Bettelheim vs Darnton

I believe that Bettelheim's argument has some validity to it, even though I don't quite agree with his attempts to "restore meaning" to disturbed children, as though as a result of being "disturbed," they have no meaning in their life. Bettelheim says that there are two important methods that help a child evolve so that he can understand reality. The first is the impact that the child's parent has on him, and the second is transmitting cultural heritage through literature. I have to agree with his statement that "when children are young, it is literature that carries such information best" (269), and I have to add that even when a person is no longer young, he is still drawn to the fairy tale. Bettelheim argues that literary fairy tales help people find meaning in their lives because it has the power to enhance reality, it allows the reader to see his own life in a different light. I think Bettelheim realizes that people, young and old, are drawn to the fairy tale because they see that in fairy tales, struggles and hardships are overcome, and so they are given hope to overcome struggles in their own lives.

A point where I see Bettelheim and Darnton overlapping ideas is that the "dominant culture wishes to pretend...that the dark side of man does not exist" (272). While Bettelheim argues that this is unhealthy for children to only be exposed to "happily ever after" endings, Darnton focuses more on the evolution of fairy tales, and he does not really look at how it affects the human being as Bettelheim does. Darnton shows that a supposedly familiar fairy tale has a twisting and ever-changing past in the oral tradition.

Essentially though, Darnton asks the same question as Bettelheim, by asking "How can the historian make sense of this world?" Lo and behold, one of the elements is folklore, or the fairy tale. Both Bettelheim and Darnton appear to be looking for meaning through fairy tales. Bettelheim focuses on the "meaning" in life that humans, (specifically children), extract from fairy tales, while Darnton looks at "meaning" in a cultural sense, and how the changes fairy tales have undergone are specific to a region. An example would be that the German tales differ from the French in that they have a "tone of terror and fantasy," whereas the French have more "humor and domesticity" (290). These aspects help to define what kind of effect the story had on the people in that particular region.

Darnton's strongest argument is that the fairy tale has lost a historical aspect by turning into a literary genre, and that originally, it was meant to be told aloud. This is a crucial point that Bettelheim seems to skip over, as he only examines how literary, recorded fairy tales affect children. Wouldn't they have a greater effect on children, and on people in general, if they were told with facial expressions, hand gestures, scary voices, etc.? Darnton makes a good point that the oral devices used in story telling helped to shape a historical meaning that is now lost in modern day recorded literature. Does this mean that now, we accept the fairy tales as they are recorded? Will they stop evolving because they are written down?

I come to the conclusion that Bettelheim and Darnton complement each other through their differences of opinion because they analyze different aspects of the fairy tale, so one argument cannot be more "right" than the other, they can only help to enhance the meaning of the fairy tale.