Folklore of the Human Mind - Assignment Example

Fairy Tales and the “Folklore of the Human Mind” Across generations, fairy tales have fascinated adult and children audiences. Stories like Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel have been reprinted in various formats and editions, have been objects of literary or film recreation, inspired operas and musical works, and have been even represented in schools performances. Fairy tales have left an imprint on childhood memories and belong to our cultural imagery, as well as myths, and they constitute what Maria Tatar has called the “folklore of the human mind” (57). Although fairy tales usually cause a good impression among children and adults, there are many horrors and cruelties in their plots: “graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children” (Tatar 3). For example, in “Snow White”, the heroine’s stepmother arranges her death; in “Cinderella”, the doves make the stepsisters blind; Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by a wolf, and Hansel and Gretel were about to be eaten by a witch. The cruelties can be found in every story of the Nursery and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled German oral folk tales in the nineteenth century. They insisted that they just changed the style, but not the spirit of the tales. However, as Tatar stated, they completely rewrote the texts and altered some details of them. Some of the tales were plenty of violent episodes, and, in other edition of Grimm’s tales, the brothers intensified the violence, justified by revenge. In this context, it is important to question why children enjoy this kind of stories, in which other children are victims of stepmothers and fierce animals, or are abandoned by their parents, or are forced to marry their own father. Before trying to provide an answer to such a complex phenomenon, the origin of these tales is to be considered. Literary fairy tales were originally oral folk tales, directed to an adult audience and told for thousand of years. They were considered literary when they were published in books, from the seventeenth century. Jack Zipes related fairy tales with their historical feudalist context, which could explain why these tales still inspire such charm in adults and children. The characters in fairy tales go from kings, queens, princes and princesses to soldiers, artisans and peasants, with intervention of speaking animals and magical creatures. Hence, an opposition between aristocrats and peasantry takes place. There is no middle class in fairy tales. The class struggles generate the conflict, and they occur between aristocracy and peasantry, or among the aristocrats or the peasants themselves. This is why the people (das Volk) were the carries of the tales: the Märchen catered to their aspirations and allowed them to believe that anyone could become a powerful knight in shining armor or a lovely princess, and they also presented the stark realities of power politics without disguising the violence and brutality of everyday life (“Breaking the Magic Spell” 35). In this context, the magic and miraculous are the elements causing the charm. The possibility of having supernatural abilities, resurrections, magical objects to make us fulfill our dreams have captivated the imagination of people along centuries, despite of ignorance or scientific knowledge. The power of imagination belongs to the human mind, and it is impossible to escape from it. A historical sociological perspective supported by Zipes considered that “magic and miraculous serve to rupture of the feudal confines and represent metaphorically the conscious and unconscious desires of the lower classes” (“Breaking the Magic Spell” 35). Furthermore, fairy tales represented many aspects of the world in medieval times. For example, mothers usually died young because of health conditions and the frequent child-bearing. Hence, stepmothers were common in the families, and they often had difficulties and conflicts with the children by former wives. The evil stepmothers appear in “Snow White”, “Cinderella”, and “Hansel and Gretel”. They abused of their stepchildren and obtained a punishment in return. “Hansel and Gretel” is a story with a plebeian perspective. A father is convinced by her wife of abandoning his children in the woods, because they were so poor to sustain them. The boy (Hansel) and the girl (Gretel) found in the woods a house that could be eaten, in which a witch lived and wanted to eat children. Due to their intelligence, Hansel and Gretel managed to kill the witch, take some treasuries from the house and return home. The father is exonerated of his guilt, justified by his poverty, and the stepmother was punished with death. However, Zipes considered that the stepmother was not condemned, “neither by the narrator nor by the children” (“Breaking the Magic Spell” 39). The widespread poverty, common in times of wars, was the cause of the conflict in “Hansel and Gretel”. Peasants, in the tale as well as in the reality of that time, forced to go to extremes, such as banditry, migration or abandonment of children, in order to survive. It cannot be denied the cruelty of such a decision, but in “Hansel and Gretel” the children do not turn against their father or blame their stepmother. They comprehend their father’s situation. According to Zipes, in this story, the witch represented the feudal system or the brutality of the aristocracy. “The killing of the witch is symbolically the realization of the hatred which the peasantry felt for boarders and oppressors” (“Breaking the Magic Spell” 38). Tatar stated that many of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales rely on a victimization/ retaliation pattern. The main character (a hero or heroine) is victimized by a villain (stepmother, witch), and suffers a lot due to her/his vulnerability and helplessness. In contrast, the villain obtains unlimited wealth and power. At the end of the stories, the situation is reversed. The main character is able to become retaliation and feel “revenged” for all that was done to her/him. For example, Cinderella obtained the reward of marrying the prince, while she witnessed the blindness of her stepsisters, and Hansel and Gretel had the risk of dying in the woods, but they returned with treasures that solved their father’s situation. This victimization/ retaliation pattern is one of the crucial arguments concluded by Tatar when she questions the charm of fairy tales despite their horrors. The fairy tale’s movement from victimization to retaliation gives vivid but disguised shape to the dreams of revenge that inevitably drift into the mind of every child beset by a sense of powerlessness. That the hero’s initial state of misery is exaggerated and inflated beyond the limits of realism makes the fantasy all the more satisfying. Both the hero’s reward and the oppressor’s sufferings are richly deserved (Tatar 190). Violence and cruelty are considered hard facts in all fairy tales, and they represent, in many cases, the struggle of good and evil, without moral concerns. The happy ending of some of the stories (“Hansel and Gretel”, “Snow White”, “Cinderella”) demonstrates the victory of good, and considers sufferings as a necessary period to battle against difficulties. Nevertheless, Tatar identified another pattern in the Grimm’s collection: the cautionary tales. These tales, intended for children, had the purpose of warning children against a bad behavior. The warning comes in the form of a conflict between the children and their parents’ commandments, which ends tragically. For Tatar, they contained more horror than the stories relying on the victimization/ retaliation pattern. These stories, with their single-minded focus on the transgression/punishment pattern, their unique power relationships, their explicit morals, and their implicit call for conformity are the most horrifying stories in the Grimm’s collection. By inverting the power structure and the underlying pattern of classic fairy tales, they are likely to instill fear rather than confidence in the children who hear them and read them (Tatar 192). Tatar mentioned two stories who tell the death of children as a way of punishment: “Frau Trude” and “The Naghty Child”. “Little Red Riding Hood” could be considered to belong to that pattern. The mother warns the child to go to her grandmother’s house and beware of the wolf. Little Red Riding Hood’s disobeys the command, and, in her ingenuity, she tells the wolf about her visit to the grandmother. Both grandmother and grandchild are eaten by the animal. Although this tale has been object of diverse psychoanalytical approaches that identified a story of sexual initiation, Little Red Riding Hood represents in this context a girl’s punishment because of her transgression of a norm. Zipes argued that tradition have been used to combat the natural children’s curiosity, in order to “tame” them and make them less probably a threat to adults (“Why Fairy Tales Stick 242). It is not strange that Little Red Riding Hood in subsequent versions has a happy –and improbable– ending, in which both grandmother and grandchild are rescued from the wolf’s stomach by a hunter. The characteristics of fairy tales make them a fascinating genre not exclusively for children, which lacks mere relaxing or recreational purposes. Tatar concludes her analysis of Grimm’s fairy tales with the following statement: Adults also have not been immune to the charm of the fairy tale’s horrors and the folk tale’s cruelties. Few people look to fairy tales for models of humane, civilized behavior. The stories have taken hold for a far more important reason: the hard facts of fairy-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult (Tatar 192). Fairy tales combine the literary characteristic of verisimilitude with the fantasy that nurtures human imagination. The grim realities of poverty, humiliation, prohibition, danger and death appear in a context of fantasy, where the dreams might come true and people could go beyond their natural capabilities. Therefore, fantastic stories such as the Harry Potter sequel, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and superheroes comics and films are enjoyed by a wide public in the present-day times. Fairy tales, although they have violence and subtle sex, enable us to dream. These visions of reality and fantasy become exaggerated in order to cause an unforgettable impact on the reader, and, as well as they did in their oral forms, fairy tales are often repeated in a variety of mass media, and they will continue their way in the folklore of our minds. Work Cited Grimm, Jacob. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Trans: Jack Zipes. New York: Bantham Books, 2003. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. ---. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. London: Routledge, 2006. Read More