The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  The great popularity of “Goldilocks” with children and adults alike derives partly from its manifold meanings on many different levels. The young child may respond mainly to the motif of sibling rivalry, delighted that Goldilocks must go back from whence she came, as so many children wish the new baby would do. An older child will be enthralled by Goldilocks’ experimentation with adult roles. Children will enjoy her peeping and entering; some adults may like to remind their children that Goldilocks is expelled for it.

  The story is particularly timely because it depicts the outsider, Goldilocks, in such appealing form. This makes it as attractive to some as it is to others because the insiders, the bears, win. Thus, whether one feels like an outsider or an insider, the story can be equally enchanting. The change in title over time shows how a story protecting the property and psychological rights of insiders—the bears—became one which concentrates attention on the outsider. What was once called “The Three Bears” is now known mainly as “Goldilocks.” Further, the story’s ambiguity, which is so much in line with the temper of the times, may also account for its popularity, while the clear-cut solutions of the traditional fairy tale seem to point to a happier age when things were believed to permit definite solutions.

  Even more important in this respect is the story’s greatest appeal, which at the same time is its greatest weakness. Not only in modern times, but all through the ages, running away from a problem—which in the unconscious means denying or repressing it—seems the easiest way out when confronted with what seems to be too difficult or unsolvable a predicament. This is the solution with which we are left in “Goldilocks.” The bears seem unmoved by her appearance in and sudden disappearance from their lives. They act as if nothing had happened but an interlude without consequences; all is solved by her jumping out of the window. As far as Goldilocks is concerned, her running away suggests that no solution of the oedipal predicaments or of sibling rivalry is necessary. Contrary to what happens in traditional fairy tales, the impression is that Goldilocks’ experience in the bears’ house made as little change in her life as it did in that of the bear family; we hear nothing more about it. Despite her serious exploration of where she fits in—by implication, of who she is—we are not told that it led to any higher selfhood for Goldilocks.

  Parents would like their daughters to remain eternally their little girls, and the child would like to believe that it is possible to evade the struggle of growing up. That is why the spontaneous reaction to “Goldilocks” is: “What a lovely story.” But it is also why this story does not help the child to gain emotional maturity.

  *In some modern bowdlerizations Goldilocks’ being lost is explained by saying that her mother sent her on an errand, and that she lost her way in the forest. This adaptation reminds us of how Little Red Cap was sent out by her mother; but she did not get lost—she permitted herself to be tempted to stray away from a well-known path, so what happened to Red Cap was to a large degree her own doing. Hansel and Gretel’s and Snow White’s getting lost was not their doing but that of their parents. Even the young child knows that one does not get lost in the woods without reason; this is why all true fairy stories tell what the reason was. As suggested before, being lost in a forest is an ancient symbol for the need to find oneself. This meaning is seriously interfered with if it is all due to pure chance.

  *Erikson speaks about the fact that these experiences will determine all through life whether we approach each event with trust or mistrust—a basic attitude which cannot help shaping how these events unfold, and what their impact on us will be.69

  “THE SLEEPING BEAUTY”

  Adolescence is a period of great and rapid change, characterized by periods of utter passivity and lethargy alternating with frantic activity, even dangerous behavior to “prove oneself” or discharge inner tension. This back-and-forth adolescent behavior finds expression in some fairy tales by the hero’s rushing after adventures and then suddenly being turned to stone by some enchantment. More often, and psychologically more correctly, the sequence is reversed: Dummy in “The Three Feathers” does nothing until he is well into adolescence; and the hero of “The Three Languages,” pushed by his father to go abroad to develop himself, spends three years in passive learning before his adventures begin.

  While many fairy tales stress great deeds the heroes must perform to become themselves, “The Sleeping Beauty” emphasizes the long, quiet concentration on oneself that is also needed. During the months before the first menstruation, and often also for some time immediately following it, girls are passive, seem sleepy, and withdraw into themselves. While no equally noticeable state heralds the coming of sexual maturity in boys, many of them experience a period of lassitude and of turning inward during puberty which equals the female experience. It is thus understandable that a fairy story in which a long period of sleep begins at the start of puberty has been very popular for a long time among girls and boys.

  In major life changes such as adolescence, for successful growth opportunities both active and quiescent periods are needed. The turning inward, which in outer appearance looks like passivity (or sleeping one’s life away), happens when internal mental processes of such importance go on within the person that he has no energy for outwardly directed action. Those fairy tales which, like “The Sleeping Beauty,” have the period of passivity for their central topic, permit the budding adolescent not to worry during his inactive period: he learns that things continue to evolve. The happy ending assures the child that he will not remain permanently stuck in seemingly doing nothing, even if at the moment it seems as if this period of quietude will last for a hundred years.

  After the period of inactivity which typically occurs during early puberty, adolescents become active and make up for the period of passivity; in real life and in fairy tales they try to prove their young manhood or womanhood, often through dangerous adventures. This is how the symbolic language of the fairy tale states that after having gathered strength in solitude they now have to become themselves. Actually, this development is fraught with dangers: an adolescent must leave the security of childhood, which is represented by getting lost in the dangerous forest; learn to face up to his violent tendencies and anxieties, symbolized by encounters with wild animals or dragons; get to know himself, which is implied in meeting strange figures and experiences. Through this process the adolescent loses a previous innocence suggested by their having been “Simpletons,” considered dumb and lowly, or merely somebody’s child. The risks involved in bold adventures are obvious, as when Jack meets the ogre. “Snow White” and “The Sleeping Beauty” encourage the child not to be afraid of the dangers of passivity. Ancient as “The Sleeping Beauty” is, in many ways it has a more important message for today’s youth than many other tales. Presently many of our young people—and their parents—are fearful of quiet growth, when nothing seems to happen, because of a common belief that only doing what can be seen achieves goals. “The Sleeping Beauty” tells that a long period of quiescence, of contemplation, of concentration on the self, can and often does lead to highest achievement.

  Recently it has been claimed that the struggle against childhood dependency and for becoming oneself in fairy tales is frequently described differently for the girl than for the boy, and that this is the result of sexual stereotyping. Fairy tales do not render such one-sided pictures. Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward in her struggle to become herself, and a boy as aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood: through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world. In this sense the male and female heroes are again projections onto two different figures of two (artificially) separated aspects of one and the same process which everybody has to undergo in growing up. While some literal-minded parents do not realize it, children know that, whatever the sex of the hero, the story pertains to their own problems.

  Male and female figures appear in the
same roles in fairy tales; in “The Sleeping Beauty” it is the prince who observes the sleeping girl, but in “Cupid and Psyche” and the many tales derived from it, it is Psyche who apprehends Cupid in his sleep and, like the prince, marvels at the beauty she beholds. This is just one example. Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa. This is as it should be, since fairy tales reveal important truths about life.

  “The Sleeping Beauty” is best known today in two different versions: Perrault’s, and that of the Brothers Grimm.70 To explain the difference, it may be best to consider briefly the form the story took in Basile’s Pentamerone, where its title is “Sun, Moon, and Talia.”* 71

  On the birth of his daughter Talia, a king asked all the wise men and seers to tell her future. They concluded that she would be exposed to great danger from a splinter of flax. To prevent any such accident, the king ordered that no flax or hemp should ever come into his castle. But one day when Talia had grown up, she saw an old woman who was spinning pass by her window. Talia, who had never seen anything like it before, “was therefore delighted with the dancing of the spindle.” Made curious, she took the distaff in her hand and began to draw out the thread. A splinter of hemp “got under her fingernail and she immediately fell dead upon the ground.” The king left his lifeless daughter seated on a velvet chair in the palace, locked the door, and departed forever, to obliterate the memory of his sorrow.

  Some time after, another king was hunting. His falcon flew into a window of the empty castle and did not return. The king, trying to find the falcon, wandered in the castle. There he found Talia as if asleep, but nothing would rouse her. Falling in love with her beauty, he cohabited with her; then he left and forgot the whole affair. Nine months later Talia gave birth to two children, all the time still asleep. They nursed from her breast. “Once when one of the babies wanted to suck, it could not find the breast, but got into its mouth instead the finger that had been pricked. This the baby sucked so hard that it drew out the splinter, and Talia was roused as if from deep sleep.”

  One day the king remembered his adventure and went to see Talia. He was delighted to find her awake with the two beautiful children, and from then on they were always on his mind. The king’s wife found out his secret, and on the sly sent for the two children in the king’s name. She ordered them cooked and served to her husband. The cook hid the children in his own home and prepared instead some goat kids, which the queen served to the king. A while later the queen sent for Talia and planned to have her thrown into the fire because she was the reason for the king’s infidelity. At the last minute the king arrived, had his wife thrown into the fire, married Talia, and was happy to find his children, whom the cook had saved. The story ends with the verses:

  Lucky people, so ’tis said,

  Are blessed by Fortune whilst in bed.*

  Perrault, by adding on his own the story of the slighted fairy who utters the curse, or by using this familiar fairy-tale motif, explains why the heroine falls into deathlike sleep and thus enriches the story, since in “Sun, Moon, and Talia” we are given no reason why this should be her fate.

  In Basile’s story Talia is the daughter of a king who loved her so much that he could not remain in his castle after she fell into a deathlike sleep. We hear nothing more about him after he left Talia ensconced on her thronelike chair “under an embroidered canopy,” not even after she reawakened, married her king, and lived happily with him and her beautiful children. One king replaces another king in the same country; one king replaces another in Talia’s life—the father king is replaced by the lover king. Might these two kings not be substitutes for each other at different periods in the girl’s life, in different roles, in different disguises? We encounter here again the “innocence” of the oedipal child, who feels no responsibility for what she arouses or wishes to arouse in the parent.

  Perrault, the academician, doubly distances his story from Basile’s. He was, after all, a courtier who told stories for the perusal of princes, pretending that they were invented by his little son to please a princess. The two kings are changed into a king and a prince, the latter somebody who obviously is not yet married and has no children. And the presence of the king is separated from the prince by a sleep of one hundred years, so that we can feel certain that the two have nothing in common. Interestingly enough, Perrault does not quite manage to extricate himself from the oedipal connotations: in his story the queen is not insanely jealous because of the betrayal by her husband, but she appears as the oedipal mother who is so jealous of the girl her son the prince falls in love with that she seeks to destroy her. But while the queen in Basile’s tale is convincing, Perrault’s queen is not. His story falls into two incongruous parts: a first which ends with the prince’s awakening Sleeping Beauty and marrying her; followed by a second part in which we are suddenly told that the mother of Prince Charming is really a child-devouring ogress who wishes to eat her own grandchildren.

  In Basile, the queen wishes to feed his children to her husband—the most terrible punishment for preferring Sleeping Beauty to her that she can think of. In Perrault, she wants to eat them herself. In Basile, the queen is jealous because her husband’s mind and love are entirely taken up with Talia and her children. The king’s wife tries to burn Talia in the fire—the king’s “burning” love for Talia having aroused the queen’s “burning” hatred for her.

  There is no explanation for the cannibalistic hatred of the queen in Perrault’s tale but that she is an ogress who “whenever she saw little children passing by, … had all the difficulty in the world to avoid falling upon them.” Also, Prince Charming keeps his marriage to Sleeping Beauty a secret for two years, until his father dies. Only then does he bring Sleeping Beauty and her two children, called Morning and Day, to his castle. And although he knows that his mother is an ogress, when he leaves to go to war he puts her in charge, entrusting his kingdom and wife and children to her. Perrault’s story ends with the king returning at the moment when his mother is just about to have Sleeping Beauty thrown into a pit full of vipers. On his arrival the ogress, who sees her plans spoiled, jumps into the pit herself.

  It can easily be understood that Perrault did not feel it appropriate to tell at the French court a story in which a married king ravishes a sleeping maiden, gets her with child, forgets it entirely, and remembers her after a time only by chance. But a fairy prince who keeps his marriage and fatherhood a secret from his father-king—shall we assume because he fears the king’s oedipal jealousy if the son also becomes a father—is unconvincing, if for no other reason than that oedipal jealousy of mother and father in regard to the same son in the same tale is overdoing it, even in a fairy story. Knowing his mother is an ogress, the prince does not bring his wife and child home as long as his good father may exercise a restraining influence, but only after his death, when such protection is no longer available. The reason for all this is not that Perrault was lacking in artistry, but that he did not take his fairy stories seriously and was most intent on the cute or moralistic verse ending he appended to each.*

  With two such incongruous parts to this story, it is understandable that in oral telling—and often also in printed form—the story ends with the happy union of the prince and Sleeping Beauty. It is this form that the Brothers Grimm heard and recorded, and which was then and is now most widely known. Still, something got lost which was present in Perrault. To wish death to a newborn child only because one is not invited to the christening or is given inferior silverware is the mark of an evil fairy. Thus, in Perrault, as in the Brothers Grimm’s version, at the very beginning of the story we find the (fairy god)-mother(s) split into the good and the evil aspects. The happy ending requires that the evil principle be appropriately punished and done away with; only then can the good, and with it happiness, prevail. In Perrault, as in Basile, the evil principle is done away with, and thus fa
iry-story justice is done. But the Brothers Grimm’s version, which will be followed from here on, is deficient because the evil fairy is not punished.

  However great the variations in detail, the central theme of all versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” is that, despite all attempts on the part of parents to prevent their child’s sexual awakening, it will take place nonetheless. Furthermore, parents’ ill-advised efforts may postpone the reaching of maturity at the proper time, as symbolized by Sleeping Beauty’s hundred years of sleep, which separate her sexual awakening from her being united with her lover. Closely related to this is a different motif—namely, that to have to wait even a long time for sexual fulfillment does not at all detract from its beauty.

  Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s versions begin by indicating that one may have to wait a long time to find sexual fulfillment, as indicated by having a child. For a very long time, we are told, the king and his queen wished for a child in vain. In Perrault, the parents behave like his contemporaries: “They went to all the waters in the world; vows, pilgrimages, everything was tried and nothing came of it. At last, however, the Queen was with child.” The Brothers Grimm’s beginning is much more fairy-tale-like: “Once upon a time was a king and a queen who said every day ‘Oh, if we only had a child!’ but they never got one. Once when the queen sat in the bath, it happened that a frog crawled out of the water on the land and told her ‘Your wish will be fulfilled; before a year is over, you’ll bring a daughter into the world.’ ” The frog’s saying that the queen will give birth before a year is over puts the time of waiting close to the nine months of pregnancy. This, plus the queen’s being in her bath, is reason to believe that conception took place on the occasion of the frog’s visit to the queen. (Why in fairy tales the frog often symbolizes sexual fulfillment is discussed later, in connection with the story “The Frog King.”)