Bettelheim and Darnton

I realize that, as a history major, my response to these two pieces might be biased. That said, I find Darnton's essay to be far more convincing than Bettelheim's, mainly because I feel that Bettelheim takes a "fairy tale" view of fairy tales. Bettelheim argues that fairy tales ‘fell from heaven’ (as we said in class today) and are the prime source of enlightenment for children. To Bettelheim “children—normal and abnormal alike, at all levels of intelligence—find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories” (271). I believe that Bettelheim gives far too much credit to the power of fairy tales, just as Freud placed vast significance on dreams. Bettelheim sees the fairy tales as a panacea for all the disturbed children of the world and the perfect way to education the normal ones. Maybe my issue is that Disney movies did not help me “master the psychological problems of growing up,” nevertheless I don’t see how a child’s subconscious would be soothed by stories alone. Bettelheim puts too much faith in the “magical powers” of fairy tales, in the power of the fantastical elements to alter the mind and heat. This might be a result of looking at fairy tales as works for children from an adult perspective: adults read fairy tales and think ‘wow, this could have changed my life if I had read it as a child’ and forget the vast intellectual differences that separate children and adults.

Darnton, on the other hand, looks at fairy tales from an adult perspective and tries to argue for their significance for adults, not for children. His analysis does not try to understand how fairy tales affect children, but what they can tell us about adults. The fairy tale is an important artifact of cultures—namely the French peasantry—that otherwise left only secondary record of their existences. He admits that the written fairy tale is also a secondary source, nevertheless, looking at fairy tales in order to learn about those who told them and wrote them down—and the continuity or change of the tale over time—tells us about the place and time from which the fairy tales originated. Bettelheim places too much faith in, again, the “magical” power of fairy tales; in effect, he buys into the fairy tales own conceits, that they take place in a different world than our own, and tries to map the fantasy world—and its potential didactic power—onto our own society. On the other hand, Darnton chooses to map that same “magic” onto the time and place of the fairy tale’s origin, thereby establishing, arguably, stronger truths about the meaning and effect of fairy tales by trying to examine their original purposes.