Introduction and Bettelheim/Darnton response

As I did not introduce myself before, I would like to do that before I respond to the articles.

My name is Kim, and I am a senior majoring in Chemical Engineering. I’m very excited about this class and I’m looking forward to some material that is very different from my usual engineering classes. I’ve always liked Disney movies, but I have not read many classic German tales. However, I was raised on the classic Danish folktales, most notably those by Hans Christen Anderson, so I am looking forward to comparing those.

What struck me in Bettelheim’s article was the need to provide children with a meaning for their life. He mentions that the children’s literature today is shallow, almost as if children today are not expected to have any meaning or purpose in their lives. Fairy tales, on the other hand, give more credit to the understanding of a child. Today, we don’t expect children to think on a deeper level, and therefore make everything painfully clear. However, a story with more meaning, that requires more thought to understand, is likely to have a more lasting impact.

Darnton’s historical view of fairytales in intriguing, but I find that I do not trust its accuracy. With stories that were passed along for so long without being written down, I would imagine it is all but impossible to verify which version was being told at a certain time, in a certain place. However, I think he does make the important point that the stories are altered by the time period, and can convey messages that may not pertain to us, but were certainly important at one point. For instance, though we may see the Little Red Riding Hood as a lesson not to talk to strangers, the people who once told the story most likely did not have such a strong mistrust of people they did not know, and an entirely different message could have been prominent in the tale.

I think both articles have good points. The article can certainly complement each other. For example, in our history, when people are studying the culture of the time of the Disney fairy tales, as Darnton would suggest, they may look at the stories and take Bettelheim’s perspective, that in modern tale there is no meaning.