Darnton most definitely makes the more convincing argument of the two. Instead of giving broad generalizations on how children behave and respond to certain stimuli (like the fairytale), Darnton gives concrete examples of the way these "original" fairytales would have been told: "Bettelheim reads 'Little Red Riding Hood' and the other tales as if they had no history. He treats them, so to speak, flattened out, like patients on a couch, in a timeless contemporaneity. He does not question their origins or worry over other meanings that they might have had in other contexts because he knows how the soul works and how it has always worked. In fact, however, folktales are historical documents" (Darnton, 283 The Classic Fairy Tales). Instead of constructing the tale he wants to fulfill his own agenda, in Bettelheim's case this is Freudian psychoanalysis, Darnton stays true to the folklore and anthropology of the tales; the French "Red Riding Hood," for example, would never have been told to a child simply because of its explicit sex and violence.
Darnton's theory that the simplicity of these tales were how they'd originally have been done makes a lot of sense. They came from an oral tradition, one where the storyteller could embellish the minor details and keep the main points of the story: "...the dramatic pauses, the sly glances, the use of gestures to set scenes--a Snow White at a spinning wheel, a Cinderella delousing a stepsister--and the use of sounds to punctuate actions-- a knock on the door (often done by rapping on a listener's forehead) or cudgeling or a fart" (287, The Classic Fairy Tales). This oral tradition is how so many different deviations of the same tale came to be throughout different towns and countries; the details might be different, but the story remains the same.
It's pretty impossible to think that both of these theories could coexist side by side: one's based on concrete facts and the other's based on subjective interpretation.
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Faith,
ReplyDeleteI like your imagery of Bettelheim's thoughts on the tale. I agree that his reading of them was probably "flat" as you put it, and he reduces the values of these stories to that of mere utility by saying there value is in "helping" people. There value is much deeper than that of course, it is a blueprint into a culture of old.
Darnton explains to us how although we may not be able to take everything in the written stories at face value, we can take the general themes and plots of the stories as genuine artifacts of the old European culture. By showing us that these stories were very similar, we can understand that Europe's country side was truly united to an extent as evidenced by their shared culture.
Faith,
ReplyDeleteI like your imagery of Bettelheim's thoughts on the tale. I agree that his reading of them was probably "flat" as you put it, and he reduces the values of these stories to that of mere utility by saying there value is in "helping" people. There value is much deeper than that of course, it is a blueprint into a culture of old.
Darnton explains to us how although we may not be able to take everything in the written stories at face value, we can take the general themes and plots of the stories as genuine artifacts of the old European culture. By showing us that these stories were very similar, we can understand that Europe's country side was truly united to an extent as evidenced by their shared culture.
Faith,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you on the fact that some of the original fairy tales were meant for adults and not for children, however, I think that toward the end of Bettelheim's argument, he makes the point that sometimes children need to read about unhappiness, that today's stories have been altered so much that they don't make sense. (Such as the example in class with the pig feeling sad.) I really like your second paragraph about the fairy tale as an oral tradition, but I think what you may have looked over is that Bettelheim looks at the literary fairy tale and Darnton looks at the transformation of the oral fairy tale. More than likely, without different expressions and voices that come with telling a story out loud, when the fairy tale is transferred onto paper, the characters are not as vibrant as they might have been when told orally. I also don't think that you can dismiss Bettelheim's argument of the impact of the fairy tale on the human being.
Yes, Bettelheim may come off as being very general in his argument, and Darnton appears to have done more research, but I feel like both arguments are necessary to understanding the past and the future of fairy tales, and that the arguments have the ability to coexist.