IN DEFENCE OF FAIRY TALES

Evening Star, Issue 21630, 27 January 1934, Page 2

IN DEFENCE OF FAIRY TALES

[Amauki, Wili.iams-Ellis, in the ‘ Spectator.’] “ How can you confuse their minds with such stuff? ‘ Why goats have short tails,’ indeed, ‘ Why the owl cries.’ Why tell children all that rubbish, when real facts are much more interesting?” Thus do some rail against the tellers of fairy tales. These critics object further that half the traditional folk-tales that we unregenerates tell our children are bloodthirsty and immoral, and that such ill morals are none the better for being dressed up. Attractive fal-lals of little gnomes and lovely princesses and amiable beasts make them all tbe more dangerous. Now can we, who unashamed and unrepentant, continue to 1 retail to the young tales of dragons, mermaids, witches, boggarts, lobs, billy-blins, and talking toads, say anything in our own defence, and in refutation of criticism which is supported by many intelligent people, among others- by that great authority Mauame Moutessori? We can say a great deal, nor can we ■be forced for a moment into taking up the Barrie standpoint, and demanding of children that they should say that they “ believe in fairies.” The case for tlie fairy tale is this. Jn the first place the Western twentieth century child gets so much enjoyment from folk-tales largely for the very reason that he does not believe in fairies. He never supposes the story of tbe Red Ettin to be an eccentric form of natural history. Fairy tales speak in parables. The witch, the dragon, the dark forest, and the wide river are symbols which are comprehensible to the primitive mind, whether of child or savage, all over the world—as comprehensible and much more universal than that of The Lamb in religion, and The Flag in nationalism to the grown-up Western. In the child, and in the original tellers of folk-tales, ' the almost unchanging, unconscious mind predominates, and to this unconscious mind fairy tales are statements, - sometimes with a moral, and sometimes without, about happenings not in the outer world, but in the world of the unconscious. The symbolism of some fairy tales is, of course, perfectly straightforward and any of us can translate it. In stories of the ‘ Beauty and the Beast ’ type, for instance, the moral is so plain as to be almost explicit. They are almost allegories. The young girl fears love—that is, is afraid of the shaggy, uncouth. Beast. All the delights of his garden and the beauty of his palace cannot reconcile her to him. But when—in some versions of the fable through pity of the poor, kindly, clumsy creature’s distress, or in others out of gratitude—she accepts love, she finds there was nothing to be afraid of after all. Beast or Toad proves to have been human all along; and turns at last, visibly, into the Handsome Prince. But what, the critic may ask, about the frightening story, the bloodthirsty Blue Beard story? How are we to account for the fact that children like such stories, and that oven timid children —who sometimes find them terrifying—find them fascinating? Isn’t this “morbid”? We must look, I hold, for the explanation along such lines as these. Most children, and certainly all timid children, suffer from unconscious fears. At six I was afraid of skulls and skeletons which haunted the room where I slept. Some other children of that age with whom 1 was intimate were inconvenienced by the fact that the landing of their London house was the haunt, of an evening, of a large number of wolves with shining eyes. To them, and to five, the bloodthirsty, , frightening fairy tale acted not as a confirmation of our fears, but as a release from them. (As a preliminary it.should be noted that we found it easy to slip into the alternative symbolism of other fairy tales so that our skeletons and wolves were personified just as easily in witches, giants, or Redcaps.) The relief came to us in four ways. First it was companionable to know that we were not alone, and that other people had had these same terrifying feelings about the world. We censed to be isolated coiVards or criminals. Second, it was reassuring to find that in such fairy tales “ the good ” always triumphed. Sometimes it was a Hero who killed the dragon, sometimes a Poor. Little Tailor, or even a little girl like Mollie Whuppic (no older surely than that very little gill who, between ourselves, was so frightened of wolves or skeletons), who by courage and cunning, triumphed over huge and terrifying Hostile forces. Third, our emotions had had free play. Yon did not have to have humanitarian feelings about a dragon. If we frightened ones (frightened in spite of good homes and kind parents) were to experience the fourth source of relief, the fairy tale had to be really good, in certain cases it had to be one cast in the romantic vein. Shelley somewhere in his ‘Defence of Poetry ’ uses a phrase to the effect that -in the presence of beauty the soul opens itself like a flower to receive the influence of wisdom. The best fairy tales have the potency of good poetry. In them the beauty of words and imagery, the use of refrain, and all the smooth cunning engines of good literature are used to enrich and ennoble a problem that in reality may be drab enough, and so they produce an effect unbelievably consolatory to the sensitive child. Sometimes, however, the skill of the best folk-tale tellers lias used tbe other approach to the purgation of the passions, the approach of mirth. The giant proves to be so stupid that clever Jack can induce him to slit bis own gizzard, or trick him by some absurdlly simple device, or the whole treatment of Die story reduces dragon and sinister goblin to "mere - figures of fun. The child emerges from the encounter with the Powers of Evil with laughter and a sense of condescension. But how about some of the stories that seem to have no moral, not even a bud one?

Now. all observant parents and most other poqple who have made a long study of children know that the emotional difficulties that they feel can sometimes be very complex. For example. the older child feels very great love and tenderness for a bably brother or sister, but this feeling will change at .times into equally real jealousy, deepening occasionally into real, if pasi sive. hatred and rage. Tbe child will have this double attitude for parents,

and, indeed, for most of the other human beings, greater or smaller than itself, with whom it conies into emotional contact. So that a child constantly experiences a very complicated criss-cross of loves and hates, generosities and meannesses, which a little over-tiredness, stomach-ache,-or a disappointment will from time > to time exacerbate to the flash point of an explosion of “ night terrors,” tears, or tantrums.

We should most of us have great difficulty in stating these tensions. So, perhaps, human nature being what it is, we ought not to feel annoyed that all folk-tales are not simple like ‘ Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘ Cinderella,’ ‘ Perseus and Andromeda,’ or ‘ The Three Little Pigs ’ (an allegory which has just taken America by storm). Some folk-tales undoubtedly seem unreasonable and difficult to translate, So do some real life situations. Nor, of course—and this is to he emphatically remembered—are the folk tales ever intended to be explicitly stated. Was it a criticism of “ Maud ” or of the Scientist when that worthy said he “ Couldn’t see that it proved anything”? . Let us summarise this defence, this hypothesis. Folk tales delight the twentieth century Western child and are of the greatest value to him largely just because he dees not believe they correspond to external reality, hut move free in a simplified diagram world. When scientifically minded people say: “Don’t, tell your children lies about why magpies make untidy nests,” they are confusing two different things. The normal child gets no misinformation about the material, external world from such stories, but it does get information about the internal world of its own imagination and emotions, and gets it coupled with a real measure of relief from unconscious fears.