child that exactly what the evildoer wishes to inflict on the hero should be the bad person’s fate—as the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who wants to cook children in the oven is pushed into it and burned to death, or the usurper in “The Goose Girl” who names and suffers her own punishment. Consolation requires that the right order of the world is restored; this means punishment of the evildoer, tantamount to the elimination of evil from the hero’s world—and then nothing stands any longer in the way of the hero’s living happily ever after.
Maybe it would be appropriate to add one more element to the four Tolkien enumerates. I believe that an element of threat is crucial to the fairy tale—a threat to the hero’s physical existence or to his moral existence, as the Goose Girl’s degradation is experienced as a moral predicament by the child. If one contemplates it, it is startling how the fairy-tale hero accepts without question that he is thus threatened—it just happens. The angry fairy utters a curse in “The Sleeping Beauty,” and nothing can prevent it from coming to pass, at least in its reduced form. Snow White does not wonder why the queen pursues her with such deadly jealousy, nor do the dwarfs, although they warn Snow White to avoid the queen. No question is raised as to why the enchantress in Rapunzel wants to take her away from her parents—it just happens to poor Rapunzel. The rare exceptions concern a stepmother’s wanting to promote her own children at the expense of the heroine, as in “Cinderella”—but even then we are not told why Cinderella’s father permits it.
In any case, as soon as the story begins, the hero is projected into severe dangers. And this is how the child sees life, even when in actuality his own life proceeds in very favorable circumstances, as far as externals are concerned. To the child it seems that his life is a sequence of periods of smooth living which are suddenly and incomprehensibly interrupted as he is projected into immense danger. He has felt secure, with hardly a worry in the world, but in an instant everything changes, and the friendly world turns into a nightmare of dangers. This happens when a loving parent suddenly makes what seem like utterly unreasonable demands and terrifying threats. A child is convinced that there is no reasonable cause for these things; they just occur; it is his inexorable fate that it should happen. Then the child either gives in to his despair (and some fairy-tale heroes do exactly that—sit there crying until a magic helper arrives and shows the way to proceed and combat the threat) or else he attempts to run away from it all, trying to escape a horrid fate as Snow White did: “The poor
child was desperately alone in the vast forest and was so terrified … that she did not know how to help herself. So she began to run and run over pointed stones and through the thorns.”
There is no greater threat in life than that we will be deserted, left all alone. Psychoanalysis has named this—man’s greatest fear—separation anxiety; and the younger we are, the more excruciating is our anxiety when we feel deserted, for the young child actually perishes when not adequately protected and taken care of. Therefore, the ultimate consolation is that we shall never be deserted. There is a cycle of Turkish fairy tales in which the heroes again and again find themselves in the most impossible situations, but succeed in evading or overcoming the danger as soon as they have gained a friend. For example, in one famous fairy tale the hero, Iskender, arouses the enmity of his mother, who forces his father to put Iskender into a casket and set him adrift on the ocean. Iskender’s helper is a green bird, which rescues him from this and innumerable later dangers, each more threatening than the preceding one. The bird assures Iskender each time with the words “Know, that you are never deserted.”48 This, then, is the ultimate consolation, the one that is implied in the common fairy-tale ending, “And they lived happily ever after.”
The happiness and fulfillment which are the ultimate consolation of the fairy tale have meaning on two levels. The permanent union of, for example, a prince and a princess symbolizes the integration of the disparate aspects of the personality—psychoanalytically speaking, the id, ego, and superego—and of achieving a harmony of the theretofore discordant tendencies of the male and the female principles, as discussed in connection with the ending of “Cinderella.”
Ethically speaking, that union symbolizes, through the punishment and elimination of evil, moral unity on the highest plane—and, at the same time, that separation anxiety is forever transcended when the ideal partner has been found with whom the most satisfying personal relation is established. Depending on the fairy tale and what psychological problem area or developmental level it is mainly addressing, this takes quite different external forms, although the intrinsic meaning is always the same.
For example, in “Brother and Sister,” during most of the story the two do not part; they represent the animal and spiritual sides of our personality, which become separated but must be integrated for human happiness. But the main threat occurs after the sister has married her king and is replaced by a usurper after she gives birth to a child. Sister still returns nightly, to take care of her child and her fawn-brother. Her recovery is described as follows: “The king … sprang towards her and said, ‘You can’t be anybody but my dear wife.’ At that she answered, ‘Yes, I am your dear wife,’ and in the same moment she was restored to life by the grace of God, was fresh, rosy and of good health.” The ultimate consolation has to wait until evil is done away with: “The witch was cast into the fire and had to burn miserably till she was dead. And as she was burnt to ashes the little deer was returned to his human form, but little sister and little brother lived happily united until their end.” Thus the “happy ending,” the final consolation, consists of both the integration of the personality and the establishment of a permanent relation.
On the surface, things are different in “Hansel and Gretel.” These children achieve their higher humanity as soon as the witch is burned to death, and this is symbolized by the treasures they gain. But since the two are definitely not of marriageable age, the establishment of human relations which will forever ban separation anxiety is symbolized not by their getting married, but by their happy return home to their father, where—with the death of the other evil figure, the mother—now “All worries had ended, and they lived together in pure joyfulness.”
Compared to what these just and consoling endings tell about the hero’s development, the hero’s suffering in many modern fairy tales, while deeply moving, seems much less purposeful because it does not lead to the ultimate form of human existence. (Naïve as it may seem, the prince and princess getting married and inheriting the kingdom, ruling it in peace and happiness, symbolizes to the child the highest possible form of existence because this is all he desires for himself: to run his kingdom—his own life—successfully, peacefully, and to be happily united with the most desirable partner who will never leave him.)
Failure to experience recovery and consolation is true enough in reality, but this hardly encourages the child to meet life with steadfastness which will permit him to accept that going through severe trials can lead to existing on a higher plane. Consolation is the greatest service the fairy tale can offer a child: the confidence that, despite all tribulations he has to suffer (such as the threat of desertion by parents in “Hansel and Gretel”; jealousy on the part of parents in “Snow White” and of siblings in “Cinderella”; the devouring anger of the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk”; the nastiness of evil powers in “The Sleeping Beauty”), not only will he succeed, but the evil forces will be done away with and never again threaten his peace of mind.
Prettified or bowdlerized fairy tales are rightly rejected by any child who has heard them in their original form. It does not seem fitting to the child that Cinderella’s evil sisters should go scot-free, or even be elevated by Cinderella. Such magnanimity does not impress the child favorably, nor will he learn it from a parent who bowdlerizes the story so the just and the wicked are both rewarded. The child knows better what he needs to be told. When a seven-year-old was read the story of “Snow White,” an adult, anxious not to disturb the child’s mind, ended the story with Snow White’s wedding. The child, who knew the story, promptly demanded: “What about the red-hot shoes that killed the wicked queen?” The child feels that all’s well with the world, and that he can be secure in it, only if the wicked are punished in the end.
This does not mean that the fairy tale fails to take into account the vast difference between evil as such and the unfortunate consequences of selfish behavior. “Rapunzel” illustrates this point. Despite the fact that eventually the sorceress forces Rapunzel to live in a desert “in great grief and misery,” the sorceress is not punished for it. The reason becomes clear from the events of the story. Rapunzel is named after the German word for rampion (a European vegetable used in salads), and her name is the clue for understanding what happens. Rapunzel’s mother, while pregnant with Rapunzel, was beset by a huge desire for the rampion which grew in the walled-in garden of the sorceress. She persuaded her husband to enter the forbidden garden and get her some rampion. The second time he did so, he was caught by the sorceress, who threatened to punish him for his thievery. He pleaded his case: his pregnant wife’s uncontrollable desire for rampion. The sorceress, moved by his plea, permitted him to take as much of her rampion as he wished, provided “you give me the child your wife will give birth to. The child will fare well, and I shall take care of it like a mother.” The father agreed to those conditions. Thus the sorceress gains the care of Rapunzel because her parents had, first, transgressed into her forbidden domain and, second, agreed to hand Rapunzel over. So the sorceress wanted Rapunzel more than her parents did, or so it seems.
All goes well until Rapunzel is twelve years old—that is, as one must guess from the story, she reaches the age of sexual maturity. With this, there is danger that she may leave her adoptive mother. True, it is selfish of the sorceress to try to hold on to Rapunzel no matter what, by secluding her in an inaccessible chamber in a tower. While it is wrong to deprive Rapunzel of the liberty to move about, the sorceress’ desperate wish not to let go of Rapunzel does not seem a serious crime in the eyes of a child, who wants desperately to be held on to by his parents.
The sorceress visits Rapunzel in her tower by climbing up by her tresses—the same tresses which permit Rapunzel to establish a relation to the prince. Thus the transfer from a relationship established to a parent to that of a lover is symbolized. Rapunzel must know how terribly important she is to her sorceress substitute-mother, because in this story occurs one of the rare “Freudian” sli
ps to be found in fairy tales: Rapunzel, obviously guilty about her clandestine meetings with the prince, spills her secret as she asks the unwary sorceress, “How come you are so much heavier to pull up than the young son of the king?”
Even a child knows that nothing causes greater fury than love betrayed, and Rapunzel, even while thinking about her prince, knew that the sorceress loved her. Although selfish love is wrong and always loses out, as does the sorceress’, again the child can understand that if one loves somebody exclusively, one does not want some other person to enjoy that love and deprive one. To love so selfishly and foolishly is wrong, but not evil. The sorceress does not destroy the prince; all she does is gloat when he becomes deprived of Rapunzel as she is. The prince’s tragedy is the result of his own doing: in his despair that Rapunzel is gone, he jumps down from the tower, falling into thorns which pierce his eyes. Having acted foolishly and selfishly, the sorceress loses out—but since she acted from too much love for Rapunzel and not out of wickedness, no harm befalls her.
I mentioned before how consoling it is to the child to be told, in symbolic fashion, that in his own body he possesses the means to gain what he wishes—as the prince reaches Rapunzel on her tresses. The happy ending in Rapunzel is again brought about by Rapunzel’s body: her tears heal her lover’s eyes, and with this they regain their kingdom.
“Rapunzel” illustrates fantasy, escape, recovery, and consolation, although innumerable other folk fairy tales could serve equally well. The story unfolds as one deed is balanced by another, following each other with geometrical ethical rigor: rampion (Rapunzel) stolen leads to rampion returned from where it was originally taken. The selfishness of the mother, which forces her husband to take the rampion illegally, is balanced by the selfishness of the sorceress, who wishes to keep Rapunzel to herself. The fantastic element is that which provides the final consolation: the power of the body is imaginatively exaggerated by the overlong tresses, on which one can climb up a tower, and by the tears, which can restore sight. But what more reliable source of recovery do we have than our own body?
The Uses of Enchantment Page 20