The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Bettelheim’s attitude to gender is contradictory. On the one hand, he stresses that all children can derive a personalized meaning from all fairy tales, regardless of the gender of the protagonist. For example, he shows how “Rapunzel,” a fairy tale in which the adolescent protagonist uses her long tresses to defy the sorceress and see her prince, was a favorite of both a seven-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy. The girl, who had suffered the loss of her biological mother and saw her father remarry, made an obvious identification with Rapunzel as “her stepmother was clearly the witch of the story, and she was the girl locked away in the tower” (131). Bettelheim adds that the girl’s sense of powerlessness also fed into the identification: The “‘witch had forcibly’ obtained” Rapunzel, “as her stepmother had forcibly worked her way into the girl’s life” (131). “Rapunzel” thus consoled the girl given that it reinforced her sense of autonomy and promoted the hopeful idea that a prince would come and rescue her from the situation.

While the girl’s experience in many ways paralleled Rapunzel’s and caused her to receive the most obvious form of consolation from the story, there was then the five-year-old boy from a single-parent family who was feeling insecure owing to his mother and grandmother’s temporary absences. This boy derived a unique meaning from the story. The elements that were important to him were the security of the tower in which the substitute mother (the sorceress) keeps Rapunzel, and the fact that Rapunzel could escape the situation through her muscular tresses, representing the strength of her own body. For the boy, “that one’s body can provide a lifeline reassured him that, if necessary, he would similarly find in his own body the source of his security” (17). Thus, when the boy’s main caretaker, his grandmother, was hospitalized, he derived consolation from the tale’s idea that he could rely on his own body to stay safe and grow up. Bettelheim concludes that the imagery and symbolism in the fairy tale has fluid and indirect applications and so can “have much to offer to a little boy even if the story’s heroine is an adolescent girl” (17). He implies that it is up to the child to derive meaning from the tale and they will do so in ways that are more creative and unpredictable than simply comparing their lives to those of the fairy tale protagonist. Still, there is some gender anxiety on Bettelheim’s part, as he seeks to reassure parents that this often-feminized form of literature will not emasculate their sons.

Even as Bettelheim argues that fairy tales about female protagonists can aid the development of young boys and so encourage empathy between the genders, he has the patriarchal tendency to portray the default child as male. This is obvious in his outdated use of the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to a theoretical, generalized child. While this practice reflects the academic style of the early 20th century, by the 1970s it had come under criticism by feminists for diminishing female subjectivity and experience.

Moreover, Bettelheim’s interpretations of female-centered fairy tales often reinforce harmful and limiting stereotypes about girls and women. He is not critical of the social and cultural contexts from which fairy tales arose or about their retrogressive messages about femininity and female fulfillment. This is evident in his discussion of the stepsisters in “Cinderella.” He makes clear that Cinderella, with her small feet, is the most desirable of the sisters, as her smallness contrasts with the largeness ascribed to males and is “especially feminine” (268). He writes that “to have such big feet that they don’t fit the slipper makes the stepsisters more masculine than Cinderella—therefore less desirable” (268). In order to fit the prescribed standard of feminine perfection, the sisters engage in “symbolic self-castration to prove their femininity” when they mutilate their feet in order to fit the slipper (268). Here, the stereotype of worthy, honest women like Cinderella, who are already perfect and only must be themselves to be desirable, is set against the stereotype of inadequate, dishonest women who deceive in order to fit an ideal. While Bettelheim believes that the child reader will identify with Cinderella, the stepsisters’ measures to become acceptable represent the bodily modifications women have perennially made in order to be more feminine and make men secure about their position. Some readers may therefore relate more to the sisters (and the culture that produced their anxieties) than to Cinderella’s good fortune. As these stepsisters do not fulfill the expectations of their gender, they do not meet a happy ending. While one could make the argument that the destruction of the stepsisters represents a destruction of vanity and deceit in the child’s psyche, the sisters being judged as lesser and unfeminine, based on patriarchal standards of bodily perfection, conveys a harmful message to young girls.

Although Bettelheim asserts that fairy tales can be interpreted in manifold ways and can serve children of both genders, his neglect of these tales’ patriarchal cultural and historical context limits his ability to sincerely affirm young girls’ identity. Instead, in Bettelheim’s interpretations, as in the tales themselves, girls are taught that they must form their identity within patriarchal expectations.