The Boys Who Went Forth to Learn What Fairy Tales Were

The tension that one senses in Darnton’s article between his perspective on fairy tales and that of Bettelheim does not seem legitimate when one actually compares the two texts. Darnton writes as though he and Bettelheim are both answering a general prompt of “explain fairy tales,” when in fact the two articles answer fundamentally different questions. Bettelheim is excited about what a fairy tale can do (and perhaps why it can do those things), and his scope should not logically extend beyond those specific stories (and versions of those stories) he wishes to address. Yes, he overstates his case quite a few times with sweeping generalizations like “children…find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories” (really? every fairy tale?) and “the child finds this kind of meaning [tangible, pro-social results of right and wrong behavior] through fairy tales” (even when grandmothers stay eaten?). But a more down-to-earth approach to Bettelheim’s basic ideas reveals that they do indeed make some sense: children have some strange thoughts and fears, and some fairy tales allow those concepts to play out in an entertaining, engaging, but ultimately fictional manner. Where Darnton is right to criticize is when this fairly innocuous claim is further extended in efforts to draw out universal symbols from specific details, disregarding the fact that not all people respond the same way to the same story and that the stories themselves vary immensely in their details.
For whatever reason, Darnton uses this fault as an excuse to toss out the psychoanalytic approach entirely, when really he is interested in answering different questions altogether: what are these fairy tales, how did they come to be that way, and what might they say about the cultures that formed and modified them. This more historical method is valid, I believe, but valid in a way that does not negate Bettelheim’s ideas. Furthermore, there is a pitfall in the historical approach that Darnton does not address in his article (though he is careful to point out certain limitations like the inaccessibility of oral performance styles through text alone). Certainly one might find some trends in how a story varies from culture to culture, as Darnton does with the French “Tom Thumb” and German “Hansel and Gretel,” but it would be enormously difficult to prove what those trends might mean about the French and German people who spread the story. Is the French version filled with more “humor and domesticity” because that is what French peasants valued and were familiar with, or is it because they had seen enough of the “terror” of the German version in their own lives and felt no need to revisit it in their fiction? As with Bettelheim, I believe Darnton may need to scale back his ambitions a bit if he intends his personal historical method to be unassailable.