AIMEE BENDER: Bruno Bettelheim, who’s been critiqued a lot, has this beautiful thesis in his book The Uses of Enchantment, which is that fairy tales teach children how to live. The reason they want to hear them over and over again is that they’re learning about how to be. And fairy tales have to be dark because children have dark thoughts, and it actually is comforting to go to a dark place—that’s why he believes a happy ending is essential, because you get to come out of the dark place. You get to go to a scary spot that you kind of know is in your mind, and then you get to leave it. He says they’re really instructive, and why not extrapolate from that and say that they’re instructive throughout life, at any point of conflict. It’s like Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, a way to organize one’s own experience, or Joan Didion’s famous quote, “Well tell ourselves stories in order to live.” People use the term like, “Oh, you think it’s just a fairy tale,” as if it’s Disney-fied, which is a whole other animal. But I think if something is like a fairy tale, that means it allows space for darkness and terror and wonder and then redemption and growth. Stephanie Palumbo talks to Aimee Bender about her syllabus: the.blvr.org/UO1AWJ
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:24:58 +0000
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