The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  The queen’s consulting the mirror about her worth—i.e., beauty—repeats the ancient theme of Narcissus, who loved only himself, so much that he became swallowed up by his self-love. It is the narcissistic parent who feels most threatened by his child’s growing up, because that means the parent must be aging. As long as the child is totally dependent, he remains, as it were, part of the parent; he does not threaten the parent’s narcissism. But when the child begins to mature and reaches for independence, then he is experienced as a menace by such a parent, as happens to the queen in “Snow White.”

  Narcissism is very much part of the young child’s make-up. The child must gradually learn to transcend this dangerous form of self-involvement. The story of Snow White warns of the evil consequences of narcissism for both parent and child. Snow White’s narcissism nearly undoes her as she gives in twice to the disguised queen’s enticements to make her look more beautiful, while the queen is destroyed by her own narcissism.

  As long as she remained home, Snow White did nothing; we hear nothing about her life before her expulsion. We are told nothing about her relation to her father, although it is reasonable to assume that it is competition for him which sets (step)mother against daughter.

  The fairy tale views the world and what happens in it not objectively, but from the perspective of the hero, who is always a person in development. Since the hearer identifies with Snow White, he sees all events through her eyes, and not through those of the queen. To the girl child, her love for her father is the most natural thing in the world, and so is his love for her. She cannot conceive of this being a problem—short of his not loving her enough, in preference to everybody else. Much as the child wants the father to love her more than her mother, she cannot accept that this may create jealousy of her in the mother. But on a preconscious level, the child knows quite well how jealous she is of the attention one parent pays to the other, when the child feels she should get that attention. Since the child wants to be loved by both parents—a fact which is well known, but in discussion of the oedipal situation is frequently neglected because of the nature of the problem—it is much too threatening for the child to imagine that love for him by one parent may create jealousy in the other. When this jealousy—as is true for the queen in “Snow White”—cannot be overlooked, then some other reason must be found to explain it, as in the story it is ascribed to the child’s beauty.

  In the normal course of events, the relations of parents to each other are not threatened by the love of one or both parents for their child. Unless the marital relations are quite bad, or a parent is very narcissistic, jealousy of a child favored by one parent remains small and well controlled by the other parent.

  Matters are quite different for the child. First, he cannot find solace for the pangs of jealousy in a good relation such as that his parents have with each other. Second, all children are jealous, if not of their parents, then of the privileges the parents enjoy as adults. When the tender, loving care of the parent of the same sex is not strong enough to build up ever more important positive ties in the naturally jealous oedipal child, and with it set the process of identification working against this jealousy, then the latter dominates the child’s emotional life. Since a narcissistic (step)mother is an unsuitable figure to relate to or identify with, Snow White, if she were a real child, could not help being intensely jealous of her mother and all her advantages and powers.

  If a child cannot permit himself to feel his jealousy of a parent (this is very threatening to his security), he projects his feelings onto this parent. Then “I am jealous of all the advantages and prerogatives of Mother” turns into the wishful thought: “Mother is jealous of me.” The feeling of inferiority is defensively turned into a feeling of superiority.

  The prepubertal or adolescent child may say to himself, “I do not compete with my parents, I am already better than they are; it’s they who are competing with me.” Unfortunately, there are also parents who try to convince their adolescent children that they are superior to them—which the parents may well be in some respects, but for the sake of their children’s ability to become secure, they ought to keep this fact to themselves. Worse, there are parents who maintain that they are in all ways as good as their adolescent child: the father who attempts to keep up with the youthful strength and sexual prowess of his son; the mother who tries in looks, dress, and behavior to be as youthfully attractive as her daughter. The ancient history of stories such as “Snow White” suggests that this is an age-old phenomenon. But competition between a parent and his child makes life unbearable for parent and child. Under such conditions the child wants to free himself and be rid of the parent, who forces him either to compete or to buckle under. The wish to be rid of the parent arouses great guilt, justified though it may be when the situation is viewed objectively. So in a reversal which eliminates the guilt feeling, this wish, too, is projected onto the parent. Thus, in fairy tales there are parents who try to rid themselves of their child, as happens in “Snow White.”

  In “Snow White,” as in “Little Red Riding Hood,” a male who can be viewed as an unconscious representation of the father appears—the hunter who is ordered to kill Snow White, but instead saves her life. Who else but a father substitute would seem to acquiesce to the stepmother’s dominance and nevertheless, for the child’s sake, dare to go against the queen’s will? This is what the oedipal and adolescent girl wishes to believe about her father: that even though he does as the mother bids him, he would side with his daughter if he were free to, tricking the mother as he did so.

  Why are rescuing male figures so often cast in the role of hunters in fairy tales? While hunting may have been a typically masculine occupation when fairy stories came into being, this is much too easy an explanation. At that time princes and princesses were as rare as they are today, and fairy tales simply abound with them. But when and where these stories originated, hunting was an aristocratic privilege, which supplies a good reason to see the hunter as an exalted figure like a father.

  Actually, hunters appear frequently in fairy tales because they lend themselves so well to projections. Every child at some time wishes that he were a prince or a princess—and at times, in his unconscious, the child believes he is one, only temporarily degraded by circumstances. There are so many kings and queens in fairy tales because their rank signifies absolute power, such as the parent seems to hold over his child. So the fairy-tale royalty represent projections of the child’s imagination, as does the hunter.

  The ready acceptance of the hunter figure as a suitable image of a strong and protective father figure—as opposed to the many ineffectual fathers such as the one in “Hansel and Gretel”—must relate to associations which attach themselves to this figure. In the unconscious the hunter is seen as the symbol of protection. In this connection we must consider the animal phobias of which no child is entirely free. In his dreams and daydreams the child is threatened and pursued by angry animals, creations of his fear and guilt. Only the parent-hunter, so he feels, can scare these threatening animals away, keep them permanently from the child’s door. Hence the hunter of fairy tales is not a figure who kills friendly creatures, but one who dominates, controls, and subdues wild, ferocious beasts. On a deeper level, he represents the subjugation of the animal, asocial, violent tendencies in man. Since he seeks out, tracks down, and defeats what are viewed as lower aspects of man—the wolf—the hunter is an eminently protective figure who can and does save us from the dangers of our violent emotions and those of others.

  In “Snow White” the pubertal girl’s oedipal struggle is not repressed, but acted out around the mother as competitor. In Snow White’s story the father-huntsman fails to take a strong and definite stand. He neither does his duty to the queen, nor meets his moral obligation to Snow White to make her safe and secure. He does not kill her outright, but he deserts her in the forest, expecting her to be killed by wild animals. The hunter tries to placate both the mother, by seemingly executing he
r order, and the girl, by merely not killing her. Lasting hatred and jealousy of the mother are the consequence of the father’s ambivalence, which in “Snow White” are projected onto the evil queen, who therefore continues to reappear in Snow White’s life.

  A weak father is as little use to Snow White as he was to Hansel and Gretel. The frequent appearance of such figures in fairy tales suggests that wife-dominated husbands are not exactly new to this world. More to the point, it is such fathers who either create unmanageable difficulties in the child or fail to help him solve them. This is another example of the important messages fairy tales contain for parents.

  Why is the mother outright rejecting in these fairy tales while the father is often only ineffectual and weak? The reason the (step)mother is depicted as evil and the father as weak has to do with what the child expects of his parents. In the typical nuclear family setting, it is the father’s duty to protect the child against the dangers of the outside world, and also those that originate in the child’s own asocial tendencies. The mother is to provide nurturing care and the general satisfaction of immediate bodily needs required for the child’s survival. Therefore, if the mother fails the child in fairy tales, the child’s very life is in jeopardy, as happens in “Hansel and Gretel” when the mother insists that the children must be gotten rid of. If the father out of weakness is negligent in meeting his obligations, then the child’s life as such is not so directly endangered, although a child deprived of the father’s protection must shift for himself as best he can. So Snow White must fend for herself when she is abandoned by the hunter in the forest.

  Only loving care combined with responsible behavior on the part of both parents permits the child to integrate his oedipal conflicts. If he is deprived of either by one or both parents, the child will not be able to identify with them. If a girl cannot form a positive identification with her mother, not only does she get stuck in oedipal conflicts, but regression sets in, as it always does when the child fails to attain the next higher stage of development for which she is chronologically ready.

  The queen, who is fixated to a primitive narcissism and arrested on the oral incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate, nor can anybody identify with her. The queen orders the hunter not only to kill Snow White, but to return with her lungs and liver as evidence. When the hunter brings the queen the lungs and liver of an animal to prove he has executed her command, “The cook had to cook them in salt, and the bad woman ate them and thought she had eaten Snow White’s lungs and liver.” In primitive thought and custom, one acquires the powers or characteristics of what one eats. The queen, jealous of Snow White’s beauty, wanted to incorporate Snow White’s attractiveness, as symbolized by her internal organs.

  This is not the first story of a mother’s jealousy of her daughter’s budding sexuality, nor is it all that rare that a daughter in her mind accuses her mother of such jealousy. The magic mirror seems to speak with the voice of a daughter rather than that of a mother. As the small girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful person in the world, this is what the mirror initially tells the queen. But as the older girl thinks she is much more beautiful than her mother, this is what the mirror says later. A mother may be dismayed when looking into the mirror; she compares herself to her daughter and thinks to herself: “My daughter is more beautiful than I am.” But the mirror says: “She is a thousand times more beautiful”—a statement much more akin to an adolescent’s exaggeration which he makes to enlarge his advantages and silence his inner voice of doubt.

  The pubertal child is ambivalent in his wish to be much better than his parent of the same sex because the child fears that if this were actually so, the parent, still much more powerful, would take terrible revenge. It is the child who fears destruction because of his imagined or real superiority, not the parent who wishes to destroy. The parent may suffer pangs of jealousy if he, in his turn, has not succeeded in identifying with his child in a very positive way, because only then can he take vicarious pleasure in his child’s accomplishments. It is essential that the parent identify strongly with his child of the same sex for the child’s identification with him to prove successful.

  Whenever the oedipal conflicts are revived in the pubertal child, he finds life with his family unbearable because of his violently ambivalent feelings. To escape his inner turmoil, he dreams of being the child of different and better parents with whom he would have none of these psychological difficulties. Some children even go beyond such fantasizing and actually run away in search of this ideal home. Fairy tales, however, implicitly teach the child that it exists only in an imaginary country, and that when found, it often turns out to be far from satisfying. This is true for Hansel and Gretel and also for Snow White. While Snow White’s experience with a home away from home is less scary than Hansel’s and Gretel’s, it does not work out too well either. The dwarfs are unable to protect her, and her mother continues to have power over her which Snow White cannot help giving her—as symbolized by Snow White’s permitting the queen (in her various disguises) entry into the house, despite the dwarfs’ warnings to beware of the queen’s tricks and not let anybody in.

  One cannot free oneself from the impact of one’s parents and one’s feelings about them by running away from home—although that seems the easiest way out. One succeeds in gaining independence only by working through one’s inner conflicts, which children usually try to project onto their parents. At first every child wishes that it would be possible to evade the difficult work of integration, which, as Snow White’s story also shows, is fraught with great dangers. For a time it seems feasible to escape this task. Snow White lives a peaceful existence for a while, and under the guidance of the dwarfs she grows from a child helpless to deal with the difficulties of the world into a girl who learns to work well, and to enjoy it. This is what the dwarfs request of her for living with them: she can remain with them and lack nothing if “you will take care of our household, cook, make the beds, wash, sew and knit, and will keep everything clean and in good order.” Snow White becomes a good housekeeper, as is true of many a young girl who, with mother away, takes good care of her father, the house, and even her siblings.

  Even before she meets the dwarfs, Snow White shows that she can control her oral cravings, great as they are. Once in the dwarfs’ house, though very hungry, she eats just a little from each of the seven plates, and drinks just a drop from each of the seven glasses, so as to rob none of them too much. (How different from Hansel and Gretel, the orally fixated children, who disrespectfully and voraciously eat up the gingerbread house!)

  After having satisfied her hunger, Snow White tries out all seven beds, but one is too long, another too short, until finally she falls asleep in the seventh bed. Snow White knows that these are all some other persons’ beds, and that each bed’s owner will want to sleep in his bed, despite Snow White’s lying in it. Her exploration of every bed suggests she is dimly aware of this risk, and she tries to settle into one where no such risk is involved. And she is right. The dwarfs on coming home are very much taken with her beauty, but the seventh dwarf, in whose bed she is sleeping, does not claim it but instead “slept with his companions, one hour with each, until the night had passed.”

  Given the popular view of Snow White’s innocence, the notion that she may have subconsciously risked being in bed with a man seems outrageous. But Snow White shows, by permitting herself to be tempted three times by the queen in disguise, that, like most humans—and, most of all, adolescents—she is quite easily tempted. However, Snow White’s inability to resist temptation makes her all the more human and attractive, without the hearer of the story becoming consciously aware of this. On the other hand, her behavior in restraining herself in eating and drinking, her resisting sleeping in a bed that is not just right for her shows that she also has learned to control to some degree her id impulses and to subject them to superego requirements. We find that her ego too has matured, since now she works hard and well, and
shares with others.

  Dwarfs—these diminutive men—have different connotations in various fairy tales.66 Like the fairies themselves, they can be good or bad; in “Snow White” they are of the helpful variety. The first thing we learn about them is that they have returned home from working as miners in the mountains. Like all dwarfs, even the unpleasant ones, they are hard-working and clever at their trade. Work is the essence of their lives; they know nothing of leisure or recreation. Although the dwarfs are immediately impressed by Snow White’s beauty and moved by her tale of misfortune, they make it clear right away that the price of living with them is engaging in conscientious work. The seven dwarfs suggest the seven days of the week—days filled with work. It is this working world Snow White has to make her own if she is to grow up well; this aspect of her sojourn with the dwarfs is easily understood.

  Other historical meanings of dwarfs may serve to explain them further. European fairy tales and legends were often residuals of pre-Christian religious themes which became unacceptable because Christianity would not brook pagan tendencies in open form. In a fashion, Snow White’s perfect beauty seems distantly derived from the sun; her name suggests the whiteness and purity of strong light. According to the ancients, seven planets circle the sun, hence the seven dwarfs. Dwarfs or gnomes, in Teutonic lore, are workers of the earth, extracting metals, of which only seven were commonly known in past times—another reason why these miners are seven in number. And each of these seven metals was related to one of the planets in ancient natural philosophy (gold to the sun, silver to the moon, etc.).