Throughout Europe children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hansel and Gretel. The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimm’s ‘fantasy’, Rolleke points out. ‘It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times.’
What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the ‘universal’ style of the writing, ‘you have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless.’
‘The tales allow us to express “our utopian longings”’, says Jack Zipes, ‘They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.’
Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic value of the Grimm’s stories, calling fairy tales the ‘great comforters’. By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers and hungry wolves, or by bringing our own interests to our reading of them, children find that the flexibility of interpretation allows them to master their anxieties for almost any time.
Questions
1. Heinz Rolleke said the abandoned children in tales
2. Bernhard Lauer said the writing style of the Grimm brothers is universal because they
3. Jack Zipes said the pursuit of happiness in the tales means they
4. Bruno Bettelheim said the therapeutic value of the tales means that the fairy tales