The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  In preliterate societies, stories of animal husbands and animal wives have not only fairy-tale-like but also totemistic features. For example, among the Lalang in Java it is believed that a princess took a dog for a husband and that the son who was born to this marriage is the ancestor of the tribe.108 In a Yoruba fairy tale a turtle marries a girl and in this way introduces intercourse on earth, showing the close relation between the idea of the animal groom and intercourse.109

  *The full title of the story is “The Frog King, or Iron Henry,” but Iron Henry is not part of most versions of this story. His extreme loyalty is added at the story’s end like an afterthought made to compare his faithfulness to the original disloyalty of the princess. It does not add materially to the story’s meaning and is therefore neglected here. (Iona and Peter Opie, for good reasons, dropped “Iron Henry” both from the title and from the story in their version.)110

  *Anne Sexton, with the poetic freedom and insights into the unconscious of the artist, in her poem “The Frog Prince”—which is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s tale—writes, “At the feel of the frog / the touch-me-nots explode / like electric slugs,” and “Frog is my father’s genitals.”114

  *In the Gesta Romanorum of around 1300, blood which fell on a mother’s hand when she murdered her child remains indelible. In Shakespeare, even if nobody else can see the blood on her hands, Lady Macbeth knows that it is there.

  *Perrault’s “Riquet à la Houppe” is earlier than either of these two tales, and his original recasting of the ancient motif has no known precedent. He changes the beast into an ugly but brilliant man—misformed Riquet. A stupid princess who falls in love with him because of his character and brilliance no longer sees the deformities of his body, becomes blind to his physical defects. And she, because of his love for her, seems no longer stupid but full of intelligence. This is the magical transformation which love achieves: mature love and acceptance of sex make what was before repugnant, or seemed stupid, become beautiful and full of spirit. As Perrault points out, the moral of the story is that beauty, be it that of physical appearance or of the mind, lies in the eye of the beholder. But because Perrault tells a story with an explicit moral, it loses out as a fairy tale. While love changes all, there is really no development—there is no inner conflict that needs to be resolved, nor any struggle that lifts the protagonists to a higher level of humanity.

  NOTES

  1. For Dickens’ remarks about “Little Red Riding Hood” and his views of fairy tales, see Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), and Michael C. Kotzin, Dickens and the Fairy Tale (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1972).

  2. Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

  3. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909). C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).

  4. “Jack the Giant Killer” and various other stories in the Jack cycle are printed in Katherine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk Tales, 4 volumes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). British folk tales mentioned in this book can be found there. Another important collection of English fairy tales is that of Joseph Jacobs: English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1890) and More English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1895).

  5. “The mighty hopes that make us men.” A. Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXXXV.

  6. The discussion of “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is based on Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

  “The Spirit in the Bottle” is one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and published with the title Kinder- und Hausmärchen. This book has been translated many times, but only a few of these translations are true to the original. Among those which are acceptable are: Grimm’s Fairy Tales, New York, Pantheon Books, 1944; and The Grimm’s German Folk Tales, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.

  All of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales are discussed in respect to the origins of each story, its different versions all over the world, its relation to other legends and fairy tales, etc., in Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols., Hildesheim, Olms, 1963.

  “The Spirit in the Bottle” illustrates how parental attitudes induce a child to engage in fantasies about gaining powers which will make him superior to his father. The story’s hero has had to leave school because of the family’s poverty. He offers to help his poor woodcutter father with his work, but the father thinks little of his son’s abilities and tells him: “That’s too hard work for you; you are not accustomed to such strenuous labor; you can’t bear it.” After they have been working all morning, the father suggests that they rest and eat their noon meal. The son says that he prefers to walk about the forest and look for some birds’ nests, at which the father exclaims, “Oh, you jackanapes, why do you want to run around? Afterwards you will be so tired you won’t be able to lift your arm.” Thus, the father belittles his son twice: first, by doubting his ability to do hard work; and, even after the son has displayed his stamina, by contemptuously dismissing his ideas about how to spend the resting time. After such an experience, what normal pubertal boy would not embark on daydreams about showing his father to be wrong, and proving that he is much better than his parent imagines?

  The fairy tale makes this fantasy come true. As the son walks about looking for birds’ nests, he hears a voice that says, “Let me out!” Thus he finds the spirit in the bottle, which, however, at first threatens to destroy him, in retaliation for having been incarcerated for so long. The boy cleverly induces the spirit to return into the bottle, much as the fisherman does in the Arabian Nights tale, and releases him only after being rewarded with a rag, one end of which heals all wounds, while the other changes everything rubbed by it into silver. By turning things into silver, the boy provides himself and his father with a good living, and because “he could heal all wounds, he became the most famous physician in the whole world.”

  The motif of the evil spirit locked up in a bottle goes back to very ancient Judean-Persian legends according to which King Solomon often imprisoned disobeying or heretic spirits in iron caskets, copper flasks, or wineskins, and dropped these into the sea. That “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is in part derived from this tradition is shown by the Jinny telling the fisherman of his rebellion against Solomon, who had as punishment shut him up in the bottle and thrown it into the sea.

  In “The Spirit in the Bottle,” this ancient motif has merged with two different traditions. One, though itself traceable ultimately to the legends of King Solomon, is a medieval account concerning the devil, who is similarly incarcerated by some holy man, or else freed by him and forced to serve his liberator. The second tradition originates in tales about a historical person: Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, a renowned German-Swiss physician of the sixteenth century whose allegedly miraculous cures stimulated the European imagination for centuries.

  According to one of these stories, Paracelsus hears a voice coming out of a fir tree which calls his name. He recognizes it as the voice of the devil which, in the form of a spider, is locked in a tiny hole in the tree. Paracelsus offers to free the devil if it will give him medicine which cures all sickness, and a tincture which changes everything into gold. The devil complies, but then wants to rush off to destroy the holy man who had incarcerated it. To prevent this, Paracelsus doubts aloud that something as big as the devil could turn itself into something as small as a spider. The devil, to show that it can do so, changes back into a spider and is again locked up in the tree by Paracelsus. This story, in turn, goes back to a much older one about a sorcerer named Virgilius (Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.).

  7. The most comprehensive enumerations of fairy-tale motifs, including that of the giant or spirit in the bottle, are those presented by Antti A. Aarne, The Types of the Folktale (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961), and Stith Thompson, Motif Ind
ex of Folk Literature, 6 volumes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955).

  In Thompson’s index, the spirit being tricked into making itself small to return into the bottle, etc., is motifs D1240, D2177.1, R181, K717, and K722. It would be tedious to give these data for all the fairy-tale motifs mentioned in this book, particularly since the distribution of a particular motif can be easily ascertained from these two reference works.

  8. The discussion of the myth of Hercules and of all other Greek myths follows their rendering in Gustav Schwab, Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946).

  9. Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958); Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). See also Paul Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles (Paris, 1923), and Jan de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Märchen, besonders in seinem Verhältnis zu Heldensage und Mythos (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications No. 150, 1954).

  10. A collection of articles discussing fairy tales on a depth-psychological basis which has the merit of adequately representing the various schools of thought can be found in Wilhelm Laiblin, Märchenforschung und Tiefenpsychologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969). It also contains a reasonably complete bibliography.

  11. There is as yet no systematic discussion of fairy tales from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Freud published two short articles in 1913 dealing with this topic: “The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” The Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids” play an important role in Freud’s famous “History of an Infantile Neurosis,” which has become known as “The Wolf-Man.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953 ff.), volumes 12, 17.

  Fairy tales are referred to in many other psychoanalytic writings, too numerous to enumerate here, but almost always only in cursory form, such as in Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1946). From among the many papers dealing more specifically with fairy tales from a Freudian viewpoint, the following may be mentioned: Otto Rank, Psychoanalytische Beiträge zur Mythenforschung (Vienna: Deuticke, 1919); Alfred Winterstein, “Die Pubertätsriten der Mädchen und ihre Spuren im Märchen,” Imago, Vol. 14 (1928).

  In addition, a few fairy tales were discussed psychoanalytically—for example, Steff Bornstein, “The Sleeping Beauty,” Imago, Vol. 19 (1933); J. F. Grant Duff, “Snow White,” ibid., vol. 20 (1934); Lilla Veszy-Wagner, “Little Red Riding Hood on the Couch,” The Psychoanalytic Forum, vol. 1 (1966); Beryl Sandford, “Cinderella,” ibid., vol. 2 (1967). Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language (New York: Rinehart, 1951), makes some references to fairy tales, particularly to “Little Red Riding Hood.”

  12. Fairy tales are treated much more comprehensively in the writings of Jung and Jungian analysts. Unfortunately, little of this vast literature has been translated into English. Typical for the approach of Jungian psychoanalysts to fairy tales is Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales (New York: Spring Publications, 1970).

  Probably the best example of the analysis of a famous fairy tale from the Jungian point of view is Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche (New York: Pantheon, 1956).

  The most complete discussion of fairy tales from a Jungian frame of reference is to be found in the three volumes of Hedwig von Beit, Symbolik des Märchens and Gegensatz und Erneuerung im Märchen (Bern: A. Francke, 1952 and 1956).

  An intermediate position is taken by Julius E. Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (Springfield: Charles Thomas, 1963).

  13. For different versions of “The Three Little Pigs,” see Briggs, op. cit. The discussion of this tale is based on its earliest published form, printed in J. O. Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London, c. 1843).

  Only in some of the later renderings of the story do the two little pigs survive, which robs the tale of much of its impact. In some variations the pigs are given names, interfering with the child’s ability to see them as representations of the three stages of development. On the other hand, some renderings spell out that it was the seeking of pleasure which prevented the littler ones from building more substantial and thus safer homes, as the littlest one builds his house out of mud because it feels so pleasant to wallow in it, while the second uses cabbage to build his abode because he loves eating it.

  14. The quotation describing animistic thinking is from Ruth Benedict’s article “Animism” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

  15. For the various stages of animistic thinking in the child, and the dominance it exerts up to the age of twelve, see Jean Piaget, The Child’s Concept of the World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929).

  16. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is a Norwegian fairy tale. A translation can be found in Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, c. 1889).

  17. “Beauty and the Beast” is a very old story, existing in many different versions. Among the best known is that of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, to be found in Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

  “The Frog King” is one of the Brothers Grimm’s stories.

  18. A summarization of Piaget’s theories can be found in J. H. Flavell, The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963).

  19. For a discussion of the goddess Nut, see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). “As vault of heaven she covers her creatures on earth like a hen sheltering her chicks.” How she was depicted can be seen on the lid of the Egyptian sarcophagus of Uresh-Nofer (XXX Dynasty) in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  20. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

  21. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” op. cit.

  22. While I do not know of any studies showing how distracting the illustrations in fairy stories are, this is amply demonstrated for other reading matter. See, for example, S. J. Samuels, “Attention Process in Reading: The Effect of Pictures on the Acquisition of Reading Responses,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58 (1967); and his review of many other studies of this problem: “Effects of Pictures on Learning to Read, Comprehension, and Attitude,” Review of Educational Research, vol. 40 (1970).

  23. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

  24. There is considerable literature on the consequences of dream deprivation—for example, Charles Fisher, “Psychoanalytic Implications of Recent Research on Sleep and Dreaming,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 13 (1965); and Louis J. West, Herbert H. Janszen, Boyd K. Lester, and Floyd S. Cornelison, Jr., “The Psychosis of Sleep Deprivation,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 96 (1962).

  25. Chesterton, op. cit.

  26. Sigmund Freud, “The Family Romance of the Neurotic,” op. cit., vol. 10.

  27. “The Three Wishes” was originally a Scottish tale, reported by Briggs, op. cit. As mentioned, with appropriate variations the motif is found all over the world. For example, in an Indian tale a family is granted three wishes. The wife desires great beauty and uses the first wish to gain it, after which she elopes with a prince. The angry husband wishes her changed into a pig; the son must use the third and last wish to restore her as she was originally.

  28. The same sequence of events could also be viewed as symbolically expressing that as the danger of giving in to id pressures decreases—the reduction of animal ferocity as represented by tiger and wolf to the tameness as symbolized by the deer—so the warning voices of ego and superego lose some of the power to control the id. But since in the tale brother tells sister in regard to his determination to drink from the third brook, “I must drink, whatever you say; my thirst is just too great,” the interpretation given in the text seems closer to the
underlying meaning of the story.

  29. The discussion of “Sindbad the Sailor and Sindbad the Porter” follows Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

  30. For the history of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and particularly about the meaning of the number 1001, see von der Leyen, Die Welt des Märchens, 2 volumes (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederich, 1953).

  31. For the tale that forms the framework within which the 1001 stories are put, see Emmanuel Cosquin, “Le Prologue-Cadre des Mille et Une Nuits” in his Études Folkloriques (Paris: Champion, 1922).

  For the frame story of Thousand and One Nights I followed John Payne’s translation in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (London: Printed for Subscribers Only, 1914).

  32. For the ancient Egyptian tale, see Emanuel de Rougé, “Notice sur un manuscrit égyptien,” Revue archéologique, vol. 8 (1852); W. F. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, vol. 2 (1895); and Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.

  33. The various renderings of the tale of “The Two Brothers” are discussed by Kurt Ranke, “Die zwei Brüder,” Folk Lore Fellow Communications, vol. 114 (1934).

  34. It is quite unusual for a fairy tale to be so specific in regard to place names. Those who have studied this problem have come to the conclusion that when a place name is mentioned, this suggests that the tale is somehow connected with an event that actually took place. For example, in the city of Hameln at one time a group of children may have been abducted, which led to the story of the Pied Piper, which tells about the disappearance of children in this town. It is a morality tale, but hardly a fairy story, since it lacks a resolution and has no happy ending. But such a story with a historical reference exists essentially only in one form.