Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Darnton on Fairy Tales
I believe that Robert Darnton did a better job with explaining how fairy tales are more than children's stories. Firstly, Bettelheim's main goal was to prove that they are indeed needed for growing and intellectually developing children, and he does a fine job of explaining it. However, it makes it hard to think of them as specifically useful in any other way. Darnton, rather, argues about their effectiveness in tracing historical facts about their respective cultures, and the ways in which oral story telling progress from teller to teller, and from society to society.
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I think that Darnton's description of the importance of the storyteller to the meaning of the fairy tale is very interesting, especially in the problems it creates for analyzing fairy tales. The fairy tales progressed from teller to teller, not only in the details but also in the manner in which the story was performed. Darnton calls attention to the importance of sound effects and body language in dramatizing the fairy tale and adding to overall meaning. These facts call into question the ability of the modern reader to fully understand the fairy tale as it was presented to contemporary listeners.
ReplyDeleteVery true, the modern reader, and analysts like Bettleheim, only read the stories on paper, they have never experienced them in the oral or performance way that they were originally meant to be told. It is easy to deconstruct a character into a symbol if they are on paper, but the earlier audiences would have identified and seen themselves within the story. Not that they believed the stories to be real, but more that the stories reflected their lives and struggles in a way that created a dreamlike and more optimistic outlook on life.
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