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  • Review: Fairy Tales as Ways of Knowing, Essays on Märchen in Psychology, Society, and Literature
  • Lois R. Kuznets
Review: Fairy Tales as Ways of Knowing, Essays on Märchen in Psychology, Society, and Literature, ed. by Michael M. Metzger and Katerina Mommsen. Germanic Studies in America, 41. Bern: Peter Lang, 1981, 198 pp.

This group of ten essays was compiled largely from papers delivered at the 1979 Annual Modern Language Association Convention in two programs sponsored by the MLA Division of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century German Literature. The essays deal almost exclusively with German tales, both folk and art, and two of the essays are in German.

For those concerned with the fairy tale as children's literature, the first five essays are of the greatest interest. The title itself is taken from the first of the essays, Bettelheim's "Fairy Tales as Ways of Knowing." Michael Metzger in his preface, expands upon the meaning of this title, noting that it "suggests that the tales possess a degree of independent epistemological validity, imparting a knowledge of self and the world that would otherwise be inaccessible." In other words, like most serious studies of the fairy tale since the advent of the Grimms' collection, the essays in this volume regard the tales as complex phenomena that can tell lay readers how they ought to view themselves as human beings in the world, and that also can tell scholars about how human beings have viewed and do view themselves in the world.

The Bettelheim essay itself seems to be mainly a summary of what Bettelheim has said in detail in his The Uses of Enchantment about how the tale first forces both the hero and the reader to "face evil and all the darkness which also resides within us" and then "serenely" rescues both the hero and the reader. Here, as elsewhere, Bettelheim emphasizes both the testing and the happy ending and condemns some art tales for not rescuing the hero properly.

The next two essays, by Linda Dégh, I found especially informative. "Grimm's Household Tales and its Place in the Household: The Social Relevance of a Controversial Classic" first delineates the ways in which the Grimms' collection does not live up to expectations either in terms of authenticity of folk or Germanic sources or in terms of being suitable, as a whole, for the household that includes children. Some of the very reasons of unsuitability seem to have been what made the Household Tales a required Nazi text, later condemned as a whole by a reconstructed Germany. Dégh herself is obviously advocating an approach to these tales that is selective, one of neither wholesale acceptance for children nor of wholesale rejection.

Her second essay, "The Magic Tale and Its Magic," in which she delineates the differences between magic tales and "legends," reinforces the conclusion of the first essay: that we need to experience in our lives the conscious suspension of disbelief that many of the Grimms' tales and magic tales in general evoke. This suspension of disbelief, according to Dégh, allows us to identify with heroes who [End Page 34] gain control over an environment different from our everyday world. In the second essay she discusses at length how this differs from the audience response to legends, tales which suggest uncontrollable forces invading our everyday environment, requiring either belief or disbelief. She finds the prevalence of horror legends in our society disturbing and sees the magic tale as a kind of antidote to them, one that Dégh calls, interestingly, a "representative of rationality" since it "demands from all those who listen to it, that they do not confuse the specific magic laws of the tale with the reality of the world." She finds also that if "the legend is a gloomy, alarming question, the tale is a comforting, reassuring, uplifting answer."

Maria Tatar, in "Folkloristic Phantasies: Grimm's Fairy Tales and Freud's Family Romance," (reprinted in part in this Quarterly) is concerned with exploring the nature of the pervasive similarity of content and structure in most fairy tales. She delineates various general theories to account for the similarity and is obviously on...

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