Cinderella analysed by Bruno Bettelheim


Cinderella has been considered the one of the simplest but most interesting and complete fairy tales of all times. The Austrian philosopher, Bruno Bettelheim, considers this known story has a deep meaning to bare in mind.
In his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim offers an extended Freudian's analysis of the characters, themes and different objects readers can find in the tale.
The key conflict of the story is sibling rivalry which is one of the humanity oldest problems, involves hostility between brothers and sisters and may turn itself into situations of different stages ranging from simple and common children's fights to a continuous hatred between adult siblings. Bettelheim uses Cain and Able from the Bible to support this idea of rivalry.
Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters make her work hard all the time while they just rest and see her working and go on demanding her more things to do: cleaning, sweeping, sewing, any homework they want. Consequently, she also has to deal with the oppression from who have power over her and do not appreciate her effort at all. On top of that, her stepsisters make fun of her when she wants to go to the ball. Bruno Bettelheim connects this issue to jealously, a form of sibling rivalry: he explains that a child's mind may cope with this when feeling jealous of his more talent brother or sister and especially because of his lack of confidence in himself and low self-esteem.
Bettelheim also mentions how devastated a child can be by these human miseries. For this author, Cinderella is a way children use to be able to face conscious and unconscious unpleasant feelings towards the members of their families. Cinderella helps them to deal with these issues and gives them the opportunity of splitting the two parts of a parent's role into a nurturing person, like the dead mother and a frightening evil person, the respurceful stepmother. Moreover, kids find hope in this tale for one day they will be rescued from their sad background as it happens to Cinderella. However, he claims that children reject those versions of the story in which the stepsisters are forgiven after all, as it offends children's sense of justice.
It is important to highlight that Bettelheim also points out different elements that have a special connotation:
* Ashes are considered as a trope in German folklore, the insecurities and aggessions between siblings, a child's masochistic desires to be treated like Cinderella and his dreadful feelings of worthlessness. The nest of ashes where Cinderella sits also embodies human misery and hopeless: she is a suffering young woman who serves cruel and wicked mistresses. Apart from this, ashes involve other negative symbols: pain, dirtyness and pollution. One of the central themes in the tale is bereavement, and this is evident in the symbolism of ashes since they reflect loss, death and grieving. Besides, Bettelheim also finds a positive meaning for the same element: purification: grey substance without is impurity. Cinderella gets her name from her role of hearth-keeper: while taking care of the fireplace, gets soots and cinders over her.
* Cinderella sitting by the fire is related to Vestal Virgins' duties who took care of the Holly fire serving godness Hera.
* The branch is a symbol of motherhood and godness. Oedipal conflict to be overcome, and it also counts as a falic symbol.
* Hard tasks are obstacles and previous steps necessary to reach happiness.
* Her escaping from the ball represents the young woman's desire not to be appreciated only by her physic appearance. Besides, it is sexually ambivalent: it shows her fear to lose virginity and it is also a way to protect herself. In spite of that, her going to the ball several times before giving herself to the prince reflects her desires to commit herself personally and sexually.
* Cinderella's father destroying her hides embodies a sexual attack: he does not want the prince to take her daughter. On the contrary, it also has a positive meaning: there are no more hides for her, from now on she has to face adult sexuality.
* The trap on the stairs has the aim to rob her virginity.
* The slipper and the foot are both fetishistic elements: the former is a symbol of the vagina, while the latter symbolizes the penis. He also finds echoes of menstruation in toes and heels cut off, and purity in the slipper.
* The mutilation of the stepsisters' feet involves forms of castration. Furthermore, their blindness made them think autocastration would bring them sexual happiness.
* The ball lasting three days is connected to a Christian number: three days passed before Christ's resuscitation.
* The fairy godmother in Pierrot's version is the sustitute mother, she appears to compensate the mothering absence.

Once upon a time in a far away kingdom... if you want to go on reading these marvellous fairy tales, just choose one and click:

l Charles Pierrot

Perrault's Fairy Tales:

* Little Red Riding Hood.
* Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper

* Sleeping Beauty
* The Master Cat or Puss in Boots.

* Little Tom Thumb.

* The Fairies

* Ricky of he Tuft.

* Bluebeard.

lGrimms Brothers' Fairy Tales:

More stories to enjoy yourself...

lChristian Hans Andersen's Tales

There's still more fun for kids!

Maria Tatar is a Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She teaches Literature for children, Folklore and German Studies at Harward University where she also chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythodology. In her books, including The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales (1987), Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (1992) , The Artificial-Silk Girl (2002), The Classic Fairy Tales (1999), she analyses fairy tales from a sociological point of view for she explores their historical and social origins and the different forms these tales have had over time, their evolution, especially in Anglo-European popular culture, as well as she questions about their psychological dynamics with issues of national identity and gender.

The author of The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (2002), Secrets Beyond the Door: "Bluebeard" in Folklore, Fiction and Film (2006), The Annotated Brothers Grimm (2004) and The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (published in 2007), also takes into account the harsher aspects of these stories originally written for adults: incest, murder, infanticide, cannibalism and multilation, and that had been removed or excised after their authors noticed that parents were reading those books to their children.

Furthermore, this leading expert in the field of Literature for Children and Folklore takes examples from some of the best-known fairy tales archetypes and compares them to similar tales from around the world pointing out common topics and themes. In addition, Maria Tatar has analysed skillfully the different versions of a same story at different historical moments and geographical places, and highlighted how the characters have evolutionated according to the different cultures, different societies and eras. On top of that, she has presented unknown versions of the tales from a feminist point of view.

Maria Tatar argues that telling frightening stories with hostiles characters and dark aspects (like death, loss of one parent, anxiety, kids dying at the end of the tales, cruelty and fears) to young children is a way adults use to mistreat and discipline them. She claims that is time to stop casting children as villans, but to help them to understand how to live in a world ruled by adults. For this reason, she explains classics should play a key role in the lives of young readers who definitely love stimulation and visuals and really enjoy fairy tales.

Kieran Egan was born in Ireland in 1942, but educated in England. He is an educational philosopher who has written about Education and Child's development. He is the director of the Imaginative Educational Research Group and currently works at Simon Fraser University. He graduated at the University of London in 1966, worked in secondary schools for two years and during a year at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston-upon-Thames. After that he moved to the USA where he started his career of Philosophy of Education at Stanford University. In 1991 he was granted the Grawemeyer Award in Education and two years later was elected as the first person in Education to the Royal Society of Canada. From that moment onwards he received many other prizes because of his work.
He wrote more than twenty books including: Imagination in Teaching and Learning and Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits and clockwork Oranges. In 1997 he published his major work, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive tools shape our understanding; Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: our progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey and Jean Piaget (2002) and Teaching literacy: engaging the imagination of new readers and writers (2006).

Kieran Egan created the Imaginative Pedagogy, an extremely new approach about education in which he points out the importance of imagination and fantansy as two essential elements to make learning meanful.

He tries to change the traditional focus on education according to which children learn if they undergo from the concret thinking to the abstract one. It is assumed that children's thinking is concrete, simple and engaged with their local experience, and that children's learning starts from what is known by them. He wonders how if that is so and children's minds are restricted to the everyday details of their social lives, why they are plenty of talking animanls, monsters and emotions. For this reason, Egan explains it cannot be justified that children are not taught History on their first forms at school because they lack the necessary abstract knowledge to understand it. All the contrary, this author indicates that children own the tools they need to give sense to History, learn about the past, understand the struggle for freedom and that they may use those concepts to learn about aspects of the world and experience.

For Egan, the traditional educational theory does not take into account the most valuable tools young learners have and use to give meaning to their experience and to the new information they are exposed to: these tools are imagination and fantasy.

He claims educational institutions should be less political and pay more attention to children's emotions. Consequently, he insists on the development of knowledge according to the level of comprehension of the world every child has.

The author of Teaching as Story Telling describes three stages of cognitive development: oral language, literacy tools and abstract thinking. The first one includes cognitive tools like tales, rhythm, jokes, plays, humour, fears, passions, metaphors, mystery and hopes. The second stage involves a sense of wonder and reality, idealism, revolt and leterate eye; and finally, a search for authority and truth, a sense of abstract reality and a sense of agency form part of the theoretical thinking. The acquisition of these tools leads students to their educational development.

Moreover, his theory promotes creativity in the classroom. His main purpose is to engage, stimulate and develope children's imagination and cope with the connection between the latter, emotion and learning. To get this goal he encourages teachers to use different strategies to activate students' fantasy and emotions.

Egan is convinced that children's imagination may become the basis for a successful learning and drive them to increase creativity and flexibility. However, this issue is a difficult stuff to deal with. According to him, generating images from words is relevant to imaginative development. In spite of that, traditional education almost prevents students from doing that by providing them with stereotypical features and images all the time interrupting their fantansy.

He draws on the curriculum content as a whole emphasising that the different areas of the curriculum (language, social studies, maths, science, art) should be shaped to help achieve this aim and supply what he notices as lacking: an educational theory that stresses imagination. He says it is necessary to incorporate learning activities which outline prominent characteristics of students'creativity in order to awaken imagination and intelligence in the classroom.

His approach puts meaning-centre stage. He focuses on children's fantasy stories: Egan considers crucial to know how to use the power of the story form (that is cultural universal) to teach any content in a meanful and clear way. Kieran Egan explains that story reflects an elemental and mightful form through which people make sense of the world and experience. Knowing that children are enthusiastically engaged by stories he has designed a model that highlights the power of the story form itself and employs that power in teaching. In his studies he describes some elements of stories like the binary opposites (good/bad; brave/cowardy; truth/lie; peace/violence) which are present in nearly all fairy tales and are powerful tools for acquiring, organizing and categorizing complex forms of knowledge. He considers these elements vital since they allow kids understand fairy tales in which animals and innanimate beings talk although through their experience they know that is not real, as well as to prove the significant power those tales have on children very early in life in all cultures with no time.

VLADIMIR PROPP
This Russian linguistic was born on 17 April, 1895, in St. Petersburg.
Between 1914 and 1918 Propp studied Russian and German philology at St. Petersburg State University and was a faculty member of the Department of Russian Literature until his death in 1970.
After collecting hundred of stories from oral tradition in his country, Propp analysed the deep structure of those tales and identified certain patterns and recurrig roles that represented the imagination of the popular culture. In addition, he found out a series of functions which appeared in the construction of the characters and settings of the narratives.
He published those findings in 1928 in his Morphology of the Folk Tales where he extended the Russian Formalist apprach to the study of the the basic components of Russian folk stories.
Propp argued that folk tales were born of popular imagination and developed over generations in different communities.
He also wrote The Historical Roots of Fairy Tales (1946), Russian Heroic Epics (1958) and Russian Agrarian Feast-days (1963).
He was recognized as one of the inventors of structuralism. His successors, Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas, spred Propp's taxonomy to look for the narrative elements in the whole contemporary culture.
Propp identified different types of characters and kinds of actions in a hundred traditional Russian folk tales and was able to arrive at the conclusion that there were thirty-one generic functions and seven sorts of heroes who appeared like archetypes common for all fairy tales. Although these constant elements were not present in every story, he discovered that all the narratives he analysed, displayed the functions in a unvarying sequence. He highlighted five categories of elements that define the tale as a whole:

• Functions as dramatis personae (character roles of the fairy tale)
• Conjunctive elements (announcement of misfortune).
• Motivations (reasons and aims)
• Forms of appearance of the dramatis personae.
• Attributive elements or accessories.

The thirty-one elements Vladimir Propp pointed out are the following :

1. ABSENTATION: a member of the family abandons the home environment for some reason.
2. PROHIBITION: the hero is warmed against something.
3. TRANSGRESSION: the prohibition is violated because the hero ignores the interdiction and goes ahead.
4. RECONNAISSANCE: the hero and the villain come into contact for first time. The villain makes an attempt at searching for something valuable or trying to catch someone.
5. DELIVERY: the villain receives information about the victim.
6. TRICKERY: the villain tries to gain confidence of his victim.
7. COMPLICITY: the hero acts in a way that helps the villain without knowing it.
8. VILLIANY and LACK: the villain causes some harm to one member of the family or a member lacks something.
9. MEDIATION: misfortune is made known by the hero who also discovers the villain's performance.
10. COUNTER-ACTION: the hero makes the most important decision to provoke a turning point in the story.
11. DEPARTURE: the hero leaves home.
12. TEST: the donor tests the hero to prepare him for the reception of magic support.
13. REACTION OF THE HERO: he fails the test.
14. GIFT: the hero is given a magical object.
15. TRIP: the hero is transferred to another kingdom to search for an object.
16. STRUGGLE: the hero and the villain face off in direct combat.
17. BRAND: the hero is wounded.
18. VICTORY: the hero defeats the villain or the latter is killed while sleeping/in combat or banished.
19. AMENDMENT: misfortune is resolved.
20. RETURN: the hero comes back home.
21. PERSECUTION: the hero is pursued or someone tries to kill him.
22. HELP: the hero is rescued and saved from pursuit.
23. UNRECOGNIZED hero arrives home.
24. FALSE HERO presents and claims achievements that are not founded.
25. DEFFAULT TASK: a difficult and complex mission is given to the hero.
26. COMPLIANCE: the hero successes when carrying out the difficult mission.
27. RECOGNITION: the hero is recognized as such.
28. UNMASKING: the false hero is exposed.
29. TRANSFIGURATION: the hero changes his look.
30. PUNISHMENT: the villain is punished.
31. WEDDING TRIUMPHANT: the hero rescues the princess, marries her and is given the throne.

BRUNO BETTELHEIM

BRUNO BETTELHEIM ( a Jewish philosopher who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1930).
Between 1938 and 1939 he was in two concentration camps in Austria and he was released before the Second World War took place. After that, he immigrated as a refugee to the United States in 1939. Some months later he became an American citizen.
After his days in the concentration camps, he published an article in which he described the dynamics there. Despite the fact that many people knew about the cruelty suffered by the prisoners in such places, up to that moment nobody had ever talked about that so openly. When the Second World War finished and Auschwitz became famous for the large number of Jewish killed there, everybody got to know that his words hadn’t been in vain.
As a Director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a home that treated emotionally disturbed children, Bettelheim became known especially for his work with autistic children. He made changes and set up an appropriate caring environment for a new therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults .
In The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, Bettelheim supported the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism in which, he said that this illness had an emotional origin rather than a neurological condition. He claimed that autism was caused by the emotional frigidity of the children’s mothers who were cold and distant, and the lack of stimuli during the first years of life, when language and motor skills developed. Consequently, many mothers of these children suffered from blame and guilt because of the belief that autism resulted from their inadequate parenting. In contrast, Bettelheim assured that a child would internalize the care and love experienced during his childhood only if he was treated with loving care. This attitude of the parents would help a child build up his self-esteem, and the child, in turn, would wish to care and protect himself and his own body.
Most of his work was influenced by his dreadful experience in the concentration camps and he also related autistic children to conditions in those camps. Bettelheim used the poem Togesfuge (the English version, Death fugue)written by Paul Celan (1) about the death camps, with its famous description of "black milk", and compared his terrible experience there with the carelessness of a mother towards her child and her unconscious desire of death. He said that when one was forced to drink black milk from sunrise to sunset, whether in the camps of Nazi Germany or while lying in a luxury cradle, if there was a deep unconscious death wish, in either situation, a living soul had death for a master.
In his writings in which he covered a wide range of topics, he insisted on the idea of feeling guilty because he managed to survive in the concentration camps.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Bettelheim analysed fairy tales in terms of Freudian pychology: he believed that traditional fairy tales, with the darkeness of abandonment, rivalry, witches and death, allowed a child to wrestle with his fears. If he could read and interpret these stories in his own way, Bettleheim suggested, he would have a greater sense of meaning. This author thought that if a child managed to developed a strong ego when very young, he would be able to face difficult situations more easily when grown up by engaging with these socially evolved stories. In addition, he would be better prepared for his future experiences.

On top of that, this psychologist described how the child's imagination was served by romantic stories, especially the ones that foster the child's developing mind. As well as, Bettelheim highlighted the important collaboration of parent and child in sharing fairy tales to improve the child's developing sensibilities.

Not only did a kid need those skills, but also a moral education communicated and taught through fairy tales.

He also discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including the ones considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim suffered from depression and in 1990 he committed suicide.


References:
Bruno Bettelheim From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim. Autism World available at www.autism-world.com/index.php/2007/03/20/bruno-bettelheim/
In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim available at www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9706/articles/finn.html -
(1) Paul Celan Romanian poet (1920-1970) who was also a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp in Poland and committed suicide after being liberated.

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