Darnton vs. Bettelheim

Of the fairy tales introduced this week, the one I enjoyed most was “Faithful Johannes” because the story affirms the sacred bonds of loyalty, trust, and fair lordship that belonged to hierarchies of the past. Johannes is without a doubt an exemplary character, and the idea that one’s loyalty could lead to one’s demise, and even be mistaken for disloyalty, is not completely absent from other genres and always makes for something to think about. By sacrificing his own children, the young king affirms the kingly quality of justice, which completes the bond between him and Johannes, which allows for their immortalization in the stories end.

Many of the stories have people falling into riches or great luck for little reason at all. Some are rotten characters such as the one who wanted to learn about “the creeps,” and others gave away all they had, such as the character in “the Star Coins.” There is little to suggest of a “morality” in this tales as Bruno Bettelheim suggests. While the tales occasionally suggest good behavior for readers, there never appears any sort of “moral imperative” for characters in their actions, rather, their goodness or badness manifests itself genuinely and naturally. There is no “searching for meaning” in these tales either. Rather, the institutions and ways of life such as marriage and work provide the characters their “meaning.” Completely absent is any sort of theoretical construct that Bettelheim suggests readers can find in these texts. By contrasting the emptiness and pointlessness of modern mass society to that of the one found in the Grimm tales, Bettelheim does make a good point though. In their world, as “primitive” as it was, society at least had firm structures and roles that gave individuals natural and fulfilling lives that made sense and served higher purpose. Bettelheim’s anxieties are justified due to modern life’s lack of sense, but his solutions are illusory. The “daydreams” he describes were real life for the people who created these oral tales, and Freud’s “courageous struggles” weren’t some sort of “inner tussle,” but rather describing real world struggles that allowed for one’s maturity and initiation into higher life through official institutions like marriage.

(I wrote this before reading the prompt)

Darnton’s article is more convincing. He rejects the application of Freudian theory to these tales by blatantly explaining that violence and sex were embedded into them explicitly, they didn’t have to live in the Bourgeois vacuum of the Freudian writers. His claim that it is possible to reconstruct close to the exact copies of stories of unwritten peasant oral tradition seems conceivable. It is very interesting how the same tales could appear in different cultures, yet maintain their own sort of details and effects that would remain unique to that particular culture. His pointing out that the texts never give much detail into a specific setting seems natural to me, as these stories were meant to provide advice and explanations that could apply universally and help the young who would hear these stories make good decisions and judgments. By attempting to fill in specificities, it would have clouded this purpose.

The two are mutually exclusive because Bettelheim takes Freudian theory at face value and reads its significance into the stories, while Darnton seeks more natural meaning in the tales.