Poets and pedants

Maureen Duffy

The Uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim (Thames and Hudson £6.50)

When I wrote the preface to The Erotic World of Faery in 1972, I lamented the onebook space I'd had to cram so much into and suggested that each chapter could be a book in itself. If I didn't see from the bibliography of The Uses of Enchantment and a note by its author, Dr Bruno Bettelheim, that he is unaware of any previous study in this field, I would have assumed that he had taken my hint literally, so closely do many of his explanations of fairy tales body out those I advanced in a chapter called 'The Brothers Grimm and Sister Andersen'. As it is, his book is a testimony to the consistency of a Freudian interpretation of the supernatural.

Dr Bettelheim, however, has a particular axe to grind. It seems that in the United States, which the book was intended for, parents are anti-fairy tale. The good doctor has the specific intention of persuading them back to Mother Goose. A quick look round my local Smith's children's department, and through the children's book pages of recent papers, suggests that this is very much a North American problem. Here the racks seem healthily full of blood and lust, the main ingredients of fairy tales, under their traditional magic cloak. Dr Bettelheim's specific message, then, seems unnecessary in a British context. Informed sources report that the people of fairy tale are alive and well and living in Kensington Gardens again since the Wombles chased them in the nicest possible way from Wimbledon Common.

Not that Dr Bettelheim would have anything to do with either Peter Pan or the Wombles. In his way he is as censorious as those 'intelligent, well-meaning, modern, middle-class parents, so concerned about the happy development of their children' who 'discount the value of fairy tales and deprive their children of what these stories have to offer'. 'These stories', that is the ones which he approves of, are folk tales. Both Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, whose Histoires on Conies du Temps Passe was published in Paris in 1697 and translated into English in the eighteenth century, come in for a great deal of stick. To do real good to 'the child'. as Dr Bettelheim calls children, the story must be anonymous and preferably Grimm—although English Jack and his Beanstalk are allowed a look in.

Because Perrault wrote his stories down for princely consumption at Versailles, he gets an extra beating. No matter that he was the first to make Cinderella's slipper of glass, and so provide us with that most psychologically powerful and aesthetically delightful of images, which children have wisely preferred and taken to themselves all over the world ever since, except for those poor deprived children of the Black Forest who were only told Kinderund Hausmarchen and therefore had to make do with a slipper of gold. Bettelheim sees the glass slipper merely as having made impossible the two mutilation sequences in the Grimms' version where the Ugly Sisters, as we call them from pantomime, cut off heel or toe to crush their big feet into the gold slipper. When we bear in mind that fairy tales were originally meant for adults, a fact this book leaves quite out of account, we may perhaps be more prepared to sympathise with those intelligent, caring, middle-class parents who might feel cautious about letting such a piece of symbolic female castration loose on their children, and be grateful to Perrault for his substitution which keeps the slipper-vagina symbol intacia and leaves out the blood.

Andersen, too, is found unsatisfactory and dismissed mainly because his stories usually have an unhappy ending. 'The Ugly Duckling' is said to misdirect the child's fantasy and therefore to be unhelpful to him, since 'His chance for success in life is not to grow into a being of a different nature .. . but to acquire better qualities and to do better than others expect'. 'The Little Match Girl' Bettelheim describes as 'a deeply moving story, but hardly one suitable for identification'. I happen to have a vested emotional interest in this story. It was the one I asked for again and again, and wept over every time. My constant demand for it suggests to me that I needed the release of tears it gave me from my childish worries about our poverty and my mother's possible death. I couldn't express those fears directly, or even perhaps understand them, because I was too young, but I was living them and they were given expression and release through Andersen's story and my reaction to it.

As for the Ugly Duckling, he is simply -what we most of us feel we are, and indeed may be, for a part of our growing up, but his story comforts us that on reaching puberty or adulthood it will all come right and we too will be (sexually) attractive. It isn't meant to be a boy scout's moral tale about 'doing better' and acquiring 'better qualities'. And I must part company with Bettelheim when he says that 'in the fairy story it is the hero's doing which changes his life', and sees the fairy story as both moral teacher and comforter.

Comforter it certainly is, because they all live happily ever after. Because the tales contain a large element of wish fulfilment, this must be so. But this is the limit of their moral teaching. All must in the end come right for the hero because, otherwise, we do not wish to identify with him—except where we are seeking masochistic pleasure. Dr Bettelheim frequently uses the term 'the fairy tale teaches' and what it teaches is, he says, 'personality integration'. This belief sometimes leads him into mistakes of inter

pretation. At the end of 'The Three Feathers', in which a king with three sons sets them a

series of tests to see who shall rule after him, the three girls that the sons have brought home are made to jump through a big ring hanging in the hall. The two coarse peasant girls whom the other sons have brought home are clumsy and break their bones, but our beautiful refined girl (we being, of

course, the despised youngest son, Dummy, and she a toad until we kissed her) vaults

through effortlessly. This is so obviously a virginity test that it seems blind perversity of the author to say: 'Jumping through the ring depends on talent—on what one can do oneself, as different from what one may find through search.'

The end of 'The Three Feathers', in fact. illustrates the kind of morals that fairy tales embody—the gratification and glorification of us, the hero. In any acceptable moral system the two peasant girls wouldn't break their bones in an impossible test. Here there is no mercy for them because they threaten the hero, and in any case their coarseness Is sexual and their broken bones are onlY symbols of their already broken virginity. The hero, of course, gets the beautiful virgin and becomes not only king but much

cleverer than those nasty brothers wh° thought they were so smart at the beginning.

The therapy of fairy story works by letting us unconsciously indulgz through an art form those fancies and fears we would otherwise have to repress.

There are also, alas, one or two odd slips that reveal that Dr Bettelheim is short on

background study and understanding. He says there are no male fairies. Oberon? He misunderstands a comment by Louis Mac" Neice about continuing to value falrYi stories 'even when I was at public schon where to admit this meant losing face', which Bettelheim believes means being 'subjected to the scorn only of pedants, as happened t° MacNeice' instead of to the scorn of the other boys. What has caused Dr Bettelheim's delene.e and analysis of the traditional tales is h.is conviction that most modern children s books are 'so shallow in substance that litte of significance can be gained from thenl,' He names only three modern titles as evl: dence, and one of them is Maeterlinck's rift Blue Bird. Britain has a wealth of corftenl: porary writing for children much of which Is of a high imaginative order. UnfortunatelY' as an American librarian has recentlYci pointed out, little of it is now being accePte,, by American publishers because of al' growing cultural and linguistic differences: In that case The Uses of Enchantment 1114‘. well be an essential corrective for 10. society it was written for, and the only source_ of emotional nourishment for Aniericeln children may be the gingerbread house.