THE EXPEDIENCE OF ANXIETY AND PLEASURE: A KLEINIAN APPROACH TO FAIRY TALES BY JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
by
Yanna Philippou
A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Thessaloniki
2013
THE EXPEDIENCE OF ANXIETY AND PLEASURE: A KLEINIAN APPROACH TO FAIRY TALES BY JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
by
Yanna Philippou
A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervising Committee:
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas (Emeritus Professor, School of English)
Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou (Emeritus Professor, School of English)
Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou (Professor, School of English)
Thessaloniki
2013
Abstract
The year 2012 marked two hundred years from the publication of the first edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Nursery and Household Tales. The international celebrations of the bicentenary, ranging from academic conferences to reworkings of the tales themselves in a variety of cultural contexts, testify to the enduring fascination that the tales continue to exercise on numerous and heterogeneous audiences all over the world. Based on the presupposition that literature and psychoanalytic theory function as communicating repositories of narratives, I attempt a parallel reading of paradigmatic texts of the Grimms and Klein, in order to highlight the way they mutually inform each other. While primarily synchronic in orientation, the thesis also employs a diachronic approach to the writing and reception of the Grimm tales and the life and psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.
Born in 1882 Vienna, Klein was brought up in a cultural environment where the Grimm tales had become institutionalized as the primary entertaining and educational narratives for children. Klein’s theories of psychic development stemmed from the analysis of children who were in turn brought up in a similar cultural milieu. This congruence, I argue, is reflected in some of Klein’s theoretical papers and recently-available clinical notes, which include imagery, symbols and structures often found in the Grimm tales.
It is my contention that the Grimm tales exercised an indirect yet formative influence on Klein’s theories. Simultaneously, however, a synchronic study of the two genres brings out their common structural and symbolic elements in a way that permits us to achieve a different understanding of the way the Grimm tales resonate with different audiences. Key
Kleinian concepts such as the centrality of the maternal in the formation of individual identity, anxiety as a prerequisite to symbolization, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions, the good internal object, all find their structural or symbolic equivalents in aspects of the tales. This mediation between psychoanalytic theory and the tales is facilitated by the ii use of Propp’s theory on the morphology of the folktale, a landmark text in the study of folklore, as well as by aspects of the work of psychoanalytically-oriented folklorist Alan
Dundes, whose work was built around the view that any collection of folklore, whatever its form, should be accompanied by informed attempts to situate folkloric elements within their cultural contexts as well as to provide interpretations of their possible use and significance for those who listen to or read them. iii
Acknowledgments
Writing a thesis is a quest in its own right, replete with questions, trials and wandering through intellectual woods till it comes to completion. It is also always the result of an active
– and indispensable – support network. I am first and foremost indebted to my supervisor Dr.
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas for her invaluable support and contribution. Her supervision provided me with all the help and guidance possible, as well as with the necessary boundaries that helped me chart my course in a vast academic plane. Words cannot do justice to her warmth, kindness, generosity and wisdom, which extend well beyond any academic obligations, and which will always remain with me as an example of what it means to be an inspiring teacher.
My two co-supervisors, Dr. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou and Dr. Ekaterini Douka-
Kabitoglou, responded promptly and graciously to all queries, while providing facilitating and encouraging feedback. I have had the privilege of being their student throughout my academic trajectory as an undergraduate and postgraduate student of the Department of
English Language and Literature; this has been a scholarly experience which I will always treasure and do my best to honor in my own field of work. My gratitude extends to the staff at the School’s library and administration, which helped smooth over the difficulties stemming from my undertaking this project from afar.
Special thanks go to my friends who have shared in my joy and worries and did not lose their faith in me even at times when I lost mine. My family has also been a source of constant support. My father, Thomas, set the example by being of an enquiring mind; although our choices are different, he has taught me the love of learning and of asking questions. My mother, Mary, supported me both emotionally and practically. She is a pillar of unwavering and enthusiastic encouragement, who undertook many obligations in order to provide me with a room of my own, both physically and mentally, in which to write. In this she was assisted by my mother-in-law, Vaia, who extended a helping hand each and every time she iv
was needed. My brother, Andreas, ascertained his faith in me with his own gentle,
unassuming manner. To my husband, Dimitris, I owe my thanks for his generosity of spirit.
While often disagreeing with my choices, he stood by me in good times and in bad, and his
constant challenges helped me retain my perspective. Finally, my deepest love goes to my
little fairytale daughter, Nephele, who is a constant reminder of the wondrous inherent in
everyday life. Because she often had to share her mom’s affection with her ink-and-paper sibling, it is to her I dedicate this thesis.
v
Table of Contents Introduction ...... 1
Part One: A Historical and Psychoanalytic Approach to the Grimm Tales and Kleinian
Theory
Introduction to Part One: Phantasy and Projective identification ...... 15
Chapter One. Once Upon a Time in Budapest: Beginnings ...... 23
Chapter Two. Second Only to the Bible: The Grimm Canon and the Fairy Tale Tradition .... 38
II...... 57
Chapter Three. Mapping Neverland in Berlin: The Psycho-Analysis of
Children…………...... 74
Chapter Four. The London Years: Fantasy, Phantasy and Symbolization in the Case of
Dick…..………………………………………………………………………………92
II. ……………………………………………………………………………..…….100
Chapter Five. Deeper Into the Woods: The Depressive Position and the Paranoid-Schizoid
Position……………………………………………………………….…...118
II. …………………………………………………………………………………...136
Part Two: The Tales
Introduction to Part Two……………………………………………………………149
Chapter Six. “Snow White” and Envy……………………………………………...152
Chapter Seven. Splits in the Self and in the Others: “|Mother Holle”, “The Three Little
Gnomes” and “The Golden
Goose”……………………………………………………………………………..179
Chapter Eight. The Wolf at the Door of the House in the Woods: Symbols of the Maternal in
“Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood”…………………195
ΙΙ...... 212
Chapter Nine. “All Fur” and “Cinderella”: The Depressive Position……………...232 vi
II. ...………………………………………………………………...... 251
Epilogue: Klein’s Legacy and the Relevance of the Grimm Tales Today:
Transitions………………………………………………………………………… 272
Works Cited………………………………………………………………………...282
vii
Introduction
It has become a truism in literary psychoanalytic criticism that psychoanalysis and literature are two discourses that have been implicated from the very beginning of the inception of psychoanalysis. Literature has provided psychoanalysis with what literary theorist Shoshana
Felman terms “the constitutive texture of its conceptual framework”, the boundaries between the two disciplines being artificially imposed, since literature traverses psychoanalysis:
“Literature is therefore not simply outside psychoanalysis, since it motivates and inhabits the very names of its concepts, since it is the inherent reference by which psychoanalysis names its findings” (9). In addition, leading theorist Peter Brooks states his conviction that literary works share common ground with mental processes as these have been described by means of analytic processes. In his Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) he writes:
We continue to dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary
criticism because we sense that there ought to be, that there must be, some
correspondence between literary and psychic process, that aesthetic structure
and form, including literary tropes, must somehow coincide with the psychic
structures and operations they both evoke and appeal to. (Brooks,
Psychoanalysis 25)
Literary works, then, have provided terminology and a testing ground for psychoanalysis, while psychoanalytic theory has assisted the production of insightful readings of literary texts, providing its own answers as to the fascination they exercise on their audiences.
In this implication of literature and psychoanalysis fairy tales as a distinct genre occupy a privileged position. The argument put forth by Felman is echoed in its line of reasoning by world-renowned folklorist Alan Dundes, who in turn and from the vantage point in his own field of studies claims an analogous relationship of implication between psychoanalysis and folklore. In his article “The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore” (1985), Dundes too poses the 2 question of authority and hierarchy in the relationship between psychoanalysis and folklore.
Asking whether an analyst is entitled to make use of the free associations of a patient in a clinical setting in order to interpret a Grimm tale, or whether a Grimm tale may shed light on a patient’s psychic troubles, he emphasizes the mutual beneficence and reciprocity between the two discourses (61).
Both Dundes and Brooks turn to tales by the Brothers Grimm to illustrate their arguments within their respective disciplines. Dundes links the psychoanalytic setting to tales by the Brothers Grimm, while Brooks provides a reading of “All Furs” before proceeding to readings of novels in his seminal work on narrative structure and plot, Reading for the Plot:
Design and Intention in Narrative (1992).
The tales collected and edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm can best be described as hybrid texts: they are primarily based on folkloric material but they also owe a lot to Wilhelm
Grimm’s editorial interventions and extensive rewriting. Liminal texts themselves as regards their place between oral narrative and written literature, they also occupy a privileged textual locus at that intersection where literature, folklore and analytic theory converge. The Grimm tales and psychoanalytic theory traverse each other to such an extent that it could be claimed they form each other’s unconscious. They are certainly not the same discourse; nevertheless, they are implicated to such a degree and in such a manner that each is the other, unto itself. It is important to note, Felman writes:
That in the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of
literature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious of psychoanalysis; that the
unthought-out shadow in psychoanalytic theory is precisely its own
involvement with literature; that literature in psychoanalysis functions
precisely as its “unthought”: as the condition of possibility and the self-
subversive blind spot of psychoanalytical thought. (Felman 10) 3
In 1919 renowned analyst Melanie Klein embarked on what was to be a creative and
influential career in psychoanalysis. Her first paper, on the merits of which she became a
member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society, was entitled “The Development of a
Child” (1921), a thinly veiled account of the analysis of her youngest son, Erich. It also
contains, albeit in embryonic form, most of the psychoanalytic concepts and issues on which
Klein would elaborate in the course of her psychoanalytic work. For any scholar interested in
the intersection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and psychoanalysis, “The Development
of a Child” is a seminal text, in that its references to the tales arguably constitute the text’s
unconscious, as I hope to show throughout this dissertation. More importantly, Klein
concludes her paper with a direct reference to the tales, writing:
I have particularly selected listening to Grimm’s tales without anxiety-
manifestations as an indication of the mental health of children because of all
the various children known to me there are only very few who do so. Probably
partly from a desire to avoid this discharge of anxiety a number of modified
versions of these tales have appeared and in modern education other less
terrifying tales, ones that do not touch so much – pleasurably and painfully –
upon repressed complexes are preferred. I am of opinion, however, that with
the assistance of analysis there is no need to avoid these tales but that they can
be used directly as a standard and an expedient. The child’s latent fear,
depending upon repression, is more easily rendered manifest by their help and
can be more thoroughly dealt with by analysis. (Klein, Love, Guilt and
Reparation [LGR] 52)
Implicitly critical of the “watered down” versions of the Grimm tales in circulation (in this foreshadowing her later adamant determination to keep pedagogical intervention as separate as possible from psychoanalytic processes), Klein certainly subsumed the tales to a 4
clinical purpose, emphasizing their expedience in bringing to light anxiety and pleasure
buried deeply within the self. Her words, however, imply simultaneous recognition of the
profundity of the Grimm tales, of their ability to resonate deeply with their audiences, in this
case of young children. In this light, as the title of my dissertation indicates, I borrow Klein’s
notion of the expedience of anxiety and pleasure in order to read tales by the Brothers Grimm
from a psychoanalytical – and more specifically a Kleinian – perspective.
Klein certainly saw (the use of) the tales as a means to a therapeutic end. While this is an aspect of the tales which does not fall directly within the scope of my thesis, I find the question as to why the specific tales were deemed expedient in bringing to light submerged affects of anxiety and pleasure challenging. Aiming to explore the common ground between the Grimm fairy tales and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, I attempt to provide a theoretical analysis and a reading which accounts for both the anxiety and the pleasure which the Grimm tales evoke in numerous and varying audiences.
The conjunction of psychoanalysis and fairy tales is, as already mentioned, not a new enterprise. Psychoanalytic theory interpreted (or simply expressed opinions on) the nature and function of fairy tales almost from its inception. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of
Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) is perhaps the most frequently-cited text in the field. Bettelheim reads his selected tales primarily from a Freudian perspective, as had others like Karl Abraham before him. Analyses of the genre were also taken up by thinkers of a Jungian background, such as Max Lüthi and Maria-Louiza von
Franz.
In contrast, the theory developed by Melanie Klein and her followers was and remains to date primarily oriented towards clinical psychoanalytic and psychiatric practice, although the relevance of Kleinian thought to non-psychoanalytic fields and practices is becoming more discernible. In his introduction to Other Banalities: Melanie Klein Revisited (2006), the 5
Canadian psychoanalyst and philosopher Jon Mills emphasizes this relevance and highlights
what he considers his unique contribution to the field of Kleinian studies, namely the diverse
backgrounds and concerns of the contributors to the volume he has edited. These
contributors, writes Mills, are from variegated backgrounds: practicing psychoanalysts,
psychologists and psychotherapists, along with academics in philosophy, sociology, religion,
social criticism and political science, all coming to the work of Melanie Klein as post-
Kleinians, in the sense that they view Klein with an expansionist and revisionist lens (4-5).
Mills’ assertion of the uniqueness of this enterprise should perhaps be taken with a grain of
salt, as scholars such as Mary Jacobus, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Michael and Margaret Rustin
and Meg Harris Williams, for example, have certainly read Klein in ways which do not
pertain exclusively to clinical settings. As Stonebridge and Phillips argue in their introduction
to Reading Melanie Klein (1998), Klein’s relative marginalization in the humanities is not
mirrored in British psychoanalysis, where Klein’s contribution remains vital (1). “Indeed,”
writes Stonebridge, “one of the strangest things about the current return to Klein in the case
of British literary and cultural studies is the sense that you don’t really have to go very far to
find her” (1-2). Nevertheless, Klein’s theory has remained to an extent a blind spot as far as
literary and cultural studies are concerned, particularly in non-European contexts as is the
case with Canadian Mills. Partly due to Klein’s intense preoccupation with clinical work
(unlike Freud, she did not devote much time to providing psychoanalytic interpretations of
cultural phenomena), partly because her prose is not particularly inviting or lucid, even when
a Kleinian approach to aesthetics is possible, it is often as necessary as it is more facilitating
either to prefer other psychoanalytic schools of thought, or to resort to secondary literature in order to grasp Klein’s theory of psychic development.
Invaluable as the secondary literature may be, however, the return to Klein in the form
of her own words is rewarding in relation to the study of the Grimm tales, since much of the 6 content of Klein’s child analyses was derived in part from the tales collected by the two brothers, as part and parcel of the Germanic tradition in which Klein and her young patients had been raised and from which she initiated her life’s work and contribution. It is possible, particularly with the help of information pertaining to Klein’s life and the cultural context in
Germany and England within which she pursued the development of her ideas, to trace the formative influence of the tales both on Klein herself and on the young patients that provided her with the impetus for the development of psychoanalytic theory. It is also possible to draw parallels between the deep structure of the tales and the structure of the human psyche as described by Klein in her theories.
Thus, in the first chapter I explore the cultural context in which psychoanalysis was being developed at the time when Klein became acquainted with it, first as a patient and then as an analyst. By the time Klein entered analysis with her first analyst and mentor Sandor
Ferenczi, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder – und Hausmärchen had undergone its own development and canonization within the German cultural context, having been heralded as second only to the Bible in cultural and moral importance. Moreover, I attempt to provide an overview of the main preoccupations of major analysts beyond the consulting room at the time.
In the second chapter I provide an overview of the gradual formulation of what today is considered as the fairytale canon of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as well as a broader historical and literary background of the oral and literary fairytale tradition, in order to show how the tales collected, edited and rewritten and published by the two brothers are bound inextricably to a tradition (written and oral) of tales spread across Europe. This will I hope provide a fuller understanding of how and why the tales came to be considered essential and formative to German childhood, an all-pervasive influence not only on individual children but also on concepts of childhood as a whole. 7
In the second part of the second chapter I discuss the emergence of the tales by the
Brothers Grimm in Klein’s first paper, “The Development of a Child”. As already mentioned,
the paper in question foreshadows almost all the major issues that would preoccupy Klein for
the rest of her career, as they surfaced in the analysis of her young son, Erich. This analysis,
arguably Klein’s professional birth, is assisted by the fairytale imagery present in the
associations, daydreams, stories and play of her young boy. Moreover, the tales are brought
into play not only as fragmented imagery but also as diagnostic tools proper in their own
right. Klein’s trajectory as a (pioneering) analyst, then, is accompanied from the very first
moment by the two brothers’ fairy tales.
This inter-implication of tales and analytic development continues in Klein’s Berlin cases, as is discussed in the third chapter. The Psycho-Analysis of Children (POC) (1932),
Klein’s first book-length presentation of her theories and of her development of the play technique was forged through clinical application of Freud’s established psychoanalytic concepts. It becomes evident when comparing the written papers with Klein’s clinical notes made available in Claudia Frank’s Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of
Children (2009), that many of her young patients’ images, symbols and associations were saturated with imagery from the Grimm paradigm, especially in the case of Erna, who was one of Klein’s most important child patients, and who relied heavily on the “Cinderella” tale to work through, in the context of her sessions with Klein, her own difficult psychic issues.
If the tales by the Brothers Grimm provided an evident backdrop to the first phase of
Klein’s analytic development, their influence did not cease (although it certainly became more indirect) with Klein’s move to England in 1926. The tales had been particularly popular when first translated into English in the eighteenth century, playing their part in the gradual development of English children’s literature, from the proliferation of Victorian literary fairy tales to the works produced during the Golden Age of children’s literature. As I argue in the 8
fourth chapter, Klein managed to create a stronghold for herself in the British Psychoanalytic
Society, which in turn had been established in a cultural context whose roots could be traced
back to British Romanticism and the high esteem in which play, fantasy and imagination in
literature and in children’s everyday lives gradually came to be held. Despite the emphasis
that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had given to the strong link between their tales and German
national identity, the tales also formed a vital and ultimately a largely non-differentiated component of a broader European cultural framework. As such, and in tandem with the earlier tales of Frenchman Charles Perrault, the Grimm tales fired the popular imagination in
England and played a vital, formative role in the genesis of the Victorian literary fairy tale and children’s literature as a whole. It does not seem coincidental, then, that one of Klein’s major theoretical papers, written during her first years in England, would revolve around symbolization, a concept which would later be taken up and refined by prominent Kleinian theorist Hanna Segal. It was Segal who, in a landmark Kleinian paper of her own in the mid-
1950s, would refer to the fairy tale as a genre which exhibited a fruitful working through of schizoid psychic processes within the highly integrated context of a work of art (H. Segal,
“Notes” 170).
This leads us to the core of Klein’s theory and its relation to the structure and symbolic imagery of the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. For one may perceive a parallel between
Klein’s theories of psychic development and the structure of fairy tales as described by her contemporary, the renowned Russian formalist Vladimir Propp. Although Propp’s classic
Morphology of the Folktale (published in Russia in 1928) was predicated on the Russian wonder tales collected by Russian folklorist Alexander Afanasev, some of the conclusions he reached are cross-culturally applicable. More importantly, some of the basic aspects of
Propp’s Morphology share a remarkable affinity with aspects of Kleinian theory. Thus, the lack (in many cases a maternal death) which is more often than not the prerequisite for the 9 beginning of narrative, corresponds, as I argue in the fourth chapter, with Klein’s symbolic matricide as a beginning of the process of symbolization and the exploration of external reality in psychic life, or the beginning of quests in tales.
In a similar way, the fundamental achievement of what Klein termed the depressive position – that is, the establishment of the good internal object – corresponds neatly to the function of the donor and the magic helper within the Proppian schema of tales. Likewise,
Proppian trebling, in addition to the binary and schizoid elements such as the witch and the fairy godmother, the prince and the ogre, are read in the first and second part of the fifth chapter as corresponding to the working of the depressive and paranoid-schizoid position respectively.
This mediation between Kleinian and Proppian elements is facilitated by the work of renowned folklorist Alan Dundes, who advocated the necessity not only for the collection and classification of folklore, but also for its interpretation and its link to broader human experience. In his introduction to the second edition of Propp’s Morphology, Dundes points out that the Russian structuralist’s syntagmatic analysis of the tales is a powerful tool for the understanding of the structure of tales, in that as an approach it is empirical and inductive, and the resultant analyses possible to replicate (Propp xii). Nevertheless, it also manifests a lack of concern about the cultural context in which the narratives occur, since Propp did not attempt to relate the tales’ morphology to the Russian or the broader Indo-European culture as a whole (Propp xii-xiii). However, as Dundes maintains, laying bare the essential form of folkloristic tales isonly a first step, albeit a giant one. The next step should involve relating the form to the culture or cultures in which it occurs (Propp xiii). Throughout his long career
Dundes considered psychoanalytic theory as the most comprehensive analytic tool at our disposal. In his introduction to a comprehensive collection of Dundes’ writings, Simon
Bronner characterizes Dundes as an “adaptive” or “post-Freudian” thinker, since Dundes 10
made frequent references to the works of Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Karen
Horney and Bruno Bettelheim (Preface, x-xi),and there are references to Melanie Klein in
some of his papers as well.1
In the second part of the thesis I turn to some of the fairy tales now considered classic, even though today they more often than not reach their audiences primarily through media such as the Disney industry animated films. I examine basic elements of the tales in question,
particularly those which seem to constitute a basic core of the tale’s structure irrespectively of
temporal or geographic context. Nevertheless, my primary focus in each case is the specific
Grimm variant. Therefore, in the sixth chapter, I read “Snow White” in relation to the
Kleinian concept of envy, a relatively late addition in Klein’s theory, yet one which would
ultimately prove fundamental both to her own analyses and to those who would follow in her
footsteps and develop her ideas. In the seventh chapter, I explore the primal split between the
good and bad breast which is a pivotal element of Kleinian thought, in the lesser-known tales
of “Mother Holle”, “The Three Little Gnomes” and “The Queen Bee”.
Yet it is not only structure that accounts for the impact and pervasiveness of the tales
but also the way in which they are fleshed out with rich symbolic imagery, also readable in
1 It should be noted, of course, that Klein considered herself first and foremost a Freudian. Author Sherry Turkle
describes Anna Freud and Melanie Klein as daughters fighting for Freud’s mantle. As Turkle writes, “For one
woman, Sigmund Freud was father to the work that was more than her life’s passion, it was her life. For the
other, Freud was this and more: her father and her analyst” (1). The feud between Anna Freud and Melanie
Klein has been described and thoroughly discussed. For my purposes it suffices to say that each of the two
women chose to emphasise different aspects of Freudian theory which, it should be noted, is not a coherent and
seamless whole. As psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and historian George Makari writes, “Sigmund Freud was a
brilliant synthetic thinker, but he was by his own admission, not a coherent system builder. He did not tie up
loose ends or repudiate the former theories he later seemed to contradict” (430). It was thus possible to draw on
one’s own Freud, so to speak, in order to develop one’s theories.
11
the light of Kleinian ideas. Two such recurrent images are the witch in the hut in the woods
and the big bad wolf, which I discuss in the eighth chapter. Finally, in the last chapter I read
“Cinderella” as the tale par excellence structured around the workings of the depressive
position, a position that allows the subject to come to terms with its own love and aggression
towards the self-same primal object, thus making it possible to establish other meaningful
relationships as well.
While the academic interest in the Grimm fairy tales has remained constant, there has
recently been a noteworthy –and in my opinion not coincidental – revival of interest in the
tales within a broader cultural context. Writing for The Guardian, columnist Libby Brooks
dubbed 2012 “the year of the fairy tale”, discussing a revival of the genre “as volcanic as the
magic porridge pot”. The year 2012 marked the bicentennial celebration of the first edition of
the Kinder und-Hausmärchen, one of the most famous collections of fairy and folk tales in
the Western world and it witnessed a simultaneous revival of interest in fairy tales within a
broader cultural context.
Indicatively, two mainstream television series, Grimm and Once Upon a Time, are
currently popular in the United States (as well as in many European, Latin American and
Asian countries). The first revolves around a police detective, the sole living descendant of
the Brothers Grimm, who is called upon to solve baffling crimes and whose mission
(alongside a reformed Big Bad Wolf) is to protect unsuspecting humans from fairytale
villains on the loose. The second, a production by Disney-owned ABC television network, features a community of ex-fairytale characters residing in the small town of Storybrooke, who have been cursed by the Wicked Queen of “Snow White”, and retain no memory of their former identities. They must be released from their curse by Snow White’s daughter, who had been given up at birth and who has no idea of her true identity. Moreover, two “Snow White” adaptations, Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror, Mirror were released in 2012. 12
Ranging from the dark and gothic to the comic and romantic respectively in their realizations,
their almost simultaneous release was characterized by critics the battle of the “Snow
Whites”. The films Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Maleficent and Jack the Giant Slayer
continue the trend of fairytale based films.
Film or television adaptations of fairy tales are by no means a new phenomenon, but in
the past they tended to cater mostly to the (perceived) needs and preferences of young or
mixed audiences. The aforementioned productions, however, are addressed primarily (if not
exclusively, as perhaps is the case with Grimm with its graphic scenes of violence and carnage) to teenage and adult audiences on a global scale. This is not to say that fairytale films or series have never been addressed to older audiences before, yet this was often done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, acknowledging (even if reveling in) the transgression of age- appropriate boundaries of the anticipated audience.
In his famous essay “On Fairy Stories” (1947), J.R.R. Tolkien questions the “natural” connection between fairy tales and children’s imagination, writing:
Actually, the association of children and fairy stories is an accident of our
domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been
relegated to the “nursery”, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to
the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it
is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. (Tolkien
130)
Bearing in mind this change in perceived audiences, it is safe, I believe, to assume that fairy tales are reemerging from the nursery and triumphantly repositioning themselves in more public spaces of discourse. What we are witnessing is a return of the fairy tale as a genre to the audiences which it addressed prior to the nineteenth century and its gradual relegation to the nursery or to the Disney animated film industry. This shift is also, in my view, a direct 13 acknowledgement of the fascination that fairy tales–and particularly the fairy tales by the
Brothers Grimm – have for many of us, well beyond childhood.
On a personal level, my own fascination with fairy tales dates back to my early childhood. An avid reader of the genre, I was told that continuing to read fairy tales after the ripe age of eight would lead me to confuse fantasy with reality, a concern which seems to have been expressed by many parents at the time. As an adult, I returned to fairy tales via a circuitous path, while considering the unique impact on me (and I would assume on other readers as well) of the works of Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling. On the surface the two writers could not be more different; they nevertheless share a common characteristic, the powerful emotional impact they both have had (and continue to have) on their readers. It is certain that many other novels and authors can boast dedicated audiences, whether in written form or in media other than written ones, yet to my knowledge, despite their divergence in genre Austen and Rowling have managed to an exceptional degree to give birth to dedicated “Janeites” and
“Potterheads”. As far as Austen’s novels are concerned, not only do they continue to be read in their own right, but they also inspire sequels, rewritings, websites, online games, adaptations to television and cinematic forms, which all do well in financial if not always in artistic terms. When it comes to the Harry Potter saga, it remains to be seen whether the seven novels will enter the canon of classic children’s literature.2 It is nevertheless indisputable that they have had a powerful influence on contemporary children’s culture, not only enabling J.K. Rowling to earn vast sums from her writing but also to create a publishing sensation and, according to many, to reintroduce children of the electronic age to the activity of reading for pleasure, in itself an impressive feat. In my view, what these two otherwise
2 It is telling, however, that in the recent Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games held in London,
Rowling was invited to read an excerpt from Barrie’s Peter Pan, while her own villain Voldemort was portrayed among other memorable characters of children’s literature, such as Mary Poppins. 14 completely different works have in common is an underlying, pervasive deep fairytale structure.3 This kinship to fairy tales may account in part for the particular effect of these two fictional works on audiences, without meaning, of course, to downplay the importance of the other artistic and literary merits they possess.
I hold, then, and hope to substantiate in the following pages, that part of the powerful effect that the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm have on readers and general audiences can be attributed to an extent to the correspondence of the tales’ structures with primal psychic processes as they have been described by Melanie Klein. This correspondence has a great deal to do with the use of symbols and imagery, whose psychic significance, as we shall see, can also be meaningfully elucidated in relation to Kleinian theory. I also hope, however, to have made some progress in a larger and more ambitious project: to demonstrate that the fairy tales collected, recorded and rewritten by the two brothers helped strew pebbles along the path of the reinterpretation of the human psyche as described in the powerful and often provocative thought of Melanie Klein.
3 In most of Austen’s novels (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Persuasion), as well as in the overall pattern of the Harry Potter novels, it is possible to discern, for example, the structuring influence of the “Cinderella” tale, as well as other elements linked to fairytale structure and symbolism. 15
Part One: A Historical and Psychoanalytic Approach to the Grimm Tales and Kleinian
Theory
Introduction to Part One: Phantasy and Projective Identification
Phantasy and projective identification are two concepts indispensable to Kleinian theory.
Klein herself did not theorize either of these concepts systematically but both are vital in her
thought. Because they do not emerge from and are not integrated into her body of work in the
way other concepts are, I have chosen to discuss them briefly here as overarching concepts,
necessary to a fuller understanding of Kleinian thought and its relevance to the Grimm fairy
tales.
Unconscious phantasy (spelled with a ph) is fundamental to any discussion of Klein’s
work. Sociologist Michael Rustin and child psychotherapist Margaret Rustin, who discuss
modern children’s literature from a Kleinian point of view, provide a useful rule of thumb in
distinguishing fantasy (spelled with an f) from phantasy. As they write, “‘Phantasy’ with ‘ph’
is a term used in psychoanalytic writing to describe the content of the inner or unconscious
mental life of a person … ‘Fantasy’ with an ‘f’ we use to describe the literary form; it is also
`the more everyday term for various forms of imaginative mental life” (Rustin, Narratives 3).
In her analyses of children Klein revealed the ubiquity and dynamic power of the
unconscious phantasy.4 Unconscious phantasies, she claimed, are active from the beginning
of life, a view which presupposes the existence of a rudimentary ego at birth that is capable of
experiencing anxiety, of using primitive defences against this anxiety, and of sustaining
rudimentary object relations in phantasy and in reality (H. Segal, Dream 20). Whereas Freud
4 In her illuminating work on the context of the development of Klein’s thought, Meira Likierman describes how the task of defining and clarifying phantasy was administered by Susan Isaacs, one of Klein’s most influential and articulate adherents in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Isaacs’ paper, “The Nature and Function of
Phantasy” was written and delivered in 1943 and remains a landmark in Kleinian bibliography, since it describes and delimits a concept at the heart of Klein’s dense web of connected theoretical themes (Likierman 136-37). 16
had posited that after a period of reality testing the hungry infant gradually acquires a mental
image of the breast as fulfilling its needs, the instinct and the object providing its satisfaction
becoming fused in the process, Klein claimed that the instinct is always already fused with
the object which will satisfy it, thus indirectly emphasizing the existence and the importance
of early object relations. Moreover, because of the early onset of phantasies, essentially from
birth onwards, they were originally physical. A hallucinated breast is a bodily image:
Early experiences, such as hunger or satisfaction, are experienced and
interpreted by the infant in terms of object-relationship phantasies. Susan
Isaacs assumes that behind every phantasy of introjection there is an earlier
one of concrete incorporation. Satisfaction is experienced as containing a
need-fulfilling object; hunger as persecution. Our language reflects this. We
speak of being “gnawed by hunger”; or “the wolf being at the door”. (H. Segal,
Dream 20)
Primitive psychosomatic phantasies evolve with growth and reality testing, but they remain at the core of our personality and influence our further development. They are also closely linked to physical reality, susceptible to influences from one’s external environment, but also influencing one’s perceptions of external reality as well as actions and decisions which have an indirect albeit formative impact on external conditions (H. Segal, Dream 20-
21). They are at the heart of one’s personality, determining the matrix of the mental structure and life (25). Phantasies evolve, like bodily characteristics and aspects of personality, and there is a constant tension and struggle between unconscious omnipotent infantile phantasies and the encounter with realities both good and bad. They are like hypotheses waiting to be tested out by reality (29). In short, as Hanna Segal writes in a comparison between Freudian and Kleinian notions: “Most of Freud’s statements give the impression that he thought of unconscious phantasies as if they were like islands in the sea of mental life. Reading Klein’s 17 work with children, one gets a glimpse of an internal phantasy world like a vast continent under the sea, the islands being its conscious, external, observable manifestations” ( Dream
19).
The second concept which is crucial to the enabling of a reading of the Grimm’s tales within a Kleinian framework is that of projective identification. Although this concept did not originate with Klein, it became useful to her and to other psychoanalysts adhering to her views. It is interesting that Klein’s fullest working out of the concept of projective identification occurs within a literary context (Jacobus 72). The processes involved in projective identification had been described in Klein’s important paper “Notes on Some
Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), and this was followed by brief references in other papers, yet in the single paper that Klein speaks of projective identification at considerable length one does not encounter a case study (Spillius, Encounters 108). Rather, as Mary Jacobus has argued, Klein not only held books up to the mirror of her theory but books also shaped her theory of identification (65) and this is made particularly clear in Klein’s relevant paper with the title “On Identification” (1955). It begins with a brief synopsis of her earlier views on the subject, followed by an extensive reading of Julian Green’s fantasy novel If I Were You
(1950), as an illustration of the process, a striking choice as Klein was primarily oriented towards clinical work.
Projective identification involves projecting aspects of the self into external objects.
The subject, then, re-identifies his or herself with these split-off parts. Klein describes the process as follows: “Identification by projection implies a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them on to (or rather into) another person. These processes have many ramifications and fundamentally influence object relations” (Klein, Envy and Gratitude
[EAG] 143). While originally projective identification involved primarily negative aspects of the self, Elizabeth Spillius’ archival research on Klein’s clinical notes led her to conclude that 18
the concept had been extended to include positive aspects too. Both good and bad aspects of
the self, then, are projected into external objects, and identification both by projection and
introjection is a vital prerequisite for all relationships, including analysis (Spillius,
Encounters 111).
Perhaps the most salient example of this process is that of the mother-infant relationship. Mutual projective identification between mother and infant enables that visceral communication which is often marveled at by outsiders, the ability of the mother (or of the primary caretaker) to respond accurately to the infant’s needs. When taken to its extreme, it threatens sanity and object relations, as it does in If I Were You. Fabian, the novel’s hero, intensely dissatisfied with his predicament, makes a pact with the devil that enables him to enter the body of anyone he wishes, provided he whisper a magical formula into the unsuspecting victim’s ear. The novel follows Fabian across a series of identifications which do not afford him the fulfillment he craves, and also threaten him with complete oblivion of his original identity. This series of failed identifications, which Klein interprets according to the concepts of her theory, ends in Fabian reverting to his original identity, only to die shortly after.
Fabian, however, is a more rounded character in a novel which despite its fantastic nature features complex characters. The question then is what is the relevance of projective identification to fairy tales, which are famous (if not infamous) for cardboard characters that do not invite analysis in the same way as fictional characters with their often remarkable complexity and vividness.
Medieval scholar Derek Brewer draws parallels between fairy tales and psychic processes as described by psychoanalysis, such as the existence of a manifest and latent content in the tales, the existence of split images as projections of conflicts within the protagonist, condensations and displacements of one image with another and the 19 protagonist’s role as a projection of the deep drive of the story (10). The fairy tale, he claims, represents a “total mind” of which all characters, both good and evil, are aspects, thus making it reasonable to describe the whole tale as a drama taking place within the mind of the protagonist, who sees himself as the hero and simultaneously creates, much in the way dreams are created, the plot and the rest of the characters involved. For our part, we identify with the protagonist, rejecting or accepting the varied figures present in the narratives, in accordance with the hero’s stance (Brewer 10). Fairytale figures ultimately add up to a total protagonist. Brewer writes:
At one level we have the protagonist and other characters inter-acting in some
ways like separate characters in life, and to that extent self-contained: at this
other more general level the characters, including the protagonists, are all
aspects of one enveloping mind, its contradictory desires, internal conflicts and
attempt to solve them. This enveloping mind is not particular to any one
individual or story-teller: it is a particular model of the human mind itself
expressed in the terms of the given culture. Thus the crowd of unrecognized,
latent fears and desires that make up so much of our inner life is expressed by
the other characters of the tale, by the father-and-mother images, in all their
variants, just as reasonable hopes, expectations and psychic preparations are
expressed by the figure of the beloved. The progress of the tale, therefore, at
this level, may be regarded as the process by which the consciousness brings
itself to recognize, overcome, accept, often forgive, other elements of the total
personality, and prepare to absorb further realities from the outside world.
(Brewer 24)
Although working within a different theoretical framework, Brewer here describes a process at work in the fairy tale akin to projecting unacknowledged aspects of the self into not a 20 living, breathing object, but rather a text, where they can be worked through and
(re)identified with, thus undoubtedly accounting for the strong emotional impact of fairy tales
(and fairytale-structured narratives) on their audiences.
This view fits in well with the contention that remained one of the constant threads in
Dundes’ approach to folklore throughout his career, namely that it functions as a mental locus of projection for affects and conflicts occurring on a less than conscious level. Dundes perceived folklore (and we need to remember here that folklore includes but is certainly not restricted to fairy tales) as a cultural response (or adaptation) to anxiety and ambiguity, as well as the reflection of belief and worldview (hence his rhetoric of folklore as mirror), both of which result in identity formation and communication (Bronner, Preface x). Folklore is viewed as an unconscious way of negotiating critical life stages, such as birth, initiation, marriage and death, and cultural preoccupations that provoke crisis and anxiety (Dundes,
Meaning 64).
This is understandable if one considers the fact that not only is folklore structured around anxiety-provoking aspects of daily life, but also that it is often the taboo activities and ideas which find expressive outlets in symbolic forms. As Dundes points out:
It is my contention that much of the meaning of folkloric fantasy is
unconscious. Indeed, it would have to be unconscious – in the Freudian sense
– for folklore to function as it does. For among its functions, folklore provides
a socially sanctioned outlet for the expression of what cannot be articulated in
more usual ways. It is precisely in jokes, folktales, folksongs, proverbs,
children’s games, gestures, etc. that anxieties can be vented … People need
such mechanisms, which is why there will always be folklore, and also
incidentally why there is always new folklore being created to take care of new
anxieties. (Dundes, Meaning 275) 21
This function of folklore as an (unconscious) outlet for taboo issues is made possible via the mechanisms of projection and projective inversion, the latter term being Dundes’ own redefinition of Freud’s term of projection. In Dundes’ view, within the context of folklore projection is more or less a translation of reality into fantasy in a manner which is intertwined with language. This translation may be described as the possible play of “literal vs. metaphorical”, in his own words: “Sometimes seeing projections as literal versions of metaphors – or, if one prefers, as metaphorical transformations of literal statements – can greatly aid in deciphering the unconscious content of folklore” (Dundes, Meaning 279). But whereas projection may be viewed as the more or less direct translation of reality into fantasy, projective inversion offers a more elaborate disguise of anxiety-provoking, guilt- inducing or taboo material. Dundes writes:
What I term projective inversion differs from straightforward projection
inasmuch as a reversal or inversion takes place. The terminology difficulty
arises from the fact that it is this latter psychological process that Freud and his
followers called “projection”. In Freud’s terms, the “proposition ‘I hate him’
becomes transformed by projection into another one: ‘He hates (persecutes)
me,’ which will justify me in hating him.” An individual’s view of hate or
dislike, for example, is supposedly projected outward onto the object of hate or
dislike. In this way, subject and object exchange places. I think this
transformational principle was a brilliant insight and further that it has
enormous relevance to the study of myth content. (Dundes, Meaning 347).
Dundes found that projective inversion is particularly prevalent in folktales and legends, suggesting that their narrative elaboration signifies a heightened level of taboo. It is not coincidental that fairy tales in particular revolve around family relations: incest, sibling rivalry, infanticide are all found in fairy tales, which moreover are always told from the 22 vantage point of the child rather than that of the parents (Bronner, Introduction 26). Bearing in mind that not all readers or members of an audience are parents, yet everyone necessarily was once a child in some sort of familial situation, it does not come as a surprise that phantasies, projections, projective identification and projective inversion come into play to give us that kaleidoscope of wonder, symbols and imagery that is the Grimm – and other – fairy tales. 23
Chapter One. Once upon a time in Budapest: Beginnings
It is tempting to begin an account of the personal and cultural circumstances which led to
Melanie Klein’s dedication to psychoanalysis in the self-same way one would begin a fairy tale. Klein’s life story is not an enchantingly happy one but – like a fairy tale – it is reminiscent of a quest for self-realization and fulfillment. Moreover, infancy and childhood, the domains she so thoroughly investigated, were then, as they are now, the domains where
fairy tales rule par excellence. Melanie Klein entered the realm of psychoanalysis at a time
when it was expanding beyond pathology and the analytic procedure and was attempting to
enter terrains that till then had been the province of those pursuing cultural studies.
Psychoanalysis had turned to folklore and literature in order both to verify and to exhibit the
exciting new discoveries that had been made. In this chapter I will attempt to provide an
overview of the prevalent concerns and preoccupations of analysts shortly before and at the
time when Klein entered into analysis with her first mentor, Sándor Ferenczi, and until her
first paper, “The Development of a Child”.
Psychoanalysis was created and began to evolve in a cultural context where the
anthropological theory of the day was structured around the notion that evolution consists of
moving from the “primitive” and “irrational” to the “civilized” and “rational”. It was believed
that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and that relics of the primitive and the savage were
retained in so-called primitive tribes, while relics of the “irrationality” and “savageness” of
childhood were retained in adulthood, particularly in the case of neurotic individuals
(Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study” 56-57). As Freud’s English disciple, Ernest Jones wrote in
1928:
there is a far-reaching parallelism between the survivals of primitive life from
the racial past and survivals from the individual past. The practical value of
this generalization is that the study of survivals in folklore can be usefully 24
supplemented by the study of survivals in living individuals, where they are far
more available to direct investigation … [W]e have before us in the individual
the whole evolution of beliefs, and customs or rituals based on them, which is
parallel to what in the field of folklore has run a course of perhaps thousands
of years. (qtd. in Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study” 57)
It is no wonder, then, that in 1913 Freud, in writing a preface to the German translation of
John G. Bourke’s pioneering study entitled Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, had stated that
folklore, while adopting quite different methods of research, reached the same results as
psychoanalysis (Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study” 56).
Psychoanalysis attempted to expand its boundaries beyond the consulting room very
early on in the history of its existence. As early as 1907 the Wednesday Psychological
Society included a growing number of humanists, critics and social reformers “who, in the
parlance of the time, were students of cultural and human science” (Makari 164). It is
estimated that the aforementioned “students” comprised about a third of the society, having
joined a fair number of physicians who were also interested in such matters (Makari 164).
Moreover, Freud’s paper “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” first appeared in 1907.
According to eminent historian Peter Gay, this paper was Freud’s first attempt (apart from
sporadic references in The Interpretation of Dreams) to apply psychoanalytic ideas to culture; it was also a first serious contribution to psychoanalytic aesthetics (307). For the first time
Freud attempted to address the issue of artistic – and more specifically literary – creativity, by applying the fundamental tenets of his Dream Book, as he liked to call the Interpretation of
Dreams, to processes other than actual dreaming. This course was also pursued by Otto Rank, who was a cultural researcher and at the time also the paid secretary of the Wednesday society. Introduced to Freud by Alfred Adler, Rank had approached the former with a manuscript which attempted to shed light on the mysteries of artistic creativity from a 25
psychoanalytic perspective. This text was reworked under Freud’s supervision and published
in 1907 as The Artist: Towards a Sexual Psychology, with the aim of expanding psychoanalysis into art and culture (Makari 166-67).5
Freud was becoming increasingly convinced of the cultural value of psychoanalysis
(Gay 310). Apparently this conviction was shared by most of his adherents, as the next few
years witnessed a proliferation of non-clinical works. In the period spanning roughly from
1907 to 1914, exegesis – and not just theory and therapy – became increasingly important in
psychoanalysis. Jung, who at the time was the president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, had begun to explore religious symbols and myths, thus taking a path that would
eventually lead to his break with Freud (Makari 268). At the same time, Franz Ricklin and
Karl Abraham undertook the application of the principles Freud had evinced in his
Interpretation of Dreams and attempted to transpose them to fairy tales and mythology
respectively.
In his Wish Fulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales (1915) Ricklin argued that the
psychology of fairy tales bore a close relationship to the psychology of dreams, of hysteria
and of mental disease (1). More specifically, he posited that fairy tales were the inventions of
directly utilized, immediately conceived experiences of the primitive human soul and of the
general human tendency to wish fulfillment (2). The fairy tale as wish-fulfilling structure
often gathered material from other sources (myths, for example) and condensed and
combined it into new wholes (9), much as a dream is composed of material from a multitude
of sources. In the same vein, Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths: A Study in Myth
Psychology (1913) attempted to compare myths with phenomena of individual psychology,
especially with dreams. His thesis was that “the myth is a fragment of the repressed life of the
5 Rank later wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), a book considered a landmark in psychoanalytic folklore. 26
infantile psyche of the race. It contains (in disguised form) the wishes of the childhood of the
race” (Abraham, Dreams 36), while mass repression is the reason why people no longer
understand the original meaning of myths (36).
Franz Riklin ran the Rheinau asylum as a Freudian, and along with Eugen Bleuler and
Jung, he was a founding member of the Freudian Society of Physicians in Zurich (Makari
210-11). Karl Abraham was the first to practice psychoanalysis in Berlin and was later to
become not only one of the founding members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society (Gay
181), but also the founder of the Berlin clinic and Klein’s second analyst and mentor. Clearly,
the application of psychoanalytic findings to cultural phenomena was taken up by the
brightest and best of the psychoanalytic establishment of the time. As Dundes writes:
There were other psychoanalytic studies of folklore in the initial decades of the
rise of the psychoanalytic movement … Actually, almost every single major
psychoanalyst wrote at least one paper applying psychoanalytic theory to
folklore. It is not hard to document that folklore, especially mythology
constituted one of the most attractive areas for applied psychoanalysis almost
right from the beginnings of the movement. (Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study”
66)6
It was around this time that Sándor Ferenczi became involved in psychoanalysis. Freud
and Ferenczi met in 1908 and although Ferenczi could not physically participate in the
6 Dundes singles out Ernest Jones and Géza Róheim as the most important and influential contributors to the
field of psychoanalytic folklore. Jones, while remembered today primarily for his extensive biography of Freud,
wrote, according to Dundes, “superb” and “[scholarly] impeccable” papers on folklore, even if they fell on deaf
ears when they were addressed to the English Folk-Lore Society (“Psychoanalytic Study” 66-67). Jones, it should be noted and as I will be discussing later, played a vital part in Klein’s career in England. I will presently be discussing Róheim in relation to his presence in the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society.
27
Wednesday circle, he followed up his introduction to Freud by a regular (and ultimately
voluminous) correspondence (Likierman 18-19). Moreover, he launched a campaign to introduce and further analysis in Budapest, where Klein and her husband and children were to move in 1910 (Geissmann 112). As Makari records, “within months, Sándor Ferenczi was lecturing, writing, and generally advocating for Freud and Jung with Budapest’s physicians and literati” (220).
In the meantime, papers and publications concerning non-clinical issues continued to appear alongside clinically-oriented ones. In the summer of 1911 Jung pursued the relationship of myth to individual fantasy in his “Transformations and Symbols of the
Libido”, a paper that signaled the beginning of his break with Freud (Makari 269). In 1912
Rank and Hanns Sachs founded Imago, a periodical specializing in the application of psychoanalysis to the cultural sciences (Gay 311). Interestingly, the original title of the periodical was intended to be Eros and Psyche, the title of a fairy tale appearing in Apuleius’
The Golden Ass (124 AD) (Warner, From the Beast 145). This dilemma concerning the periodical’s title underscores yet again the interest in myth and folklore that existed from the inception of psychoanalysis. The particular title was rejected, but the periodical, despite
Freud’s initial concern about its financial viability, did surprisingly well. Not only did it attract a satisfactory number of subscribers, it also continued to attract its fair share of non- clinical papers (Gay 311-12). What is more, it continued to be published during the First
World War (when other psychoanalytic publications had ceased), although reduced in size
(Gay 351).
This interlinking of dream interpretation and myths and fairy tales was taken up by
Freud himself, who in 1913 published two papers, namely “The Occurrence in Dreams of
Material from Fairy Tales” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets”. In the first paper he briefly explores the relation between fairy tales and dream elements, claiming that not only 28 do fairy tales occur in the context of analyses as associations to psychoanalytic material, they may also serve as screen memories for some patients (281). It is in this context that he first refers to the case of the Wolf Man, as the particular patient first became known, and the link between the patient’ s dream and the Grimms’ “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”
(“Occurrence”281). As Dundes points out, “There is no doubt that Freud was intrigued equally by the challenge of helping a patient and by explicating the latent content of fairy tales” (“Psychoanalytic Study” 62). In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” Freud conflated literature, myth and fairy tale, drawing from a variety of sources and interweaving his interpretation of the theme of the three caskets with his views on symbolism, inversion and displacement.
The culmination of this psychoanalytic detour into non-analytic terrain is probably
Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Originally published as a series of four essays between 1912 and
1913, it reflected Freud’s long-standing interest in anthropology and more specifically in the way that the organizations of primal human communities shaped the unconscious of contemporary men and women (Makari 287). Cultural anthropology and archaeology preoccupied Freud all his life (Gay 326), but at this particular time his interest in anthropology had been intensified by Jung’s pursuit of the psychological origins of religion
(Makari 287). In his imaginative reconstruction of the primal horde and the killing of the primal father, Freud created a text that was eventually discredited by later anthropological findings, as well as by the evolution in the science of genetics. Nevertheless, it was a text
(and a theory) that remained close to his heart and he defended it in an arguably stubborn way to the very end of his life (Gay 333-34).7
7 In his article “The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore” Dundes describes the anthropological theory on which
Freud based his theory of the primal horde. Freud accepted as dogma the anthropological principle of his day that folkloric elements were survivals from days of primitive savagery (56). Moreover, he took for granted the 29
The period spanning from 1907 to the outbreak of the First World War was a period during which artistic creativity, cultural anthropology, mythology and folklore were all attracted huge psychoanalytic interest. It is in this historical context (i.e. with psychoanalytic emphasis redirected towards cultural phenomena) that Melanie Klein entered into analysis with Ferenczi. As a member of the Secret Committee, which was established on May 25,
1913, Ferenczi aspired to protect the newly founded discipline against unwelcome digressions such as that made by Jung. Simultaneously, the Committee became an informal study group, so to speak, where ideas and most importantly manuscripts were circulated and commented upon well before publication, Totem and Taboo among them (Makari 288).
According to Grosskurth, Freud sent Ferenczi every manuscript he produced before publishing it (70). As a result, Ferenczi’s influence on Klein was not only that of a psychoanalyst and eventually professional mentor, but it also implicated Ferenczi’s own professional development during Klein’s treatment, a development that took place mainly through his correspondence with Freud (Likierman 15). Bearing this in mind, it is, I believe, reasonable to assume that new developments in psychoanalysis, along with prevailing interests, tendencies in thought and preoccupations, became available to Klein before they became common knowledge, in real time as it were. This becomes even more probable considering that Klein’s analysis gradually and eventually became a training analysis of sorts.
In her biography of Klein, which till now remains the only extended biography and includes unpublished autobiographical material, Phyllis Grosskurth names 1914 as the year in which Klein began her analysis (69). As Janet Sayers points out in her book Kleinians (2000),
Haeckelian principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a principle which may be discarded from Freudian theory without lessening the value of its insights in the interpretation of folklore (61). Despite, however, these theoretical shortcomings, Totem and Taboo fascinated thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, who both wrote relevant essays on it. 30
Grosskurth’s biography of Klein tells “a dispiriting tale of [Klein’s] life as a mixture of
intrusiveness, loss and rejection” (9), and it may be useful at this point to provide a brief
overview of Klein’s life prior to her involvement with psychoanalysis, in order to gain a
fuller understanding of her trajectory.
Born in 1882 in Vienna, Klein was the daughter of Moriz and Libussa Reizes
(Grosskurth 9-10). The youngest of five children, Klein was an unexpected addition to a
liberal Jewish family with an inclination towards intellectual pursuits. Unlike her older
siblings, she was not breastfed by her mother, a detail which seems significant in the light of
her later theories (Sayers 9). Later in life she remembered feeling rejected by her father, who
openly preferred her older sister, as well as being teased by her two oldest siblings, Emilie
and Emanuel. She had found comfort in the presence of her third sister, Sidonie, who,
however, died from a form of tuberculosis when Klein was only four years old. From then on,
Klein’s life was punctuated by a series of losses and displacements. She found solace and
encouragement of her intellectual pursuits and creative writing in her brother Emanuel, who
also introduced her to the cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna (Sayers 9-10). As the distance between Melanie and her father Moriz deepened due to the deterioration of the latter’s health,
Emanuel supported Melanie’s ambitious plans to study medicine, while simultaneously introducing her to many of his friends that purportedly fell in love with her. It was through
Emanuel that Melanie met Arthur Klein, a young chemical engineer who proposed marriage shortly after their acquaintance. Despite her misgivings, Klein accepted the proposal and the two became engaged, thus ending Melanie’s medical ambitions. Moriz Reizes’ death in 1900 probably served to consolidate this choice, as the family’s financial circumstances became more straitened. Klein entered a long engagement, during which she was separated from her fiancé as he continued his education abroad, and she was also separated from Emanuel.
Suffering from heart disease since he had been ill from rheumatic fever, Emanuel had 31
discontinued his studies, and knowing he had not long to live, desired to spend his remaining
days travelling. He died in Genoa in 1902, leaving his sister heartbroken. A few months after
Emanuel’s death, Melanie and Arthur Klein were married. As Sayers writes, “she was just
twenty-one and was disgusted by her first night’s sex … And when her daughter Melitta was born on 19 January 1904, she threw herself into mothering” (10).
Melitta’s birth was followed by Libussa’s practically moving in with the new family, in
an endeavour to help her daughter with her new responsibilities but also in an attempt, it
transpires from the letters exchanged between mother and daughter, to control the Kleins. She
took care of Melitta and Hans (born in 1907), while encouraging Melanie to undertake
“cures” or to go on protracted holidays for her “nerves”. These absences kept Melanie Klein
away from her young children and did not seem to offer a solution to her problem. In 1912
the Klein family moved to Budapest form the small town of Hermanentz, Silesia, in which
they had been staying due to Arthur’s work, and Melanie’s spirits were somewhat revived
(Sayers 10-11).
In the course of 1914 Klein gave birth to her third child, Erich, and lost Libussa, who
died of cancer only months after Erich’s death (Sayers 11). It was at this time that she entered
analysis with Ferenczi as a result of depression, possibly post-natal or linked to unresolved
mourning for her mother – or both (Grosskurth 64-65). In her unpublished autobiography as
quoted by Grosskurth, Klein mentions reading Freud’s 1901 paper on dreams and
recognizing in his work a potential source of inspiration: “that was what I was aiming at, at
least during those years when I was so very keen to find what would satisfy me intellectually
and emotionally. I entered into analysis with Ferenczi, who was the most outstanding
Hungarian analyst” (Grosskurth 69). Although Klein here seems to imply that it was
admiration for Freud’s work that led her to Ferenczi, it has been established that she had been
battling bouts of depression for at least a decade before her analysis. 32
Klein very soon became interested in the theories which informed her treatment. She
began by reading Freud’s works and by observing Freudian principles in the play of her own
children. These observations probably surfaced in her sessions and became an object of
interest between her and Ferenczi, who was also interested in child analysis. This broadening
of the analytical process to one of education was not uncommon at the time (Likierman 15-
16). It is also very likely that during her analysis Klein attended the meetings of the
Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. Founded in 1913, the group was originally small and
meetings were informal – occasionally even held in cafés – and attended by the wives and guests of the original members (Grosskurth 70).
As opposed to the Berlin society, which in later years became the beacon of
psychoanalysis and was more formally organized, encouraging its members’ curiosity about
and interest in clinical phenomena, the Budapest meetings often veered towards phylogenetic
speculations (Makari 374). This may have been a reflection of the interests and training of its
first individual members. Ferenczi may have been a medical doctor, but he was interested in
issues such as psychic powers and thought transference (Makari 282). In 1915, the group was
joined by Géza Róheim, who was also undergoing analysis by Ferenczi. Róheim’s body of
work presents another interesting link between psychoanalysis, folklore and Melanie Klein.
Róheim became, after Freud, the single most important contributor to the development of a psychoanalytic approach to folklore and anthropology at the time. Something of a child prodigy in the Hungarian ethnological community, he abandoned his theoretical orientation of solar mythology when he read The Interpretation of Dreams and Totem and Taboo
(Dundes, Fire ix-x). “It was apparently during his time in Germany” writes Dundes, “that
Róheim discovered the writings of Freud and his early disciples, Ferenczi, Abraham, Jung, and Riklin … So this is how Róheim first found his intellectual niche. Lunar and solar mythology were permanently abandoned in favor of the exciting new possibilities of applied 33 psychoanalysis.” (Fire x-xi). During the years 1915 and 1916 he began a didactic analysis with Ferenczi, at the same time as Melanie Klein, “which might account in part for Róheim’s later adaptation of the useful notion of her split mother imagos (good and bad mother) as well as her idea of the aggressive infant’s attempt to tear out the body contents of the good mother
(and her breast)” (Dundes, Fire xi).
In addition, Róheim seems to have adapted another aspect of what was later to become
Kleinian thought to his researches in folklore: just as Klein was to focus on the emotional life of the infant, so Róheim was to emphasize the primacy of infantile conditioning in the creation of folklore, among other phenomena. In a contemporary attempt to account for the psychological development of humanity by applying psychoanalytic techniques to archaeological findings, analyst and philosopher George Frankl elaborates on one of
Róheim’s tenets:
Each culture has certain prevalent patterns of child rearing which produce
infantile traumas and conflicts characteristic of that culture. The infantile
traumas experienced by the members of a culture and shared by them evoke
certain typical reaction formations, certain modes of repression, sublimation,
fantasies, certain types of Superego and, above all, certain characteristic
symbols which create myths, religions, moral concepts as well as political and
economic ideas. The imagery and the fairy tales of childhood and the shared
mythological fantasies of adults provide members of a society with a common
understanding of the world and of their relation to each other; they provide the
foundation for their collective consciousness and common evaluation of
events, of their rights and duties. (Frankl 19)8
8 Róheim’s conclusion coincides with the views of psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, who in cooperation with anthropologists organized a joint seminar at Columbia University in order to consider the interrelationships 34
Both Klein and Róheim in their respective fields claimed that formative human
experiences, both on a collective and an individual level, took place much earlier than hitherto believed. In accordance with the views held by both Klein and Róheim, Hanna
Segal’s now famous aphorism, that whereas Freud discovered the child in the adult, Klein discovered the infant in the child (Klein 49), seems to hold true in terms both of individual growth and of cultural production and creativity. However, this emphasis on the infantile also involved setbacks. Just as Klein’s later work concerning infantile instinctual life had often been dismissed as fanciful, so Róheim’s premise on the infantile origin of folklore made his interpretations of various folk narratives difficult to validate or replicate (Dundes, Fire xxii).
Interestingly, however, in one of his letters to Stefan Zweig, Freud considers the possibility that narrative creativity could ultimately be reduced and attributed to a limited number of primal motifs operating within the artistic psyche. Freud writes:
Analysis allows us to suppose that the great, apparently inexhaustible wealth
of the problems and situations the imaginative writer treats can be traced back
to a small number of primal motifs, which stem for the most part from the
repressed experiential material of the child’s mental life, so that imaginative
productions correspond to disguised, embellished, sublimated new editions of
those childhood fantasies. (Freud qtd. in Gay 319)
between psychoanalysis and anthropology during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Having undergone analysis
with Freud, Kardiner explored the aforementioned interrelationship between the two disciplines, and
attempted to relativize Freudian theory culturally (Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study” 68-69). According to
Dundes, Kardiner distinguished between what he termed “primary institutions” such as feeding, weaning
techniques, toilet training and “secondary institutions”, including adult projective systems (religion, ritual,
folklore, myth, fairy tales). Kardiner claimed that there is an observable correlation between infantile
conditioning and adult projective systems: “In other words, the folklore of a particular culture would be
parallel to or isomorphic with the infant care of that culture” (Dundes, “Psychoanalytic Study” 69).
35
Although Freud refers to individual works of art, it is possible to assume that the same
principles underlie collective texts, such as fairy tales or myths. It is tempting to link this
hypothesis of primal motifs to Róheim’s postulations, which in turn lead us back to Klein,
albeit to her later work, and to her emphasis on infantile instinctual life. Moreover, it seems
plausible that Róheim influenced Klein in turn.9 Both were lay analysts (Róheim held a PhD
in philology, Klein, according to Segal, had completed a two-year course in art history at the
University of Vienna before her marriage to Arthur Klein [Geissmann 112]), and both were
Ferenczi’s analysands. Both took part in the meetings of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic
Society, which at the time (circa 1918) seemed to be the centre of the greatest hopes for
psychoanalysis as a young science (Makari 324).
“The Hungarian Society”, writes analyst and historian George Makari, “met almost
every Sunday, attracting promising young members like Sándor Radó, Imre Hermann, Géza
Róheim, Melanie Klein and István Hollós” (324); the atmosphere in the society was relaxed
and Ferenczi drew everyone into the discussions (Grosskurth 72). It is therefore likely that
just as Róheim would later be influenced by and utilize Kleinian concepts and innovations in
his works, Klein too was exposed to anthropology and folklore not only in an indirect way
via Ferenczi, but also in a more straightforward manner, by the man who by 1925 Freud
considered, along with Theodor Reik, as the most significant contributor to the enrichment
and expansion of the anthropological insights which Freud had articulated in Totem and
Taboo (Dundes, Fire xii).
Klein’s analysis lasted till 1919. The last five months of this period were taken up by
the completion of “The Development of a Child”, on the basis of which she was accepted into
the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society (Likierman 15). Despite the obvious shortcomings of a
9 Klein refers to Róheim by name in “The Development of a Child” in the context of a discussion of infantile sexual theories (Klein, LGR 34). 36 first theoretical paper, it contains, as I have previously stated, all the important ingredients that were to play a significant role in Klein’s future thinking. As Likierman puts it, “the style of the paper, with its somewhat rambling narrative and overenthusiastic rhetoric can belie the exactitude that is hidden in its making. Klein’s use of Ferenczi’s ideas, though still undeveloped, heralded the main themes that were to occupy her lifelong thinking” (24).
Fairytale imagery weaves in and out of this text, just as folklore and mythology weave in and out of the fabric of psychoanalysis during the period preceding Klein’s entry into analysis and the years before the First World War. Bearing in mind that “The Development of a Child” is in actuality the analysis of Klein’s youngest son, Erich, it is interesting to see how the personal and the theoretical merge in her work. Klein began her involvement with the field at a time during which, as previously noted, psychoanalysis turned towards folklore and anthropology. As a result of her relationship to Ferenczi, as well as her involvement with the
Hungarian Society, it is reasonable to assume that Klein’s emerging analytic thought was implicated in these cultural concerns.
However, she began her trajectory in psychoanalysis in another role as well, that of the mother. Analysing Erich, the youngest of her three children (at the time aged about five) at a period in her life during which she was presumably more involved in childrearing than ever before. Her two older children, Melitta and Hans, had often been left to the care of their grandmother for extended periods of time, as Klein attempted to deal with her nerves in the decade preceding her analysis (Grosskurth 49). It is tempting to assume that, having been deprived the help of her mother, as well as having experienced considerable psychic recovery through analysis, Klein wrote her first paper as a more involved – perhaps for the first time – mother. I speculate that she would have also been interested in fairy tales as an integral discourse of childhood, as she played with Erich and produced and reproduced staple childhood narratives. I attempt, therefore, in the second chapter, to provide an overview of 37 contemporary scholarship concerning the origin and nature of fairy tales. Moreover, I outline the tales’ role in child rearing at the time Klein wrote “The Development of a Child”, and their significance in the particular paper.
38
Chapter Two. “Second only to the Bible”: The Grimm Canon and the Fairytale
Tradition
As discussed in the previous chapter, the period from 1910 to 1919 witnessed a systematic
attempt on the part of eminent analysts to expand psychoanalytic thought into the domain of
cultural theory, with folklore being a privileged site for the application of the new theories.
Germanicists and psychoanalysts have had a long tradition in interpreting the Grimm fairy
tales. “Since the founder and early practitioners of psychoanalysis were native speakers of
German”, writes Dundes, “it made sense for them to choose samples from the celebrated
Grimm canon on those occasions when they sought to consider folklore as grist for the
psychoanalytic mill” (Dundes, “Interpreting” 18).
I would add that it not only made sense, but that it was inevitable that the
psychoanalysts, Melanie Klein among them, would utilize the Grimm canon, as they were
completely immersed in it. By the period in question the fairy tale had been institutionalized
as a genre into the national consciousness. It had been rendered short and didactic, so it
could be memorized, remembered and orally reproduced, by-passing adult censorship and it addressing social issues such as obligation, gender roles, class differences, power and decorum in a way that satisfied both those who published fairy tales and their (middle and upper class) public (Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, [FTMMFT] 33). The fairy tale as a genre had also expanded to include drama, poetry, ballet, music and opera (Zipes,
When Dreams Came True, [WDCT] 22).
Tales from the Grimm collection held the lion’s share of popularity within both the
German and the European context. They had become an inextricable part of German childhood, even though, as fairy tale and children’s literature expert Maria Tatar claims, their rise to canonical status was not immediate: “While it is tempting to imagine that the collection found its way effortlessly into German households because of its innate aesthetic, 39 ethical, or spiritual merits, the history of its reception was marked by disapproval, hostility, and contempt” (Hard Facts xii). Nevertheless, and despite the collection’s adventurous trajectory through various editions, by the 1830s selected tales had been incorporated in elementary-school curricula and their memorization was becoming standard classroom practice (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 104). Gradually the tales in a way began to replace the
Bible both at home and in school as a familiar narrative whose exegesis helped clarify and anchor social values (Bottigheimer, Grimms’ 21).
Moreover, folk and fairy tales had also become an independent field of study in themselves. Theories concerning the origin and dissemination of fairy tales were being formulated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most influential of which being the historical-geographical method. Originally established and developed by Julius
Krohn (1835-1888) and further expounded and elaborated on by his son, Kaarle Krohn
(1863-1933), this method emphasized the genesis of fairy tales in oral folk culture, as well as the primacy of oral dissemination. Moreover, the geographical-historical method privileged oral as opposed to printed tales, the latter essentially coming to represent a contamination of
“pure” orality (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 111). This emphasis on the primacy of oral origin and nature of folk tales prevails to our day, although it has not gone unchallenged, a subject to which I shall presently return.
The creation of theories concerning the genesis and dissemination of folk tales took place at the same time as the creation of one of the most important reference book for the folkloristic study of the fairy tale (Apo 121). Published in four editions, The Types of
International Folktales remains an indispensable tool for anyone interested in the study of folk and fairy tales. The first edition appeared in 1910 and the most recent, edited by Hans-
Jörg Uther, was published in 2004 (Apo 121). As Finnish folklorist Satu Apo explains,
“Folklorists use the concept ‘tale type’ to indicate an abstracted plot of a narrative which has 40 been recorded in several versions from the oral tradition” (121). In order to be deemed international, a tale type must be traced in the oral narratives of at least two ethnic groups.
Tale types are then accompanied by a name (a title of sorts) and a classification number. As already mentioned, the first edition of this common catalogue was compiled in 1910 by
Finnish folklorist Antii Aarne (1867-1925), whose aim was to provide a system of classification common to folklorists across countries, thus facilitating the collection and classification of folklore material Aarne drew primarily from three traditions in order to formulate the tale types, namely the Finnish and Danish folktale collections, as well as from the Grimms’ Nursery and Household Tales. According to Apo, “[Aarne] considered the magnum opus of the Grimms to be a truly scientific collection of texts offering a reliable picture of the German folktale tradition” (121-122).
Aarne’s classification was deemed extremely useful and, as already mentioned, remains to date a fundamental reference work for folklorists on an international level. In the 1920s,
American folklorist Stith Thompson (1885-1976), at the time a professor of folklore at
Indiana University, revised Aarne’s work in collaboration with his European colleagues, and provided a new version of the reference book with the title The Types Of the Folk-Tale: A
Classification and Bibliography (1928). This was further revised in 1961, and has been primarily in use for the last forty years (Apo 122-23). Finally, In 2004 Hans-Jörg Uther revised the catalogue of tale types, enriching it with what Apo terms a long-awaited innovation, by taking into consideration and including information on literary fairy tales, which apparently had hitherto been overlooked or marginalized as a result of the emphasis placed on the oral aspect of folklore (123).
This marginalization of the literary contributions to folk and fairy tales brings us back to the issue of the oral creation and dissemination of fairy tales. This emphasis on the oral aspects of tales may be attributed primarily to the needs of folklorists working within a 41
paradigm whose main aim was to chart a given tale’s history by comparing many texts
geographically and chronologically, a process primarily based upon the collection of oral
variants. Moreover, Aarne refuted the hypothesis that literary tradition would have made
much impact on oral folklore, basing his contention both on a small number of studies, as
well as on the view that the folk did not know how to read (Apo 123-24).10
Acclaimed scholar Ruth Bottigheimer in her 2009 book Fairy Tales: A New History
caused somewhat of a sensation in the field by challenging this premise of folkloric thought.
“It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales”, she states, “that
this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition. It may therefore surprise readers
that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact”
(Bottigheimer 1). This contention, however, has not been received unquestioningly within
the scholarly community. The prominent and prolific American scholar Jack Zipes, for
example, wrote a scathing critique of Bottingheimer’s thesis, accusing her of attempting to
draw attention to her work by making sensationalist claims rather than balanced and well-
researched contributions to the history of fairy tales (Zipes, “Sensationalist Scholarship”
129).
I shall not go into the details of this debate, as I am neither in a position of expertise to
do so, nor does the argument fall within the scope of this thesis. Nevertheless, it is a debate
which remains relevant insofar as it pertains to the diachronic aspect of the genre. For my
part, I find that some basic knowledge concerning the historical aspects of the fairy tale genre
10 This contention was reinforced partly by conceptual models deriving from cultural nationalism and romanticism. Folklore scholars believed that oral traditions remained unchanged for centuries, thus providing an important source of information and evidence concerning national identity (for the construction of a national identity it was more expedient to rely on a centuries-old oral tradition rather than on written sources dating back only a few hundred years) (Apo 124). 42
is essential in order to appreciate and comprehend the genre’s synchronic aspects in full.
What seems to be accepted by folklorists irrespective of their propensity to confer primacy
either to oral or written sources,11 is the apparently inherent hybridity of the narratives when
it comes to national origins and the means of their transmission and dissemination, as well as
to their perceived audiences. With this in mind, I borrow Bottigheimer’s organizational
schema of moving back in time in my attempt to provide a brief overview of the fairy tales’
trajectory as a written genre from the fifteenth century to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
The “contamination” of “pure” oral tales was deemed a necessity in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, as a number of scholars throughout Europe, but primarily and
most famously Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to record what they perceived to be an
endangered tradition. In the case of Germany, the fragmentation of the German-speaking population into numerous small and independent principalities, in combination with inner turmoil, led to aspirations on the part of the middle class for the unification of Germany within a modern nation-state. As a consequence, there was a deeply-felt need for the creation of a common German national identity, in which language, literature and folklore would play a vital role as ideological tools (Csapo 16). Not only were the Brothers Grimm deeply upset by the Napoleonic wars and the French rule of their day (Zipes, WDCT 65), they also considered the folkloric material circulating at the time to be threatened by the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization (Tatar, Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, [ACFT] 341).
These two processes, they believed, posed a serious threat to German identity, since language, folksong and mythology were viewed as the spontaneous and true expressions of
11 According to Zipes, in the last forty or fifty years scholars of various disciplines (folklorists, literary critics, historians, scholars of folklore and fairy tales) on an international level have been more interested in the intersections between literary and oral traditions rather than with attempts to privilege the one over the other
(“Sensationalist Scholarship” 135). 43
national character; the Volksgeist (national spirit), then, was to be pursued through the study
of folklore and myth (Csapo 17). What is more, within the context of Romanticism products
of the imagination, dreams and fantasies were privileged. Romantic thinkers, the Brothers
Grimm among them, identified folk and fairy tales with the unsophisticated and unspoilt
mind, with all that was innocent and unadulterated (Warner, From the Beast 188). In a
nutshell, “‘[t]he folk’ (das Volk in German) were discovered to have sheltered many customs
and superstitions, myths, and tales, that might be recovered in a renewal of contemporary
culture” (Doty 108).
And thus the two brothers began their folkloric endeavour. Their methodology in
collecting and saving these texts was taken up as a model by early schools of folklore, yet it
was also harshly criticized by later schools (which did not, however, seem to take into
consideration that the Grimm brothers, being pioneers in their field, made up the rules as they
proceeded with their project ) (Dégh 68). In 1811 the brothers proclaimed that their efforts as
collectors were guided by scholarly principles, thus implying that their Kinder – und
Hausmärchen (Nursery and Household Tales) was written mostly for their academic
colleagues. During their search for a publisher they claimed that the main purpose of the
volume was not to profit from but rather to “salvage what was left of the priceless national
resources still in the hands of the German folk” (Tatar, Hard Facts 11).
The first volume of the Nursery and Household Tales was published in 1812 and, despite its fair commercial success, received little critical acknowledgement. The Grimms waited in vain for literary luminaries such as Goethe to take notice of their endeavor, while those minor figures who did take notice of the first edition rarely had anything good to say about it (Tatar, Hard Facts 14-15). As Tatar puts it:
For many observers, the Nursery and Household Tales fell wide of the mark
and missed its potential market because the brothers had let their scholarly 44
ambitions undermine the production of a book for children. The Grimms’
seemingly slavish fidelity to oral folk traditions – in particular to the crude
language of the folk – came under especially heavy fire. August Wilhelm
Schlegel and Clemens Brentano felt that a bit of artifice would have gone a
long way toward improving the art of the folk and toward making the tales
more appealing. (Tatar, Hard Facts 16)
This advice was not lost on Wilhelm Grimm who in the succeeding volumes and editions of the Nursery and Household Tales both elaborated on the texts till they were almost double their original size and polished the prose so that nobody could complain of stylistic roughness (Tatar, Hard Facts 17-18). Having primarily taken over the adaptation of the texts and their transcription from oral narratives to printed ones (as opposed to the practice of Jacob Grimm who was mostly concerned with unearthing material and channeling it to his brother) (Bottigheimer, Grimms’ xii), he tried to make the tales stylistically smoother and to ensure they had a clear sequential structure. Wilhelm inserted dialogues and old proverbs, as well as adjectives, in order to make the stories more lively and pictorial. In addition, he reinforced the characters’ motives for action, attempting to provide psychological motifs, while eliminating elements that could detract from the tales’ rustic overtones (Zipes, WDCT 71). As Zipes writes, Wilhelm Grimm’s goal was ultimately “to create an ideal type for the literary fairy tale, one that sought to be as close to the oral tradition as possible, while incorporating stylistic, formal, and substantial thematic changes to appeal to a growing middle-class audience” (WDCT 71).
In 1825 an abridged third edition of the tales, known as the Kleine Ausgabe, became a single, low-priced volume (till then there were two volumes in circulation), including fifty of the best-known stories which would eventually become the classic canon of the texts. This particular format sold well; the two brothers witnessed nine additional reprintings in their 45
lifetimes (Tatar, Hard Facts 19-21). The final Large Edition of 1857, however, is of
particular importance as, according to Bottigheimer, this was the edition which was the
source of nearly every subsequent reprinting of the Grimms’ tales: “What the 1857 edition
contains is of the utmost importance, for it is the locus classicus commonly acknowledged to
have been one of the most powerful formative influences on generations of German,
European and American children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as a
clear reflection of children’s (or adults’) psyches” (Grimms’ xii).
In his preface to the second edition Wilhelm emphasized the value of these stories for
children: he expressed the hope that the collection would serve as an Erziehungsbuch, a
manual of manners and upbringing (Tatar, Hard Facts 19), as fairy tales and folktales were
gradually relegated to the nursery due to the changes brought about in social structures.
Traditionally told at adult gatherings, fairy and folk tales often contained sexual allusions or
sexually explicit episodes (Tatar, Hard Facts 23).12 As industrialization swept across Europe,
the changes brought about in the way of life also engineered changes in narrative habits:
Exactly when the function of folktales shifted from amusement for adults to
the edification and diversion of young children is not clear … But as
industrialization gradually curtailed the need for the kinds of collective
household chores and harvesting activities that had created a forum for oral
narration, folktales as a form of public entertainment for adults died out. There
may still exist many pockets of culture – both rural and urban – in which oral
performance of tales and songs thrives, but on the whole it is safe to say that
12 According to John Updike, folk and fairy tales were “the television and pornography of their day, the life- lightening trash of preliterate people” (qtd. in Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales xii). While this statement seems somewhat exaggerated, it does capture the appeal of these tales to an audience more diverse than usually assumed. 46
the nineteenth century witnessed a steady decline in the once intense
preoccupation of adults with folktales. (Tatar, Hard Facts 23)13
The Grimm collection, then, hovers between adult entertainment and children’s literature.
The Nursery and Household Tales are hybrid texts not only in terms of their perceived audience, but even more in their status as folkloric texts. As has already been mentioned, the brothers set out to capture and retain the essence of the German spirit as this was manifested in tales, proverbs and superstitions, which they took down and claimed to have edited merely in order to make them accessible in print. However, they had somewhat obscured their sources for the first volume of texts, and had idealized the source of the tales of the second edition. Specifically, they were not meticulous about citing their sources for the first edition, but took to providing extremely vague information, such as “orally in Hessia”, or “from
Westphalia”. In this way they avoided attributing specific tales to individuals and invoked the anonymous spirit of the folk, to which they attributed the composition, preservation and the transmission of the tales (Rölleke 102).
Moreover, two of the Grimms’ informants were portrayed in such as a way as to gloss
over some of their features that did not tally with “traditional” accounts of the tales’
13 In her Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (1993) Tatar points out that the need to shield children from the biological facts of life became at just the time when collecting folk and fairy tales had become a critical item on every national agenda. Many collectors intentionally eliminated bawdy episodes, scatological humour or anthologized tales already suitably “purged” for children. It is also most likely that collectors were always already presented with more sanitised versions, as they were outsiders to the narrative communities they approached (65). Bearing this in mind, it may not be a coincidence that psychoanalysis as a discipline emerges roughly two generations later (the considered as definitive edition of the Nursery and
Household Tales was published in 1857, The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, although the date appearing on the first edition was 1900), psychoanalysis partly setting out to undo this collective repression of sexuality, especially in its manifestations during childhood or in anything addressed to children. 47 provenance and authenticity. As a result, their identities were practically fabricated. Dorothea
Viehmann was recognizably transformed into the ideal type of the teller of tales; “as such”, writes Rölleke, “she was supposed to determine the image of the circle of contributors that the readers were to carry away with them – and in the most literal sense, for her portrait, drawn by their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm, adorned the second volume of the tales beginning with the second edition of 1819” (103). Dorothea Viehmann was the ideal narrator for the Grimms both because she was described as an old (but not too old) and hearty peasant woman from the village of Zwehrn near Kassel, but also because she was a lively narrator, who could moreover recall the tales with noteworthy precision. The words “peasant woman”, from a “village” and“old” are key words which influenced both the general image and the scholarly view of the origin of the Grimms’ collection (Rölleke 103). This phrasing conjured up a specific image in the mind of reading audiences:
One thinks of old, simple women from the countryside who remember such
stories, which have come down to them from generation to generation
reaching back to time immemorial. Preferably, one envisions them as illiterate,
unafflicted by any touch of literary education or equivalent fruits of reading.
And if such people have always lived in the same spot, then the guarantee that
their storytelling is unadulterated and unspoiled is still stronger. (Rölleke 103-
04)
These images do not quite square with the facts, however, as subsequent scholarship has revealed that Dorothea Viehmann was of French descent, apparently fluent in both French and English, the wife of a tailor and the daughter of innkeepers, who was sent to the proverbially shy Grimm brothers by the family of the French preacher Ramus in Kassel, with whose family the Grimms were closely acquainted (Rölleke 104), and whose members also provided tales for the collection (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 29). 48
The image of another archetypal narrator and contributor also proved to be a combined
product of incomplete information and idealisation. “Old Marie”, as she became known, was
supposedly the housekeeper of the Wild family’s pharmacy and she had greatly contributed
to the considerable repertoire of the young Wilds, who in turn were the very first contributors
to the Grimms’ venture. She was perceived as a perfect contributor to the German fairytale
tradition, as she spoke nothing but German and had never lived anywhere but in Kassel
(Rölleke 105). Archival research, however, has established that “Old Marie” was neither a
housekeeper nor old. Hermann Grimm, son to Wilhelm Grimm, out of both bias and
ignorance of the facts, had put “Old Marie” in the place of a very young Marie, the nineteen-
year-old Marie Hassenpflug, who was a member of a highly educated and well-placed family, quite conversant in French culture and literature (Rölleke 106).
At this point it is useful to make a clarification in terminology. I use the terms “folk tale”, “folktale” and “fairy tale” as defined by Maria Tatar in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’
Fairy Tales (2003). The term “folktale” is used to designate a traditional oral narrative that circulates among the folk, as opposed to the term “folk tale”, which designates tales circulating among the folk and taking place in a realistic setting, with naturalistic details (33).
As Bottigheimer further elaborates, folk tales are peopled by characters from the familiar world: husbands, wives, peasants and rascals. They often have unhappy endings and marital strife looms large; they are more about the difficulties of being married than about the joys of getting married (Fairy Tales 4-5).
Fairy tales, on the other hand, are set in a fictional world where preternatural and supernatural events are taken for granted (Tatar, Hard Facts 33). One of their most salient characteristics is that they can be distinguished from other literary productions by means of the sense of wonder they induce. Much like in dreams, the fairy tale universe is a universe in which anything can happen (Zipes, WDCT 5). When discussing folk tales and fairy tales, it is 49
useful to bear the following clarification in mind: “A fairy tale can thus belong to the
category of folktales, but it stands in contrast to the folk tale, which is sharply biased in favor
of earthy realism” (Tatar, Hard Facts 33).
The Nursery and Household Tales, then, included both folk tales and fairy tales in its volumes. As most contributors to the first volume of the Nursery and Household Tales belonged to the middle and upper class, it is not surprising that most of the tales therein are fairy tales. On the contrary, Dorothea Viehmann supplied mostly folktales for the second volume (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 3) and as Bottigheimer writes: “The Schwank [folktale] rather than the conte de fée [fairy tale] was the norm for Wilhelm Grimm’s later sources, and
… the Schwank reflected the coarse world of the peasant and the artisan, not the cultivated
Biedermeier parlor of the Kassel bourgeoisie” (“From Gold” 196).
Even when archival research revealed the middle and upper-middle class background, as well as the youth of the Grimms’ first informants, they came to be viewed primarily as conduits of folktales, which the two brothers then took down (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 30).
The theory which considers household servants as channels through which oral narratives made their way to the upper echelons of society is now a commonly held view and recurs repeatedly even in contexts preceding the Grimms. As novelist and historian Marina Warner puts it in her landmark study of fairy tales and their tellers, the gouvernante acts as a hinge between the ranks of society: posited in a liminal space between high and low culture, she was united in the narration of fairy tales with both the peasants appointed to mind the children and her young charges (From The Beast 171).
With this in mind, it is interesting to learn that fifty years before the Brothers Grimm began their perceived mission to salvage the German oral tradition, a French gouvernante was responsible for the dissemination of fairy tales as a didactic genre over Europe. Jeanne-
Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711-1780) was a French writer who had left France after an 50 unsuccessful marriage. Working in England as a governess, she provided a book of moralized versions of French fairy tales for her young charges, specifically middle and upper class young girl readers. Hers is the version of “Beauty and the Beast” which today forms the canonical text of the particular fairy tale (Warner, From the Beast 292). The tales in her collection were highly didactic, which may partly account for the collection’s numerous translations. Originally published in London in French in 1756, it was subsequently translated into German and published in both Switzerland and the Germanies. The collection was extremely successful and as a result was constantly reprinted – in German – during the 1760s,
1770s and 1780s (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 55). It is therefore no surprise that the fairy tales provided by Wilhelm’s young female informants bore striking resemblances to French fairy tales, more particularly to those of Charles Perrault. It is very likely that they were familiar with de Beaumont’s text, or others similar to it.
De Beaumont belonged to the second wave of a host of fairytale authors situated in
France, where the genre flourished from 1690 to 1714 (Zipes, WDCT 12). Already accepted in literary salons, the fairy tales gradually began to be published in simplified versions and cheap editions, which were popular among the lower classes, and gradually became a source for oral culture in turn. Moreover, these fairy tales were cultivated for children, becoming a didactic, moralistic genre (15). Again, de Beaumont and her contemporaries did not compose in a vacuum – they drew freely form a rich, preexisting tradition which featured Charles
Perrault and a circle of now largely forgotten French women authors, who became known as the conteuses.
In 1695 Charles Perrault published his collection of fairy tales, a slim volume of eight tales, which became classics (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 53-54). Dedicated to the nineteen- year-old Elisabeth-Charlotte d’ Orléans, niece to Louis XIV, it contained some of the best loved fairy tales, such as “Cinderella”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “Puss 51
in Boots” and “The Fairies” (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales, 64-65). As a sophisticated aristocrat,
Perrault did not attach his name to the collection; he first attributed them to his son, then to
Mother Goose. Nevertheless, his stories became established among an audience which was
not only interested in narration in itself, but was also concerned with educating, socializing
and civilizing children (Tatar, ACFT 348-50).
Perrault was the first male and académicien to write fairy tales; he was, however, simultaneously part of a literary coterie consisting of a number of fairytale authors, most of whom were women. Linked to a previous generation of independent women known as the précieuses, they were by no means common folk (Warner, From the Beast 168). All the same, they too existed in a liminal social space, on the fringe of the court and often in trouble with it, as they held unconventional views on the status of women in polite society, as well as regards the protracted military campaigns of the era, which had resulted in devastation. As women, they were also not part of the literary establishment; they therefore built their literary reputation in a new genre that was viewed with suspicion (Zipes, WDCT 39). At the time,
European aristocracy and the intelligentsia considered oral wonder tales as common and vulgar. The tales were also viewed as repositories of superstitions and pagan beliefs, with no relevance to the Christian world (30). During the reign of Louis XIV, however, the wonder tale as a genre was adopted as a narrative strategy to criticize the rule of the king, as well as a means of elaborating on a code of morals, conduct and integrity (39).
The conteuses used the fairy tale as a vehicle to express their views primarily on women’s predicament. These views were socially subversive, as they advocated equality between the sexes and intelligence in conversation (Warner, Wonder Tales 8). As Warner writes in her introduction to six of these now-forgotten French precursors to contemporary fairy tales, “[t]hese successors of the précieuses were combating aristocratic complacency and determinism: tenderness and interior worth rather than title and goods were what they 52
urged in a prospective husband” (Wonder Tales 11-12). Moreover, in their choice of fairy
tales as a genre they opted, like the Grimms more than a century later, to claim oral tradition
as the source for their tales:
The conte was characteristically transmitted orally, and when Marie-Jeanne
L’Héritier and Murat made their claim to popular roots, they were defying the
tradition of high-flown classicism, pompous odes and allegorizing
mythologies. Fables, old wives’ tales, proverbs, the handed-down, well used,
anonymous culture did not require an education to be understood or an
aristocratic audience to be heard; the writers shared it among themselves, and
echoes sound between the stories, as the imagery recurs, of white cats,
disembodied hands, rudderless boats, while the motifs return with modular
differences: cannibal ogres, jealous old fairies, bad mothers, rivalrous mothers.
(Warner, Wonder Tales 12-13)
The authenticity of the fairy tales was apparently confirmed by the author’s direct
contact with a speaking woman (Warner, From the Beast 175). Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, for instance, claimed to have gathered her material form an old Arab woman, whereas
L’Héritier invoked more intimate memories of hearing her stories from her own nurse and governess as they sat together by the fire; the latter also urged other writers to put on paper the stories told in French from the voices of the people (Warner, Wonder Tales 12). However, as Warner states, this seamless version of the transmission of folk narratives orally and their mere transcription by literary personages, as it were, does not, as in the case of the Grimms, square with the facts of composition. As she writes:
The popular, unwritten provenance was often – almost always – fictive.
D’Aulnoy drew on Greek romances, medieval legends of Mélusine, on Tristan
and on Merlin, on fabliaux and the Lais of Marie de France, on her 53
contemporary La Fontaine, as well as finding plots and much narrative
incident in the down-to-earth and vigorous fantasies of story collections like
Boccaccio’s Decameron and Le Piacevolli Notti by Giovan Francesco
Straparola (“The Babbler”). L’Héritier, too, for all her protestations about her
beloved childhood nurse, also drew on printed literature, especially
Giambattista Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti, published in 1634-36 in Naples.
(Warner, Wonder Tales 13)
Just as the Nursery and Household Tales consisted of elements deriving from both the oral tradition as well as the French fairy tales of Perrault and women authors that preceded him, the French contes were partly indebted to the collections of tales that preceded them in Italy
during the sixteenth century.
The fairy tale flourished in Italy before it did in any other European country. The
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented prosperity and the development of
great commercial centers, as well as a growth of literacy (Zipes, WDCT 11). The two most
important authors of fairy tales were the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile (c.1585-1632), who
wrote Lo Cunto de le Cunti (The Tale of Tales), popularly known as The Pentamerone and
which was published in 1634-1636, and the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1485-
c.1557), whose Le Piacevoli Notti (Pleasant Nights), was published in two volumes in 1551
and 1553 (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 58).
Both Basile and Straparola modeled their respective works on Boccaccio’s
Decamerone, organizing their tales under a framing tale and creating an atmosphere of
verisimilitude for the embedded narratives (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales 78). But whereas
Boccaccio reworked preexisting narratives masterfully and set a lofty tone for his work,
Basile inverted each and every one of the former’s ideal, thus creating a stage for low
comedy (78-79) and a text so well suited for performance that it is not unlikely that it was 54
composed for oral presentations (86). According to Bottingheimer, Basile also provided a
series of plots that made admirable literary templates and as such transplanted easily, even
thought the lifespan of his own work was limited due to his Baroque literary style (Fairy
Tales 89). As she claims, Basile’s “Sun, Moon and Talia” became, via Perrault, the plot of
today’s “Sleeping Beauty”, albeit with alterations; the “Cinderella Cat” became “Cinderella”,
“Nennillo and Nennella” became “Hansel and Gretel”, and “Petrosinella” is now better
known as “Rapunzel” (89).14
Finally, one must acknowledge the influence of Giovan Francesco Straparola on the
creation of written fairy tales as we know them today. The biographical evidence on
Straparola is scant. “Straparola” (meaning “Babbler”) was apparently a nickname, while the
writer added “da Caravaggio” to his name, so it can reasonably be assumed that he was born
in the Italian town of Caravaggio, but little else can be ascertained concerning his life (Waters
869). The first edition of the first part of his Facetious Nights was published in Venice in
1550 and the second part was published in 1553. What can be inferred from the succeeding
editions after 1553 was that some charges of plagiarism must have been made against him,
charges which he obviously found insulting, as in some editions of the work published after
1553 there is a short introduction to the second part, in which he refutes these charges and
assures his reading public that the tales included in his selection are a faithful transcript of
those told to him by his ten narrators (Waters 870). As nineteenth-century scholar and
translator of the tales in English W.G. Waters comments in his “Terminal Essay” in The
Facetious Nights of Straparola:
14 Again, Zipes contests this argument by claiming that Basile’s plots highlight the fact that he was conversant with the lower-class storytelling tradition of Naples and Sicily. Basile travelled throughout Italy and was not a member of the aristocracy, hence his stylistic brilliance in using folk dialect in order to parody Baroque mannerist conventions (“Sensationalist Scholarship” 139).
55
After reading the “Facetious Nights” through one can hardly fail to be struck
by the amazing variety of the themes therein handled. Besides the fairy tales –
many of them classic – … there is the world-famous story of “Puss in Boots”,
an original product of Straparola’s brain. There are others which may be
rather classed as romances of chivalry, in the elaboration of which a generous
amount of magic and mystery is employed. The residue is made up of stories
of intrigue and buffo tales of popular Italian life, some of which are fulsome in
subject and broad in treatment, but with regard to the majority of these one is
disposed to be lenient, inasmuch as the fun, though somewhat indelicate, is
real fun. (Waters 872-73)
Waters speculates on the origins of Straparola’s material, acknowledging the variety of possible origins for the tales. He tentatively attributes the origin of fifteen fables to novelists preceding Straparola, twenty-two to Jerome Morlini and four to mediaeval and oriental
legends, thus leaving about twenty-eight to be classed as original (Waters 878). Moreover, he
writes:
From beginning to end [Straparola] certainly made free use of all the storehouses
of materials which were available, selecting therefrom whatever subjects pleased
him, and working them up to the best of his skill. It was unrealistic to censure him
on this score, seeing that in what he did he merely followed the fashion of the
age. He borrowed from Ser Giovanni, and Ser Giovanni borrowed also from the
“Directorium” and the “Gesta Romanorum”. Folk-lorists [sic] have discovered
for us the fact that all the stories the world ever listened to may, by proper
classification, be shown to be derived from some half dozen sources. As the
sorting and searching goes on, new facts come to the light, the drift of which 56
tends to prove that the charge of plagiarism is now almost meaningless. (Waters
878-79)
Sixteen successive editions of Straparola’s tales were published in the twenty years
between 1550 and 1570. The first volume of the tales was translated in French in 1560 and it
was followed by a translation of the second part approximately thirteen years later (Waters
871). There is then an acknowledged and verifiable connection between the tales of
Straparola and the French writers of fairy tales, which becomes particularly evident when one
considers that “Puss in Boots” is now attributed solely to Perrault rather than to Straparola.
The Grimms were also familiar with the Facetious Nights, although their use of the French
spelling of the proper names in the tales suggests that they had used the French translated
editions rather than the original work (Waters 870).
As both Warner and Zipes point out in the introduction to Wonder Tales: Six French
Stories of Enchantment (2004) and in the rebuttal of Bottingheimer’s views on the history of fairy tales respectively, the genre in its written form was crystallized in France rather than in
Italy (Warner, Wonder Tales 3-4; Zipes, “Sensationalist Scholarship” 131). Nevertheless, what stands out particularly clearly is the inability (and perhaps even the futility) of trying to establish with absolute certainty the priority of either oral or written tradition. For example, in the French salons where the fairy tale flourished in the seventeenth century, word games of all kind were a favorite pastime, and telling stories artfully and resourcefully was a prerequisite for any welcome guest (Warner, WonderTales 4). However, these tales were not necessarily impromptu narrations; rather they had been carefully prepared (and probably rehearsed) in order to give the impression of spontaneity.
It has always been known that oral and written tradition have almost always existed
side by side, with folktale and fairy tale material weaving in and out of the printed text
(Warner, From the Beast 24). As Warner puts it, “in the West, oral literature has not existed 57 in isolation since Homeric times” (From the Beast 24). The pretence at anonymity, however, confers the authority of traditional wisdom accumulated over the past and acknowledged by many for and because of its capacity to teach and be useful (Warner, From the Beast 24). As consumers of numerous narratives we have been left with the image of oral culture influencing and gradually making its way into print culture; first the spoken, then the written word. As regards the fairy tale genre, however, documentary evidence indicates a more complex trajectory of the genre, where oral narratives are recorded and become disseminated through written media, while written tales may well enter oral discourse, for example by means of public readings and incorporation in oral tales of motifs earlier read by (or read to) a narrator, who then makes them a part of his own repertoire. It is therefore important to have an overview of the genre, particularly of its perhaps lesser known historical aspects, in order fully to appreciate the position and role of the tales at given moments in time.
II
By the time Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, fairy tales had been well institutionalized in a variety of ways. As Jack Zipes claims, Germans had incorporated folktales and fairy tales in its literary socialization processes in such a way that they played a formative role in cultivating both moral values and aesthetic taste (Fairy Tales and the Art of
Subversion, [FTATAOS] 137). This was not a new development. Despite their hybridity in terms of national descent, of media of creation and transmission and of perceived and actual audiences, the tales collected by the two brothers had, by the 1850s, found their way into the syllabi of Prussian elementary schools (Bottigheimer, Grimms’ 20). According to
Bottigheimer, the tales included in the school syllabi were selected in order to avoid those that incorporated magical or imaginative elements, such as for example “Cinderella”, “Little
Briar-Rose” or “Snow White”. Those preferred for classroom use revolved around issues 58
such as family life, comradely relationships or relations between servants and masters, thus
allowing for the generation of classroom discussions (Bottigheimer, Grimms’ 21). Be that as
it may, fairy tales were gradually viewed as an irreplaceable discourse for the edification of
children: “Tome after tome glorified fairy tales as an effective medium of instruction, while
in the classroom Grimms’ Tales, officially chosen over the Bechstein versions, was
expounded in minute and dreary detail” (Bottigheimer, Grimms’ 21).
This situation was the result of a number of changes in the perception both of childhood
as a distinct phase of human life, and of the corollary changes this shift in perception brought
about in the way childhood was experienced and organized. The nineteenth century witnessed
a radical change in the position and the depiction of the child in society. The fairy tale as a
distinct genre for children came into its own from 1830 to 1900, coinciding, not
insignificantly, with the rise of the middle class. “As we know”, writes Zipes, “fairy tales in
particular were used consciously and unconsciously during the rise of the bourgeoisie to
indicate socially acceptable roles for children and to provide them with culture, the German
version of civilité” (Why Fairy Tales Stick, [WFTS] 86). The first child analysts, therefore,
had inherited a relatively new concept of childhood and the nature of the child, and would
themselves bring about another revolution in this area.15
In his The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1988) Lawrence Stone describes a fascinating alteration in both parenting and social relations that took place in the
15 It is interesting to note that of the three analysts who could safely be described as pioneers in child analysts, two – Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Anna Freud – had worked as teachers; Melanie Klein was the only one
among them to actually have had children. All three would, in some way, be deeply implicated in the prevailing
culture of childhood of their eras. 59
eighteenth century and set the stage for the different perception of childhood.16Stone paints a
bleak picture of affective expression during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
The lack of a unique mother figure in the first two years of life, the constant
loss of close relatives, siblings, parents, nurses and friends through premature
death, the physical imprisonment of the infant in tight swaddling-clothes in
early months, and the deliberated breaking of the child’s will all contributed to
a “psychic numbing” which created many adults whose primary response to
others were at best a calculating indifference and at worst a mixture of
suspicion and hostility, tyranny and submission, alienation and rage. (Stone
80)
Even if this description of the family bonds of the era is exaggerated, it certainly comes
into sharp contrast with developments during the eighteenth century, when affective
relationships between parents and children began to change. Modern childhood began to
emerge in the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an emergence partly due
to the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. This was accompanied by three major
changes regarding family life and the experience of childhood: the reduction of the number of
16 As is evident from the title, Stone’s book focuses primarily on circumstances in England. Nevertheless, the situations he described bear many affinities to other Western European countries of the time, including
Germany. More importantly, it should be borne in mind that child analysis (both Kleinian and Anna Freudian) flourished within an English context (this is particularly true in the case of Klein, whose views, as it shall be shown, were not at all popular in Berlin, before her departure for London). It is therefore pertinent to bear in mind not only the aspects of German culture which may have played a formative role in Klein’s thought, but also those of the British context within which her thought evolved. Moreover, history of childhood as a distinct field of study is a new field of research. Classic works in the field, such as Stone’s or Philippe Ariés’ landmark
Centuries of Childhood (c.1962) tend to provide information from a broader perspective. This is not to say, of course, that differences due to national cultures are non-existent or insignificant. 60 children born to each family by means of birth control, the aspiration to replace work in childhood with schooling and the impressive reduction of the infant mortality rate (Stearns
55). In addition, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment challenged the long-held perception of the child’s birth into original sin, and the consequent need to save it from eternal damnation and break its will. John Locke’s view of the child as a tabula rasa, whose nature, if not good, was at least neutral until corrupted by external influences, gradually became prevalent (Stearns 57). Moreover, there was a dramatic change in the affective relationships between children and parents. There was both an increased parent-child interaction due to the smaller number of children within individual households and a simultaneous emotional involvement and attachment which was made emotionally feasible, as it were, by the decreased infant mortality rate (Stearns 56).
At this point it is interesting to note the coincidence of the birth of the French literary fairy tale as described in the first part of this chapter with an emerging consciousness of the mother’s power and importance within society. As Lewis Seifert writes in his study of sexuality and gender in French fairy tales of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the end of the seventeenth century witnessed a marked change in the quantity and quality of appeals to motherhood as a distinct familial and social role (179). Prescriptive writings of the day promoted the image of the mother whose primary concern is the upbringing of children, and while this was not entirely new, the advice that mothers show their children affection and work towards sentimentalizing the bonds between family members indicates that till then family ties in upper class and aristocratic echelons were mostly functional and instrumental (Seifert 180). Maternal affection was coming to be viewed as a learned but nonetheless important role (Seifert 181):
the valorization of motherhood might be interpreted as advancing the primal
mother (in the Freudian sense) as a culturally imposed psychic construct. Both 61
public and affective, motherhood was beginning to occupy a cultural space
that could or was supposed to be appropriated by each and every person. As
the sentimentality of the “new” bourgeois family emerged from the
indifference of aristocratic dynamism, the individual was increasingly
compelled to create a self based on a master narrative model. And, I would
argue, the “good” primal mother, object of nostalgic longings, was a central
part of this narrative. (Seifert 182)
This preoccupation with motherhood is partly heralded, partly reflected in the French contes
des fées, where the reader finds a multitude of maternal figures in the plots, either alive or
dead, biological mothers or stepmothers, or even mothers-in-law. No one maternal type predominates (Seifert 182).
The shift in affective relationships within the family went hand in hand with emphasis on maternal breastfeeding in the late eighteenth century. The practice of putting young children out to wet-nurse was gradually abandoned throughout Europe, dying out in France during the nineteenth century and in Germany in the twentieth century, to be replaced by bottle-feeding in many cases (Stone 273). The emphasis on the importance of maternal breastfeeding and the subsequent change in childrearing practices had important practical and psychological ramifications. The infant mortality rate decreased as fewer infants were left to the care of potentially negligent wet-nurses, while the stronger mother-infant bonds to which breastfeeding contributes may well have been a significant cause of the growth of affect during the eighteenth century (Stone 273).
Moreover, the eighteenth century was a turning point in the recognition of childhood as a period distinct in the development of the individual, replete with its individual requirements
(Stone 258). This was reflected, among other things, in the production of books specifically addressed to children. These were aimed at amusing rather than educating, and their low 62 prices rendered them “accessible to the humblest artisan who wished to indulge his children”
(Stone 258). In addition, the portrayal of children in middle-class literature became that of wondrous innocents, full of love and deserving to be loved in return (Stearns 62).
Fairy tales played an important role in this endeavour both to instruct and to amuse children. As already mentioned in the first part of this chapter, Wilhelm Grimm had partly conceived the Nursery and Household Tales as a child-rearing manual, and this ambition was realized with the introduction of the Grimms’ tales into the Prussian school curricula from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This emphasis on the fairy tale as a primary text for children continued well into the twentieth century, to the time, that is, when Klein began practicing psychoanalysis. As Zipes writes:
The significance of the classical fairy tale for children in Germany at the onset
of the twentieth century can be measured to a large extent by the voluminous
attention paid by scholars of different disciplines. By “classical” I am referring
to the standard popular works of the Grimms, Andersen, and Bechstein, which
were the major reference point in German debates and discussions and often
regarded as folktales. (Zipes, FTATAOS 139)
Within the context of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) fairy tales drew the attention and elicited numerous responses from thinkers in various fields. Aside from the Freudian and
Jungian interest, folktales and fairy tales became the object of interest for psychologists of other schools, who sought to point out the general importance of fairy tales in the full development of children’s personalities and to defend their positive contribution to role development and socialization. They were also the objects of pedagogical and sociological studies (Zipes, FTATAOS 139).
In addition, this was a period in Germany during which a heated discussion about the value and function of children’s books in the process of socialization was taking place. There 63 was a synchronized attempt on the part of numerous thinkers to improve the aesthetic standards of children’s literature, while simultaneously making sure that it remained morally impeccable. To a certain extent this paved the way for a number of conservative books, which sought to reinforce the value system of the bourgeoisie. This trend was opposed by a number of more radical thinkers, who for their part sought to revise and reutilize children’s literature as a means openly to politicize children’s tales and thus challenge existing mores and values (Zipes, FTATAOS 140). Again, fairy and folktales were used as models on which
German writers of the time based their work. Things, however, did not go as planned:
the movement to radicalize fairy tales never really took root among children
and adults in the Weimar Republic. The classical fairy tales of the Grimms,
Andersen, and Bechstein reigned supreme and were imitated by a host of
mediocre writers who fostered a canon of condescending, morally didactic
tales that were used basically to sweeten the lives of children like candy for
consumption. Moreover, the classical fairy tale was now disseminated through
radio and film, and this distribution made its impact even greater on children
of all classes. (Zipes, FTATAOS 141)
Both the pioneers of psychoanalysis, then, as well as the first child analysts (Klein was preceded by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and was of course the contemporary and adversary of
Anna Freud) had inherited a view of the child that was rooted in the eighteenth century. It was the view with which they would enter into debate and would effectively – particularly
Klein – dismantle. Moreover, they had been raised – and (in the case of Klein) raised their own children – in a cultural milieu which was saturated with fairy tales and where fairytale references abounded. This was roughly the cultural context in which Klein produced “The
Development of a Child”. 64
The paper’s original title is “Der Familienroman in Statu Nascendi” and it consisted of the analysis of Klein’s younger son, Erich, who in the paper is referred to as Fritz. According to Grosskurth, Erich was subjected to the most intense analytic scrutiny at least since the age of three; his analysis continued well after their move to Berlin in 1921 (Grosskurth 75). The paper was published in this form in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1923
(Grosskurth 105).
The first part of the paper is titled “The Influence of Sexual Enlightenment and
Relaxation of Authority on the Intellectual Development of Children”. Klein’s project – the observation and analysis of her own son – needed a precedent. Although the analysis of children by their (analyst) parents was not unprecedented at the time (Freud had analyzed
Anna, Abraham and Jung their own children), Klein needed a working model on which to base her work with Erich. This model was provided by Freud’s analysis of “Little Hans”
(1909), which partly explains the similarities between the two papers:
Freud not only provided an accessible model, but one that was successfully
tried and tested, and in this sense, comprised a practical manual which
demonstrated how childish questions on sexuality were actually answered. It is
thus that Klein’s first paper bears so much resemblance to the “Little Hans”
model, both in content and in the style of delivery. (Likierman 26)
Klein began her paper by asserting that sexual enlightenment must take place from an early age, at a pace compatible with the child’s rate of development, in order to avoid both real dangers as well as dangers provoked by over-strong repression, which may result in illness or problematic character traits (LGR 1). She was confident when stating that the satisfaction of sexual curiosity is the basis for intellectual curiosity: “[An upbringing founded upon unqualified frankness] has another and not less significant consequence – a decisive influence upon the development of the intellectual powers” (Klein, LGR 2). Klein’s decision 65
to analyze Erich, she informs us, was due to what she described as a general slowness, his
lateness in speaking, his inability to grasp basic (according to Klein) concepts, his marked
feeling of omnipotence (2-3).
Following Erich’s enlightenment about the way babies are born (but not about the part
played by the father because, Klein says, he had not asked about it), a striking increase in his
need to ask questions set in. All of his questions tested the limits of reality: what exists and
what does not, the Easter Rabbit, Father Christmas, and ultimately the existence of God (3-4).
The parents’ views differed on this particular issue, so the question of the existence of God
remained unresolved and resulted in the decrease of the parents’ authority over Erich. Here
Klein drew on an educational premise of eighteenth-century Enlightenment principles, that
parental – and paternal – authority is reinforced by the authority of God. According to Julia
Kristeva in her analytic assessment of Klein’s contribution, Klein had the insight to associate
sexual curiosity to the child’s metaphysical curiosity about the existence of God: “In this way
Klein exposed the child’s troubles and, by sparing the parents their ideological disagreement,
relaxed their authority and allowed their offspring’s thought to develop” (Kristeva 38).
Klein’s outlook was, in Kristeva’s view, an optimistic, eighteenth-century vision of the child’s psychic life (39). Grosskurth, on the other hand, is much more critical when she (in a somewhat derogatory tone) describes Klein’s conclusions as “probably the high point in
Klein’s own optimistic sense of omnipotence” (77), going on to state that Anton von Freund was unimpressed by Klein’s result. Von Freund pointed out to Klein that she had not in any way touched the child’s unconscious and suggested she approach the case not as one of analytically informed upbringing, but rather as one of analysis proper, in a way similar to that of an adult. Klein took his advice:
She then began interpreting his dreams, his play, and his fantasies in as daring
a way as she would have done with an adult. Instead of the improvement she 66
claimed to have achieved with the child, she now discovered she had a very
troubled little boy on her hands – one who no longer questioned her
constantly, who played fitfully and had lost interest in stories, particularly
Grimm’s frightening tales. He had become increasingly withdrawn.
(Grosskurth 78)
Yet even in her “omnipotent” first paper, Klein detects in her son a resistance to enlightenment that could not be attributed solely to educational pressure alone, and did not diminish even in the face of truthful explanations:
After he had once put the question, “Where was I before I was born?” it
cropped up again in the form of “How is a person made?” and recurred almost
daily in this stereotyped fashion. It was clear that the constant recurrence of
this question was not due to lack of intelligence, because he evidently fully
understood the explanations that were given him about growth in the maternal
body (the part played by the father was not referred to as he had not at that
time asked directly about it). That a certain “pain”, an unwillingness to accept
(against which his desire for truth was struggling) was the determining factor
in his frequent repetition of the question was shown by his conduct – his
absent-minded, somewhat embarrassed behavior when the conversation had
hardly started and his visible endeavour to be quit of the subject he himself
had begun. (Klein, LGR 3-4)
As Klein proceeded with Erich’s analysis, she soon realized (and this realization forms the introductory statement to the second part of her paper which bears the title “Early
Analysis”) that education or sexual enlightenment alone did not suffice to help him overcome his neurotic difficulties. Foreshadowing her later conviction that no educative or moral pressures should be part of children’s analyses, she states that neurotic difficulties in children, 67 as is the case with adults, cannot always be ascribed to the child’s environment or education, but should ultimately be attributed to an inherent attitude or predisposition (27). It was not enough to apply enlightened principles of sexual enlightenment in a timely and pedagogically appropriate manner; rather, the analyst had to delve deeper in the child’s unconscious.
As a result, Klein interpreted the child’s phantasies, which were affecting it in a profound manner. She made up stories and played, sharing in Erich’s phantasies and anxiety, offering her own tales when the child remained silent (Kristeva 41). As Kristeva describes it,
“she projected herself onto Fritz’s splitting; she lived in it, in its place, in the tension between desire and repression – endowing it with words, with stories that she was convinced were her own” (41). The words Klein had to offer allowed the child’s fantasies to be translated into playlets and reconstructed tales (Kristeva 42).
It is noteworthy, then, that in this attempt to verbalize Erich’s anxieties and to bridge this rift between unconscious fantasies and reality, one of the discourses that emerged and was readily recognizable was that of the fairy tale. As Klein tells us, it was by a tale of magic that Erich’s second phase of analysis was triggered. Until his mother had the inspiration to reintroduce the issue of sexual enlightenment by relating the story about a woman upon whose nose a sausage grew at the wish of her husband, Erich had asked compulsive questions and had reduced his play to equally compulsive and unimaginative activity(30). Seizing on the opportunity provided by a commonplace incident, the analyst-mother provided him with the necessary information about the role of the father in the birth process and accompanied it with the aforementioned tale:
Then quite spontaneously he began to talk, and from then on he told longer or
shorter phantastic stories, originating sometimes in ones he had been told but
mostly entirely original and providing a mass of analytic material. Hitherto the
child had shown as little tendency to tell stories as to play. (Klein, LGR 30-31) 68
These stories lacked any sort of artistry, according to Klein, but were rich in analytic
material, as they were akin to dreams and dream association. They were also rich in fairytale
imagery and elements. In Erich’s own words:
“Two cows are walking together, then one jumps on to the back of the other
and rides on her, and then the other one jumps on the other’s horns and holds
on tight. The calf jumps on to the cow’s head too and holds tight on to the
reins.” (To the question what are the cows’ names, he gives those of the maid-
servants.) “Then they go on together and go to hell; the old devil is there; he
has such dark eyes he can’t see anything but he knows there are people there.
The young devil has dark eyes too. Then they go on the castle that Tom
Thumb saw; then they go inside with the man who was with them and go up
into a room and prick themselves with the spin” (spindle). “Then they fall
asleep for a hundred years; then they get up and go to the king, he is very
pleased and asks them – the man, the woman and the children who were with
them, whether they will not stay.” (To my question as to what had become of
the cows, “They were there too and the calves also.”) (Klein, LGR 31)
The narrative as quoted or paraphrased by Klein is reminiscent of dreams, where there is no
consistent narrative logic and nonsensical images succeed one another rapidly. Yet within
this dream-like discourse one can discern the oedipal triangle of the pair of cows with their
calf, as well as the father-son oedipal rivalry as expressed in the image of the devil with the
very dark, blind eyes (a symbol of castration) and the young devil.17The castle that Tom
17 The image of the devil and the young devil brings to my mind “Three Golden Hairs of the Devil”, a tale in which a young boy is sent to the devil in order to get answers to three questions. In his essay “Psychoanalysis and the Folktale” (1920) Róheim interprets this tale as referring to children’s sexual curiosity, the young boy’s questions being distorted versions (in the manner of dreams) of the question “how are children born?”.
Moreover, it is a tale involving a distinct undercurrent of oedipal rivalry, since the young hero is helped by the 69
Thumb saw is the castle of the cannibalistic ogre, who attempts to eat Tom Thumb and his siblings and who is temporarily dissuaded by his wife. On the whole, this short narrative contains, in condensed form, aspects of Erich’s oedipal struggles expressed by means of fairy tale discourse.
When his mother wakes him up in the morning, her body is a mountain that he wants to climb (31), an image that will recur in later children’s analyses so frequently that Klein will come to consider it as a typical symbolism. As Erich voices these phantasies, his play becomes much less inhibited. He plays with other children and shows a remarkable interest in reading (32).
Even though Erich was by then completely enlightened as to the processes of impregnation and parturition, he continued to express a marked interest in the stomach, which retained, as Klein claimed, a peculiar affective meaning for him. Just as is the case with many tales, where the cure for childlessness is often the consumption of a particular kind of food,
Erich associated eating and the stomach with impregnation. Moreover, he described his feces, his “‘kakis’”, as he termed them, as naughty children who run upstairs and do not want to come down; for him these are the children that grow in the stomach (33). Even after he had incorporated the relevant information about the father’s role in the procreation of children, he retained part of his infantile sexual theory and continued to phantasize about the inside of the maternal body and the womb, which he imagined as a completely furnished house – the stomach in particular being very well equipped, complete with bathtub and soap-dish (35).
devil’s mother or wife, who agrees to hide the boy in her skirts as the devil falls asleep in her lap, in the course of the tale providing the answers necessary to the hero. There is no indication in Klein’s text that Erich was familiar with the particular tale, but it is very likely. In any case, this fragment of imagery Erich uses coincides neatly with Róheim’s interpretation of the tale, and it bears affinities to “Tom Thumb”, another tale (more familiar through Perrault’s collection) which can be read in terms of oedipal rivalry. 70
It does not then come as a complete surprise that Erich’s attitude to fairy tales – and to the Grimm fairy tales in particular – acts as a kind of barometer, indicative of his changing psychic reality. As the analysis progressed and anxiety set in, Erich’s attitude towards the tales changed: “The release of fear was probably occasioned by listening to Grimm’s fairy- tales, to which he had latterly become much attached and with which [anxiety] was repeatedly associated” (40). In the accompanying footnote Klein explains that before the analysis started, the child had exhibited a marked dislike for the tales, whereas they became favorites after a change for the better had set in (LGR 40n1). He was particularly afraid of a poisoning witch, whom Klein interpreted as standing for the phallic mother as well as the bad mother-imago, which he had split off from his (own good) mother in order to maintain her as she was (or as he wanted her to be) (42). This splitting of the maternal imago was to become a central aspect of Klein’s theory, as shall later be discussed.
At this point it is interesting to consider Eric Clyne’s own take on his analysis by his mother. When he and his mother relocated to Rosenberg after a period of political turmoil in
Budapest, an hour just before his bedtime was set apart for analysis. Eric had remarked to
Grosskurth that this had not been a pleasant experience, although he did not hold it against her (79). More interesting for our purposes here, however, are his childhood memories in relation to the issue of the impact of fairy tales. Grosskurth writes:
It could be argued that Klein was more therapist than mother to Erich. He has
no recollection of her playing with him but she did hug him. The only toy he
remembers is a harlequin doll Melitta once made for him. When asked what
books his mother read him, he replied: “I have no recollection of stories read
to me but do have a recollection of being familiar with Grimm, Anderson [sic],
and the old-fashioned books like Strawwelpeter. When I started to read I read 71
everything voraciously. However you must bear in mind that I am ancient and
it’s a very long time ago.” (Grosskurth 80)
Eric Clyne’s memories tally with Klein’s rendition of his analysis, at least on the issue of the
prominence of fairy tales in his early years.
Klein disclaimed the title “complete analysis” in the case of Erich, as she foresaw (and
correctly) the possibility that he would need additional analysis in the future, as his
difficulties had not been completely resolved. As she wrote: “The display of so active a
resistance to analysis, and the unwillingness to listen to fairy-tales seem to me in themselves
to render it probable that his further upbringing will afford occasion for analytic measures
from time to time” (Klein, LGR 44). It is telling, in my view, that Klein equates the resistance
to analysis with the unwillingness to listen to fairy tales, implicitly (or unconsciously)
acknowledging the powerful impact not only of active therapeutic intervention in the form of
analysis, but also in the form of the Grimm fairy tales. As I have already argued in the
introduction to the thesis, in the conclusion to her paper Klein emphasizes the usefulness of
fairy tales – and in particular the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm – in recognizing and
addressing children’s latent fears (LGR 52).
The question then arises as to the way fairy tales impact on young readers. It is helpful
in this respect to turn to Meira Likierman’s lucid and in-depth account of the context in which
Klein’s work developed. In particular, Likierman traces the influences under which Klein forged her own work, and discusses the influences of both Freud and Ferenczi on “The
Development of a Child”. As mentioned earlier on, Freud’s account of “Little Hans” provided Klein with a working model of child analysis. Moreover, she developed Freud’s idea that sexual curiosity forms the basis and the origin of a general thirst for knowledge
(Likierman 30). Klein took this view a step further, claiming that the child who is at liberty to ask about sexuality is better able to reach out to the world with a lively curiosity; sexual 72 curiosity and the accompanying sexual enlightenment are ways of essentially liberating intellectual powers (Likierman 30).
Klein not only adopted this view, she also combined it with Ferenczi’s theories on the decline of omnipotence of thought as a prerequisite to normal development. Ferenczi claimed that intellectual growth was a process of increasing recognition of the world as it actually is – in other words, as separate from the infant and not subject to its omnipotent control
(Likierman 36). Ferenczi considered the dawning of this recognition inevitable and prompted by life’s necessities. Although crying or other modes of affective expression are originally deemed to be magical because they seem to conjure up the desired satisfaction (and the mother complements this stance as she attempts to recreate some conditions of the lost intrauterine perfection), the infant soon begins to use a more sophisticated communication repertoire, which ultimately culminates in the acquisition of speech and – consequently – the acknowledgement of a separate world: “Development in thinking can therefore be described as an expedient shift in the site of the infant’s expressive life from the body to language”
(Likierman 36). Klein did not simply graft Freud’s views on the importance of unhampered sexual curiosity to intellectual development onto those of Ferenczi on the decline of infantile omnipotence. Rather, she provided Ferenczi’s view that healthy development requires a psychic shift from omnipotence to the reality principle with a plausible trigger for intellectual development, while Ferenczi believed that this transition was simply a natural occurrence, part of the developmental process (Likierman 36).
“The Development of a Child” exemplifies this transition, as it shows fairytale narratives emerging in a liminal space, the space of negotiation between the realm of the pleasure principle and that of reality. One of the distinguishing characteristics of fairy tales is that their action takes place in a universe similar to ours, yet one where magic may occur. In this light, they can perhaps be said to function as an arena for the negotiation between reality 73
and magical thought. When Erich came to establish a fairly firm reality principle (and to
accept procreation and the father’s role in it), listening to fairy tales no longer frightened him.
With occasional lapses, a barrier had been established between his world and that of the tales; the reality principle had taken over.
In the years to come Klein began to move much further back in psychic development.
Phantasies (as opposed to fantasies) became one of the primary objects of her analytic focus,
and the vividness and sadism of early phantasies seemed to supersede fairytale violence.
What needs to be explored next, then, is whether fairy tales – and more specifically the
Grimm fairy tales – can be viewed as symbolic reenactments of the paranoid-schizoid and the
depressive positions, which figure prominently in Kleinian theory.
74
I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's
mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and
your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch
them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only
confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag
lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are
probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more
or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and
there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing,
and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly
tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with
six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very
small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if
that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion,
fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings,
verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into
braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth
yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or
they are another map showing through, and it is all rather
confusing, especially as nothing will stand still. (Barrie, Peter
Pan)
Chapter Three. Mapping Neverland in Berlin: The Psycho-Analysis of Children
In 1918 Budapest was the place to be if you were a practicing or aspiring psychoanalyst.
However, when the First World War ended, things were completely overturned. A period of political turmoil was succeeded by the violently anti-Semitic White Terror, which rendered the life of Jews virtually intolerable. The Klein family did not remain unaffected. Arthur
Klein could no longer hold his managerial position, so he resigned and moved to Sweden, 75 whereas Melanie and the children found temporary refuge at Ružomberok with Arthur
Klein’s family, with whom she had always been on excellent terms (Grosskurth 82-83).
Despite being away from immediate danger, one can imagine the frustration and anxiety Klein must have experienced at being forcibly removed from the psychoanalytic scene just as she had begun to establish herself within the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society.
As Grosskurth describes it:
Before leaving for Berlin, she must have had to do some hard thinking about
her life. The Hungarian psychoanalytic movement had come to an abortive end
because of the anti-Semitic counterrevolution, and her future must have looked
very dark. She acknowledges that she was always highly ambitious and the
prospect of spending the rest of her life in Ružomberok was intolerable. If she
was ever to establish herself in the psychoanalytic community, it was
necessary to make her mark. She must make a name for herself by publishing
papers; and the subsequent recognition would give her freedom to move to
other centers. (Grosskurth 90-91)
Klein moved to Berlin in 1921 and remained there till 1926, when she relocated to
England. It was a most turbulent time, both personally and professionally. The practical difficulties of settling in post-war Berlin were certainly exacerbated by the tension in the marriage of Melanie and Arthur (Grosskurth 109-10). Professionally, Klein had finally begun to tap into her creative potential, which she had hitherto stifled, but this took place in the face of considerable opposition (95). Although there were misgivings among her colleagues as to the advisability of probing too deeply into a child’s unconscious, some of them entrusted her with the “prophylactic” analyses of their children and her practice grew, but as she complained in later life, “the only patients sent to her were children and the deeply disturbed relatives or patients of other analysts” (Grosskurth 95). This, however, gave her the 76
opportunity to engage in the observation – and the analysis – of children (95). In this effort
Klein could count on the support and guidance of Karl Abraham18 within the Berlin
Psychoanalytic Society. She also turned to him for analysis, as she felt that Ferenzci had not
adequately analysed her negative transference (114).
Dedicated to the memory of Karl Abraham and published in 1932, The Psycho-Analysis of Children was based primarily on the analyses and the material selected during Klein’s residence in Berlin. It is a work of particular importance, as it incorporated both Klein’s conclusions derived from years of clinical experience as well as the theoretical underpinnings for some of the concepts she would later go on to develop (Grosskurth 191). As Klein herself asserted in the second and final preface to the book, despite some expected reformulations resulting from the additional clinical and theoretical work she had done in the years between the publication of the book and the writing of the final preface, the main technical innovations and theoretical conclusions remained unaltered: “There are also a number of statements in this book which, in keeping with my work over the last sixteen years, I might wish to reformulate. Such reformulations, however, would not entail any essential alteration in the conclusions here put forward. For this book, as it stands, represents fundamentally the views I hold today” (The Psycho-Analysis of Children, [POC] xiv).
Klein then went on to enumerate some of the central hypotheses she first presented in this book: processes of projection and introjection operative from the first moments of life,
18 Abraham was the one who introduced Klein to Nelly Wolffheim, a kindergarten teacher in Berlin that in 1914 established the first kindergarten thoroughly informed by psychoanalytic principles (Kerl-Wienecke). Several of
Klein’s child patients, including Erna, attended the kindergarten. According to Grosskurth, while Abraham had sent Klein to Wolffheim as an observant of the latter’s work with children, Klein soon sought to put the kindergarten to her own good use. She often phoned in to be informed of Erna’s behavioural patterns during the course of the analysis, but when the case study appeared publicly, there was no reference to either Wolffheim or her institution, an omission which the former found highly offensive (Grosskurth 120). 77 internalized objects which gradually form the basis for the formation of the superego, the early onset of the Oedipus complex, the infantile anxieties of a psychotic nature which may come to form fixation points for the development of psychosis (Klein, POC xiv). More importantly, it is also here that she first presented her ground-breaking play technique, which remained unaltered over the years. And, in relation to fairy tales, one can already discern the shared ground between discourses.
The pioneering aspect of The Psycho-Analysis of Children becomes even more evident when read in conjunction with Claudia Frank’s Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First
Psychoanalyses of Children. First published in German in 1999 and translated into English in
2009, it is an important account of how Klein came to develop her basic tenets of child analysis. Claudia Frank, both a practicing and a training analyst, first encountered the
Melanie Klein Archive in the context of preparing a paper for a conference; although the archive’s existence was known, no one had explored its potential (Frank xi). After what comes across as painstaking – and meticulous – research, Frank was able to provide readers with fascinating insight into the creation and evolution of Klein’s thought processes, reproducing both unpublished material (such as parts of Klein’s 1925 London lectures) as well as Klein’s own clinical notes. Frank ranks the importance of this hitherto unpublished material as the equivalent of the Freud/Fliess correspondence, in that it provides us with a type of mental biography of Klein’s work at the time. In Frank’s own words:
To some extent, the notes on Melanie Klein’s early analyses enable us to draw
up a kind of biography of the work of these early years. In my view this
material, despite its great diversity, constitutes a sort of counterpart to the
Freud/Fließ correspondence, which gives us an insight into the crucial years of
Freud’s initial discoveries … Unfortunately we do not have a comparable
correspondence between Melanie Klein and a friend, reporting on work with 78
patients, reflections and developing theories alongside news of herself and
family life. On the other hand, in her case we have direct evidence of her
initial clinical experiences in the form of primarily hand written notes on her
first analyses … The material available to us in Melanie Klein’s own hand
allows us to follow the development of her technique through to analysis of
play, as well as her theoretical innovations. (Frank 8)
In the course of this mental biography, Frank was also able to verify or disprove hypotheses concerning both Klein’s life and her work. She was able to prove conclusively that Klein had analysed Erich but not Melitta or Hans, as the actual names and family circumstances of the patients who appear as “Felix” and “Lisa” in Klein’s paper “The Rôle of the School in the Libidinal Development of the Child” (1923) were recorded in her clinical notes (Frank 18-19). This discovery challenges some of the conclusions of the secondary literature on Klein, which are based on this presupposition (Frank 19-20n1).
In terms both of Klein’s working method and of her theory, Frank attempted to counter
another frequent objection to the way in which Klein formulated her theories. Klein’s critics
often accused her of foisting her own concepts onto her patients’ material in order to make
them adhere to her analytical theses. Moreover, they characterized her work as based more on
intuition and inspiration than on observation and impartiality.19
Frank’s research present us with a somewhat different view both of the way Klein
worked and of the route via which she came to her conclusions. Based on unpublished
lectures, texts and clinical notes, Frank attempts to point out how and where “Kleinian
19 For example, Wolffheim, who had acted as unofficial secretary to Klein during her stay in Berlin, recalled later on in life that Klein would dictate to her without notes, pacing up and down in the former’s apartment while gobbling up cake, stopping only when she came up with a new idea that she would immediately term a
“discovery” (much later on an apparently disillusioned Donald Winnicott would dub Klein “a Eureka shrieker”)
(Grosskurth 121). 79
concepts” did not in essence predate the analyses Klein had hitherto undertaken, but how
(and where) Klein had first utilized the existing concepts of the oedipal complex, before
attempting to formulate concepts that diverged from orthodox Freudian theory but originated
from – and were in a sense imposed by – her own clinical experience. In Frank’s words:
The material available to us in Melanie Klein’s own hand allows us to follow
the development of her technique through to analysis of play, as well as her
theoretical innovations as they suggested themselves to her in the clinical
situation. She learned from her little patients about their sadistic phantasies
and analysed their meaning. She observed anxieties about a punishing internal
entity in a girl 2 ¾ years old and conceived of an early superego at that time.
She took her small patients’ Oedipal phantasies and games seriously and
described the pre-genital Oedipus complex. She discovered the attitude of girls
to their own genitals. We find precursors of the differentiation between
systems of anxiety and defence, which she was later to describe as the
“paranoid-schizoid position” and the “depressive position”. However, it was to
be a long time before she developed these nuclei of a new conceptualization
that did not emerge at the outset but followed in the course of her endeavours
to understand her clinical experiences. (Frank 8-9, my emphasis)
With a view to substantiating this claim and in order to provide a coherent account of
the Melanie Klein archive, Frank selected cases according to their significance for and impact
on the early development of Klein’s thought. Moreover, these were cases of children on
whom Klein herself had already published papers in order to provide additional insight by
means of the unpublished material. In this way it was feasible to provide a systematic
procedure for reviewing the development of Kleinian techniques and concepts (Frank 27). As a result, Grete, Rita, Inge and finally Erna were selected for presentation. Before proceeding 80
to a discussion of the inter-implication of fairy tale and Kleinian theory, it will be useful to
present an overview of what these patients had to offer to the development of the new
theories.
Grete was nine years old at the time of her treatment and one of the earliest of Klein’s
child patients (February 1921 to May 1922) (Frank 236). Klein had not at the time developed
the play technique but had merely attempted to transfer to child analysis not only the
concepts derived from adult analysis but its techniques as well. As Elizabeth Spillius,
honorary archivist of the Melanie Klein Trust, comments in her preface to Frank’s work, “one
of the strangest and most endearing things to emerge from Claudia’s research is Klein’s
naïvety: she assumed at first that she could get her child patients to lie down on the couch and
free associate in the way that adult patients were instructed to do in the early 1920s” (Preface
xiv).
Firstly, Grete alerted Klein –as did most of her young patients – to the importance of
assessing the negative transference and of addressing it by interpreting it as soon as possible,
linking it to the original objects. Moreover, she was the patient who pointed Klein in the
direction of addressing the girl’s fear of her own damaged genitalia, as opposed to Freudian
penis envy (Frank 103). Klein attempted a classical penis-envy interpretation according to the prevailing analytic views of the day but she gradually let herself be guided by Grete and stood corrected: it was her own genitals that the young girl was worried about. This anxiety was manifested in a number of phantasies, but it comes across in a striking fairytale manner in an association with her worn-out shoes:
Next association: shows / me a hole in her shoe, that / she is to get new shoes
from / mother that she would so like / to throw away the old ones. That her
friend / Irma has some much worse shoes still / with the whole sole coming
off – that her mother does not take enough care of / her. When asked 81
association shoe / she does not want to say. Fiercest resis - / tance as not for
long time now. / Finally – her genitals because of shape / 2 side parts &
tongue. Cannot state / why so difficult to say? (I interpret | because of the torn
damaged aspect / guilt feeling damaged because of / masturbation – mother’s
consolation even more damaged / by sexual intercourse with father). (Frank
252)
This imagery verified yet again the unconscious association of shoe and genitals so
often found in dreams as well as in fairy tales, the most famous example being that of
Cinderella’s slipper. It is also reminiscent of the “Worn-Out Dancing Shoes” (also known as
“The Twelve Dancing Princesses”), the fairy tale in which twelve princesses dance all night with twelve princes in a magical kingdom under their bedroom floor. In the morning, their shoes are worn out and full of holes, and the princesses are exhausted and sleepy after their night’s exertion.
Moreover, the little patient’s imagery followed a train of thought which involved distinct reference to a split mother imago. The child had spoken in gushing terms about her mother and then immediately very angrily about her grandmother (with whom she was actually living at the time of the analysis for reasons that are not specified in Klein’s notes)
(Frank 252). In view of the development of Klein’s later theories, Grete’s anxiety expressed in the shoe phantasy and her splitting of the maternal object could be viewed as the result of the retaliatory attacks by a persecuting maternal object. In any case, it introduced in no uncertain terms a theme that both Kleinian thought and fairy tales share, namely the split between the good and bad object and particularly the good and bad mother imago, which would figure prominently in Erna’s case.
Before I turn to the case of Erna, it will be useful to provide a brief overview of Klein’s two other important early patients. At the age of 2 ¾, Rita was the youngest patient to be 82
analysed by Klein at the time (March to October 1923), leading the latter to the discovery of
an early, punitive superego which found expression in all of the child’s play activities (Frank
135). This had become evident not only in Rita’s conspicuous remorse at every minor
wrongdoing and her over-sensitiveness to reproach, but it was also enacted in an obsessive
bedtime ceremonial during which she had to be tightly tucked up in the bedclothes with her
toy elephant standing guard, essentially in order to prevent her from harming or being harmed
by her parents (Klein, POC 6). Setting aside the importance of Klein’s discovery of an early,
severe superego, it is important to note that, in order to reach these conclusions, Klein treated
Rita’s spontaneous recourse to her toys as the child’s means of natural expression, and
interpreted both her play and her verbal associations (Frank 236-37). The focus on Rita’s play
rather than her speech, however, was not a conscious formulation of technique, but rather a necessity stemming from Rita’s young age. This challenge to technique would prove invaluable for the analysis of children.
It was the analysis of Inge which would provide the impetus for the development of the
play technique per se. Klein claimed that it was a prophylactic analysis of a “normal” child
who displayed no neurotic symptoms but had nevertheless severe learning disabilities (Frank
141) and it was the first child analysis in which toys were introduced as an integral part of the
analytic hour, when Klein was unable for several sessions to find any means of approach
(Klein, POC 59). She finally resorted to bringing from the nursery some of her own
children’s toys, with which Inge, till then uninterested in drawing or any other activities,
began to play (Frank 140). The use of toys was, in the case of latency-aged children, also
supplemented with role-playing, which could very well continue over numerous sessions till
all its details and connections had been clarified by analysis (Klein, POC 61).
Negative transference, girls’ anxiety about the state of their genitalia, the existence of a
severe early superego, the replacement of free association by playing with toys, drawing and 83 role-playing in child-analysis: all these conceptual innovations to which Klein was led by analyzing Grete, Rita and Inge were reencountered in the case of six-year-old Erna, whose analysis was the most extensive one during Klein’s Berlin years (Frank 237). Erna could be described as the founding case of Kleinian thought, as Klein’s clinical experience with her allowed her to grapple with early projective and introjective mechanisms, splitting, disavowal, paranoid and repressive guilt feelings (Frank 236), as well as envious attacks on the good breast and the will to know. Erna was also the only child to whom Klein dedicated a whole chapter in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (Frank 168).
Klein was intent on maintaining the main principles of adult analysis in the analysis of children: consistent interpretations, gradual resolution of the resistances, steady reference back to the original objects, analysis of both the positive and the negative transference and – perhaps most conspicuously of all – the avoidance of all pedagogical interventions (POC 9).
She was adamant in seeking out a path to the unconscious agencies of the mind, and her perseverance led to representations of the infantile and childish mind which Klein herself found disturbing and initially hard to fathom. Anticipating many of the objections that some of her later detractors were to express, Klein writes:
The idea of an infant of six to twelve months trying to destroy its mother by
every method at the disposal of its sadistic trends – with its teeth, nails and
excreta and with the whole of its body, transformed in phantasy into all kinds
of dangerous weapons – presents a horrifying, not to say an unbelievable
picture to our minds. And it is difficult, as I know from my own experience, to
bring oneself to recognize that such an abhorrent idea answers to the truth. But
the abundance, force and multiplicity of the cruel phantasies which accompany
these cravings are displayed before our eyes in early analyses so clearly and
forcibly that they leave no room for doubt. (Klein, POC 130) 84
At this point it will be helpful to make a short digression in order to compare the image of the infant and child as described by Klein to the commonly-held perceptions of childhood at the time. Klein and her contemporaries were heirs to a Romantic perception of childhood, beginning with the views originally put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and culminating in the apotheosis of childhood by William Wordsworth and other Romantics. Emphasizing the importance of childhood as a valuable period in its own right – rather than in relation to adulthood – Rousseau advocated maternal breastfeeding, no swaddling of infants and allowing the child to learn in a “natural” way, from experience, rather than from people.
Rousseau was the first thinker to present the notion that childhood was a period in life that could be looked back to with nostalgia; he was also the first thinker to forge the link between children and nature (Cunningham 62).
This link was taken up by Romanticism, which as a movement sought to recover for children an imagination which utilitarianism would have crushed (62). It was Wordsworth in particular who attempted to depict how nature would implant in the child the foundations of
moral virtue and beauty, which in turn would enrich adult life: “The romantics in this way set
out an ideal of childhood in which it was transformed from being a preparatory phase to
being the spring which should nourish the whole life” (Cunningham 68). Ultimately,
Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
became as influential for nineteenth-century perceptions of childhood as Freud’s views would
become for ours (69). In this context it is also useful to note that childhood also came to be
regarded as an era during which gender differences were not considered to be of primary
importance and the child was thought of as of neutral gender (70).
By the twentieth century the figure of the child was viewed as possessing the energizing spirits and impulsiveness associated with sexuality, while not yet driven by it:
“The proper place of the child was in the lost playground – an Arcadia not yet touched by 85
mortality, a past not yet burdened by the guilts of adult sexuality, Alice’s rose garden that all
might find and enter, if only via the little door of the imagination” (Briggs, “Transitions”
167). Childhood came to be seen as a state distinct from that of adulthood, a state of
“otherness”, with all the idealization, horror and projection which this entailed. The child was
presented as “primitive” biologically, socially and intellectually, a little savage waiting to
evolve by means of education (Briggs, “Transitions” 168-69). And in terms of sexuality it
was also perceived as the other of the guilty, desiring adult, the child being innocent of
desire. As Briggs points out, “it was left to Sigmund Freud to point out to a disbelieving
world the self evident fact of children’s sexuality … And it is no coincidence that he wrote
[the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality] in these years, from 1890 to the 1920s, years in
which children’s literature was most heavily invested in denial” (169-170).
Even though Freud had paved the way for the discovery of children’s sexuality, it is no
wonder that Klein’s discoveries and depictions of children’s minds should cause many – her
fellow analysts among them – to shudder. The clinical notes are difficult to read not only
because of the repetition, fragmentation and personalized shorthand that Klein used to take
them down, but also because they are at times downright repulsive. This holds true for all
four cases, but again is more evident in the case of Erna, who was also physically
aggressive;20 Klein’s exasperation can be sensed, for example, between the following lines:
As usual beginning of session rage / and jealousy of previous patient. –
Demands / struggle for my chair / insisting on beautiful writing-paper - / …
20 Erna was of course not the only child patient to physically attack Klein. The prohibition of physical aggression was one of the few rules Klein imposed within the analytic setting. Nevertheless, it was apparently often attempted and Klein interpreted these attacks aimed at her head, feet and nose as attempts against the father’s penis incorporated into the mother’s body (especially in the cases of young boy patients) (Klein, POC
132n).
86
Smells at me and states / I stink. – Wants to caress me – and / jabs pencil at
me; harasses in every / possible way pushes table at me – too / close pushes
too close with feet. … I have difficulty in subduing the aggression / constantly
directed at me / - every day problem in the session - / also tenderness behind
which aggression / immediately reappears – and inducing / other aggression.
(Frank 392)
This sequence is followed by Erna’s associations of an “eye-salad” while she was drawing, which in turn were followed by her throwing a pencil at Klein’s eye (Frank 392-93). While drawing, she began to masturbate. When asked to relate her associations to her drawing of a defecating and urinating girl, she came up with images of an eye-tooth salad, i.e. a salad including eyes and teeth and a crushed and ground nose, mixed with stool. According to
Klein’s interpretation, the eyes, nose and teeth were torn out from Erna’s mother in order to punish her mother for trying to keep Erna’s masturbation under control (Frank 394-95).
This imagery, rife with symbolism deriving from the pre-genital phase of development,
may well have led Klein to question both the time of the onset of the Oedipus complex and
the (fairly) rigid classification of stages of development (later in her thought she opted for the
word “positions”, in order to signify the relative fluidity in psychic functioning). Specifically,
she had observed that the genital impulses set in at the same time as the pre-genital ones,
resulting in reciprocal influences and modifications. The attainment of the genital stage
simply meant a strengthening of the genital impulses, which remained merged with pre- genital ones (Klein, POC 134):
That the pre-genital and genital impulses are thus merged together is seen from
the well-known fact that when children witness the primal scene [of parental
intercourse] or have primal phantasies – both events of a genital character –
they experience very powerful pre-genital impulses, such as bed-wetting and 87
defaecating, accompanied by sadistic phantasies directed towards their
copulating parents. (Klein, POC 134)
All these sadistic pre-genital elements were pronounced in Erna’s case. Many of her water games (i.e. games she played with water in or near the wash-basin provided within the analytic setting), for example, as well as her role-playing, revolved around her oral and anal fixations (particularly the latter) and became quite extravagant in a number of sessions.
Bearing the context of fairy tales in mind, it is interesting to note one particular phantasy involving a father, a mother and a child, whom Erna named “Cinderella”. “Cinderella” was obliged to look on and remain absolutely quiet during a performance given by a priest, in which he turned on the water-tap and a woman dancer drank from it (Klein, POC 40). This scene was a variation on phantasies which involved the parental couple exchanging substances (milk, semen) during coitus, as well as incorporating the breasts and the penis respectively (Klein, POC 40). Erna usually ended these activities with outbursts of rage, which showed her feelings of hatred directed particularly against her mother: “Her whole relationship to her mother had been distorted by them, as every educational measure, every act of nursery discipline, every unavoidable frustration, was felt by her as a purely sadistic act on the part of her mother, done with a view to humiliating and ill-treating her” (Klein, POC
40). As Julia Segal points out, the “Cinderella” story may well be used to describe the way ordinary little girls hate and envy their live mothers; the story seems to satisfy “an ordinary little girl’s desires for revenge on a sexual mother preferred by her father, with a life and daughters of her own” (J. Segal, Melanie Klein 32).
In general, one of the most prominent characteristics to emerge from Erna’s analysis is the mechanism of paranoid-schizoid splitting of the self and the (part) object, a mechanism which is not termed as such but is encountered throughout Erna’s case history and the clinical notes. As already mentioned, toys and role-playing were utilized in Erna’s analysis but 88 towards the end of the treatment the analysis revolved primarily around Erna’s drawings, which were rich in fairytale imagery: kings, queens, princes, princesses, witches and peasant girls. This imagery became particularly vivid and it is interesting to read Klein’s own comments on the material available in the Archive:
The material in the drawings clearly indicates the fragmentation of the
personality in two parts. The opposition between the beautiful princess and the
peasant girl or between the witch and the good princess etc. signifies the
opposition between good and evil that she feels within her own personality,
which is also repeatedly represented in games and phantasies by the alternating
angel and devil figures. In the drawings, the evil principle, as for example
represented by the witch, regularly and indeed increasingly clearly comes to
take on particular characteristics of the good princess, who conversely takes on
the other’s traits, so that, as it finally turns out in individual drawings, the two
opposing figures come to resemble each other … In this way, the unsuccessful
endeavour somehow to fuse together the two parts of her personality is
expressed again. (Klein qtd. in Frank 178)
It is useful to compare Klein’s unpublished text to the relevant clinical notes which accompany and comment on Erna’s drawings. Erna associated as she drew:
5/XI.25 / 1. Queen has short hair – none at all – just wig / draw flowers
(genitals) / with special care – but then / covers in red, supposedly prettier /
(Interpret steals & tears genitals to pieces / tears out pubic hair.) / Same with
lines over face / - damage. Criticises fat / legs, left heel twisted / foot sprained
– mother’s foot disease!) / 2. Begins to draw / more beautiful princess. Does
not / succeed, gives up. 3. Meant to be beautiful / princess but find this / not
worked, legs / thin. 4. Thunderbolt princess / has become bald & ugly / behind 89
only poo – reluctance / to play, depression, remorse / then school lessons.
(Frank 431)
Erna switched her drawing activity in order to role play with Klein, Erna assigning to Klein the role of the strict schoolmistress; the schoolmistress in turn was made to assign copy work to Erna, and the work was badly done. When Klein interpreted her associations to this game as fear of punishment from the strict mother for cutting up and taking out her stomach, Erna was reluctant to play school and once again resorted to drawing (Frank 431):
1. X = 1 beautiful girl / under spell from witch; black / hair poo’. _ | _ Witch
herself also under / spell so must do evil; cries / bloody tears (recognizes red /
body etc. bloodily cut to pieces, by / her)…2. Witch is released = more
beautiful… / Princess is freed by / prince, who wants to marry her. / Suddenly
explains will not marry / her, princess ugly, bad / & wants to cut her to pieces
while / draws thick lines from other / side. On other page 8 stomach also /
filled with stool. (Frank 431)
Klein clearly recognized in the witch or the peasant girl or other associated imagery the
mother or a possible sister (Erna was an only child) the emergence of the evil principle of
Erna’s personality, which she was unable to tolerate:
The mechanism of this projection is thus that she has to project the part of her
personality that she cannot tolerate outward on to someone else. By doing this,
however, the other person becomes an entirely evil and sadistic figure about
whom Erna feels guilty because of her projection. In her phantasy, Erna
herself then becomes the victim of the external sadistic person (her mother),
who persecutes her in the same way as Erna had persecuted her. This is the
genesis of the external female persecutor. (Klein qtd. in Frank 178-79) 90
What emerges from the whole picture of Erna’s analysis, and later on from The Psycho-
Analysis of Children, is the centrality of the mother within Kleinian theory, where the relation
of the infant to the maternal object is the crux of psychic development. Klein has been
described as the matriarch of psychoanalytic thought, challenging Freud’s emphasis on the
role played by the father during the period (and the resolution of) the Oedipus complex and
instead emphasizing the centrality of the maternal object, either as part-object (breast) or as a
whole object.21 This was dramatically evident in Erna’s case, where even her striving to attain the father was ultimately motivated by rivalry towards and envy of the mother. Till a fairly advanced stage in her treatment, the essential determinant of her phantasies had been her attitude of simultaneous love and hatred towards her mother (Klein, POC 46) .
This splitting of the maternal imago is in accordance with the practice of fairy tales where evil stepmothers and benevolent fairy godmothers abound. Real mothers are often dead, a trope already commonplace in much realistic literature, the novels of Charlotte Brontë being a prominent example. Fathers or father figures can be away on trips, indifferent or simply ineffectual when it comes to protecting their children.22 But mothers loom large in
21 It is interesting briefly to consider here Ferenczi’s view as expressed in his work Thalassa: A Theory of
Genitality, where he postulates that “the Oedipus wish is precisely the psychological expression of an extremely general biological tendency which lures the organism to a state of rest enjoyed before the birth” (19). In this way, via the desire to return to the intrauterine state Ferenczi implicitly, I think, points towards the centrality of the mother in individual psychic as well as phylogenetic development. Setting aside the current validity of
Ferenczi’s hypotheses, it should be noted that these views were developed in the years 1914-1919 and were published in 1923, in other words during the years in which Klein was in analysis with him and he was one of the most prominent figures of the psychoanalytic movement. It may well be that despite Klein’s constant homage to the theories of Freud and Abraham, some of her basic notions, such as the centrality of the mother, owed in actuality more to the influence of her first analyst and mentor.
22 A notable exception to this rule is the Grimm’s “The Twelve Brothers”, where the King father threatens to kill his twelve sons if his thirteenth child is a girl. Warned by their mother, who in this case is unable to protect her 91 fairy tales, just as the mother in Klein is presented as all-encompassing, incorporating and containing the father’s penis. Splitting and fairytale imagery were crucially implicated in the case of Erna. The six-year-old girl used fairytale imagery, with which she was undoubtedly familiar, in order to express her psychic conflict through play, narration and drawings. Klein too, in turn, based her thought on this imagery in order to formulate and crystallize the concepts and mechanisms that were to form integral parts of her thought. And in the case of the Grimm stories in particular, it is perhaps no coincidence that Klein was part of a cultural milieu which did not shirk from accepting, even perhaps embracing, sadistic or terrifying elements in children’s literature. This tolerance had perhaps encouraged her to explore
Neverland, with its eternally shifting, terrifying contours, zigzags, astonishing splashes of colour, fathers, murder and the one very small old lady with a very crooked nose.
children, the twelve princes flee to the woods, where their sister will join them after finding out her brothers’ fate. As Tatar comments, “In ‘The Twelve Brothers’, the brothers recorded a tale that shows fathers as the source of threats to children, as parents willing to undertake premeditated murders for the flimsiest reasons”
(Annotated Brothers 37). 92
Chapter Four. The London Years: Fantasy, Phantasy and Symbolization in the
Case of Dick
Melanie Klein arrived in London in September 1926 and her presence was first recorded in
the British Psycho-Analytical Society’s minutes on 17 November 1926 (Grosskurth 153). She
had been invited to England by Ernest Jones, whom Grosskurth describes as “a strong-willed,
tenacious Welshman, who was the dragoman of the psychoanalytic movement in the English-
speaking world” (154). Karl Abraham’s death on Christmas Day in 1925 was a great personal
blow for Klein, as he was her analyst and mentor in Berlin. Moreover, Abraham’s death led
to mounting opposition from her Berlin colleagues.23 These two circumstances probably
made Jones’ invitation first to lecture in London and afterwards to relocate feel like
something of a lifeline.
At the time, child analysis was a particular point of interest for the London-based
analysts. As early as 1920, Jones had requested that members of the British Psycho-Analytic
Society provide psychoanalytic commentary on observations of young children. In addition, a
series of papers on child analysis, particularly concerning the applicability of psychoanalytic
techniques to children’s analyses, as well as the extent to which the former could be put into
practice, had been produced: apparently Jones had envisaged the British Society as a
pioneering center for child analysis (Grosskurth 159). Nina Searle had begun analyzing
children in 1920; Mary Chadwick, Susan Isaacs and Ella Freeman Sharpe were also
developing child analysis as a specialty, as the British Society had a strong contingent of
23 Grosskurth writes that Sandor Radó, at the time appointed editor of psychoanalytic publications and a fierce opponent of the concept of lay analysts, would not accept Klein’s papers for publication in the relevant journals, and became increasingly abusive towards her during the meetings of the Berlin Society – so much so that the other participants would be moved to pity. Moreover, Klein’s involvement in a whirlwind – but ultimately disastrous – affair with a married man nine years her junior probably contributed to her desire to move to
England (141). 93
women determined to succeed professionally in the period after the First World War
(Hinshelwood 44-45). Many ex-teachers had joined the British Society soon after its
founding in 1919, “perhaps because of an interest spawned in the strong current of reform
and progressiveness in British education at the beginning of the century” (Hinshelwood 45).
Susan Isaacs had established an experimental school based on psychoanalytic principles,24
and Donald Winnicott, a pivotal figure in the Object-Relations school of thought, was already
training as an analyst in 1924 (Hinshelwood 45).25
In the context of this particular thesis it is interesting to note at this point that this generation of analysts, so central to the development of the British Object-Relations School, had been born and raised during the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras,26 periods which had a
special bearing on the establishment of the importance and evolution of fairy tales, fantasy
and children’s literature in England (although these three genres should not be conflated, they
24 It is interesting to note that A.S. Neill’s now famous Summerhill School was established in Lyme Regis in
1923. Neill was strongly influenced by both Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, and he held “private lessons” with some of the school’s more difficult students; these amounted to a sort of psychotherapy, which, however,
Neill gradually abandoned. He was familiar with some aspects of Klein’s theory but was not congenial to it or to
Klein’s followers. He described them in a 1955 letter as a “dull crowd”, “[like] communists with a blank curtain that you couldn’t penetrate” (qtd. in Grosskurth 448).
25 To the analytical preoccupations of the British Society as a whole was added Jones’ personal investment in child analysis. Jones’ wife was experiencing difficulties in bringing up their two children, Mervyn and Gwenith
(born in 1923 and 1921), and both shared a belief that the children would benefit from analysis (Grosskurth
159). Melanie Klein’s analysis of the two children was part of the arrangement for her to come to England, and she also analyzed Katherine Jones (Grosskurth 159).
26 Indicatively I mention the dates of birth and death of prominent members of the British Society: Ernest Jones
1879-1957, Susan Isaacs 1885-1948, Donald Winnicott 1896-1971, Paula Heimann 1899-1982, Joan Riviere
1883-1962. 94 are necessarily intertwined). Bearing in mind this overlap in time, it is interesting to explore the way in which intellectual currents converge or tincture each other.
This short investigation is facilitated by an overview of the trajectory of the fairy tale in
England. Zipes –and other scholars – presents a history which can approximately be summarized as a conflict between indigenous (so to speak) fairy lore and utilitarianism and
Puritanism (Introduction xxii), what is described as a “dichotomy of ‘fantasy’ and ‘reason’ which, it used to be assumed, powered the development of children’s literature through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century” (Grenby 2). Prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars postulate an (indigenous) oral tradition which may be glimpsed at in works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Shakespeare’s Tempest. This was followed by
English translation of tales from the French tradition (Perrault, the conteuses), as well as the
Arabian Nights, which were apparently popular with both adults and children (Grenby 1).
The tales’ distribution was certainly facilitated by the introduction of cheap books
(commonly known as “chapbooks”) which were sold by peddlers to members of the lower classes. Containing the work of educated writers, often in significantly abridged or bowdlerized forms, these tales then often found their way back into the oral tradition (Zipes,
Introduction xxii-xxiii).
While the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a gradual decline in interest in fairy tales, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of “bourgeois” children’s literature in France, Germany and England. This increase in literary production was accompanied by debate concerning the potential harm on the child’s soul caused by indulgence in the fantastic and the supernatural (Zipes, Introduction xxiii). Contemporary scholars tend to question this strict dichotomy between “fantasy” and “reason” but it is generally accepted that the late eighteenth century did witness, if not necessarily a hiatus in 95
the history of the genre, then certainly a spirited debate as to the advisability of providing
young readers with fairy tales as the appropriate reading material (Grenby 2-6).
The reasons for this debate were not exclusively ideological, but also pertained to the
financial realities of the time, as the market for children’s literature was expanding and
professionals were battling to carve out niches for themselves. The debate on fairy tales may
be attributed partly to marketing campaigns for rival sectors of children’s literature (Grenby
6). It was also partly derived from Locke’s condemnation of the supernatural as liable to
frighten children, a point still discussed today (8). Moreover, due to their putative oral origins
in addition to their dissemination through tawdry chapbooks, fairy tales were seen as properly
belonging to the lower classes, and thus unsuitable for the rising bourgeoisie. Whereas
children’s books of the day emphasized rationality, piety, self-improvement or even social mobility, fairy tales were viewed as the cultural property of servants and as such unappealing to parents who were able to purchase the books and were very likely to be drawn to more utilitarian narratives in their attempts to promote the advancement of their progeny in either worldly or spiritual terms (Grenby 8-9).
Defenders of fairy tales on the other hand, attempted to reassure consumers that fairy tales were no less genteel and improving than any other children’s book. In fact, the effort to accommodate the fairy tale in children’s literature of the day led to the creation of the moral fairy tale, which attempted to emphasize the compatibility of the fairy tale form with the aims of more utilitarian literature (Grenby 9). This did not necessarily mean the colonization of the one genre by the other, but rather points towards a relationship of symbiosis (Grenby 11).
This is very much in the spirit of Wilhelm Grimm’s rewriting of the tales, in order to make them more palatable to the tastes and consistent with the needs of a rising middle class audience. 96
At the turn of the nineteenth century German romantic writers such as Clemens
Brentano, Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffman wrote tales which revealed the capacity of the
fairytale genre to address complex philosophical issues in a metaphorical way. Moreover, the
genre was used to defend imagination and to criticize the worst aspects of the Enlightenment
(Zipes, Introduction xxiv). Previously vilified, imagination had gradually come to be
considered as an integral – and desirable – aspect of childhood, in turn inducing a change in the perception of the function of literature:
Wordsworth and Coleridge saw childhood as characterized by freedom and
vitality of the imagination as it instinctively recognized its affinities with the
natural world. Only too often, growing up diminished this capacity, and
conventional education frequently hastened the process of loss. Writing that
stretched the imagination – fairy tales or the Arabian Nights – was thus more
nourishing for the child reader than facts or figures. (Briggs, “Emergence”
137)
The tales of the Brothers Grimm played a pivotal role in this change of attitude towards
the genre in England as well as in other European countries. More than the collections of the
French writers of the late eighteenth century, the tales by the two brothers were calculated to
appeal to audiences comprising both children and their adult educators (Zipes, Introduction
xxvi). Edgar Taylor’s two-volume translation of the Grimm tales entitled German Popular
Stories (1823-1826) stimulated an increased flow of fairytale translations (Manlove 17), even
though there had been no attempt to provide a selection of specifically English fairy tales to
match the spirit of the brothers Grimm and Perrault.
Despite the scantiness of English fairy tales per se, the French and German fairytale
traditions, in addition to the influence of the work of Hans Christian Andersen, provided the
impetus for the development of English literary fantasy (Manlove 14). Colin Manlove, who 97
has written extensively on both literary fantasy and children’s literature, observes in his
recent study of children’s fantasy literature in England from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present that although the Grimm and Andersen tales were an integral part of children’s
literature of the fantastic throughout the Western world, fantasy as a distinct literary genre
appeared first in England rather than on the Continent (the only notable exceptions being
Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in Germany
and Denmark respectively) (12).
The time span from 1850 to 1914 is also considered the “Golden Age” of fantasy,
including writers such as Thackeray, Lear, Carroll, Macdonald, Browning, Ruskin, Dickens
and Wilde. Some children’s fantasies – such as Alice in Wonderland or Mopsa the Fairy –
were reminiscent of or involved dream-sequences of strange and apparently unconnected
events (Manlove 23). Others featured more sinister things, as if the darker side of liberated
imagination had stimulated the nightmare aspects of dreaming, as well as an abundance of
grotesque images in literature (Manlove 24).27 Moreover, as fantasy elements in the form of
the supernatural were gradually excised from the realistic adult novel, they found their way
into more marginal genres, children’s literature among them (Parkin-Gounelas, “Likenesses”
148). As literary scholar Ruth Parkin-Gounelas points out in her reading of Christina
Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses, “[t]he supernatural was removed, then, out of the everyday
adult world and employed to ‘keep us in the dark’, to use Freud’s phrase from his essay on
27 Cf. Lucy Clifford’s “The New Mother” (1882), a tale which provides a very Kleinian view of children’s
primal fears of being abandoned by their mother (Manlove 32-33). Replete with images that could well be associated with the envious destruction of the good breast, it is a story of two children whose overwhelming desire to be naughty leads to the replacement of their own sweet mother with a new one complete with glass eyes and a terrifying wooden tail (Hunt 139). The full text of Lucy Clifford’s Anyhow Stories: Moral and
Otherwise is available on archive.org. 98
‘The Uncanny’ – in the dark and license of unrealistic forms intended for merely holiday (or childhood) consumption” (148).
Gradually – and perhaps due to the rather larger number of woman writers involved– fantasy became more domestic and less wildly inventive. The environment in which the tales were set became more realistic (houses and rooms rather than forests and castles) and in this way the development in fantasy paralleled a development in adult-oriented literature, both becoming more oriented towards psychological realism. Moreover, children were consistently becoming the protagonists of fantasy literature addressed to them. Whereas previously the child protagonist was shown as trying to negotiate its position in a setting revolving primarily around adults, or children readers were provided with adult protagonists in fantasy worlds, now fantasy entered the world of the child itself (Manlove 26).
Fairy tales of this period were often used for light-hearted parody, being largely playful and escapist (Manlove 36).28 From the 1890s and until World War I, fairy books and fantasy became loci of prolonged secondary worlds, where imagination was felt to be at home, and where difficulties existed just for the fun of overcoming them (Manlove 40). This was also a period during which play had been rehabilitated as an activity: middle-class children were encouraged to exercise their imagination both by reading imaginative literature and by taking part in imaginary games (Briggs, “Transitions” 173).
Moreover, the period spanning from the 1910s to the 1920s witnessed – along with the continued vogue for fairy tales and fairy books which was also furthered by the great and enduring success of Peter Pan – the heyday of children’s illustration, featuring artists such as
Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham and Mary Cicely Barker. These and other renowned
28 Adventure stories, already popular since the 1850s, also continued to proliferate; their use of formulaic elements and stereotypical characters could well be traced back to traditional folk and fairy tales, the structure of the folk-tale lying behind many of the narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson (Hunt 151). 99
illustrators provided a graceful and desire-filled vision of fairyland, closely linked to the beauties of the imagination. They mingled currents of mysticism, nostalgia, feminism and – after the war –an air of social disengagement in their work (Manlove 55). Yet at the same time fantasy as a whole had become a form of entertainment that was also consolatory
(Manlove 40). A well-known example was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
(1911), which embodied fantasies of wish-fulfillment, healing, consolation and reconciliation. As such, it was symptomatic of numerous works of fiction of the era, since by the end of the century narratives of self-division were proliferating (Briggs, “Transitions”
168).
The period following the trauma of the First World War witnessed a gradual marginalization of children’s fantasy – the development of popular entertainment led to the production of literature that was often stereotyped and formulaic (Manlove 54-55).29
Moreover, as opposed to the “external” and “solid” imaginary worlds portrayed in the pre-
War period, now it was the ability or propensity of the mind to create a fantasy world which was stressed (Manlove 61). As Manlove comments:
One aspect of the change is that whereas before 1914 children’s fantasy often
had a fairy or other supernatural manager, in the 1920s this is much less
common, and characters have to find happiness for themselves. And this in
turn may be because children themselves are often absent from 1920s fantasy.
(Manlove 61)
29 More innovative were A.A. Milne’s Pooh books (published 1926, 1928), along with other animal and toy fantasies; along with Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit (published 1922), they are, I think (particularly in the case of The Velveteen Rabbit), fictional manifestations of what Winnicott was later to term transitional objects.
100
Apparently, the primary impulse of post-World War I fantasy was one of introspection and
retreat (Manlove 62). This is an interesting parallel to Klein’s greater emphasis on the inner
reality of the child (as opposed to the external environmental circumstances).
II
When Klein reached London in 1925, she was about to join a society of analysts who
had been brought up in a cultural milieu that as a whole had become more child-oriented in
comparison to the past, partly as a result of the intellectual and emotional impact of
Romanticism. Imagination and fantasy had been rehabilitated within this cultural context, and
both were deemed highly desirable qualities, particularly in children. Children (especially
middle-class ones) were consistently offered fairy tales and other works of fantastic literature
as a staple of their literary diet. In the majority of works the child and his or her world, now
conceived as separate from that of the adult, reigned supreme.
It was within this context that Klein dedicated one of her papers, “Infantile Anxiety-
Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse” (1929) to Maurice Ravel’s
opera L’ Enfant et Les Sortilèges (with a libretto written by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette), and to
an article entitled “The Empty Space”, where author Karin Michaelis gives an account of the
artistic birth of artist Ruth Weber (Ruth Kjär in the article). As Kleinian scholar Lyndsey
Stonebridge points out, Klein does not approach either Ravel’s opera or Kjär’s trajectory and
works as aesthetic creations in their own right, but rather “as privileged case-histories that validate her theories of infantile anxiety and psychic reparation” (Destructive Element 47).
Nevertheless, the paper is a precursor of Klein’s views on symbolization, which would be expounded in the years to come.
A young boy of six is the protagonist in the Ravel opera. Bored and frustrated by having to do his homework, the child is rude to his mother who decrees that he shall have 101
only bread to eat and no sugar in his tea. Flying into a rage, the child attacks a squirrel and
the family cat, then proceeds to destroy objects in his room until the things he has maltreated
come to life and begin to persecute him. The boy seeks refuge in the park outside the house,
where squirrels and other small animals turn against him, till he spontaneously binds the paw
of a squirrel hurt in the skirmish. As he does this, he cries out “mama”, and this evocation
restores him to the human world of helping, of “being good” (Klein, LGR 210-11).
The article by Michaelis, in turn, recounts the extraordinary story of Ruth Kjär, a young
socialite and wife of a privileged social and financial position and with a satisfying personal
life, who was subject to occasional fits of depression. During these bouts she complained of
an empty space within her that she could never fill. This emptiness coincided with an empty
space on the wall of her house, where one of the paintings had been removed: as Klein
phrases it, “The empty space grinned hideously down at her” (LGR 215). Kjär, without
having previously any training or experience in painting whatsoever, decided to draw a
picture directly on the wall herself, a decision which marked the beginning of her artistic
career. The first painting was that of a naked black woman, while maternal images figured
repeatedly in her work (Klein, LGR 217).
The common theme binding these two otherwise disparate accounts of artistic creation
is the link between creativity and phantastic sadistic attacks on the maternal body.
Particularly in the case of Kjär, Stonebridge comments, Klein puts the body back in the field
of vision: “or more precisely, she inscribes phantasies about the body, frequently sadistic and
destructive phantasies, across the (psychic) work of art” (Destructive Element 47), as opposed to Ravel’s opera that functions primarily on a metaphorical level. What the readings of both works of art have in common, however, is the link between reparation and restitution to creativity on a more general level. As analyst Ole Andkjær Olsen points out, the term
“reparation”, which was to become so pivotal in Klein’s thought, appears in a somewhat 102
haphazard manner in “Infantile Anxiety Situations”, where it should be noted Klein discusses
works of art which are known to her only through newspaper articles (34). Olsen contends
that it was primarily the picture analyses that contained the core of the concept of reparation,
whereby:
The idea that the inner void, which is at the core of depression, springs from the
destruction of the representation of the good mother as a stabilizing psychological
gestalt is a starting point for Klein’s analysis. In order to find a way out of
depression, it is necessary to establish a connection between this void and the
visibly empty space on the wall, since the latter can be filled through creative
work. (Olsen 36)
The issue of mother-child separation and the ensuing affects of loss and grief were subjects of interest to all psychoanalysts but it was Klein who gave concrete form to this depression in the image of a mother who falls prey to the child’s sadistic attacks (Olsen 36). The loss of the mother is also due to having hurt her oneself, so the question then becomes how and with what means the child will be able to undo the phantastic damage brought on by its sadism
(Olsen 36).
Naturally, the concept of reparation did not occur out of the blue. In 1923 Klein wrote
“Early Analysis”, where she relied on formulations by both Ferenczi and Jones, in order to
arrive at her own conclusions on the issues of symbol-formation and sublimation. According
to Ferenczi, Klein wrote, the basis of identification (as a stage that predated and was
necessary for symbolism) was the child’s attempt to rediscover its bodily organs and their
activities in every object that it encountered (Klein, LGR 85). Jones, in turn, took Ferenczi’s
view a step further, by claiming that this identification was driven by the pleasure principle,
thus allowing the subject to compare otherwise dissimilar activities or objects on the basis of
their ability to invoke pleasure (Klein, LGR 85). Klein added to this that the libidinal 103
cathexis of various activities led to a constant displacement and replacement of interest in the
external world. She describes it in this way in “Early Analysis” (1923):
It seems then that, where the necessary conditions for the capacity to sublimate
are present, the fixations, beginning with these most primary sublimations and
in connection with them, continually proceed to a sexual-symbolic cathexis of
further ego-activities and interests. Freud demonstrates that that which seems
to be an impulsion towards perfection in human beings is the result of the
tension arising out of the disparity between man’s desire for gratification
(which is not to be appeased by all possible kinds of reactive substitutive
formations and of sublimations) and the gratification which in reality he
obtains … Accordingly the impulsion constantly to effect by means of
fixations a libidinal cathexis of fresh ego-activities and interests genetically
(i.e. by means of sexual symbolism) connected with one another, and to create
new activities and interests, would be the driving force in the cultural
evolution of mankind. This explains, too, how it is that we find symbols at
work in increasingly complicated inventions and activities, just as the child
constantly advances from his original and primitive symbols, games and
activities to others, leaving the former ones behind. (Klein, LGR 104)
Klein followed the views of both Ferenczi and Jones on the issues of identification and symbol-formation, paying tribute to Freud’s views in her conclusion. She posited that the sexual instincts and the pleasure principle fueled the processes of identification and symbol- formation, which in turn led to the evolution of speech and sublimation, whereby libidinal phantasies stemming from primal phantasies became fixated in a sexual-symbolic fashion upon particular objects, activities and interests (Klein, LGR 86). 104
In order to consolidate her argumentation, Klein drew examples from her clinical experiences. Again, she referred extensively to material from the analysis of “Fritz” – who, it will be remembered, was none other than her own son Erich. She referred to his phantasies of the phallic mother, with whom he desired to have coitus. These phantasies were expressed symbolically in terms of his leading troops to war, riding on motorcycles or other vehicles and walking in the streets. Trains too played a prominent part in the child’s phantasies (Klein,
LGR 92-93). As Klein describes in a footnote, providing additional material:
The circular railway which came into his phantasies appeared in all his games
as well. He constructed trains which ran in a circle and he drove his big hoop
round and round in a circle. His gradually increasing interest in the direction
names of streets had developed into an interest in geography He pretended that
he was going on journeys on the map. All this showed that the advance in his
phantasies from his home to his town, his country and the world at large (an
advance which manifested itself when once the phantasies were set free) was
having its effects on his interests also, for their sphere was widening more and
more. (Klein, LGR 97n3)
All these phantasies revolving around motility and different forms of transportation, Klein
concluded, were connected to an explicit desire and intention to enter the maternal body,
when Erich stated “I am going into your tummy” (Klein, LGR 94). This “tummy” he
phantasised as a world peopled with humans and animals, and furnished with all sorts of
modern contrivances (Klein, LGR 96).
Possibly drawing on the views expressed by Ferenczi in Thalassa, Klein refers to the
phantasy of returning to the mother’s womb and the exploration of the maternal body which
takes place via coitus. Erich had made a tiny dog (which repeatedly stood for the son in his
phantasies) slide along his mother’s body, while talking about the countries which he 105 imagined he was exploring: “At her breast there were mountains and near the genital region was a great river. But suddenly the little dog was intercepted by servants – toy figures – who charged him with some crime and said he had damaged their master’s motor, and the phantasy ended in quarrelling and fighting” (Klein, LGR 98n1). And Klein herself uses the same tropes when she talks of Fritz’s creation of “a geography of the mother’s body” (Klein,
LGR 98n1) at an even earlier age. Consequently, she linked learning and orientation difficulties to castration anxiety due to the child’s desire to penetrate into the maternal body
(Klein, LGR 100).
Klein then proceeds to discuss symbols, sublimations and their relevant subordination to other primal phantasies. For example, she refers to the case of Grete, who had unconsciously linked any sort of performance or spectacle to her witnessing parental coitus
(Klein, LGR 101-02). Musical sublimations, as well as sublimations pertaining to colour and pictorial representations, revolve around things seen and heard, and often have the displaced primal scene at their source, as do many artistic and intellectual fixations in general (Klein,
LGR 102-03).
It is interesting to note, in retrospect, that although Klein generally referred to “primal phantasies” and the subsequent libidinal cathexis of a variety of symbols, interests and sublimations, she consolidates her argument with case material mostly from Erich’s case rather than from her other patients, thus attesting to the significance of her son’s analysis.
Moreover, she continues to speak from the vantage point of both mother and analyst: it was her own maternal body in its physicality among other things that Erich desired to penetrate, explore and possess. In “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the
Ego” (1930) this maternal body would come to figure prominently at the center of and as the crux from which emanates the human child’s relation to the world. 106
Klein had utilized Ferenczi’s views on the origins of identification and Jones’ views on
the predominance of the pleasure principle, to these adding her own view on the importance
of primal phantasies in the development of symbolization and ego-interests. With the analysis
of Dick she was to make yet another crucial step on her own, namely that of underlining the
significance of sadism and anxiety in symbol-formation, crucial to the evolution of speech
and thought.
It has often been deplored that Klein did not explicitly account for the development of
thought and language in a way similar to that of other psychoanalytic thinkers such as
Jacques Lacan, for example (Kristeva 129). This is true to an extent, yet one of her more
insightful papers revolved around symbolization and the generation of speech. “The
Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) remains a seminal
paper in Kleinian thought, in that it touched upon the issues of the genesis of symbol
formation and, more specifically, on the role that sadism and anxiety played in these
processes.
Basing her views on Abraham’s distinction between the oral-sucking and the oral- sadistic phase, Klein claims that at a given point in human development the child desires to devour the maternal breast, to possess the contents of the mother’s body (unborn children, feces, the father’s penis and milk or other edible substances) (Klein, LGR 219). The object of the attack then becomes a source of danger, since the child comes to fear retaliatory attacks on itself. Side by side with libidinal interest, this profound anxiety triggers the mechanism of identification, in turn leading the child to displace his or her anxiety onto an ever widening sphere of external objects, both animate and inanimate (Klein, LGR 220):
Thus, not only does symbolism come to be the foundation of all phantasy and
sublimation but, more than that, it is the basis of the subject’s relation to the
outside world and to reality in general. I pointed out that the object of sadism 107
at its height, and of the desire for knowledge arising simultaneously with
sadism, is the mother’s body with its phantasied contents. The sadistic
phantasies directed against the inside of her body constitute the first and basic
relation to the outside world and to reality. Upon the degree of success with
which the subject passes through this phase will depend the extent to which he
can subsequently acquire an external world corresponding to reality. We see
then that the child’s earliest reality is wholly phantastic; he is surrounded by
objects of anxiety, and in this respect excrement, organs, objects, things
animate and inanimate are to begin with equivalent to one another. As the ego
develops, a true relation to reality is gradually established out of this unreal
reality. Thus, the development of the ego and the relation to reality depend on
the degree of the ego’s capacity at a very early period to tolerate the pressure
of the earliest anxiety-situations. And, as usual, it is a question of a certain
optimum balance of the factors concerned. A sufficient quantity of anxiety is
the necessary basis for an abundance of symbol-formation and of phantasy; an
adequate capacity on the part of the ego to tolerate anxiety is essential if
anxiety is to be satisfactorily worked over, if this basic phase is to have a
favourable issue and if the development of the ego is to be successful. (Klein,
LGR 221)
Dick’s analysis began in 1929 and continued – with some interruptions – for a period of nearly twenty years (Hinshelwood 71). He is often referred to by later analysts as “the autistic child”. Despite the fact that Klein never formulated a diagnosis as such, Frances Tustin, a later expert on autism, describes Klein’s recognition that Dick’s troubles were different than those of other child patients as very perceptive on her part: “She was brave and very far- seeing, years ahead of her time” (qtd. in Grosskurth 187). Klein was able to discern that 108
Dick’s problems – lack of speech being one of them – were not regressions but rather
inhibitions in development (186). By the time Dick continued his analysis a few years later
with one of Klein’s colleagues, Beryl Sanford, he was described by her as a “terrific talker”
(Grosskurth 187). Grosskurth herself, having met Dick (then in his fifties) during her research
for the writing of Klein’s biography, described him as friendly in a child-like way, well-
informed and capable of holding down a job that did not exert too much pressure on him. He
was fairly functional in his everyday life, and moreover described his relationship to Klein in
fond terms: despite her repeated assertions that she retained a professional attitude to her
child patients, avoiding displays of affection or physical contact, Dick claimed that she used
to soothe him when he cried; “Life is not all that bad”, she used to say (Grosskurth 187-88).
Life, for Dick, however, may not have been all that good to begin with. A poor feeder
as an infant, with a variety of physical complaints such as digestive upsets, he had also,
according to Klein, been brought up in an environment in which, “although he had every
care, no real love was lavished on him, his mother’s attitude to him being from the very
beginning over-anxious” (Klein, LGR 223).30 His symbol formation had come to a standstill
due to the premature onset of his genitality, which had in turn led him to a premature and
exaggerated identification with the object, as well as the constitutional inability of his ego to
tolerate anxiety (Klein, LGR 223-24): “The defence against the sadistic impulses directed
30 Klein was – and remains – notorious for her alleged indifference to the environmental factor in the development of children, a claim which is somewhat exaggerated. Not only does her presentation of Dick’s case include references – and harsh ones at that – to the external reality which the child had to face, she also pointed out the parents’ shortcomings even though, as Hanna Segal commented in an interview with Daniel Pick and
Jane Milton, most of her child patients (Dick included) were children of other analysts. As Segal notes, “Dick’s analysis starts by saying mother rejected him from birth. It comes very little in her work because practically all the children are children of analysts. I know an awful lot about Dick’s parents from her but she couldn’t possibly put it in print.” 109
against the mother’s body and its contents – impulses connected with phantasies of coitus –
had resulted in the cessation of the phantasies and the standstill of symbol-formation. Dick’s
further development had come to grief because he could not bring into phantasy the sadistic
relationship to the mother’s body” (Klein, LGR 224). Hanna Segal succinctly describes
Dick’s case as that of a child terrified of his own aggression against the maternal body, which
he in turn felt to be a terrible persecutor. As a result, Dick had erected powerful defences
against his phantasies about her, in turn leading to practically the cessation of symbol
formation (H. Segal, “Notes” 163).31
As already mentioned, Dick did exhibit a rudimentary interest in trains and train
stations, and Klein based her interpretations on this and on his running in and out of the space
between the doors of the consulting room in order to establish the analytic process. What she
managed to achieve throughout the analysis was the gradual release of anxiety, which in turn
led to a chain of symbol formations. The working-over of his latent anxiety led him gradually
to establish a symbolic relation with things and objects, and the constant release of fresh
quantities of anxiety led him to displace his aggressive and epistemophilic instincts onto new
affective relations (Klein, LGR 227-28). This in turn led to the enrichment of his vocabulary,
as Dick showed interest not only in things themselves, but also their names (LGR 228).
31 Klein’s conclusions on the importance of an adequate degree of an anxiety for the emergence of symbolic capacity are further illustrated by anecdotal evidence. The two-year-old daughter of Lola Brook, Klein’s secretary and close friend later in life, did not speak, much to the concern of her family. Klein stated that the child had not experienced sufficient separation anxiety, that Brook had been too good a mother, so much so that the child did not feel the need to use language in order to communicate or to replace people and objects around her by symbols. Klein assigned the child to a supervisee of hers and enforced periodic mother-daughter separations. According to witnesses, the child at first remained uninterested and expressionless, but Klein in the end proved absolutely right: the girl began to exhibit stages of anxiety, protest, naughtiness and then such extreme talkativeness that the rest of the family began to complain (Grosskurth 368). 110
Klein’s views on symbolization were further refined and enriched by Hanna Segal, in
the additional light of the formulation and theoretical refinement of the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions, as well as of the mechanism of projective identification. In her book
Melanie Klein, Kristeva describes Hanna Segal as the most tenacious and useful of Klein’s analysands and then scrupulous exegete of her work, who deepened it while remaining an interpretative spirit free from accommodation (210). Hanna Segal’s “Notes on Symbol
Formation” (1955) stands as an important psychoanalytic paper in its own right, as it reflects on and clarifies Kleinian theory of symbol formation. Because, as previously mentioned,
Klein did not formulate an explicit theory as concerns the genesis of language, her papers on symbolization are usually read in conjunction with this paper.
Segal draws a distinction between symbolic equations, which are formulated primarily
during the paranoid-schizoid position and symbols proper, whose creation takes place during
the working through of the depressive position. Early symbols are not felt to be symbols but
rather actual objects. Because they are in phantasy equated with their counterpart objects,
Segal used the term “symbolic equations” (“Notes” 164). When symbolic equations are made
in relation to bad objects, the ego attempts to deal with them in the same way as it would a
real object, i.e. either by total annihilation or by scotomisation (165).
Segal linked symbolization proper to the depressive position, during which the object is
felt to be whole and there is a greater awareness of separateness, which goes hand in hand
with a more acute ambivalence towards the object. The processes of introjection are more
pronounced, the subject striving to keep the good object inside and to recreate it. This leads to
feelings of guilt, (fear of) loss, and attempts at reparation (166). Consequently (and if the
good object has been sufficiently and successfully established), the feeling of omnipotence
decreases and the ego increasingly tries to protect the introjected object by displacing its
aggression onto the external world – hence the creation of symbols (166-67). 111
Symbol formation necessitates some inhibition of direct instinctual aims, therefore making the symbol available for sublimation. The symbol can also be re-projected onto the external world, thus investing external objects with symbolic meaning. Simultaneously, however, the symbol is acknowledged as the creation of the subject, and can therefore be used more freely than the actual object; it is also acknowledged as an object in itself, with its own qualities to be used and respected (167). In Segal’s words:
The symbol proper, available for sublimation and furthering the development
of the ego, is felt to represent the object; its own characteristics are
recognized, respected, and used. It arises when depressive feelings
predominate over the paranoid-schizoid ones, when separation from the object,
ambivalence, guilt and loss can be experienced and tolerated. The symbol is
used not to deny but to overcome loss. (H. Segal, “Notes” 168-69)
Kristeva provides a more lyrical, if darker, reading of the loss of the object (the mother or at best the combined parental imago) by implicitly questioning the description of Kleinian theory as the cult of the mother and describing it rather as an ode to matricide. During the depressive position the infant “loses” the good object – a loss which in the unconscious is equated with death – and this loss becomes the organizing principle for the subject’s symbolic capacity (Kristeva 129-30):
Both the cult of the mother and the matricide play a saving role. From all
appearances, however, matricide is far more than just the cult of the mother:
without matricide, the internal object cannot be formed, the fantasy cannot be
constructed, and reparation, as well as the redirection of hostility into the
introjections of the self, is foreclosed. Kleinian negativity, which … guides the
drive to intelligence by way of the fantasy, chooses the mother. The paths
toward this loss diverge: splitting leads us on the wrong track, whereas the 112
depression that follows the separation and/or death is more befitting. (Kristeva
130)32
The symbols generated by this phantastic matricide, as the subject works through the depressive position, allow both for communication with the external world, as well as for internal communication, i.e. communication with other parts of the self. As Hanna Segal
explains, people who achieve an adequate degree of internal communication are not
conscious of primitive phantasies but they do have actual communication with unconscious
phantasies, a communication which can only take place via symbols: “So that in people who
are ‘well in touch with themselves’ there is a constant free symbol-formation, whereby they can be consciously aware and in control of symbolic expressions of the underlying primitive phantasies” (“Notes” 169).
This capacity to communicate with one’s self by using verbal thinking is ultimately linked to the depressive position. The symbolization which cannot take place during the paranoid-schizoid position due to the concreteness of experience and the existence of symbolic equations can be achieved during the depressive position, when older unresolved issues can come forth and be symbolized. What is fascinating in the context of this particular thesis is that once Segal switches to a non-clinical discourse in order to complete her argumentation with an example, it is to the discourse of fairy tales that she turns:
Some of the paranoid and ideal object relations and anxieties may be
symbolized as part of the integrative process in the depressive position.
The fairy tale is an example in point. It deals basically with the witch and
the fairy godmother, Prince Charming, the ogre, etc., and it has in it a great
deal of schizophrenic content. It is, however, a highly integrated product, an
32 Tellingly, one of two of Klein’s papers which were published posthumously in 1963 was titled “Some
Reflections on The Oresteia”, a myth quintessentially matricidal. 113
artistic creation which very fully symbolizes the child’s early anxieties and
wishes. (H. Segal, “Notes” 170)
Fairy tales, in other words, may well be viewed as symbolic, sublimated representations of paranoid-schizoid splits of (part) objects after (Kristeva’s) symbolic matricide has taken place, thus providing the subject with a capacity to think.
However, fairy tales can also be related to the maternal on a different level. As a discourse, they have been perennially associated with women, even when their narrators, writers, transmitters or transcribers have been male (for example, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and the Grimm brothers, who evoked or claimed some sort of female or feminine origin for their tales). In 1979, and in the light of the developments in post-Kleinian thought by Wilfred
Bion and other leading theorists, Segal added a postscript to her article on symbol formation.
Verbalisation (acquisition of speech), she added, could also be examined from the perspective of the container and the contained, as speech has to be taught and learned, in most cases in the interchange between mother and infant: “The infant has had an experience and the mother provides word or phrase which binds this experience. It contains, encompasses and expresses the meaning. It provides a container for it” (H. Segal, “Notes” 175).
In this light, it is not perhaps coincidental that the province of fairy tales has been intertwined with the province of women, and more particularly with that of mothers (in most cases the stereotype of the female storyteller is that of the homely grandmother – an overdetermined, perhaps, image of the mother). It may therefore be viewed as a discourse associated with the maternal in this more literal sense, one which thus contains and makes creative use of symbolized and sublimated schizophrenic content.
Bearing this in mind, it will be useful to turn to the structure of the fairy tale as described by Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale. Propp’s Morphology was completed in 1928, but the English translation did not appear until 1958 (Propp xi), both these dates 114 roughly coinciding with the dates of appearance of Klein’s and Segal’s papers respectively.
While I am not claiming a direct correlation between the Kleinian and the Proppian theories, their concurrence is I think indicative of the deep affinity between psychic processes as described by Klein and subsequent Kleinian thinkers and the structure of narratives such as the wonder tale. At this point I would like to draw attention to the way Kleinian theory on symbol formation on the individual level coincides neatly with Propp’s formulations as concerns the ways in which narrative begins in fairy tales.
Propp describes the structure of fairy tales in terms of the actions of the characters, which he termed functions, and the position of the actions in the narrative (Propp 21). He sets down the following principles which, he concludes, permeate the tales:
1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale,
independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the
fundamental components of a tale.
2. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. …
3. The sequence of functions is always identical. …
4. All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure. (Propp 21-23)
Functions are the defining elements of the tale, in that they are independent of who performs them or the way in which they are carried out (Propp 20).
Fairy tales, then, may begin with an initial situation, which is not strictly speaking a function, since it introduces the members of the protagonist’s family, and his or her status is indicated. As such, the initial situation is an important morphological element and is followed by a number of functions which act as preparatory parts of the tale, before the actual movement or complication occurs, which triggers the narration per se (Propp 30).
Nevertheless, true action, so to speak, begins with the function designated as Villainy, whereby the Villain causes harm or injury to a member of the family. 115
Villainy, of course, can be realized in numerous ways. Yet it is intriguing that in the
more popular fairy tales one of the most common forms of villainy involves (step)mothers,
who expel their (step)children (Propp 33). Hansel and Gretel are an iconic case in point, as
they are expelled by the stepmother in the Grimm version of the tale (although in the early
versions of the tale the woodcutter and his wife are the children’s biological parents). A similar expulsion occurs in the beginning of “Snow White” as it had been recorded by Jacob
Grimm in 1806 (and was not included in any editions of the tale). The initial sequence repeats the familiar motif of the queen’s intense wish for a child with skin as white as snow, cheeks as red as blood and eyes as black as the ebony of the window frame (Grimm 904). However, the queen’s love is transformed into unquenchable envy as the child grows more beautiful, and when the mirror gives the now-famous answer as to who is the most beautiful, the queen takes matters into her own hands:
So when the king went off to war one time, she had the horses harnessed to her
carriage and ordered her driver to take her and Snow White deep into a dark
forest, which was filled with many beautiful red roses. When the queen arrived
with her daughter at a spot where the roses were growing, she said to her, “Oh,
Snow White, climb out and pick me one of the beautiful roses.”
As soon as she obeyed her mother’s command and climbed out of the carriage,
she heard the wheels of the carriage roll off in great speed, for the queen had
ordered the driver to do so and hoped that the wild animals would eat her child.
(Grimm 904-05)
In the now definitive Grimm variant, the queen has become an evil stepmother, who orders the young girl to be murdered, a demand which is described as an intensified form of expulsion. As Propp comments, “usually in such instances a presentation of the heart and liver of the victim is demanded” (33). 116
Not all tales, of course, begin with villainy, injury or misfortune: narrative action may
be triggered by insufficiency or lack. Yet after the tale begins, its development and structure
are the same as when the tale begins with villainy. A tale very often begins with lack in a
direct way, which may be created from within or imposed from without (Propp 34-35). This
lack is then followed by what is termed the mediating incident, whereby misfortune or lack is
made known and the hero is approached with a request or a command; he or she is either
allowed to go on a quest, or is dispatched despite his or her desires, thus introducing a
distinction between seekers and victimized heroes (Propp 36).33
In both instances, however, there is a common denominator, namely that it is by parental – and more often than not maternal – intervention that the narrative begins. In cases of villainy it is, I believe, worth noting that the (step)mother is portrayed as initiating the injurious attack against the child and subsequently turning the child out of the house. In many cases, the heroes and heroines of the tales find themselves abandoned in the woods. This setting out on a journey brings to mind the exploratory desire set in motion by the sadism accompanying the epistemophilic instinct. In a neat act of projective inversion, the child’s desire to attack and penetrate into the mother’s body is represented as the maternal figure’s attack against the child, which in some cases takes the form of a pure, unmitigated death wish. As a result, the woods or other loci of exploration become threatening and dangerous.
In a similar way, it is often lack of food that propels the narrative trajectory with a similar outcome. The heroes and heroines of the tales are often compelled to travel far away from
33 Dundes observes that Propp’s schema of lack or villainy as a prerequisite for the beginning of narrative is
applicable to many games, in particular children’s games, such as hide-and-seek, or hunt-the-thimble, etc. Such
games may be based on sequences such as lack-interdiction-violation-consequence, also at times including donors and villains, very much like those found in Grimm tales (Dundes, Meaning 156-57). This becomes relevant when one bears in mind the significance of play in the context of Kleinian analysis as a means of the child’s expression of (unconscious) affects. 117
home and face potentially life-threatening situations before this lack is liquidized, as will be
discussed in more detail in the second part of the thesis.
As already mentioned, Klein had relocated to London at a time when “the child”
reigned supreme, when imagination and fantasy, literary or otherwise, were held in high
esteem and deemed desirable. The effect on Klein of her first years in London was profound:
the first extended period of her London stay aroused her interest in culture, history and
evolution, leading her to consider issues of creativity (Likierman 65). While it is true that
during the period from 1927 to 1935 Klein suggested that the human infant was replete with
particularly sadistic urges, what ultimately emerged from her papers was a view of the infant
psyche as being essentially creative (Likierman 65):
For the first time, Klein began to portray mental life as creative in essence. Her
descriptions conjure up all the key features of human creative activity,
including the forging of new images to reflect life experience, the use of these
in internal narratives, the creation of symbols as a central mental activity, and
the mental creation of a subjective, personal mythology, an inner world
inhabited by “phantastic” beings and dominated by their adventures and
relationships. Just as Klein’s accounts were earlier suggestive of a link
between the creation of weapons and pre-genital aggression, they now invoked
links between the developing ego and a work of art. (Likierman 79)
Children, it seems, were no longer just the subjects or the consumers of fantasy. Within
Kleinian thought, each child (in the adult) – and each infant in the child – had become the creator of its own phantastic narratives, replete with stepmothers and fairy godmothers, donors and magic helpers. The quest was now in full force. 118
Chapter Five. Deeper into the Woods: the Depressive Position and the Paranoid-
Schizoid Position
Freud discovered the repressed child in the
adult. Investigating children, Melanie Klein
discovered what was already repressed in the
child – namely the infant. (H. Segal, Klein 49)
Elements now integral to Kleinian thought were present in Klein’s work as early as in “The
Development of a Child” (1919) and were developed in a way that is reminiscent of a
fairytale protagonist’s moving ever deeper into the fearsome, enchanted woods of a tale. In
developing her theories of the mind, Klein moved backwards in human development into a
pre-oedipal, pre-verbal realm.
In hindsight, development along Kleinian lines can be described as proceeding from the paranoid-schizoid position (with its concurrent mechanisms of projection, introjection and projective identification, as well as the defence mechanisms of idealisation and denigration) to the depressive position, which involves the “loss” of the original loved object, the acknowledgment of separateness, and the phantastic reparation of the attacked object.
Nevertheless, Klein’s formulation of the depressive position preceded that of the paranoid- schizoid position chronologically, a schema which I retain in my exploration of the common ground between Klein’s theoretical concepts and structural aspects of the Grimms’ fairy tales.
The explicit theorization of the depressive position was to an extent linked to personal tragedies. The year 1932 marked the beginning of a series of extremely trying events in
Klein’s life, which would play their role in the enrichment of her theory. In 1932 her daughter
Melitta moved to London, later to be joined there by her husband Walter Schmideberg.
Melitta began analysis with Edward Glover in 1933 and this triggered a bitter strife between mother and daughter, which remained relentless till the end of Klein’s life and caused 119
prolonged pain and embarrassment not only to the individuals involved, but also to the
British Psychoanalytical Society as a whole (Grosskurth 198-99). 1933 was also the year in
which Sandor Ferenczi, Klein’s first mentor, died.34 More importantly, however, Klein
sustained a tragic loss in the death of her son, Hans, in a mountaineering accident in April
1934. Melitta immediately pronounced it suicide; Eric Clyne, on the other hand, claimed that
this could not have been the case, adding that Hans’s death remained a source of grief to
Klein for the rest of her life (Grosskurth 214-15).
Whatever the relationship dynamics between Klein and her own children, what
emerged from this period of loss and mourning was an extraordinary paper, which introduced
the entirely new concept of the depressive position (H. Segal, Klein 78). As Meira Likierman
points out, however, the theoretical elaboration of the depressive position, a watershed in
Klein’s thought, was not prompted solely by the experience of personal tragedies. Klein’s
preoccupation with depressive states was part of a general interest on the part of her fellow
psychoanalysts’ attempts at the time to distinguish between “normal” mourning and
depression (then termed melancholia)35 which was clearly pathological. This resulted in a
cluster of conceptual elements to which depression was linked (Likierman 101-02).
The interest in depression dated back to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”,
published in 1917 although written (as part of a series of papers) in 1915 (Likierman 102).
Freud had compared the mechanisms of normal mourning to those of melancholia, and had
34 In the last years of his life and career Ferenczi had fallen out of grace with Freud. Probably recognizing her deviations from orthodox Freudian thought and fearing a similar fate, Klein avoided overt references to his work. She opted to draw more on work by Karl Abraham. It is interesting to note, however, that, although she cited Abraham more frequently in her theoretical papers, she had far more to say about Ferenczi in her unpublished autobiographical writings (Grosskurth 73).
35 I will be using the term “melancholia” throughout, as it was used in the original texts, in order to avoid confusion. 120
attributed the latter to the unconscious loss of a loved object (“Mourning” 254). What he
found puzzling were the self-reproaches of the melancholic, only to realize gradually that
they were ultimately directed against the patient’s own ego (Freud, “Mourning” 257). Freud
attributed melancholia to narcissistic object choice, as well as to the ego’s desire to
incorporate the loved object, to devour it in accordance with oral or cannibalistic impulses,
and thus partially to identify with it (258-89). The reproaches leveled against the object are
then directed against the patient’s own ego: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego,
and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the
forsaken object” (Freud, “Mourning” 258).
Freud, in turn, owed some of his insight to the work of Karl Abraham, who had
focused his interest on the therapeutic approach to manic-depressive disorders as early as
1911 (Likierman 74). Abraham’s clinical experiences had led him to distinguish between a
benign and an oral-sadistic phase during pre-oedipal development. This pre-genital phase of development began and ended with benign preservative tendencies, the first being oral- sucking and the last anal-preserving. The middle period saw two sadistic sub-phases follow in close succession: the oral cannibalistic phase and the anal sadistic phase of expelling and destroying (Likierman 77). It was at this intermediate phase of development that Abraham placed the genesis of melancholia:
In melancholic states of depression the libido seems to regress to the earliest
stage of development known to us. That is to say, in his unconscious the
melancholic depressed person directs upon his sexual object the wish to
incorporate it. In the depth of his unconscious there is a tendency to devour
and demolish his object. (Abraham, Selected Papers 276) 121
The unconscious wish of the melancholic was to destroy the love object by eating it up, a
phantasy linked to the typical self-accusations of melancholic patients, and which was more
often than not also linked to eating disturbances (277).
In addition, in his 1924 paper “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido,
Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders”, Abraham had attributed the onset of melancholia
to a severe injury of infantile narcissism brought about by successive disappointments in
love: the infant, disappointed in its relationship with its mother and frustrated in its attempts
to find an adequate replacement, feels deserted; similar disappointments can also be repeated
later on in life (Selected Papers 458-89). As a result, ambivalence sets in as regards the
relation to the object (primarily the mother, although the father too is an object of
introjection). (Abraham, Selected Papers 469). Other analysts at the time were also
describing clinical cases where patients were unable either to accept and forgive their object,
or to reject and relinquish it. As Likierman summarizes their conclusions:
The patient continued to seek love and approval from the very object who was
apparently repeatedly betraying. Inasmuch as the object was needed and
sought, it was still loved, and yet strong resentment meant that it was equally
hated. This tormented state, termed “ambivalence” by Eugen Bleuler, was now
seen to be crucial to the depressive predicament, as had indeed first been
suggested by Abraham. (Likierman103)
For “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1934) in which the concept of the depressive position was first introduced, Klein drew explicitly on the views of Freud and
Abraham and attempted to account for the genesis of melancholia, emphasizing that its fixation point should be sought in that moment of development when there is a transition from part-objects to whole objects (LGR 263), as the ego (present from birth but loosely organized around a number of rudimentary ego-nuclei) and part-objects (the maternal breast, 122
the penis) gradually become more integrated. There then occurs a shift from a partial-object
relationship to a relation to the whole object (263-64). This alteration is even recognizable in
lay terms, at the moment when the infant is perceived as recognizing its mother (H. Segal,
Introduction 68).36 When this is achieved, the stage is set for the situation termed the loss of
the loved object:
As the ego becomes more fully organized, the internalized imagos will
approximate more closely to reality and the ego will identify itself more fully
with “good” objects ... Hand in hand with this development goes a change of
the highest importance; namely, from a partial object-relation to the relation to
a complete object. Through this step the ego arrives at a new position, which
forms the foundation of the situation called the loss of the love object. Not
until the object is loved as a whole can its loss be felt as a whole. (Klein, LGR
264)
This transition brings about an intensification of the mechanism of introjection. During the developmental period preceding the depressive position the infant draws a fairly sharp distinction between good and bad experiences, part-objects both external and internalized. At the same time, by means of the mechanism of projection, its own aggressive impulses are deflected onto external objects and to an extent disowned: these external part-objects are then
experienced by the ego as persecutors, both external and internal. However, once the
integration of the part-objects and the ego begin to come about, introjection is intensified
36 I use the terms “object” and “mother” interchangeably, as the psychic processes described revolve primarily around the (biological) mother-infant dyad. Klein seems to take this relationship as a given, not only because she considered (successful) breastfeeding a precious contribution to healthy psychic development, but presumably because at the time the mother was the primary caretaker of the very young infant. As this situation has to an extent remained valid, I retain this interchangeability in terms, since an exploration of psychic growth where the primary caretaker is, for example, the father, remains beyond the scope of this thesis. 123
(Klein, LGR 264). This intensification is firstly due to a greater identification with the good
object, which in turn leads to a strengthening of oral desires and the urge to devour the object
out of love. It also enables the use of the good object as a buffer, so to speak, against attacks
launched by the child’s internal persecutors. Finally, it stems from a desire to incorporate the
object and to keep it safe inside the body, as a precaution and a protection against dangers
projected onto and perceived as originating from the external world (Klein, LGR 264).
When the ego has fully identified with the object, however, it realizes that the latter is under threat from internal persecutors as well. At this point, a situation has been reached where every attack against the good object is ultimately perceived as the destruction of the ego. Defence mechanisms against anxiety which had been mobilized during the previous phase of development do not, however, become inactive as this integration proceeds. They continue to tincture the emerging subject’s relationship to its object, resulting in the attempt to destroy the good object by means deriving from oral, anal and urethral sadism. This, in turn, ushers in depressive anxiety, which fuels the ego’s desire to make restitution to the object for all its phantastic sadistic attacks on it (Klein, LGR 265).
This is by no means a straightforward or easy process. In cases where the ego is overwhelmed by sadism and anxiety, and the distinction between good and bad object is temporarily suspended, the child fears that its good object is gone:
A little child which believes, when its mother disappears, that it has eaten her
up and destroyed her (whether from motives of love or of hate) is tormented
by anxiety both for her and for the good mother which it has absorbed into
itself ... From the very beginning of psychic development there is a constant
correlation of real objects with those installed within the ego. It is for this
reason that [this] anxiety … manifests itself in a child’s exaggerated fixation to
its mother or whoever looks after it. The absence of the mother arouses in the 124
child anxiety lest it should be handed over to bad objects, external and
internalized, either because of her death or because of her return in the guise of
a “bad” mother. (Klein, LGR 266)37
The processes which subsequently become known as “loss of the love object” have their roots
in that period of development when the transition from part-object to whole object is made, and are ultimately determined by the ego’s inability to secure the good internalized object due to the inability to overcome the fear of internal persecutors (Klein, LGR 267).
Klein ultimately departed from the views expressed by both Freud and Abraham by emphasizing the momentousness of the early introjective processes. In addition, she posited that the formation of the superego takes place much earlier than hitherto supposed and involves even the earliest introjections of the primary part-objects (Klein, LGR 267). Since, as Klein argued, even the earliest introjected part-objects enter into the structure of the superego’s formation, the relentless severity of the melancholic superego could well be attributed to the earliest utterances of conscience associated with persecution by terrifying bad part-objects: “The very word ‘gnawing of conscience’ (Gewissensbisse) testifies to the relentless persecution by conscience and to the fact that it is originally conceived of as devouring its victim” (Klein, LGR 268).
In addition, Klein drew attention to manic defences associated with the depressive position: denial and the sense of omnipotence. Denial primarily refers to the denial of psychic reality, of the overwhelming anxiety of internal persecutors. As Klein puts it, “that which is first of all denied is psychic reality and the ego may then go on to deny a great deal of external reality” (LGR 277). The ego attempts to deny both the dangers by which it is
37 This interpretation of the mother’s absence on the part of the child corresponds almost exactly, as we shall see, to the beginning of a large number of fairy tales, where the good mother is dead and the mother present is bad. 125
menaced through the bad internal objects and the id, and its dependence on its good object,
which it nevertheless attempts to control. This is linked to the utilization of the sense of
omnipotence with a view, in addition, to making reparation to them in a manic way (Klein,
LGR 277-78).
We see, then, that in this paper Klein attempted to deepen the existing understanding of
manic-depressive conditions, drawing on thoughts about the early oral experience, the
separation of the good and bad experience and the infant’s rage against the maternal object,
ideas which were already in circulation at the time (Likierman 104-05). What differentiated
Klein’s contribution, however, was her ability to combine these insights with her own unique vision, suggesting that depression was not an occasional aberration, but rather part and parcel of the human condition. As Likierman puts it: “Klein justified the notion that depression can happen so early on the grounds that since depression is a prototypical human reaction to loss, it must have a point of origin in the earliest situations of loss, even if the loss experience itself is not initially framed in conceptual adult terms” (105).
More specifically, Klein placed the onset of the depressive position at roughly four or five months of age (LGR 285). As the infant comes to know its mother as a whole person, she explained, it experiences “some of the feelings of guilt and remorse, some of the pain which
results from the conflict between love and uncontrollable hatred, some of the anxieties of the
impending death of the loved internalized and external objects – that is to say, in a lesser and
milder degree the sufferings and feelings which we find fully developed in the adult
melancholic” (Klein, LGR 286). If the infant’s introjection of the good object in some way
“miscarries”, then the infant experiences the “loss of the loved object” in the same way as the
adult melancholic (287). 126
In order to achieve a successful introjection, ambivalence comes to the fore as a useful mechanism, allowing the infant gradually to work its way through good and bad part-objects and conflicting feelings of love and hatred:
Ambivalence, carried out in a splitting of the imagos, enables the young child
to gain more trust and belief in its real objects and thus in internalized ones –
to love them more and to carry out in an increasing degree its phantasies of
restoration of the loved object. At the same time the paranoid anxieties and
defences are directed towards the “bad” objects. The support which the ego
gets from a real “good” object is increased by a flight mechanism, which
alternates between its external and internal good objects. (Klein, LGR 287)
This unification of external and internal, loved and hated, real and imaginary objects is carried out gradually, in such a way that each step in the unification leads to renewed splitting of the imagos; as development proceeds, however, this splitting is carried out on planes closer to reality, gradually leading to the strong establishment of love and trust towards the real internalized objects. This in turn leads to the lessening of sadism and aggression, and to the operation of reparative tendencies, which play an important role in overcoming the depressive position (Klein, LGR 288). Once this point is reached, the ego has arrived at a crossroads from which the ways determining the whole mental development will radiate in different directions. The depressive position is the nodal position in human development, defining the infant’s development and its capacity to love (Klein, LGR 288-89).
The emphasis which Klein laid on the successful establishment of a good internal object can be linked to another aspect of Propp’s structural theory of the folktale. As discussed in the previous chapter, fairytale narrative may be triggered by villainy, injury, or lack. These functions in turn are followed by a mediating incident, whereby the misfortune or 127
lack is made known to the hero or heroine, who either actively take it upon themselves to
remedy the situation (seekers), or are unwillingly dispatched to do so (victims) (Propp 37).
This is then followed by the function of departure, whereby the hero leaves home. This is a departure different from temporary absences. Moreover, it helps define the protagonist in that if the seeker willingly leaves home, it is the beginning of a quest narrative. If the hero is expelled, it is a victimized hero leaving and this becomes a journey of (mis)adventures
(Propp 39). Nevertheless, spatial transference is not a prerequisite for the unraveling of the plot: “In certain tales a spatial transference of the hero is absent. The entire action takes place in one location. Sometimes, on the contrary, departure is intensified, assuming the character of flight” (Propp 39). Lack of spatial transference seems to be true particularly in cases of female heroines, as for example in many “Cinderella” tales, or in the Grimm version of
“Sleeping Beauty”, where the heroine never leaves the castle, although, as already mentioned, this is not the rule in the greater number of fairy tales (regardless of the gender of the protagonist).38
At this point, then, the donor or provider is introduced into the narrative. The donor is
usually encountered accidentally (if the tale involves a journey, this encounter often takes
place in the woods), and his or her role is to provide the tale’s protagonist (whether seeker or
victimized) with a magical agent which will eventually bring about the liquidation of the
original misfortune or lack (Propp 39). What tallies well with the Kleinian concept of the
good introjected object is the provision or receipt of a magical agent, an object with the
powers of a talisman, capable of ensuring success.
38 The ease with which a given function can be realised in narrative in two or more distinctly opposing ways
(lack of spatial transference as opposed to quest or flight, for example) is another reminder of dream processes, whereby a given dream thought may be manifested by means of its opposite. I would also like to add that this curious lack of emphasis on the quest or the journey per se seems to hint at the primary psychological significance of these tales; in other words, one does not have to travel physically in order to go on quests. 128
Magical agents vary greatly in form. They may be animals (as is the case, for example, of “Cinderella”, where birds help the heroine sort out the lentils from the ashes), objects out of which magical agents appear (the genie in the lamp is perhaps the most famous magical agent to be imprisoned in an object), objects possessing a magical property (such as a cloak of invisibility in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”), or qualities and capacities which are directly given to the protagonist (the ability to transfigure, for example) (Propp 44). The agents may be given to the protagonist in a variety of ways, for example as rewards for feats of valor, industriousness or compassion (the motivations which lead the donor to provide a magical agent vary according to context).
What Propp points out –and it is a feature highly relevant to Klein’s emphasis on the importance of the ego’s identification with the good object – is that once a magical agent
(whether animate or inanimate) enters the narrative, the protagonist seems relegated to the sidelines, as practically all action is then undertaken by the donor or the magical agent (Propp
50). It is as if the protagonist and the object are as one, since the use of the magical object is an integral part of what constitutes a hero or heroine. In Propp’s definition:
The hero of a fairy tale is that character who either directly suffers from the
action of the villain in the complication (who senses some kind of lack), or
who agrees to liquidate the misfortune or lack of another person. In the course
of the action the hero is the person who is supplied with a magical agent (a
magical helper), and who makes use of it and is served by it. (Propp 50)
The existence and use of the magical object, in other words, is instrumental in defining the hero. The intentions of the protagonist continue to radiate throughout the narrative and create its axis, but now appear in the form of commands which the hero gives to the helpers (Propp
50). This can be explained, as already mentioned, as an embodiment in concrete terms of the protagonist’s identification with their good internal object. The vital function of this 129
identification with the good object becomes clearer when “The Psychogenesis of Manic
Depressive States” is read in conjunction with Klein’s paper “Mourning and Its Relation to
Manic-Depressive States” (1940).
The year 1937 had marked the crisis and turning point of Klein’s mourning, as she gradually began to emerge from it (she would also, in light of the arrival of Anna Freud and the Viennese analysts to London, begin to prepare herself for defending her own work)
(Grosskurth 234). Simultaneously, Klein experienced two more losses, that of Arthur Klein and of her older sister, Emilie. In addition to the pain caused by the death of Hans, the ambivalence of Klein’s feelings towards both her ex-husband and her sister may have enabled her to delve deeper into the complexities of mourning. “Mourning and its Relation to
Manic-Depressive States” (1940) is recognizably autobiographical, Mrs. A. in the paper being Klein herself (Grosskurth 250-51).
Klein begins her paper with a reference to a query expressed by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia”, namely why the process of reality testing, whereby the mourner ascertains again and again that the loved object no longer exists, should be so painful (253). Klein uses this query as a springboard from which to expound her theory about why this reality is so painful. As she claims:
In my view there is a close connection between the testing of reality in normal
mourning and early processes of the mind. My contention is that the child goes
through states of mind comparable to the mourning of the adult, or rather, that
this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. The
most important of the methods by which the child overcomes his state of
mourning, is, in my view, the testing of reality; this process, however, as Freud
stresses, is part of the work of mourning. (Klein, LGR 344) 130
She then provides a concise and elegant summary of the depressive position already
described in “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States”, which, in addition, included a reference to the early Oedipus complex, as well as an expansion and an attempt at the definition of the concept of internal objects.
As Klein stated, the onset of the Oedipal complex, whose roots in time could be traced to the oral phase of development and are triggered by breast frustrations, led to the widening of the child’s circle of objects to include the father as well as phantasized brothers and sisters that were also attacked, giving rise to feelings of aggression and ambivalence (Klein, LGR
345). The sorrow of the depressive position, then, is caused by fear of loss of loved objects
(rather than just the one object), and, according to Klein’s view, is the deepest source of the pain provoked by conflicts in the Oedipal situation, as well as in the child’s relations to people in general (LGR 345).
Klein then attempts to provide a working definition of inner objects:
The baby, having incorporated his parents, feels them to be live people inside
his body in the concrete way in which deep unconscious phantasies are
experienced – they are, in his mind, “internal” or “inner” objects, as I have
termed them. Thus an inner world is being built up in the child’s unconscious
mind, corresponding to his actual experiences and the impressions he gains
from people and the external world, and yet alters by his own phantasies and
impulses. If it is a world of people predominantly at peace with each other and
with the ego, inner harmony, security and integration ensue. (Klein, LGR 345-
46)
Inner objects are linked to unconscious phantasy which, as I have previously argued, is a concept intrinsic to Kleinian thought. Although the concept of unconscious phantasy was explicitly presented to the British Society in 1943, it had been present (if unexplained) in 131
Klein’s thought practically since the beginning of her career (Likierman 136) and integrally
linked to the creation of inner objects, which are in constant interaction with external ones.
As Klein points out:
In the baby’s mind, the “internal” mother is bound up with the “external” one,
of whom she is a “double”, though one which at once undergoes alterations in
his mind through the very process of internalization … When external
situations which he lives through become internalized – and I hold that they
do, from the earliest days onwards – they follow the same pattern: they also
become “doubles” of real situations, and are again altered for the same
reasons. (Klein, LGR 346)39
Drawing (among other sources) on Susan Isaacs’ significant paper “The Nature and Function
of Phantasy” (1943), the first paper attempting to present a coherent definition of the concept
of Kleinian phantasy (Likierman 136), Marion Milner40uses an interesting analogy to
describe the visceral, corporeal nature of the first phantasies, which in the course of
development are repressed into the unconscious. It takes a long and complex process of
development to realize that objects are outside the mind and images are inside the mind, as
originally simple perception is felt in concrete terms. Because of this, conflict between
impulses may well be felt as the counterpart of actual conflict between people of the external
39 Once again I point out the fact that Klein does take into account the effect of external reality onto the
psychical make up of the child. As she points out, the “external”, visible mother provides continual proof of
what the “internal” mother is like. The extent to which external reality is in harmony with internal reality can be
considered as one of the criteria for normalcy (Klein, LGR 346).
40 Marion Milner underwent training analysis with Joan Riviere and Ella Sharpe; part of her training analysis was also supervised by Klein herself, as she was asked to analyse Klein’s grandson, Michael Clyne. Klein divulged a lot of information concerning Michael’s external circumstances – so much so that Milner found it highly disconcerting to listen to negative comments on Melanie’s son, Eric (Grosskurth 396). 132 world, while harmony between impulses may be experienced like harmony between people.
What is more, gradual learning and the acquisition of facilitating habits may be felt as a good, helping person appearing inside oneself (Milner 47):
It seems to me we get nearest, apart from the material given in an analysis, to a
picture of how psychic processes must feel to a child from the mythical
cosmologies, such as those of the Greeks, for instance. Here we find the loves
and quarrels of the gods of Olympus, in an endless and complicated pattern,
continually controlling, both helping and hindering, the hero’s endeavours.
(Milner 47)
It may be argued, then, that donors in fairy tales (a genre whose borders often fuse with those of mythology, so much so that in lay speech the two are often conflated) are the concrete manifestations and projections of the protagonists’ good internal objects. This becomes more relevant when one considers that in many cases the donors are parental figures, often in the guise of old men or women. In some tales donors appear as frail, elderly men or women, only to reappear at the end of the tale as powerful radiant fairies that have been testing the protagonists all along. This, I think, points us even more clearly in the direction of the internalized objects as the counterpart of the donor figures in tales, as their double nature is indicative of the split way in which primary objects are experienced prior to the depressive position.
This is the case, for example, with the Grimms’ “The Golden Goose”. Dummy, the youngest brother, encounters a little grey man in the woods, who wants to share Dummy’s meager meal. As the hero gladly feeds the stranger, he passes the test of compassion and gains a golden goose as a reward. Unbeknownst to Dummy, the donor helps him again in three successive tasks and enables him to win the hand of a princess, before revealing his true identity (Grimm 313-15). 133
The plotline of “The Golden Goose” neatly coincides in this respect with the schema proposed by Propp. According to Proppian formulations, the first function of the donor is to test or interrogate the protagonist, or in some way prepare them for the reception of a magical agent or helper (39). This may take place in many ways: the donor may test the heroine in household chores, or the donor may question a protagonist (a weakened, indirect test) (Propp
40). Imprisoned magical agents may beg for their freedom (as is the case with the genie of the lamp or of trapped animals); often the hero is approached with a request for mercy and assistance, thus making the test one of compassion (Propp 41-42). This act of compassion in many cases is something as simple as feeding animals or beggars, a link perhaps to the anxieties of the oral phase of development. The protagonist reacts to the actions of the future donor, and the magical agent is acquired (Propp 43).
The encounter with the donor and the acquisition of the magical agent require some sort of active participation on the part of the protagonist, rather than a simple, passive acceptance of a gift. Likewise, the successful negotiation of the depressive position involves the mobilization of psychic mechanisms and defences in order to combat persecution by bad internal objects effectively and to endure the pining for the loved object. Pining may be dealt with by means of manic defences, such as omnipotence and idealization (Klein, LGR 348-
49). As already mentioned, omnipotence may also subsume manic omnipotence, with attempts at reparation carried out in an obsessional manner (350-51). Manic reparation can be associated to the fairy tale repetition of tasks (usually three in number), often undertaken with the help of magical agents. Ambivalence and the manic defences associated with the depressive position buy time, so to speak, for the developing ego to come to terms with external as well as psychic reality. In a perhaps analogous way, the protracted trials of the hero or heroine of a fairy tale not only provide narrative interest but also stand for the 134 prolonged trajectory towards successful integration, which is more often than not indicated by the establishment of a sexual relationship.
At this point I would like to comment on Klein’s use of vocabulary, expressions and images which evoke the necessity for active effort on the part of the infant in order to overcome the depressive position. She states, for example, that “every step in emotional, intellectual and physical growth is used by the ego as a means of overcoming the depressive position. The child’s growing skills, gifts and arts increase his belief in the psychic reality of his constructive tendencies, in his capacity to master and control his hostile impulses as well as his ‘bad’ internal objects” (Klein, LGR 353). The implication here seems to be that overcoming the depressive position in a way that is healthy and effective entails an active struggle, which mobilizes all of the subject’s innate capacities and demands involvement in the process: this is decidedly not a “passive” phase one has simply to wait out.41
This impression is reinforced when Klein links the infantile depressive position to mourning which occurs in later life, caused by actual object loss. Once again she incorporates the views of Freud and Abraham that during mourning the subject must reinstate the lost object in the ego. Going a step further, however, Klein posits that the mourning subject must in addition reinstate the internal good objects which had been incorporated in the earliest period of development, and which are felt to have been lost at the death of a beloved person
(Klein, LGR 353):
The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of
mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the
41 Klein and her followers preferred the term “position” rather than “stage” or “phase”, since one did not outgrow positions. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions were better thought of as constellations of attitudes and mechanisms which worked together, acting on the subject’s preoccupations (J. Segal, Melanie
Klein 33). 135
links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but
at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world,
which is felt to be in danger of collapsing. Just as the young child passing
through the depressive position is struggling, in his unconscious mind, with the
task of establishing and integrating his inner world, so the mourner goes
through the pain of re-establishing and reintegrating it … I should say that in
mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive
state and overcomes it, thus repeating, though in different circumstances and
with different manifestations, the processes which the child normally goes
through in early development. (Klein, LGR 354)
Once the process of mourning reaches the stage where grief is experienced to the full and despair heightens, the subject feels the love for the object well up, and that life inside or outside will go on after all. This is described as a particularly productive period in mourning, whether it lead to the stimulation of sublimations and creative work, or to an enrichment of the personality, to a deepening of relationships to others: in short, to wisdom (Klein, LGR
360).
Indeed, Klein’s two papers exemplified this link between mourning and creativity all too poignantly. Although they refer only to the writing of “The Psychogenesis of Manic
Depressive States”, Grosskurth’s observations concerning the link between Klein’s prolonged period of mourning over both very real and metaphorical losses pertain just as well to
“Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive Sates”. Grosskurth writes:
Her “vurk”, as she called it, had proved Melanie Klein’s salvation in the past,
and so it was to do again in this long, elaborately thought-out paper. For the
rest of her life she was to turn her attention to the questions of loss, grief, and
loneliness, experiences that formed the recurrent pattern of her life … In 136
“Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work and the Creative Impulse”
(1929), she described the urge to create as the impulse to restore and repair the
injured object after a destructive attack. This new paper, on the centrality of
the depressive position, allowed her to sublimate her suffering so that she not
only came to terms with her own grief but achieved the insight that grief could
be a stepping stone to maturity and development. Just as Freud’s greatest
work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was the outcome of his own self-analysis,
so “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” is an exploration of
Klein’s psyche. (Grosskurth 215-16)
Like a heroine in a fairy tale, who has to rely on donors and magical agents but, more importantly, on her own resources to rectify the injury she may have suffered, or to liquidate the lack that she has sustained, Klein relied on her psychoanalytic fathers and contemporaries, as well as on her own inner resources and creativity in a time of emotional difficulties to continue her quest into the pre-oedipal, pre-verbal realm. Enter the paranoid- schizoid position.
II
In late August 1939, Melanie Klein moved to Cambridge, in anticipation of the outbreak of World War II; she would later be persuaded by the parents of “Dick” to join them in Pitlochry, Scotland. Although her stay in Scotland was immensely fruitful in that it provided her with the opportunity to conduct the analysis of a ten-year-old boy known as
“Richard” (later published as Narrative of a Child Analysis [1961]), Klein was not keen on remaining there any longer than necessary (Grosskurth 254). She desired to return to London for personal reasons and because turmoil had been stirred up within the British Society as a result of the attacks launched against her by Edward Glover and Melitta, who had sided with 137
Anna Freud and the Viennese analysts in questioning Klein’s work. Fervent debate was
taking place as to whether Klein’s views should be considered psychoanalysis or whether
Klein should be labeled a heretic, along the lines of Jung and Adler (Grosskurth 256).
As the War was raging over the world, in the British Society too Klein was fighting for
her survival in opposition to Anna Freud. “People were ill, tired, hungry and testy”, writes
Grosskurth, “in difficult wartime conditions. But Melanie Klein was in her element, fighting
for her life, exhorting and deploying troops, issuing commands, bullying, encouraging,
unceasingly vigilant” (285). The battle was long and difficult (the so-called Controversial
Discussions spanned from 1942 to 1944); the parties involved were so impassioned that they
even disregarded air raids:
While these discussions … were taking place an air raid started, but the
members were so absorbed in their own battle that they remained glued to their
seats. Indeed, Winnicott had to draw their attention to the uproar outdoors …
At the next meeting … Glover felt that it was expedient to decide what action
should be taken if another air raid occurred during the meeting. It was agreed
that the meeting should be stopped temporarily to allow members who had
responsibilities at home to leave, and the others should carry their chairs to the
basement to continue the discussion. (Grosskurth 321)
The Controversial Discussions resulted in the creation of three distinct groups within the
British Society (the Kleinian, the Anna Freudian and the Independent or Middle groups).
Moreover, it had been a battle to the (metaphorical) “death” of both Glover and Melitta.
Glover resigned, and Melitta left for the United States, the rift between mother and daughter
never healing.42
42 Melitta left London in 1945 and returned in 1961, after Klein’s death in 1960. Although in London at the time, she did not attend her mother’s funeral, and delivered a lecture wearing flamboyant red boots (Grosskurth 138
Nevertheless, Klein emerged from the Controversial Discussions having established a
firm footing within the British Society. In the meantime, as these events were taking place,
W.R. Fairbairn was working independently in Edinburgh, practically isolated from the British
Society. He had come to conclusions similar to those of Klein as regards the origins of
schizophrenia. Aspects of the paranoid-schizoid position had been included or implied in
Klein’s previous work such as in her papers on depression and mourning. However, she had
yet to present an explicit account of these processes and this was therefore a necessary step:
“If Fairbairn had turned his attention to schizophrenia, it was necessary to work quickly in
order to anticipate him in any concepts he might develop” (Grosskurth 371). In this sense
Fairbairn’s work provided the impetus for the last major creative period in Klein’s life. She
acknowledged his stimulating suggestions, as well as the contributions made by Paula
Heimann, in her “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” that was delivered to the British
Society in 1946 (Grosskurth 372). In addition to Klein’s views on the function of
mechanisms of a paranoid and schizoid nature during the first months of life, this paper also
included the seminal concept of projective identification (Grosskurth 373-74).
The new concepts developed in this paper paved the way for the analysis of borderline and schizophrenic patients. At the same time, they made many other analysts (many of a
Kleinian persuasion, such as Joan Riviere) feel uneasy and unwilling to follow her in this line of thought (Grosskurth 375). As Likierman points out:
For a start, a conspicuous feature of this thinking was the continuing adoption
of psychiatric terminology for the purpose of psychoanalytic definitions.
Already with the depressive position, Klein forged a link between early mental
461) – an image quite worthy of any fairytale scene. In New York Melitta took in her younger stepsister Kristina
(daughter to Arthur Klein from his second marriage). In a telling continuation of the domineering mother role,
Melitta resented it when Kristina later asserted her independence (Grosskurth 369). 139
experience and later psychiatric illness. She showed how it is the primitive
experience of the world which exposes the infant to intolerable anxiety and
how this, in turn, sets in motion defences that, when excessively reinforced,
have all the hallmarks of mental illness. Human pathology is thus accounted
for through the very problems of living and of survival. (Likierman 146)
Klein had based her theory of the infantile depressive position on the psychiatric work which
had been accomplished by Abraham with psychiatric patients in a hospital setting. Likewise,
in order to formulate the paranoid-schizoid position she relied on the psychiatric expertise of
Fairbairn and Winnicott (Likierman 146). She thus continued to forge links between early
anxiety situations and an adult personality prone to illness (Likierman 148), relying on
medically qualified analysts yet with her concepts simultaneously providing impetus for the
development of psychiatry.
“Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946) begins with the premise that object
relations exist from the beginning of life. The first object is the maternal breast to which the
infant relates in phantasy by splitting it into a good and bad part-object, thus leading to the
severance of love and hate (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, [EAG] 2). This phantastic relation to
the part-object rests on introjection and projection, psychic processes which bring about the
interaction of internal and external objects (Klein, EAG 2).43 The operation of introjection
and projection presuppose the existence of an early ego, already present and functional at
birth. Klein could support this thesis by drawing on Winnicott’s view that there exists a
rudimentary early ego, largely lacking in cohesion and with a tendency to alternate between
integrated and unintegrated states, which are experienced as disintegration, as falling into bits
43 In her paper “On the Development of Mental Functioning” (1958) Klein refers to projection and introjection as primal processes , whose operation essentially allows the neonate’s both physical and psychic survival (Klein,
EAG 238) 140
(Klein, EAG 3).
In addition, Klein posited the arousal of anxiety from the very beginning of life, linking it to the operation of the death drive:
I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the
organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of
persecution. The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once
to an object – or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable
overpowering object. Other important sources of primary anxiety are the
trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs; and these
experiences too are from the beginning felt as being caused by objects. Even if
these objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal
persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within.
(Klein, EAG 4-5)
Part of the death drive, then, remains in the organism, bound by the libido; another part is deflected outwards and attached to the maternal breast (Klein, EAG 5). Neither of these processes, however, is adequate to eliminate this anxiety of being destroyed from within. As a result, and due to the lack of cohesiveness in the early ego, the latter tends to fall to pieces, particularly when the part-object is felt to be introjected in a fragmented form, as a result of oral aggression (5). The gratifying breast, on the other hand, which is introjected under the sway of oral-sucking libido “acts as a focal point in the ego. It counteracts the processes of splitting and dispersal, makes for cohesiveness and integration, and is instrumental in building up the ego” (6).
These splitting processes are necessarily accompanied by splitting in the ego itself.
Therefore, phantasies pertaining to the state of the internal object are also linked to the perceived state of the ego. The more sadism prevails on the introjection of the object, the 141
more fragmented the ego feels itself to be; and although these processes take place in
phantasy, they are felt to be very real, and have equally real effects on ego formation and
development (6).
As psychic impulses are mobilized during the paranoid-schizoid position (essentially
from the very beginning of post-natal life), so too are defence mechanisms in order to ward
off anxiety. Projection and introjection also function as defence mechanisms, in that they
deflect the death drive outwards and establish a good introjected object which helps ward off
internal persecutors respectively (7). Likewise, affects towards the part-objects are split. In
states of gratification love-feelings are directed towards the good part-object, whereas in
states of frustration hatred and persecutory anxiety are directed against the bad part-object
(Klein, EAG 7).
In its more intense form splitting may take the form of idealisation or denial respectively. In the case of idealisation, the good aspects of the breast are exaggerated, primarily as a safeguard against the fear of the persecuting breast, but also “from the power of the instinctual desires which aim at unlimited gratification and therefore create the picture of an inexhaustible and always bountiful breast – an ideal breast” (Klein, EAG 7). In a similar vein, frustration and persecution by a bad object may well be denied: that is, not only is the idealized object kept as far away as possible from the bad breast, but the very existence of the persecuting object is denied (7). Linked to the sense of omnipotence in infantile life, omnipotent denial, as Klein termed it, may produce a dangerous situation:
Omnipotent denial of the existence of the bad object and the painful situation
is in the unconscious equal to annihilation by the destructive impulse. It is,
however, not only a situation and an object that are denied and annihilated – it
is an object-relation which suffers this fate; and therefore a part of the ego,
from which the feelings toward the object emanate, is denied and annihilated 142
as well. (Klein, EAG 7)
The binary splitting between the good and bad object and the extreme polarization
between the good and bad part-object have significant counterparts in Proppian theory. Propp
lists a finite and comparatively small number of functions (31), which moreover seem to be
cross-culturally applicable (Propp 64). In the context of my argument it is relevant to note that a binary logic seems to underlie the very organization of functions into narrative
sequences. Propp points out, for instance, that many functions are often paired in opposites
(prohibition-violation, struggle-victory) (64-65). Individual functions –and more importantly the function of the donor – can be split between a person and some sort of object, where the object (or a given quality of the object), however, takes on anthropomorphic characteristics
(i.e. it was essential that it functioned as a person) (Propp 82). In addition, specific narrative elements necessarily elicit a given corresponding reaction: for example, an interdiction is necessarily followed by violation, the attempt to find out something is followed by the transmission of information, deception by the villain is followed by the hero’s reaction to it, fight is followed by victory, marking by recognition (Propp 109).
Pairs also exist in which one half may be connected with certain (but not all) varieties of its corresponding half; for example, the function of a direct pursuit may be followed by rescue by means of flight or by rescue through fleeing and throwing down a magical comb, or by the transformation of the pursued person (Propp 110). Even when one function within the limits of a pair provokes more than one response (e.g. direct pursuit followed by fleeing and throwing down a magical comb in order to escape, and, when that fails, by the transformation of the hero), these are necessarily linked, in binary fashion, to the particular form that calls them forth (Propp 110). These binary links are to all intents and purposes inviolable: whenever these norms of dependence are in some way violated, one often gets the feeling that the given tale is somehow “out of tune” (Propp 110). Provided that the functions retain their 143
order, “all remaining elements, including actual pairs, can be freely connected without any
violation of logic or artistic values … Thus the principle of complete freedom and mutual
substitution is dominant here” (Propp 111).
In his paper “Structuralism and Folklore” Dundes discusses the application of structural methodology to folklore. In the context of this dissertation it is of particular interest that
Dundes discusses the cross-cultural existence of binary oppositions as a structuring feature of folklore, and writes: “One could well argue that binary opposition is a universal. Presumably all human societies, past and present, made some kind of distinction between ‘Male and
Female’, ‘Life and Death’, ‘Day and Night’ (or Light and Dark) etc” (Meaning 150). From a
Kleinian perspective this binarism of some of the structural characteristics of fairy tales, as
well as the presumably universal binarism underlying structural elements of other folkloric
creations, corresponds directly to the splitting processes which form an integral part of the
theory.
Deep structure aside, there is, of course, a much more obvious correspondence between
the splitting involved in the paranoid-schizoid position and the characteristics of fairy tales,
namely the splitting of the characters into wholly good and evil ones. This is particularly
evident not only in the hero/villain distinction, but also in the splitting of maternal figures
into good mothers and evil stepmothers or, somewhat less often, in the splitting of fathers
into benevolent parents and cannibalistic ogres. There are few tales (if any) where the
protagonists are not either heroes or villains (and nothing in between), just as there are very
few (if any) fairy tales which provide us with the balanced image of a “good enough” mother,
to use Winnicott’s famous term, or a father who is both present and protective.
Maternal figures are pivotal in fairy tales, just as the maternal imago plays a pivotal
role in development. They are split into good mothers who are more often than not dead (a
trope which proliferated in literature long after fairy tales ceased to be in vogue for adult 144 audiences) or dying. Stepmothers, in turn, are evil incarnate and fairy godmothers are all- powerful yet somewhat capricious, appearing at whim and thus not necessarily reliable:
Many fairy tales start from the situation of the splitting of the mother into the
good (often missing or dead) and the evil (stepmother), as in “Cinderella”,
“Snow White” or “Hansel and Gretel”. Many feature motifs of oral sadism,
incorporation or engulfment. In being eaten (or nearly eaten) by the dangerous
object … the ego is rehearsing the persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-
schizoid position. (Parkin-Gounelas, Literature 35).
In this light, it is not, I think, a coincidence that Julia Segal resorted to imagery drawn from “Cinderella” in order, among other considerations, better to illustrate the excessive splitting between the idealized and the persecuting part-object. Although “Cinderella” will be discussed in the second part of the thesis, this is a useful example of how an ordinary little girl, envious of her real mother (and possibly jealous of her siblings) would in phantasy transform her into an ugly, malign presence who has given birth to two ugly stepsisters to boot (J. Segal, Melanie Klein 32). The fairy godmother, on the other hand, is an idealized breast, essentially unsustainable: “a small girl’s own envy and jealousy of her mother is painful reality: in her attempts to get rid of this perception of herself she may invent an envious step-mother, a persecutory phantasy. The fairy godmother and Cinderella herself, as a helpless innocent victim, are both idealisations which may be used to defend the girl from this phantasy woman” (J. Segal, Melanie Klein 45). Or, to put it differently, the evil stepmother (or the terrifying witch) is an embodiment of aspects of the child’s psyche:
“confronting the witch thus becomes an act of self-recognition, a means by which children are forced to acknowledge parts of themselves that might otherwise be denied or ignored. In the words of Pogo, a popular cartoon character of the 1960s, ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us’” (Cashdan 35). 145
As already mentioned, this fissure at the heart of the human psyche is provoked (at least
according to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis) by the operation of the death drive,
from the very beginning of life, and splitting, projection and introjection are mobilized in the
struggle against it. When asked, Klein claimed that the greatest inspirations to her thought
were Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and The Ego and the Id, characterizing both
these works as illuminations (Grosskurth 284).In opposition to the Viennese group of
analysts, whose work primarily focused on examining the defences employed by the ego in
its attempt to control its unconscious drives, Klein and her followers were drawn to Freud’s
theory of guilt and the death drive (Grosskurth 222-23). Comparing Anna Freud’s emphasis on the function of the ego, the exploration of its boundaries, functions and relations to the id, the superego and the outside world, Grosskurth writes:
Anna Freud was an expositor of her father’s ideas, but only of those ideas that
could be scrutinized in clearly-lit, well-ventilated places. Sin, cruelty, suffering
she shunned. The witches of the night ride on broomsticks and converse with
the powers of darkness in Klein’s work, but a Viennese spinster creates a tidy,
reasonable world by vigorously sweeping away the cobwebs. (Grosskurth 227)
Grosskurth’s dismissal of Klein’s rival Anna Freud as a domesticated spinster here is
surely off the mark. As Makari points out, Anna Freud “softly but firmly” redefined
psychoanalysis for many of her contemporaries and followers by drawing attention to the
more observable “I” which observed the internal processes of the mind and through which
information about the superego or the id could be gleaned (440-41). Moreover, her work at
the Hampstead Nurseries during World War II (and in the aftermath of the war) enabled her
to make invaluable contributions to the field of child analysis. It is true, however, that Klein
tackled, head on, the darker aspects of human existence. Freud’s notion of the death drive as
a function of the mental apparatus which may not contradict the pleasure principle per se, but 146
goes beyond it and seems more primitive (Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 304) was
not comfortably received by fellow analysts, even more so his aphorism “the aim of all life is
death” (Freud, “Beyond” 311). Freud claimed that his views, dualistic from the very first,
became even more so in his later work, only the opposition now was not between the ego and
the sexual drives, but between those of life and death (Freud, “Beyond” 362); nevertheless
this was not so much a result of personal belief as it was of logical necessity, an unexpected
outcome of an intellectual journey (Freud, “Beyond” 332-33).
Not so for Klein. Klein viewed herself primarily as a clinician, and used the concept of the death drive in her analyses of young children from the very beginning (Klein, EAG 28).
She held that anxiety was a manifestation of the death drive, and openly stated her disagreement with Freud’s contention that the unconscious knows no fear of death:
my analytic observations show that there is in the unconscious a fear of the
annihilation of life. I would also think that if we assume the existence of the
death instinct, we must also assume that in the deepest layers of the mind there
is a response to this instinct in the form of fear of annihilation of life. Thus in
my view the danger arising from the inner working of the death instinct is the
first cause of anxiety. Since the struggle between the life and death instincts
persists throughout life, this source of anxiety is never eliminated and enters as
a perpetual factor into all anxiety situations. (Klein, EAG 29)
When the earliest fears of infancy are revived within the analytic setting, the inherent power of the instinct which is ultimately directed against the self cannot be overlooked (Klein, EAG
29).
Within the context of literary studies, the death drive brings to mind Peter Brooks’ influential Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1992), where he attempted to find analogies between the workings of the death drive as described by Freud 147 and the inner logic and forces underlying the organization and function of narratives. In fact,
Brooks wrote, because Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is concerned with beginnings, endings and what happens in the middle, it is suggestive of what happens to readers when they are engaged with a narrative, thus allowing for a superimposition of the model of the functioning of a psychic apparatus on the functioning of the text (112).
What I am particularly interested in is the phenomenon of repetition, which Brooks devotes much attention to and which also occurs in a variety of ways within wonder tales.
Propp notes a phenomenon which takes place in practically all fairy tales. One he termed trebling, i.e. the repetition three times of individual details of an attributive nature (e.g. a three-headed dragon) or the repetition of individual functions, pairs of functions within a tale.
Trebling can also take the form of distribution (three tasks), of accumulation (the third task being the most difficult), or even of the occurrence of two negative results before success at the third attempt (third time’s a charm) (Propp 75). Propp did not attempt to account for this in terms other than morphological (74).
Trebling, according to Brooks, is a characteristic of folktale and other formulaic narratives, since, as he wrote, “we may consider that the repetition by three constitutes the minimal intentional structure of action, the minimal plot” (Reading 99). Repetition in literary texts is used as a major operative principle of the textual system, shaping its energy and giving it a perceptible form, thus allowing the reader to make sense of thematic wholes and narrative orders (Brooks, Reading 123). Moreover, repetition and return in the text is indicative of the death drive, the desire to return to the quiescence of the inorganic state, the non-textual (134). Bearing in mind that, as Freud had argued in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, repetition is a kind of remembering – and thus of reorganizing a story whose links have been obscured or lost, Brooks comments: “If repetition speaks of the death instinct, the finding of the right end, then what is played out in repetition is necessarily 148 the proper vector of the drive towards the end. That is, once you have determined the right plot, plot is over. Plot itself is working through” (Reading 139-40).
This last comment is particularly pertinent to the analysis of fairy tales, as plot structure
(as realised, for instance, in splitting) can perhaps point us to the reason for the consistent impact of fairy tales over time. As Propp had pointed out, nomenclatures and external attributes of characters in tales are variable quantities, which nevertheless provide the tales with brilliance, charm and beauty (87). The importance of motivations, connections and other auxiliary elements, including the psychology of the storyteller, are not to be discounted, “but it is possible to assume that the basic vivid moments of our essentially very simple scheme also play the psychological role of a kind of root” (Propp 112). This root may well be the constant struggle between the life and death drives, which operate side by side throughout life and manifest themselves in symbolic ways by means of the structure and symbolism employed in fairy tales, a hypothesis that will be explored in more detail – and in relation to specific tales – in the second part of this thesis.
149
Part Two: The Tales
Introduction to Part Two
My purpose here is briefly to clarify the logic underlying the selection, order and organization of the tales in the second part of this dissertation. I have opted to discuss some of the stories I consider to be the most common cultural heritage in Western societies, as these have been anthologized, adapted in various media (animated films included), or read from a psychoanalytic perspective. To this end, I have relied primarily on the fairy tale anthologies compiled by notable academics in the field such as Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar, but also on my own experiences and instinct as a reader, a mother of a young child and a primary school teacher.
To this end I have also partly followed the selection of Bettelheim’s seminal The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976). Despite some of the work’s shortcomings, it has been very instructive, not only in its insights involving fairy tales’ latent content, but also in the choice of tales which may be considered pivotal in their reflection of – or impact on – psychic development. Acknowledging what he perceived as his work’s limitations, Bettelheim pointed out that not only did he restrict himself to the most well-known fairy tales (although it is interesting to note that he included tales much less popular or even familiar today, such as “A Fairy Tale About a Boy Who Left Home to Learn
About Fear”, tales which may have been equally or more familiar to him due to his age or his
Jewish-Austrian background), but that he also restricted his analyses to the central aspects of the tales, since fairy tales – like all great works of art – speak to the recipient on many different levels, which cannot all be analyzed in one study (15).
A brief word may be necessary here as regards the personality and work of Bruno
Bettelheim. Till his death in 1990 at the age of eighty-six, Bettelheim was known as the acclaimed director of the famous Sonia Shakman Orthogenic School for troubled children at 150 the University of Chicago. Within months of his death (he committed suicide due to his failing health and his disturbed relationship to at least one of his three children), several former students as well as former associates accused him of things as varying as fabricated professional credentials, plagiarism and brutality (in the form of both corporal punishment and emotional abuse) towards the children and staff in his school (Gottlieb). A lot of this information was included in a scathing biography by Richard Pollak. Despite Pollak’s acknowledged personal bias against Bettelheim and his practices, the information presented in the biography was thoroughly researched and shed light on some of the hazier aspects of
Bettelheim’s life (Gottlieb).
Of specific interest to me in the context of this thesis are the accusations of plagiarism as regards Bettelheim’s work on the fairy tales. Pollak claimed that Bettelheim plagiarized some of the work of psychiatrist Julius Heuscher, one of Bettelheim’s passages echoing one of Heuscher’s. Heuscher himself when interviewed attributed this to oversight rather than to conscious intent (Gottlieb). Dundes too made similar claims when he pointed out that
Bettelheim’s reading of the significance of the shoe episode in “Cinderella” was preceded by a paper of his own published in the Psychoanalytic Forum and written in response to a relevant essay by Beryl Sanford on the same tale. Dundes’ argument too is echoed in
Bettelheim’s reading, yet despite the indication in one of Bettelheim’s footnotes that he had read the Sanford essay, there was no reference to Dundes’ work, although the latter stated that he felt flattered to have Bettelheim borrowing his work (“Psychoanalytic Study” 74).
Dundes also points out that Bettelheim does not refer to Ricklin’s pioneering work or to the work by Róheim, thus indirectly pointing out Bettelheim’s omissions in keeping abreast of developments in the field (73). Be that as it may, however, Dundes credits Bettelheim with providing brilliant readings of individual European fairy tales within a Freudian framework
(72). In addition, Bettelheim’s insistence that the tales play a significant if not critical role in 151
the mental well-being of children was a departure from previous negative assessments of the
potential impact of fairy tales on their audiences (72-73).
In this light, Bettelheim’s readings of the tales provide not only significant points of entry to the texts but also a working model for anybody attempting to provide their own approach. For my part, I will be emphasizing key features of the tales selected, drawing examples from other variants of a given tale or literary texts where relevant. In addition, the tales are loosely grouped according to the themes which in my opinion they highlight most prominently in light of the Kleinian theory discussed in the first part of this thesis. Of course,
I cannot claim to offer an exhaustive reading, as most of the tales revolve around many issues simultaneously. Finally, the tales have been placed in an order which roughly reflects the developmental order as posited by Kleinian theory, proceeding from those primarily preoccupied with the paranoid-schizoid position to those revolving around concerns pertaining to the depressive position.
152
Chapter Six. “Snow White” and Envy
Today the Grimms’ “Snow White” is considered the classic form of the tale (Anderson 43),
and it is this variant which formed the basis for the 1937 Disney animation film, Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 242).However, “Snow White” (AT Type
709) can be traced in various forms both across time and across cultures.
The examination of ancient texts led Graham Anderson to argue that many of the most
loved fairy tales – in a form which may well be different but nevertheless recognizable – can
be encountered in the literature of (remote) antiquity. “Snow White” has a pedigree as ancient
as that of “Cinderella”, which is very ancient indeed (Anderson 43). In the case of both tales,
Anderson argues, it is possible to trace proto-variants as far back as in Sumerian and
Akkadian narratives (60). This is feasible because folk and fairy tales retain their structure, intrinsic logic and basic identity for millennia. As Anderson puts it:
If a story is a genuine folktale or fairy-tale it will maintain most of its
structure, intrinsic logic and basic identity for centuries and millennia on end.
In the world of traditional storytelling (as opposed to modern literary parody
or pastiche), I have yet to encounter a wolf trying on a glass slipper. (Anderson
19)
Anderson provides a comprehensive summary of what he considers to be the recurring (and formulating) characteristics of the “Snow White” tale: a persecuted heroine, some sort of oracular function (the magic mirror), a compassionate executioner, an alternative community which provides the heroine with protection, one or more attempts against the heroine’s life, her near death and her resuscitation (46). A more simplified pattern would involve the heroine’s expulsion from home, the various threats on her life culminating in her apparent death, and her rescue and reawakening (Stone 56). 153
Whereas scholars like Anderson emphasize common themes and elements of plot in order to identify kinship between variants of “Snow White”, those employing a psychological or psychoanalytic framework tend to emphasize the importance of vanity as a recurring and stable theme, particularly as it pertains to the relationship between the female characters. In
The Witch Must Die (1999) Sheldon Cashdan reads fairy tales from a perspective of self psychology, stating that they assist children in facing aspects of their personality which threaten to undermine their relationships to significant others, be they parents or peers (12).
In his view, “Snow White” best captures the dangers of vanity, vividly demonstrating the havoc caused by excessive preoccupation with external appearances (Cashdan 13). While including other potent themes such as the loss of the biological mother, compassion (as manifested for example in the dwarves’ offer of sanctuary) and ultimate redemption (in the death of the witch), vanity is essentially the thread which weaves in and out of the tale, keeping the narrative strands together (Cashdan 43).
In this emphasis on the importance of vanity in “Snow White” Cashdan was preceded by Bettelheim, who also considers it one of the tale’s driving forces (196). Bettelheim emphasized the usefulness of fairy tales in allowing their young audiences to grapple with their oedipal struggles, among other issues. He thus interpreted the tale as one primarily revolving around mother-daughter rivalry within an Oedipal framework – including the
Oedipal issues involved in a mother unable to tolerate the existence of a daughter whose beauty surpasses her own (Bettelheim 194-95). With this rivalry in “Snow White”,
Bettelheim names the father as the central point of contention between the two women (203).
Both Cashdan and Bettelheim’s comments provide useful insights as to the underlying psychic issues and conflicts which make “Snow White” both resilient in time and powerful in terms of psychic impact. Their emphasis on the issue of jealousy and vanity, however, gives only a partial rendering of the forces involved in the structure and the symbolism of the 154
variant of “Snow White” discussed, since both point towards (but do not explicitly articulate)
the operation of envy as a vital force in the tale’s structural aspects and symbolic imagery.44
As a fundamental psychoanalytic concept and analytic tool envy was a late yet
ultimately invaluable development in Klein’s thought. Once more her views concerning
primal psychic processes were not placidly received by many of her colleagues, an outcome
she seems to have anticipated. As Grosskurth writes:
In the past she had always discussed her forthcoming congress paper with
close associates, but this time few knew its actual contents until they heard the
provocative paper, “A Study of Envy and Gratitude”, on the first morning of
the [Geneva Psychoanalytic Congress of 1955] … It certainly gave people
something to talk about over lunch. During the presentation of the paper Clare
Winnicott recalled that her husband, stunned, held his head in his hands,
muttering, “Oh no, she can’t do this!” Paula Heimann later said that this paper
marked the irrevocable theoretical break between them. (Grosskurth 414)
Klein in this paper attributed yet again a host of complex and conflicting affects and
object relations to neonates and infants (Grosskurth 416). The reason why the concept of
envy stirred up controversy was that it confirmed a general attitude (prevalent among the
Americans) that her views were grotesque. At the same time, it bound her supporters closer to
her than ever, so much so that the Kleinian group was later described as “a supremely envy-
conscious society” (Grosskurth 416). In any event, Klein soon found herself at a distance
from D.W. Winnicott, who had already voiced discomfort over Klein’s views on the
paranoid-schizoid position, and this was soon followed by her break with long-time
44 Cashdan links envy – as one of the seven deadly sins – to the “Cinderella” cycle and, again, to the Grimm version of the tale. While I agree that there are aspects of “Cinderella” which are linked to envy, I am not inclined to see it as the tale’s structuring affect par excellence. 155
analysand, friend and heiress presumptive, Paula Heimann, who disagreed with her both on
the issue of envy and on the function of countertransference (Grosskurth 417-18).45
Nevertheless, most Kleinian analysts have continued to treat envy as a cornerstone of their theory and their clinical practice, as it provided them with an invaluable clinical tool
(Spillius, Encounters 145).
Well-written and compelling, Klein’s paper on envy paints a fascinating – albeit not comforting – picture of the infant’s earliest psychic processes. It is also another step backwards towards primal experiences. One in fact gets the impression that Klein intrepidly attempted to describe the first moments of life, the “core” of psychic genesis, as well as its apparently inherent pitfalls. Perhaps in an attempt to forestall her colleagues’ oppositions,
Klein extensively quoted Freud’s comparison of psychoanalysis to an archaeological excavation, reaffirming her allegiance to his thought in its essentials yet also her conviction that a complete analysis had to include the emotional life of the infant (EAG 178).46And in
45 One of the case studies in “Envy and Gratitude” (1957) involved a woman patient whose strong feelings of envy towards the analyst (i.e. Klein) found expression in a dream image, where a cow was eating what appeared to be an endless strip of blanket. In the course of the dream’s analysis it transpired that the cow stood for the analyst and the strip of blanket for her wild and wooly interpretations which she would have to swallow. This patient, whose envy, according to Klein, contributed immensely to her negative therapeutic reaction, was none other than Paula Heimann (Grosskurth 417).
46 The analysis-as-archaeology analogy was also commented on by W.R. Bion, who presents us with a skillful summary of the difference in view between the Freudian and Kleinian or post-Kleinian view of psychic fluidity:
“Freud’s analogy of an archaeological investigation with a psychoanalysis was helpful if it were considered that we were exposing evidence not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster. The value of the analogy is lessened because in the analysis we are confronted not so much with a static situation that permits leisurely study, but with a catastrophe that remains at one and the same moment actively vital and yet incapable of resolution into quiescence” (Bion 94). 156
order to include aspects of infantile life in the reconstruction of adult psychic reality, one had
to take envy into consideration.
“I consider”, wrote Klein, “that envy is an oral-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and that it has a constitutional basis” (EAG
176). Recapitulating her views that the infant, under the dominance of oral impulses, has an instinctive awareness of the maternal breast (or its symbolic equivalent, the bottle), she also
(fairly tentatively) hypothesized that the mental and physical closeness to the mother
(perceived early on as the gratifying breast) in some measure restored the prenatal unity with the mother and the accompanying feeling of security (178-89).
Klein devoted a part of her paper to describing and delimiting the concepts of envy, jealousy and greed before proceeding to a more detailed exposition of her views, since, as she noted, the terms “envy” and “jealousy” are often used interchangeably both in everyday talk as well as in analytic practice. Thus, envy is described as the angry feeling that somebody else possesses and enjoys something desirable, the impulse being to take it away or to spoil it.
Envy implies a relationship between two people and it goes back to the binary relationship between the mother and the (nursing) infant (181). Jealousy, on the other hand, implies at least a tripartite relationship; while based on envy, the implication is that the love which is somebody’s due is (in danger of) being taken away, thus involving feelings of rivalry (181).
Greed is the impetuous and insatiable craving to take in more than one needs – or that the object can or is willing to give; it is linked to the process of destructive introjections, as its prototype consists of scooping out or sucking dry the nurturing breast. Envy, in contrast, includes the impulse to destroy the good breast by placing destructive aspects of the self into it, i.e. by resorting to destructive projective identification.
Envy stems from within, and therefore always finds an object to attach itself to, even though primary envy is directed against the feeding breast, “for the infant feels that it 157
possesses everything he desires and that it has an unlimited flow of milk, and love, which the
breast keeps for its own gratification” (Klein, EAG183). This is described as a universal
phenomenon:47 all infants experience it, but as the good object is more established and
becomes firmly rooted, the feelings of envy become more transient and the good object
stronger, able to withstand the envious and destructive attacks which occur even in the cases
of otherwise well-mothered children (187).
Because the breast which is attacked under envious influences is felt to be in pieces and
poisoned, prolonged and intensified envious attacks make it more difficult for the infant to
regain the lost good object. Since enjoyment and gratitude mitigate destructive impulses and
envy, these positive affects are impeded in the aforementioned case (Klein, EAG 186-7).
Envy, greed and persecutory anxiety are bound up with each other: the feeling of having
caused harm by envious attacks generates greater persecutory anxiety, thus leading to greater
uncertainty as concerns the goodness of the object. When the object is felt to be good again, it
is greedily introjected. As a result, doubt is created about the possession of the good object
and correspondingly the goodness of one’s own feelings; greedy and indiscriminate
identifications predominate, as envious people cannot in the end trust their own judgment and
are easily influenced (187).
By contrast, gratitude is one of the major derivatives of the feelings of love; it is based
on the capacity to feel enjoyment, which in turn is based on the capacity to love (188). Full
gratification at the breast is experienced by the infant as a unique gift which it wants to keep
– this is the basis of gratitude, and it is in turn linked to trust in good figures. It also forms the
47 This seems to be the assumption among contemporary Kleinian analysts. Elizabeth Spillius, elaborating on envy as it emerges within a clinical framework, comments: “I assume that everyone tends to be somewhat allergic to otherness, especially to goodness in others. Ordinary envy may become malignant, but some degree of it is universal” (148). 158
basis of generosity, since inner wealth ultimately stems from having assimilated the good
object in such a way that the individual is able to share its gifts with others (188-89). Strong envy is so destructive because it interferes with feelings of enjoyment, thus also impeding feelings of gratitude:
There are very pertinent psychological reasons why envy ranks among the
seven “deadly sins”. I would even suggest that it is unconsciously felt to be the
greatest sin of all, because it spoils and harms the good object which is the
source of life … The feeling of having injured and destroyed the primal object
impairs the individual’s trust in the sincerity of his later relations and makes
him doubt his capacity for love and goodness. (Klein, EAG 189)
While recapitulating her views on the importance of the primal splitting between the good and bad object, Klein also discussed the distinction between the good and the idealized object, stating that a very deep split between the two aspects of the object indicates that it is an idealized and an extremely bad object which are kept apart, rather than a good and bad one
(192). Destructive impulses such as envy and strong persecutory anxiety should be sought at the root of such a sharp and deep division:
Excessive idealization denotes that persecution is the main driving force. As I
discovered many years ago in my work with young children, idealization is a
corollary of persecutory anxiety – a defence against it – and the ideal breast is
the counterpart of the devouring breast … I also found that idealization derives
from the innate feeling that an extremely good breast exists, a feeling which
leads to the longing for a good object and for the capacity to love it. (Klein,
EAG 193)
Some degree of idealization is bound to enter into the relation to the good object, but idealization may partly be a result of some people’s inability – due to excessive envy – to 159 possess a good object; this first idealization is precarious, inasmuch as the envy experienced towards the original good object will inevitably seep into the relationship to its idealized counterpart (193).
The deep split between the idealized and evil breast, which renders the gradual integration of the good and bad object precarious is reflected in the splitting and the integration of the ego. When the split between the good and bad object can be mitigated by love and integrated during the depressive position, the ego is also gradually able to attain identification with the good object, thus retaining a sense of identity along with a belief in its own inherent goodness and value. If this process is disturbed, it may lead to excessive projective identification, whereby parts of the self are split off and projected into the object, thus causing a strong confusion as to the boundaries between self and object, which then also comes to stand for the self (192).
The split both in the maternal object and in the self is very much at work in the Grimm version of “Snow White”, which begins with a portrayal of an ideal, omnipotent maternal object. The tale begins with a mother’s intense longing for a child:
Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, when snowflakes were falling like
feathers from the sky, a queen was sitting and sewing at a window with a black
ebony frame. And as she was sewing and looking out the window, she pricked
her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell on the snow. The red
looked so beautiful on the white snow that she thought to herself, If only I had
a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the
window frame!
Soon after she gave birth to a little daughter who was as white as snow, as
red as blood, and her hair as black as ebony. Accordingly, the child was called
Snow White, and right after she was born, the queen died. (Grimm 237) 160
This is a compelling description, echoed in many other tales, of a desire powerful enough to
essentially “wish up” a child, so much so that the child has specific physical characteristics:
black hair, white skin and blood-red cheeks. Anderson has located the particular colour
scheme in this and other tales (either in the physical attributes or in the names of heroes and
heroines of other related tales, such as “Chione”, literally “Snow”) (46). This colour motif is
more often than not repeated in variants of the “Snow White” tale type, or in tales which bear
similarities to it such as “The Juniper Tree”, which also begins with an intense desire for a
child. A variant of Tale Type AT 706, “The Juniper Tree” retains the motif of the intense
wish for a child while highlighting the tale’s relentless fixation on orality: “It begins with the
hero’s mother wishing for a child while she is peeling an apple, then recounts her death in
childbirth after she has gorged on juniper berries” (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 208).
The intense images at the beginning of the Grimm “Snow White” take the form of the conjuring of a maternal presence – a good breast – so powerful and benevolent that its very desire and love essentially will the child into existence.48 This is accompanied by love so
powerful that it seems ultimately unbearable and all-consuming: the biological mother in the
“The Juniper Tree”, for instance, practically dies of happiness upon seeing her infant son.
Likewise, in the Grimm variant Snow White’s mother dies shortly after the child’s birth.
Both these descriptions can be read as textual incarnations of the ideal breast which, bearing
in mind the previously described distinction between the ideal and evil object, should perhaps
alert us to the affects underlying this sharp cleavage between the two. In my view, envy is the
driving force behind this sharp differentiation.
48 The link between the infantile state of mind as evinced through the power of wishing is further reinforced by the incorporation of infantile sexual theories in the beginnings of some of the tales’ variants. In Basile’s “The
Little Slave Girl”, which also shares elements with “Snow White”, the heroine’s mother accidentally becomes pregnant when she swallows a rose petal. In “The Juniper Tree” the biological mother is eating an apple – a fruit with multiple connotations – when she utters her wish. 161
Moreover, it can also be read as a manifestation of infantile omnipotence. In “Notes on
Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946) Klein had linked idealization with the splitting of both the external (part) object and the ego, as a process whereby the good aspects of the breast are exaggerated as a safeguard against the perceived destructiveness of the persecuting breast.
While idealization is thus the corollary of persecutory fear, it also springs from the power of the instinctual desires which aim for limitless gratification, thus creating the picture of an inexhaustible and ever bountiful breast – an ideal breast (Klein, EAG 7):
We find an instance of such a cleavage in infantile hallucinatory gratification.
The main processes which come into play in idealization are also operative in
hallucinatory gratification, namely, splitting of the object and denial both of
frustration and of persecution. The frustrating and persecuting object is kept
widely apart from the idealized object. However, the bad object is not only
kept apart from the good one but its very existence is denied, as is the whole
situation of frustration and the bad feelings (pain) to which frustration gives
rise. This is bound up with denial of psychic reality. The denial of psychic
reality becomes possible only through strong feelings of omnipotence – an
essential characteristic of early mentality. Omnipotent denial of the existence
of the bad object and of the painful situation is in the unconscious equal to the
annihilation by the destructive impulse … In hallucinatory gratification,
therefore, two interrelated processes take place: the omnipotent conjuring up
of the ideal object and situation and the equally omnipotent annihilation of the
bad persecutory object and the painful situation. (Klein, EAG 7, my emphasis)
In summary, infantile omnipotence (as it is manifested in both hallucinatory gratification by means of a phantastic all-powerful breast and in the annihilation of disturbing aspects of 162
psychic reality) in correlation to envy lead to a deep split between an ideal and a persecutory object.
The opposite to this ideal maternal object in the tale is, of course, the evil (step)mother.
The queen in the Grimm “Snow White” is a compelling presence, whose main preoccupation is her external appearance:
When a year had passed, the king married another woman, who was beautiful
but proud and haughty, and she could not tolerate anyone else who might rival
her beauty. She had a magic mirror and often she stood in front of it, looked at
herself and said:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in the realm is the fairest of all?”
Then the mirror would answer:
“You, my queen, are the fairest of all.”
That reply would make her content, for she knew the mirror always told the
truth. (Grimm 237)
However, when Snow White reaches the age of seven, the mirror declares the child the fairest of them all, much to queen’s chagrin. It is telling that the queen’s reaction is openly attributed to envy: “The queen shuddered and became yellow and green with envy. From that hour on, her hate for the girl was so great that her heart throbbed and turned in her breast each time she saw Snow White. Like weeds, the envy and arrogance grew so dense in her heart that she no longer had any peace, day or night” (Grimm 238).
The replacement of the benevolent maternal object with a fiendish one is totally in keeping with the omnipotent denial of psychic reality previously described. As this envy towards the maternal object is too powerful to bear, the relationship itself is denied, thus turning the mother into a stepmother. It should be remembered, however, that in the first 163
“Snow White” version collected by Jacob Grimm49, the stepmother was nowhere to be seen;
in her place stood a robust and envious mother. (Grimm 905).
A frequent defence against envy is to attempt to stir up analogous affects in others by
flaunting one’s own successes, thereby reversing the situation in which envy is experienced
(Klein, EAG 218). The queen in “Snow White” has set her own beauty as a yardstick by
which all others are measured, the implication being that she desires her beauty to be an
object of admiration or envy. Yet the absence of onlookers other than the mirror suggests that
this preoccupation is deeply seated, going beyond the (often natural) desire to be admired and
loved. In her “Early Stages of the Oedipal Conflict” (1928) Klein had asserted that the girl’s
castration anxiety was the unconscious fear that her internal reproductive organs and
childbearing capacity would be destroyed by a retaliating bad maternal object, in revenge for
the infant’s phantastic attacks on the inside of the maternal body (Klein, LGR 194). As Klein
pointed out, this was one of the unconscious roots of the constant concern of women with
their external appearance: “At the bottom of the impulse to deck and beautify themselves
there is always the motive of restoring damaged comeliness, and this has its origin in anxiety
and sense of guilt” (Klein, LGR 194). Bearing in mind the destructiveness of envious attacks
on the good object, it is understandable why the queen’s preoccupation with her external
appearance is so intense. It can, in other words, be construed as an unconscious attempt to
deal with the anxiety caused by a retaliating, avenging object, which threatens her creative
powers, since on the whole it is creativeness, the capacity to give and to preserve life, which
is felt as the ultimate gift and the deepest cause of envy (Klein, EAG 202).
This subterranean connection between pathological preoccupation with one’s
appearance and fear of retaliation from a vengeful object is in the Grimm variant further
49 This version was included in an 1806 letter from Jacob Grimm to Friedrich Carl von Savigny. The final version (what we consider to be the canonical one) was published in 1857 (Grimm 999n251). 164
underlined by the queen’s injunction to the hunter to bring back the child’s liver and lungs
after taking her to the forest, as proof that she has indeed been put to death. The hunter takes
Snow White into the woods, where she begins to weep and ask for mercy:
Since she was so beautiful, the huntsman took pity on her and said, “You’re
free to go, my poor child!” Then he thought, The wild beasts will soon eat you
up. Nevertheless, he felt as if a great weight had been lifted off his mind,
because he did not have to kill her. Just then a young boar came dashing by,
and the huntsman stabbed it to death. He took out the lungs and liver and
brought them to the queen as proof that the child was dead. The cook was
ordered to boil them in salt, and the wicked woman ate them and thought that
she had eaten Snow White’s lungs and liver. (Grimm 238)
As Bettelheim points out, the queen’s desire can be construed as a reflection of the primitive
notion that one can acquire the characteristics of what one eats (207). Moreover, it is
indicative of the queen’s psychic functioning in paranoid-schizoid mode: the oral-sadistic onslaughts on the maternal breast and body, which are phantastically waged by biting, scooping and tearing out its contents, are literally performed.
To sum up so far, the Grimm “Snow White” begins with a split between an idealized good object (whose immediate disappearance – a first lack – initiates the narrative) and a terrifying cannibalistic one. The deep cleavage between the two can be attributed to destructive envious feelings unconsciously at work, as this can be inferred from the queen’s paranoid preoccupation with her external appearance and her cannibalistic tendencies.
Yet the queen is not the heroine of the story, despite the fact that feminist critics Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar have credited her with immense narrative energy, particularly in the animated Disney version of the tale. The audiences of the tale in any of its variants are called to identify with Snow White, the persecuted heroine. Nevertheless, as I have argued in the 165 introduction to the first part of this thesis, it should be borne in mind that fairytale figures, including the protagonist, ultimately add up to a total protagonist, the total mind of the tale
(Brewer 24). Although working within a different theoretical framework, Brewer describes a process at work in the fairy tale akin to that of projective identification. This observation concerning the enveloping mind of the tale is also in harmony with Propp’s view of the tale’s protagonist as the nodal point in the tale from whom all action emanates (50).
To return to a Kleinian context, it should be remembered that each splitting of the object entails a corresponding split in the ego. This accounts for the splitting of the self in fairy tales into two people who seemingly have nothing to do with each other: “As the parent in the fairy tale becomes separated into two figures, representative of the opposite feelings of loving and rejecting, so the child externalizes and projects onto a “somebody” all the bad things which are too scary to be recognized as part of oneself” (Bettelheim 10). In line with
Dundes’ concept of projective inversion, this “somebody” onto whom the Grimm Snow
White projects all negative aspects of herself is none other than the evil queen. Bearing in mind both the splitting of the ego in conjunction with the splitting of the object, as well as the manifestation of infantile omnipotence whereby negative affects and experiences are denied and repressed, it is, I believe, plausible that the evil queen with all her nightmarish attributes is ultimately a cut-off and repressed aspect of Snow White herself.
It is useful to remember at this point that identification in conjunction with the sadistic attacks launched against the maternal object lie behind the process of symbolization and the exploration of the outside world. In a slim volume entitled Love, Hate and Reparation (1964) where Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere attempted to make aspects of Kleinian theory more accessible to a wider audience, the two authors discussed (among other themes) the love of the “motherland” and the urge to explore (and colonize) foreign lands. These were linked to the phantasied attacks on the mother’s body and its contents, as well as to the urge to make 166
reparation. Although presupposing that explorers are men, most of the observations are valid
for women as well:
In psycho-analytic work it has been found that the phantasies of exploring the
mother’s body … contribute to the man’s interest in exploring new countries.
In discussing the emotional development of the small child, I pointed out that
his aggressive impulses give rise to strong feelings of guilt and to fear of the
death of the loved person, all of which form parts of feeling of love and
reinforce and intensify them. In the explorer’s unconscious mind, a new
territory stands for a new mother, one that will replace the loss of the real
mother. He is seeking the “promised land” – the “land flowing with milk and
honey.” … Here both the escape from her and the original attachment to her
find full expression. The child’s early aggression stimulated the drive to
restore and to make good, to put back into his mother the good things he had
robbed her of in phantasy, and these wishes to make good merge into the later
drive to explore, for by finding new land the explorer gives something to the
world at large and to a number of people in particular. (Klein and Riviere 104)
Of course, Snow White and her counterparts are by no means willing explorers; rather, they are victimized protagonists, forcibly expelled from their first homes. From a Kleinian point of view, their envious attacks against their maternal objects have propelled them into an exploration of sojourn in the woods, which is both fearsome and comforting, providing sanctuary:
the poor child was all alone in the huge forest. When she looked at all the
leaves on the trees, she was petrified and did not know what to do. Then she
began to run, and she ran over sharp stones and through thornbushes. Wild
beasts darted by her at times, but they did not harm her. She ran as long as her 167
legs could carry her, and it was almost evening when she saw a little cottage
and went inside to rest. Everything was tiny in the cottage and indescribably
dainty and neat. (Grimm 238-39)
While the forest is terrifying, teeming with wild animals, it ultimately provides a place of refuge, a safe haven in the form of the dwarves’ little cottage. In a sequence reminiscent of
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, she eats and drinks in a restrained manner from each of the seven dishes and glasses she finds there, and then finds the bed which is just right. In
Bettelheim’s view, the dwarves’ house can protect Snow White for a while, providing a liminal space for her to cultivate some aspects of her overall personality, such as the work ethic manifested in housekeeping. What is more, Snow White’s self-control over her impulses in relation to the dwarves’ food and beds indicates some measure of control over her id impulses (Bettelheim 209).
The hospitable house in the woods functions, in my view, as a further, if latent, aspect of the good maternal object, as the house has long been established as the symbolic equivalent of the maternal body. This symbolism is further enhanced by the existence of the dwarves, who have phallic connotations, as suggested by their mining operations – skillfully penetrating into dark holes and discovering hidden treasures (Bettelheim 210). This view is corroborated by Géza Róheim: “Clinical and mythological materials point very clearly to the phallic significance of the dwarf and also to be more exact to the dwarf as representing the father’s penis” (Róheim 69). It also coincides with that of Klein, who had stated that the child phantasises about the maternal body as containing among other treasures the father’s penis as well as unborn siblings. The dwarves, then, may symbolize both aspects, as their injunctions to Snow White and their decision to allow her to stay on provided she do the housework are reminiscent of younger siblings desiring to be cared for by older ones: 168
Then the dwarfs said, “If you’ll keep house for us, cook, make the beds, wash,
sew, and knit, and if you’ll keep every-thing neat and orderly, you can stay
with us, and we’ll provide you with everything you need.” … So she stayed
with them and kept their house in order. In the morning, they went up to the
mountains to search for minerals and gold. In the evening, they returned, and
their dinner had to be ready. (Grimm 240)
Moreover, Snow White undertakes to feed the dwarves, a gesture not only linked to the oral
stage of development but also indicative of a maternal and reparatory attitude, i.e. an attempt
to restore the damaged penis and siblings contained in the maternal body.
Yet this effort on the part of Snow White to establish and maintain a good object (albeit
in symbolic form) is ultimately undone. Despite being warned by the dwarves, she is twice
fooled by the queen, who disguises herself as an old peddler woman and visits the cottage. In
her first attempt, she offers the girl stay laces: “My goodness, child,” she says to the young
girl, “What a sight you are! Come, I’ll lace you up properly for once” (Grimm 241). Snow
White swoons because of the tightness of her stays, and is revived when the dwarves loosen her laces in the evening. Despite their sober warnings, Snow White is duped a second time, when the witch-queen offers to comb her hair with a poisoned comb (Grimm 242).
This repeated lapse in judgment has been taken as an indication of Snow White’s immaturity, although it should also be noted that the heroine violates an interdiction because she is taken in by behavior aping actual maternal concern (Tatar, Annotated Brothers
249n16). In addition, Snow White’s inability to recognize a threat corresponds neatly to the workings of envy at an unconscious level. As envy contaminates the good breast, resulting in a (more or less) temporary breakdown in the good-bad breast distinction, one of the defences against it is confusion. Being confused – whether in severe confusional states or simply by evincing indecision – is both a result of envy and a defence against it, as to some extent it 169 mitigates persecution and guilt caused by attacking the primary good object (Klein, EAG
216).
Snow White’s falling victim to temptation also serves to underline the affinity between the queen and her (step) daughter. Narcissism, writes Bettelheim, is part of the psychic make up of children as well and almost leads to Snow White’s undoing, as she thrice gives in to the queen’s temptations (203): “The readiness with which Snow White repeatedly permits herself to be tempted by the stepmother … suggests how close the stepmother’s temptations are to
Snow White’s inner desires” (Bettelheim 211). The objects the queen offers Snow White – the tight stay laces, the poisoned comb – are all directly or indirectly connected to external appearance and sexual desire, or making one’s self desirable (Bettelheim 212). When the queen offers to lace up Snow White “properly” (Grimm 241) because she is a sight, Snow
White “stood in front of the old woman and let herself be laced with the new staylace”
(Grimm 241). When the old woman presents her with the poisoned comb, Snow White is completely taken in despite her initial misgivings: “The comb pleased the girl so much that she let herself be carried away and opened the door” (Grimm 242). The two scenes evoke the queen’s preoccupation with her external appearance, thus subtly underlining the latent connection between the two protagonists and reinforcing the theme of vanity which runs through the tale.
Bearing in mind the link between envy and (excessive) vanity, it also indicates Snow
White’s envious affects, which will find culmination in the apple scene: “[The queen] then went into a secret and solitary chamber where no one else ever went. Once inside she made a deadly poisonous apple. On the outside it looked beautiful – white with red cheeks. Anyone who saw it would be enticed, but whoever took a bite was bound to die” (Grimm 243). After a brief exchange with the witch-queen, Snow White craves the apple and is moreover taken in by the queen’s offer to share it with her: 170
“Are you afraid that it might be poisoned?” said the old woman. “Look, I’ll
cut the apple in two. You eat the red part, and I’ll eat the white.”
However, the apple had been made with such cunning that only the red
part was poisoned. Snow White was eager to eat the beautiful apple, and when
she saw the peasant woman eating her half, she could no longer resist … No
sooner did she take a bite than she fell to the ground dead. The queen stared at
her with a cruel look, then burst out laughing: “White as snow, red as blood,
black as ebony! This time the dwarfs won’t be able to bring you back to life!”
(Grimm 244)
After her return home, the queen consults the mirror, who assures her that she is now the fairest in the land; “[s]o her jealous heart was satisfied, as much as a jealous heart can be satisfied” (Grimm 244).
The extract quoted above epitomizes the envy-saturated, mother-daughter conflict. First of all, it consolidates the deep underlying bond between Snow White and the evil queen, despite all appearances to the contrary. Cackling over Snow White’s unconscious body, the witch-queen uses the exact same words to send Snow White to her death as her mother had to bring the child into life. This implies that not only are the two queens aspects of the same mother, but that they are also an integral part of Snow White herself: “[The use of the same phrase] demonstrates that the witch, like the good mother, is also a part of Snow White. As such, each is privy to the other’s innermost thoughts. The words invoked by Snow White’s mother to bring the child into the world are now summoned by the witch to drive her out of it” (Cashdan 58). 171
The means employed are three, yet it is the poisoned apple50 which finally does the
trick. The apple, of course, is an overdetermined symbol in the Western context. In antiquity
the apple was sacred to the goddess Aphrodite and a symbol of fertility. Within a Christian
context, it symbolizes sexual desire:
In many myths as well as fairy tales, the apple stands for love and sex, both in
its benevolent and its dangerous aspect. An apple given to Aphrodite … led to
the Trojan War. It was the biblical apple with which man was seduced to
forswear his innocence in order to gain knowledge and sexuality. While it was
Eve who was tempted by male masculinity, as represented by the snake, not
even the snake could do it all by itself – it needed the apple, which in religious
iconography also symbolized the mother’s breast. On our mother’s breast we
were all first attracted to form a relation, and find satisfaction in it. (Bettelheim
213)
Bettelheim emphasizes the importance of the sexual connotations of the apple, stating that it
stands for the mature sexual desires shared deep down by both mother and daughter (213). I
suggest that, bearing in mind the apple’s symbolic link to the maternal breast, Snow White’s
and the queen’s simultaneous biting of the apple also indicates the pervasiveness of envy in
their relationship. It can be argued that the division of the apple into a white innocuous part
and a red poisonous one evokes yet again the division of the primal object, the breast, into a
good and bad one. In terms of visual associations, the colour contrast could perhaps evoke the
difference in colour between the breast and the nipple. It may then be valid to argue that
50 In “The Juniper Tree” the evil stepmother entices her stepson to his death by offering him apples stored in a chest. When the child bends over to take the offered fruit, she decapitates him by shutting the lid with all her might. The apple remains in his hand when the stepmother props him against the wall with a handkerchief tied around his neck to cover up her crime (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 212). 172
when Snow White bites the red side of the apple, she attacks the good breast in a sadistic and
envious way.
This becomes more plausible in light of the argument put forth by Róheim in his essay
“Magic and Theft in European Literature” (1940). In this text the Hungarian folklorist and
psychoanalyst directly used Klein’s views as expressed in The Psycho-Analysis of Children to discuss the close association in European folklore between magic, witchcraft and theft
(Róheim 20). Within this context he discusses the symbolism of the apple tree:
If somebody steals the first fruit from the tree there will be no more fruit on
that tree for seven years or the tree will wither away … The first fruit should
be eaten by the owner or by a child, then the tree will bear plenty of fruit. The
stolen object has a symbolic value, it represents the “good body contents” or
the “mana” … That the tree or apple tree represents a pregnant woman and the
fruit the embryo or “body contents” becomes quite evident when we are told
that in Bohemia the first apple should be eaten by a woman who has had many
children, or by a pregnant woman. (Róheim 22)
Just as fertility and continuity (in the form of successive harvests) are ensured by
having the fruit first eaten by its rightful owners (to each their own), so witches, in a reversal,
are particularly associated with the theft of milk: “Stealing and magic are the same thing, the
witches steal in a supernatural way, preferably milk” (Róheim 20), although it should be
noted that milk here refers not only to the tangible substance but also to what is referred to as
“mana” in anthropology, or as “luck” or “profit” (the latter term used in Hungarian and
German folklore) (Róheim 21). Thus witches are representatives of the “bad mother” image,
the retaliatory aspect of the child’s body destruction phantasy, since during the oral stage in
development the child responds to frustration of any kind with the urge to rend apart the
mother’s body and tear out all the valuable body contents (Róheim 23). In addition, the witch 173
sometimes gives excrement as an equivalent to the milk or “profit” she has taken (Róheim
22).
To summarise Róheim’s views, trees and fruit (and more particularly apples and apple
trees) are symbolically equated with pregnant women and body contents. By contrast, witches
are viewed as destructive because their malevolence is targeted towards a life-giving
substance, milk, which is also in essence representative of any sort of bountifulness.
Moreover, they stand for retribution for the phantasied attacks against the body contents of
the mother (Róheim 22-23). In the context of the apple scene in “Snow White”, then, it can
be argued that Snow White’s biting the apple is an envious attack because it symbolizes the
attack on fertility, creativity as such. The queen can be said not to have attacked first, but to
retaliate against an envious attack by Snow White.
That this is a confrontation (rather than merely a persecution on the part of the maternal
figure) between mother and daughter fueled by envy, can be further substantiated by the
absence of the father figure in the narrative. The king in “Snow White” is conspicuously
absent, thus making the hunter the primary fatherly figure51 (though in a rather vague way).
51 In their classic reading of the Grimm “Snow White” tale, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose that the mirror’s voice is that of the Father, who imposes patriarchal standards of beauty and around whose approval this whole drama is staged. If this be accepted, it can be argued that there is a split in the paternal object which is present (ever so marginally) in this tale, namely the split between the authoritative (and ultimately indifferent) voice of the mirror and the more compassionate (if feeble) hunter. Yet the form the oracle takes is prone to cultural variation, according to the contexts in which the tale is encountered. In an ancient variant of “Snow
White” appearing in Xenophon’s of Ephesus Ephesiaca the role of the oracle is undertaken by a prophetess, who is simply jealous of the heroine’s beauty and has her exiled (Anderson 51). South-East European versions tend to assign the role of the oracle to the sun (Anderson 54). To some extent this version corroborates Gilbert and Gubar’s views on the patriarchal aspect of the voice refereeing the beauty contest, as the sun is more associated to the male. In Greek tales the heroine is often described as being of such radiant beauty that she 174
In this tale he spares Snow White and actively deceives the queen by presenting her with the lungs and liver of a young animal instead of those of the girl.
From a Kleinian perspective this marginalization of the father could once again be attributed to a strong undercurrent of envy. Seeing that there is a direct link between envy and jealousy arising from the Oedipal rivalry with the father, it should be noted that in cases where the early mother-infant relationship is disturbed by envious attacks too soon, the rivalry with the father enters the equation prematurely. Phantasies of the father’s penis in the mother’s body or in the breast turn him into a hostile intruder (Klein, EAG 196). Along with other repercussions, intense oral rivalry may lead to excessive Oedipal rivalry:
This rivalry is much less due to love of the father than to envy of the mother’s
possession of the father and his penis. The envy experienced towards the
breast is then fully carried over in the Oedipus situation. The father (or his
penis) has become an appendage to the mother and it is on these grounds that
the girl wants to rob her mother of him. Therefore, in later life, every success
in her relation to men becomes a victory over another woman. (Klein, EAG
200)
If this is the case, then all interest is lost once the conquest of a man is achieved (Klein, EAG
200). Therefore, the marginalization of the father figure in this tale may well partly be due to the envious motive, so to speak, behind the mother-daughter rivalry.
After biting the apple Snow White drops dead, to be found by the dwarves at night.
Despite their attempts at resuscitation, Snow White does not come to:
The dear child was dead and remained dead. They laid her on a bier, and all
seven of them sat down beside it and mourned over her. They wept for three
would get up in the morning and ask the sun whether “he” (the sun in Greek takes an inflection denoting the masculine) would shine or she. 175
whole days, and then they intended to burry her, but she looked so alive and
still had such pretty red cheeks that they said, “We can’t possibly burry her in
the dingy ground.”
Instead, they made a transparent glass coffin so that she could be seen
from all sides. Then they put her in it, wrote her name on it in gold letters, and
added that she was a princess. (Grimm 244)
This episode of (near) death is an integral component of the tale type’s stable and identifiable core. Whereas the coffin may be made of glass, gold, silver or lead, what remains unalterable is a state of what Anderson terms “suspended animation” of the heroine (55). As already mentioned, proto-variants of the “Cinderella” and “Snow White” tales have been traced in Sumerian and Akkadian recensions, which, in the case of “Snow White”, list elements such as the jealousy of a female rival, an episode of suspended animation and the intervention of seven inhuman, sexless creatures who act as judges of the dead and through whose intervention the heroine returns to the world of the living (Anderson 60). What is more, within the context of classical antiquity the entrapment in the glass coffin seems to point to some sort of segregation at puberty, as it has been held to do in the modern tale
(Anderson 160).
Likewise, Snow White enters a state of suspended animation52 when a piece of the
apple gets stuck in her throat: having returned home, the queen finds out that the girl is dead
52 What is interesting is that the term “suspended animation” occurs in the context of one of Klein’s case
studies referred to in her paper “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935). Here
Klein discusses the utilization of the sense of omnipotence in manic states for the purpose of mastering and controlling one’s objects, a process necessitated both in order to deny the dread that they cause and in order to carry out reparation (LGR 277-78). By mastering its objects, the ego believes that it is possible to prevent injury to them or by them; at the same time, the existence of this internal world is depreciated and denied (278). In other words, internal objects are simultaneously feared, disparaged and denied. In the ascendance of mania, the 176
– long live the fairest in the land! Yet this omnipotent control over the (dead) object cannot be forever maintained. The apple is dislodged when the prince carries Snow White off to his castle, to have and to hold and to admire like a work of art, a finale, as Tatar points out, which comes into sharp contrast with the kiss which awakens the princess at the end of the
Disney animated film (Annotated Brothers 254n21).
This is an ending which to my mind is unsatisfactory, as Snow White’s resuscitation is purely a matter of coincidence. Fairytale endings, being happy and for the greater part ending in romantic union, can be read as indication of the adequately successful negotiation of the depressive position. While “Snow White” does end with a wedding and the punishment of the female villain, it is, in my opinion, a somewhat ominous ending due to this element of haphazardness in its achievement, as opposed, for example, to the prince’s active seeking out of Cinderella in the “Cinderella” cycle, or to accomplishment of tasks for the sake of a princess’s hand in marriage.
At the tale’s end, the young queen is now the fairest of them all; the old queen attends the wedding as if compelled by some external force. Paralyzed as she is by fear, she nevertheless feels an irresistible urge to see Snow White:
The evil woman uttered a loud curse and became so terribly afraid that she did
not know what to do. At first she did not want to go to the wedding
celebration. But, she could not calm herself until she saw the young queen.
When she entered the hall, she recognized Snow White. The evil queen was so
petrified with fright that she could not budge. Iron slippers had already been
heated over a fire, and they were brought over to her with tongs. Finally, she
specific patient “kills” the objects, yet since the subject was omnipotent, it is assumed that they can be brought back to life at will: “One of my patients spoke of this process as ‘keeping them in suspended animation’”(Klein,
LGR 278).
177
had to put on the red-hot slippers and dance until she fell down dead. (Grimm
246)
There is no “happily ever after” here, the romantic union which would imply the ability to
establish and continue a functional, potentially (pro)creative relationship is very quickly
relegated to the sidelines of the narrative, in order to provide ample space for the queen’s last
performance, the last plot, the dance in the red hot shoes,53 which perhaps points towards the
all-consuming nature of envy.
As Hanna Segal points out, Klein underlines the common source of envy and the death
drive, both attacking life and creativity (H. Segal, Psychoanalysis 23). Envy, Segal continues,
is an ambivalent feeling rooted in need and admiration, and the question (as in all ambivalent
feelings) remains whether libidinal or destructive forces will predominate in the end (23). If
the death drive is a reaction to the emergence of needs, the object is perceived both as a
disturbance (that which created the need in the first place) and as the unique object capable of
removing that disturbance (23-24). As such, the very existence of such an object causes
psychic pain which is in turn alleviated by self-annihilation and object-annihilation: “The
annihilation is both an expression of the death drive in envy and a defence against
experiencing envy by annihilating the envied object and the self that desires the object” (H.
Segal, Psychoanalysis 24).
The queen’s destructive fascination with Snow White is to my mind indicative of the
predominance of the destructive instinct, as she very literally is consumed by envy, dancing
to her death in red-hot shoes. This, in my view, provides a possible reading of the queen’s
53 Róheim en passant mentions that among the East Europeans the main accusation against witches was that on the day of St. George they stole milk from the cows; this could be counteracted if one milked the cow through a red hot horseshoe (21). Although this is of course slim evidence for the association between the red-hot horseshoe and the queen’s red-hot dancing shoes, it is an interesting coincidence bearing in mind the previous discussion concerning the queen’s witch-like characteristics. 178 irresistible urge to see Snow White as the fairest of them all, even if she is paralyzed by fear of retaliation. Unable to obliterate the envied object, she ultimately dances to her death, putting an end to envious torment. Yet, as already discussed, the queen is simultaneously a powerfully repressed and cut-off part of Snow White herself. If Snow White also envies the queen her beauty, the maternal object is obliterated in turn, no longer there to produce need, admiration and ultimately envy. And since integration is impeded when envy is too powerful, there is no telling if Snow White may ultimately resort to a magic mirror of her own. 179
Chapter Seven. Splits in the Self and in the Others: “Mother Holle”, “The Three Little
Gnomes” and “The Golden Goose”
There are few things in Klein’s thought that emerge as distinctively as the primal split between the good and bad breast, between good and evil. As already elaborated on in the first part of this thesis, this primal differentiation is a necessary and formative precondition for the gradual creation of (infantile) subjectivity, as well as for cognitive development, since the notions of the “good” and the “bad” breast form the prototypes upon which all later distinctions will be drawn. According to Bettelheim, the polarization which dominates the child’s mind dominates the fairy tale as well (9). Although, as we have seen, fairy tales were not addressed primarily or exclusively to children (nor is polarization an exclusive characteristic of the mind of children, as the notion of “position” in Klein shows), this observation remains generally valid; evil in fairy tales is as omnipresent as good and often equally attractive (Bettelheim 8-9).
Fragmentation proliferates in fairy tales, often producing a veritable kaleidoscope of potential identities and possibilities for identification and interpretation, and thus defying a rigid pattern or recipe for interpretation. It is nevertheless possible to discern three basic splits in tales: that of the protagonist, of the father and of the mother (although these do not of course necessarily coexist all the time and in all tales). This split of the protagonist and the corresponding one in the parental figures can be explained according to Klein’s contention that any split in the object necessarily involves a split in the ego and vice versa: the more sadism prevails in the introjection of the (part) object, the more fragmented the ego feels itself to be (Klein, EAG 6).
Perhaps the most observable – and the most commented on – split in fairytale characters is that which involves the maternal imago. Nevertheless, I propose to begin the exploration of fairytale splits with those concerning the main protagonists of the tales in 180 question. When these occur, they are more often than not in the form of sibling rivalry.
Within the corpus of the Grimm tales, “Mother Holle” perhaps best exemplifies this split in the form of the good and bad sisters, although this particular tale remains marginal to the small group of fairy tales included in the contemporary canon of “classic” fairy tales
Referred to by folklorists as the tale of “The Kind and Unkind Girl” (AT 480), it is a tale perhaps more familiar through Perrault’s version, “The Fairies”, in which the kind and gracious girl is rewarded by having precious stones and roses dropping from her mouth as she speaks, whereas her unkind sister is punished by having toads and other slimy creatures dropping out of hers (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 128). The story was first encountered, however, in written form in Basile’s Pentamerone, where –in more graphic detail, as Basile was apt to do – the virtuous girl receives a gold star on her forehead, whereas the ill-tempered stepsister has to wade through a pile of manure; when the time for her reward comes, she is punished with the growth of an ass’s testicle on her forehead (Tatar, Annotated Brothers
128).
“Mother Holle” begins with a widow who has two daughters, of whom, of course, she favors the biological one. Her stepdaughter “had to do all the housework and carry out the ashes like a Cinderella. Every day the poor maiden had to sit near a well by the road and spin and spin until her fingers bled” (Grimm 119). One day she drops her spindle in the well by mistake as she tries to rinse the blood from the yarn and, in despair at her stepmother’s
(anticipated) scolding, jumps in the well to retrieve it. To her surprise, she finds herself in a sunny meadow, in the land of Mother Holle. While wandering in this strange land, she is called upon by loaves of bread to take them out of the oven lest they burn, and by an apple tree to shake the apples off its branches, because they are ripe and heavy. After successfully discharging these duties, she is invited to stay in Mother Holle’s house, provided she shakes the old woman’s eiderdown heartily enough to induce snow on earth, as the people were wont 181
to say. After a while, and despite Mother Holle’s kind treatment, the girl becomes homesick
and desires to leave.54 In reward for her diligence, Mother Holle literally showers her with
gold and thus she returns and relates the story to her stepmother and stepsister (Grimm 120).
It is immediately decided that the lazy sister do the same, but she does not succeed in
lightening the burdens of either the oven or the apple tree, and her services to Mother Holle
are found equally wanting. As a result, she is punished with a shower of pitch, which
moreover remains on her for the rest of her life (Grimm 121-22).
What is particularly interesting is that in a study surveying over nine hundred versions
of tale type, only a handful of male protagonists have been found. As Tatar points out, the
two main figures of the given tale type may be (half or step) sisters, cousins, neighbors, or in-
laws, but they are almost always female (Off with Their Heads 66). There seems to be no
exact male counterpart to this tale, although tales which pit a younger (often foolish or naïve)
brother against two older cruel and cunning ones are fairly common (Tatar, Off With Their
Heads 66). Tale type AT 660 under which they are classified is known as the tale of “The
Three Brothers”, and will be discussed presently as regards the dichotomy of male characters.
The binary opposition between the kind and unkind sister, also reflected in the
appellation of the tale type, connotes sibling rivalry on a very visible level. Folklorists have
observed a pattern in sibling rivalry which consistently runs along gender lines. It flourishes
in tales where siblings are of the same sex, such as “Cinderella” for example, or “The Water
of Life”, but when siblings are of the opposite sex, such as in “Hansel and Gretel” or “Little
Brother and Little Sister”, or even in “The Twelve Brothers” or “The Seven Ravens” (which
54 This is a tell-tale sign as to the real identity of the stepmother; even if she is mistreated, the heroine desires to go back to her own family, thus implicitly acknowledging her bond to her mother. It should be noted that
“Mother Holle” belongs to that group of tales in which Wilhelm Grimm replaced mothers with stepmothers as editions succeeded each other. “Mother Holle” was changed in the second edition of the tale (Tatar, Facts 36-
37). 182
are different tale types altogether), brothers and sisters more often than not exhibit
unswerving loyalty, a touching camaraderie in the face of external hardships (Tatar, Off With
Their Heads 68).55
The sibling rivalry manifested in these tales is in turn structured around binary
distinctions. As Tatar points out:
Tales with two female rivals tend to work with the contrasting attributes
lazy/industrious, polite/rude, and kind/unkind. Stories of male rivals, even
when they are not modeled on “The Kind and Unkind Girls” tend to work with
the oppositions faithful/treacherous, polite/rude, and kind/unkind. Since the
first pair of opposites in each series functions as the primary one, it also sets
the basic tone of the tales. Heroines are, then, faced time and again with the
task of demonstrating their domestic competence. Whether sweeping the
house, making beds, spinning, cooking, building a fire, washing dishes,
milking cows, feeding hens, or cleaning a stable (these are among the actual
tasks that appear in versions of the tale), they earn rewards. Heroes, by
contrast, are challenged with tasks and missions that lead them on the road to
high adventure. (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 69)
It should be noted that, except for the first binary pair, courtesy and compassion are desirable characteristics for protagonists of both genders; whether male or female, protagonists of these tale types must demonstrate compassion, humility, gratitude and kindness in order to achieve a happy ending (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 67).
55 Tatar does point out one exception to this rule, tales involving two brothers, which are often twin brothers.
This would perhaps explain why there is no sibling rivalry between them, as in folk logic they are seen to be aspects of the same person (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 68). I would add, however, that in these tales the two brothers separate and we do not see them in interaction; there is not much scope for sibling rivalry when the protagonists do not occupy the same narrative space for the greater part of the tale. 183
To return to “Mother Holle”, the two girls stand in complete opposition to each other as
regards their physical appearance and their character traits. The one is beautiful and
industrious; the other ugly and lazy. Likewise, in “The Three Little Gnomes in The Forest”
the stepmother’s envy is fueled by her stepdaughter’s beauty as opposed to her own
daughter’s “ugly and gruesome” appearance (Grimm 63).
Whereas beauty is palpably visible (although more often than not refreshingly left to
the reader’s or listener’s imagination), character traits and motives are realized primarily
through actions; a character’s physical and mental traits serve not only to define him or her,
but also elicit action, being simultaneously descriptive and causal (Tatar, Hard Facts 79). In addition, they nearly always have a single predictable outcome or consequence rather than eliciting multiple possibilities:
In the narrative logic of the fairy tale, jealousy translates into murder. The
unrivaled beauty of a heroine attracts a suitor and gives rise to marriage. The
desire to travel leads to a voyage. Fear breeds ogres and sundry other
monsters. Helplessness and despair magically produce assistants. Compassion
brings a reward. Curiosity elicits a prohibition. Odd as it sounds, it appears
that we must look to the plot in order to read the minds of fairy-tale characters.
(Tatar, Hard Facts 79).
It should be borne in mind that the actions elicited by psychic states run along gender lines.
For girls, humility and compassion are expressed by means of domestic chores of various types. In this the tales incorporate and to an extent reflect the actual circumstances in which they were recorded and recomposed, highlighting aspects of daily life, instructing in what was considered desirable, gender-appropriate behavior (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 69).
Of course, the trials in “The Three Little Gnomes” are, so to speak, once removed from everyday requirements. Combining familiar elements from both “Hansel and Gretel” and 184
“Snow White”, the heroine is sent out into the woods in winter with nothing but a small piece of dry bread to eat, a paper dress on her back and the strict admonition not to return until she has filled her basket with strawberries. Once in the forest, the girl finds shelter at the cottage of three gnomes, who offer her warmth (and strawberries for her stepmother) after she gladly agrees to share her meager meal with them, and to sweep the snow away from the back of their house. When these tasks are completed, they reward her by granting her growing beauty with each passing day, a gold coin each time she speaks, and ultimately her marriage to a king (Grimm 63-64).
In complete contrast, the ugly sister, when informed of the heroine’s adventure, desires to go out into the forest herself, opposing her mother’s wishes and thus expressing disobedience along with her envy of her sister’s good fortune. After pestering her mother till the latter yields, wrapped in a warm fur coat especially made for the occasion and carrying bread and butter and cake for her refreshment, she soon alights on the gnomes’ cottage. As is to be expected, she neither shares her fare with her hosts nor sweeps away the snow. As a result, the gnomes wish her uglier with every passing day, a toad with each word she utters and a miserable death (Grimm 64-65).
So far, then, it is evident that there is a point-by point correspondence of antitheses as far as the characteristics of the two rival girls are concerned. It is here, I believe, that the mechanism of projection comes into play, whereby all the negative aspects, both conscious and unconscious, are projected onto an external object. Hostility against parents and siblings may well be part of everyone’s psychological makeup, but before entering the public domain of folklore, it has to undergo a process of considerable modification and repression, as well as one of inversion (Tatar, Hard Facts 78). Much in line with Dundes’ notion of projective inversion, Tatar writes: 185
To obviate the profound sense of guilt aroused by unacceptable thoughts, an
aggressor can take advantage of a willfully clever stratagem. He turns himself
into an innocent martyr and casts the victim of his guilt-tainted thoughts into
the role of a nefarious villain … A bold inversion of actual conditions often
takes place before private fantasies make their way into the public domain.
The belligerent romancer slips imperceptibly into the role of the victim who
fashions a tale recounting his persecution. There is no doubt much truth in
Otto Rank’s view that adults invest the lives of folkloric heroes with the details
of their own infantile history and that they thereby create the stuff of fairy tales
by means of retrograde childhood fantasies. (Tatar, Hard Facts 78)
This becomes particularly evident in the “Three Little Gnomes”, as the story does not end on the didactic note of “Mother Holle”. After the stepmother’s second unsuccessful attempt against the heroine’s life and the latter’s subsequent marriage to the king, a son is born and the stepmother, feigning concern for the mother and the baby, finally succeeds in replacing the queen with her own daughter by drowning the latter in the river (Grimm 65-66).
Bearing this in mind, it is evident how the female rival of the tale not only literally embodies all that the heroine is not, but also attacks the young queen in order to take her place.
As already mentioned, the split in the subject corresponds to a necessary split in the external object and vice versa; as the two aforementioned tales revolve around female protagonists, it is no surprise that the split occurs primarily in relation to the mother figures of the tales. In “Mother Holle” the situation is fairly clear-cut: the widowed stepmother corresponds to the bad object, whereas Mother Holle can be said to represent the good object, the caring mother (there is no male presence in the text whatsoever). When the heroine first sets eyes on her, however, she is not immediately comforted: 186
At last she came to a small cottage where an old woman was looking out of the
window. She had such big teeth that the maiden was scared and wanted to run
away. But the old woman cried after her: “Why are you afraid, my dear child?
Stay with me, and if you do all the housework properly, everything will turn
out right for you. Only you must make my bed nicely and carefully and give it
a good shaking so the feathers fly. Then it will snow on earth, for I am Mother
Holle. (Grimm 120)
Mother Holle is an ambiguous figure, frightening in her appearance yet benevolent when
appropriate (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 130n4). The underlying binary nature of Mother
Holle finds its expression not only in her physical appearance but also in the textual split
between the widowed mother and the benevolent helper that Mother Holle becomes to the
diligent girl. Within a psychoanalytic context her large teeth bring to mind the oral phase of
development. Her prominent teeth render her frightening to behold; yet at the same time she
is described as soft-spoken and just:
Since the old woman had spoken so kindly to her, the maiden plucked up her
courage and agreed to enter her service. She took care of everything to the old
woman’s satisfaction and always shook the bed so hard that the feathers flew
about like snowflakes. In return, the woman treated her well: she never said an
unkind word to the maiden, and she gave her roasted or boiled meat every day.
(Grimm 120)
Evoking both the aggression associated with the cannibalistic tendencies of the oral phase of development by means of her physical appearance, yet simultaneously providing the girl with sumptuous nourishment (meat on the table every day must have been an unimaginable luxury at the time; for many it remains one today), Mother Holle simultaneously embodies a good 187 breast, as it would be described in terms of the paranoid-schizoid position, and a more integrated maternal imago, in keeping with the workings of the depressive position.
A similar split between the good and evil maternal presence occurs in “The Three Little
Gnomes in the Forest”, although it takes place in a more complex way, involving considerable fragmentation. The first split occurs, in predictable fashion, at the beginning of the tale: the heroine’s biological mother is dead, her father widowed, and she is taken in by her stepmother’s false promises of lavish maternal care. Once the wedding takes place, the balance between the two girls is quickly overturned:
On the day after the wedding when the two girls got up, the man’s daughter
had milk to wash herself and wine to drink, while the woman’s daughter had
water to wash herself and water to drink. On the second morning both the girls
had water to wash themselves and water to drink. On the third morning the
man’s daughter had water to wash herself and water to drink, while the
woman’s daughter had milk to wash herself and wine to drink. And that’s the
way it remained. (Grimm 62-63)
The persecuting behavior on the part of the stepmother continues and is intensified, as we have seen, throughout the tale. Once the heroine is married and becomes a mother, however, a different configuration occurs. The stepmother retains her position as an evil presence, her malevolence heightened as, with the assistance of her daughter, she lifts the queen from the bed of childbirth and drowns her in the river which runs by the castle. The ugly stepdaughter replaces the queen in the bed, and, once again feigning maternal care and 188
concern, the stepmother dupes the king by claiming that the toads dropping from her mouth
are the result of a terrible sweat (Grimm 66).56
This comes in direct contrast to the queen herself, who now fills the slot of the benign
maternal presence, as she returns from the dead in the form of a duck in order to nurse her
newborn baby. In a poignant scene, the duck swims through the drain in the middle of the
night, and converses with a kitchen boy who is awake:
“King, my king, what are you doing?
Are you awake, or might you be sleeping?”
When the boy did not answer, the duck said:
“And are all my guests now sound asleep?”
Then the kitchen boy answered:
“Yes, indeed, you can’t hear a peep.”
Then she asked again:
“How about that baby of mine?”
He replied:
“oh, he’s asleep and doing just fine.”
Finally the duck assumed the shape of the queen, went upstairs, nursed the
baby, plumped up his little bed, covered him, and returned to the drain, where
she swam away as a duck. This happened on the next night too, and on the
third night, she said to the kitchen boy: “Go and tell the king to take his sword
and swing it three times over my head on the threshold”. (Grimm 66-67)
56 This is a stark if implicit reminder of both mother and infant mortality rates at the times; puerperal fever was a common cause of death of mothers, and this fairy tale, like many others, reflects, if not straightforwardly, aspects of the historical period in which it was recorded. 189
In this way the queen is restored to life and reveals herself on the Sunday of the child’s baptism, when the stepmother and her daughter find a gruesome death they themselves have invented – to be put in a barrel studded with nails on the inside and rolled down the hill into the river (Grimm 67).
“The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest” nears its resolution in the same way that
“Snow White” begins, namely with the portrayal of an ideal breast, a maternal presence so benign and so powerful that it could create life by wishing it or defeat death for the love of the child respectively. In the case of the “Three Little Gnomes in the Forest” it is imperative that the female adversary be faced and eliminated. If not, the triangle involving the father, the stepmother and the children will be repeated, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle and precluding any possibility of living happily ever after (Tatar, Hard Facts 147). This is achieved by the mother’s return from the dead, in order to expose the evil done to her: once this is done, the evil stepmother is destroyed along with her progeny and the vicious cycle stops (Tatar, Hard Facts 148). This split between maternal malice and maternal nurture by far surpasses in emotional intensity the fairly straightforward, didactically rendered tale of
“Mother Holle”.
Moreover, it includes, albeit in a subsidiary, rather faint pattern, a split in the father imago. In “The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest” there is a father at the beginning of the text who is ambivalent about remarrying. As he says, marriage is both joy and torture and in order to resolve his dilemma, he resorts to a curious course of action:
He took off a boot and said, “Take this boot. It’s got a hole in the sole. Carry it
up to the loft, hang it on a big nail, and pour water into it. If it holds the water,
I’ll get married again. But if it leaks, I won’t.”
The maiden did as she was told, but the water drew the hole together, and
the boot became full to the brim. The daughter informed the father how 190
everything had turned out. … Soon after, the wedding took place. (Grimm
62)57
Once the wedding has taken place, the father to all intents and purposes disappears, although
he can be said to reappear in the guise of the three little gnomes in the forest cottage. Much
like the seven dwarves in “Snow White”, the gnomes act as donors, providing the heroine
with food, shelter and magical objects (in the form of attributes such as physical beauty); it is
57 Bearing in mind the association between shoes and genitalia, this trial in this context is, to my mind, somewhat odd. The shoe’s worn-out state, the hole, could by implication refer to sexual experience (cf. the association between worn-out shoes and masturbation, in connection with the tale of “The Twelve Dancing
Princesses” on p.51), the father, in other words, preferring to avoid the marriage due to widow’s prior sexual experience, until this is in a magical way undone. It could also be construed differently, however, if the father is associated to the tale’s king (this is a typical symbolism in fairy tales). The king’s first address to the heroine is more paternal than erotic in nature:
While she was in the middle of chopping the hole [in the frozen river, in order to rinse yarn], a
splendid coach with a king inside came driving by. The coach stopped, and the king asked,
“Who are you, my child, and what are you doing here?”
“I’m a poor maiden and I’m rinsing yarn.”
The king felt sorry for her, and when he saw how beautiful she was, he said, “Would you
like to ride with me in my coach?”
“Oh yes, with all my heart!” she replied, for she was glad to get as far away as possible
from her mother and sister. So she climbed into the coach and drove away with the king, and
when they got to his castle, the wedding was celebrated with great pomp, and this would not
have happened were it not for the gifts of the three gnomes. (Grimm 65-66)
This quasi-incestuous approach, in addition to the shoe element, brings to mind the tale of “Thousand Furs” which in turned is linked to the “Cinderella” cycle. As will be discussed in the final chapter, together both tale types chart feminine oedipal development. If this be accepted, then oedipal rivalry towards both the mother and the sister can be seen as functioning as the subtext of the particular tale. 191
also stressed in the narrative that it is through their gifts that the heroine is able to marry the
king (Grimm 66).
After the heroine marries the king, another split occurs, one between the king as spouse and the kitchen boy. Again, the two characters can be said to complement each other: whereas the king is away at the queen’s time of need and is also taken in by the stepmother’s duplicity, he is the one who is called upon to break the spell and bring his wife back from the dead. The kitchen boy (and it is interesting how again the notion of kitchen is linked to nurture and care) keeps vigil at night, answers and consoles the queen, but cannot perform the spell himself. If one puts the two characters together, we have the composite image of a fairytale perfect husband.
As is evident from the mapping out of male identifications in the aforementioned tale, whereas female configurations of characters tend to be structured in a binary fashion, male ones follow – at least on the surface – a pattern of trebling. This is reflected in the title of the male type bearing the closest affinity to the “Kind and Unkind Girl”, “The Three Brothers”
(AT 660). This tale type, like its female corollary, is not particularly popular today. Perhaps the most familiar variant is “The Golden Goose”, which I will now examine in conjunction with “The Queen Bee”.
“The Queen Bee” is a structurally more straightforward story, beginning with two decadent brothers who set out to seek adventure, and a younger brother, Simpleton, who goes out to look for them, only to be ridiculed for his naïve approach to life: “when [Simpleton] finally found them, they ridiculed him for thinking that he, as naïve as he was, could make his way into the world when they, who were much more clever, had not been able to succeed”
(Grimm 306). There are no parental figures here, paternal or otherwise, and the main observable split is that between Simpleton and his two brothers. It should be noted here that, although three in number, the two older brothers practically function as one, as they are 192
essentially undifferentiated in appearance and behavior. The two brothers exhibit selfishness
and wanton cruelty towards insects and animals, desiring to crush ants underfoot, to roast
ducks they see in a pond and to smoke bees out of their beehives; Simpleton manages to
dissuade them and save the creatures (Grimm 306-07). The same principle applies to the two older brothers in “The Golden Goose”; they remain in essence undifferentiated, both rudely declining to share their food and drink with the little grey dwarf. In contrast, Simpleton in
“The Golden Goose” willingly shares his pancake of water and ashes and his sour beer with the dwarf, only to find out that they have magically been turned into a proper pancake and good wine (Grimm 312).
But whereas “The Golden Bee” essentially limits –perhaps also due to its brevity – the splitting merely on the level of the protagonist (the grey dwarf in the narrative, unlike the donor function he plays in “The Golden Goose”, is an equivocal presence, providing them with food and hospitality and instructing them in their required tasks, yet also turning the two brothers to stone when they fail their tests. He functions more as an arbiter, facilitating the plot). In “The Golden Goose”, however, there is a division of characters in the same vein as in “The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest”. Simpleton being the main character, he is complemented by his two more competent and less benevolent older brothers, whose physical and mental ability he lacks (the two brothers are described as “clever” and “sensible” in turn, while Simpleton’s physical weakness is implied when his father originally discourages him from trying to chop down trees). At the same time, this trebling is echoed in the presence of three paternal figures in the story: that of Simpleton’s biological father who, while not outright cruel in the manner of stepmothers, is indifferent to his son, if not impatient at his simplicity. As Tatar points out, contrary to contemporary expectations dragon slayer heroes do not occur very often, particularly within the Grimm corpus of tales; if it is any attribute they share, it is that of naiveté (Hard Facts 86): 193
If the female protagonists of the fairy tales are often as good as they are
beautiful, their male counterparts generally appear to be as young and naïve as
they are stupid. Snow White’s stepmother may be enraged by her
stepdaughter’s superior beauty, but the fathers of male heroes are eternally
exasperated by the unrivaled obtuseness of their sons. To the question, Who is
the stupidest of them all? most fairy-tale fathers would reply: my youngest
son. (Tatar, Hard Facts 87)
Nevertheless, this exasperation does not materialize in any other way but as a mere expression of impatience on the part of the father, of the wish that if Simpleton does get hurt when chopping down trees, he may at least learn something from it. The king, however, whose daughter Simpleton has succeeded in making laugh, does not look forward to having him as a prospective son-in-law, so he is more energetic in his attempt to avoid this prospect and sets Simpleton three impossible tasks to fulfill before he can marry the princess. In these tasks Simpleton is aided by the little grey dwarf, whose function is that of the donor. He provides Simpleton with the golden goose whose adhesiveness makes the princess bursts out into uncontrollable laughter, and also, in an echo of the trial Simpleton succeeded in passing, drinks a cellar full of wine, eats a mountain of bread and provides Simpleton with a ship which can sail on sand and water in order to help the hero gain the princess’s hand in marriage (Grimm 314-15).
It is perhaps valid to argue that the prevalence of trichotomy in tale types which feature heroes rather than heroines is linked to the symbolic association of the number three with male genitalia (Bronner, Introduction 7). It does not, however, alter the basic binary structure of the tales in question (or of most, if not all tales for that matter). Stripped down to their bare essentials, fairy tales can be reduced to a binary schema wherein the protagonists and their helpers are pitted against the villain and his or her henchmen: “This dichotomy between hero 194
and villain, or between helpers and adversaries, is as basic to the fairy tale as the other
pervasive binary oppositions between good and evil, weak and strong, humble and royal,
young and old, familiar and alien. Indeed, it seems to serve as the generating source for all
those contraries” (Tatar, Hard Facts 71). It is not difficult, bearing this pervasive binarism in
mind, to attribute it – from a Kleinian perspective – to the tensions between the life and death
drives underpinning the workings of the paranoid-schizoid position, which are then reflected
in structural elements of fairy tales. This is partly corroborated by the theory of monogenesis,
which posits a singular, probably psychological, source for the existence of resemblances in
tales encountered in diverse (and non-communicating) areas of the world (Tatar, Hard Facts
64-65).
What, then, helps negotiate the schism in the self as this is expressed in the splitting or
trebling of the tale’s actors? Compassion, and its concomitant trait, humility, would be the
answer, tallying rather neatly with the Kleinian notions of mourning and reparation. What
sets heores and heroines apart from their false siblings is compassion and humility; once
these traits are exhibited, the protagonist can do no wrong (Tatar, Hard Facts 88-89). Granted
that these traits are realized along gender lines; this allows the hero practically to do no
wrong, even if he blatantly disregards instructions, while taking credit for the feats performed
on his behalf by his magic helpers. The heroine, in contrast, is often humbled in the tale, even
if she shows compassion; once she has properly accepted her humble place, often performing
household drudgery, she benefits from magical helpers and rises socially by means of an
advantageous marriage (Tatar, Facts 94- 95).
In both cases, however, compassion is the determining factor which allows the hero or heroine to fulfill their potential and rise in the world, just as the successful negotiation of the depressive position forms the basis of future development. Before this takes place, however, the protagonists often have to walk through the woods or reckon with the wolf at the door. 195
Chapter Eight. The Wolf at the Door of the House in the Woods: Symbols of the
Maternal in “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood”
In the previous chapter I discussed structural aspects of two fairy tales in the attempt to provide an example of how psychic structures pertaining to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position correspond to those of fairy tale texts. The splits previously described are not unique to the specific tales, but generally recognizable in the vast majority of Grimm texts. Textual structure alone, however, does not account for the powerful impact of the tales. Rather, it works in conjunction with the tales’ imagery, which in many cases becomes iconic for the tales themselves. Out of the multitude of (symbolic) images available in fairy tales I have decided to focus on those of the house and the wolf. These two images constantly recur in fairy tales and are particularly pertinent to the Kleinian model of the mind and psyche.
I intend to explore the theme of houses (both in and out of the woods) as they are in my
view linked to Klein’s theories of the (sadistic) exploration of the maternal body, as well as
her views on phantasied retaliation on the part of the mother during the oral phase of
development. Hand in hand with this phantasied exploration of the maternal goes the image
of the witch and the wolf, in the woods or at the door, an image which symbolically links
cannibalism – another essential component of fairy tales – with oral aggression as well as (in
“Little Red Riding Hood”) with the darker aspects of sexuality.
I would like to begin this exploration with “Hansel and Gretel”, perhaps one of the
most poignant and enduring tales in the collection. Belonging to the tale cycle which features
abandoned children and titled “The Children and The Ogre”, it had been extensively rewritten
by Wilhelm Grimm before it reached the form with which we are currently familiar. As
Zipes informs us, Wilhelm Grimm first heard the story in 1809 from Dortchen Wild, but by
the time it was included in the last edition of the tales in 1857, it was twice as long as in the
1810 edition. In addition, it had been constantly revised in terms of both tone and content, 196
becoming more Christian in tone in every edition, while simultaneously replacing the
biological mother with a stepmother (and at the same time exonerating the father). These
changes reflected historical circumstances both in family life and in peasant life at the time of
the tale’s oral circulation and recording. Zipes describes the era as one of extremely poor
living conditions and lack of birth control, which led to child abandonment and abuse,
although precise statistics may not be easily available (Great Fairy Tale Tradition, [GFTT]
699).
Historian Robert Darnton paints a much bleaker picture of living conditions during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which saw widespread famines across the European
continent. It was common, he writes, to see corpses by the roadside with their mouths stuffed
full of straw, and parents were ultimately reduced to turning their children out onto the streets
to steal or beg for food; often, infants were abandoned in the woods to die of starvation (qtd
in Cashdan 66).58 Or, as Bettelheim put it, “Hansel and Gretel” appeals both on an
unconscious psychic level but also on a very literal, surface one by showing how poverty,
need and deprivation do not improve human character but mostly accentuate selfishness and
evil (159).
The popularity of the theme of child abandonment in fairy tales, however, is largely disproportionate to its actual practice, as Tatar has pointed out, while providing a
58 In Greece today (2012-13) “Hansel and Gretel” takes on particular poignancy and relevance as young children of previously self-sufficient families are reported to be left to the care of institutions and homes, as their parents find it increasingly difficult to provide them even with the basic means of sustenance. This is indicative of the way that tales can, in a sense, come to life within given historical and financial circumstances. Tales which have been read as narrative husks, so to speak, for psychic, ideological or other processes, may well incorporate and reflect historical circumstance simultaneously, thus making awareness of historical aspects of the tales’ context both imperative and enriching to their synchronic study. 197 fascinating piece of information which indicates the importance of psychic factors at work within the structural contours and content of the tale type:
even in cultures where child abandonment is supposedly rare or unknown, the
theme of children deserted at birth figures prominently in folkloric traditions.
Ruth Benedict discovered that among the Zuni, the largest Pueblo tribe in the
Southwest of the United States, the theme loomed large in folktales, although
the practice was wholly alien to the culture. This stark contrast between
narrative convention and contemporary social custom could not, for Benedict,
be adequately explained by the cultural conservatism of folklore, by its
tendency to lag behind the times. The popularity of the theme of abandoned
children seemed rather to stem from psychic sources, from childhood
daydreams and fantasies about grudges and reprisals against parents … So
deeply rooted were the feelings that gave rise to those plots that even adults
appeared to have no trouble identifying with the child-hero rather than with the
parental figures (Tatar, Hard Facts 60)
This seems to hold true for the great number of tales which feature a victimized young hero or heroine. While they constitute but a small portion of all fairy tales, they certainly retain a powerful hold over the popular imagination, which cannot simply be attributed to historical conditions or individual suffering alone (Tatar, Hard Facts 60).
Bettelheim had of course pointed out that “Hansel and Gretel” is structured around a primal anxiety, the fear of abandonment, and death by starvation – in other words, it harks back to the earliest times in development during which oral impulses are predominant. As the mother is the primary source of nourishment during infancy, it is no wonder that the tale’s anxieties revolve around the figure of the bad mother, the mother who refuses nourishment or who, in reversal, threatens to make a meal out of the two children (Bettelheim 159). 198
Nevertheless, this is not, for Bettelheim, the crucial point of the tale; it is individuation and
autonomy, along with the curbing of oral impulses, which make “Hansel and Gretel” an
important tale, so poignant and persistent (165).
This emphasis on autonomy and the shift of focus and blame from at best negligent
parents onto the children was challenged by Maria Tatar in Off With Their Heads: Fairy
Tales and The Culture of Childhood (1992), where she points out that throughout the tale
both Hansel and Gretel almost starve to death, so it is not so much a question of voracious
children learning to curb their greed but rather of disempowered protagonists trying to find
their way home and have a good meal with their dignity intact (197). Tatar draws on Klein’s theory concerning oral aggression in order to provide a backdrop for the reading of the tale:
“oral deprivation leads to a desire for retaliation in the form of oral aggression, which in turn is projected in fantasy onto the agent responsible for the original state of deprivation” (196).
“Hansel and Gretel” begins with a realistic description of hunger during a time of famine, which soon veers into the nightmarish proposal that the children be abandoned in the
forest. In true Grimm spirit, the biological mother is replaced by a ruthless stepmother, who
refuses to place the children’s needs on a par with her own:
“Early tomorrow morning we’ll take the children out into the forest where it’s
most dense. We’ll build a fire and give them each a piece of bread. Then we’ll
go about our work and leave them alone. They won’t find their way back
home, and we’ll be rid of them.”
“No, wife”, the man said. “I won’t do this. I don’t have the heart to leave
my children in the forest. The wild beasts would soon come and tear them
apart.”59
59 Oral deprivation and aggression are intertwined here in the form of hunger (having a mere crust of bread to eat) and the apprehended attack from wild animals. No doubt the latter also reflected some very palpable fears 199
“Oh, you fool”, she said. “Then all four of us will have to starve to death.
You’d better start planing the boards for our coffins!” She continued to harp
on this until he finally agreed to do what she suggested.
“But still, I feel sorry for the poor children,” he said. (Grimm 71)
With this inhumane attitude towards the children, it is no wonder that the stepmother who refuses nourishment and protection to Hansel and Gretel while they remain at home should reemerge as a fiendish, cannibalistic witch in the middle of the forest (Tatar, Hard
Facts 72).60 The same holds true for “Little Brother and Little Sister”, a variant of “Hansel and Gretel”, where the two children, tormented and starved by their stepmother, flee to the woods of their own accord, only to realize that their stepmother (who unsurprisingly is also a witch) has enchanted all drinking water, so that the Little Brother of the tale, parched and unable to contain his thirst, turns into a deer (Grimm 51).
In an uncharacteristic way, Wilhelm Grimm provides a compelling physical description of the witch in the tale, a description which seems also to have had an impact on the contemporary imagery of witches (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 80n10). Described as a woman as old as the hills, she hobbles out of her magnificent bread house in order to invite Hansel
and realities of the time. Yet fear of being devoured by wild animals or being torn to pieces by wild beasts haunts the mind of fairytale characters, while also occasionally serving as punishment for those who have exposed fairytale protagonists to perils in the woods (Tatar, Annotated Brothers 74n4). This all-too-realistic fear may well be unconsciously enforced by fear of oral retaliation after phantasies of attack on the maternal body. In
The Psychoanalysis of Children Klein points out another potential significance of wild animal symbolism, where wild animals may play the part of externalized projections of internal sadistic impulses (127fn4).
60 The death of the stepmother at the end of “Hansel and Gretel”, comments Cashdan, indicates the deep underlying affinity between the two women. This is very concretely rendered in Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 children’s opera, where the same actress typically appears as both stepmother and witch (Cashdan 78). 200
and Gretel in. After a sumptuous meal of milk, pancakes, apples and nuts, she tucks them into
beds with snow-white sheets and then gleefully observes them as they sleep:
The old woman, however, had only pretended to be friendly. She was really a
wicked witch on the lookout for children, and had built the house made of
bread only to lure them to her. As soon as she had any children in her power,
she would kill, cook and eat them. It would be like a feast day for her. Now,
witches have red eyes and cannot see very far, but they have a keen sense of
smell, like animals, and can detect when human beings are near them.
Therefore, when Hansel and Gretel had come into her vicinity, she had
laughed wickedly and scoffed: “They’re mine! They’ll never get away from
me!”
Early the next morning, before the children were awake, she got up and
looked at the two of them sleeping so sweetly with full rosy cheeks. Then she
muttered to herself: “They’ll certainly make for a tasty meal.” (Grimm 76)
As in “Snow White”, the children are taken in partly by behavior which mimics maternal
care; likewise, they are here also in for a rude awakening.
At this point I find it imperative to make a digression in order to elaborate further on the figure of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”. In her study of the discourses of witchcraft in early modern Europe, Diane Purkiss (re)turns to depositions of witch trials, in order to show that the figure of the witch as we know it today was not only and primarily a male construct.
Women too had invested heavily in the figure of the witch as a fantasy which allowed them to express and manage otherwise inexpressible and unmanageable anxieties concerning
domesticity, motherhood and children (2): “I argue that some women’s stories of witchcraft
constituted a powerful fantasy which enabled women to negotiate the fears and anxieties of
housekeeping and motherhood. Throughout, I am using the term fantasy in its quasi- 201
psychoanalytic sense … [as] a story in which people both express and relieve their
unconscious (and sometimes their conscious) fears, conflicts and anxieties” (93).
What emerges vividly in these narratives – and particularly in the context of fairy tales
– is the association of witches with food (apparently witches targeted dairy products and
churning in particular, which formed a vital source of protein and fat in times of famine, as
well as apples, as I have previously discussed) (Purkiss 95-96). Food and domestic tasks such
as churning and spinning played a central role in witchcraft. Two strands emerge within this
discourse: the first involves women exhibiting domestic authority by turning materials of
nature into cultural products, milk into butter, for example, or wool into material for clothes.
Witchcraft purportedly disrupted these transformational processes, thus undercutting
domestic authority and blurring the boundaries between nature and culture. In this sense, the
witch functions as the (competent) housewife’s dark Other, who causes pollution where there
should have been cleanliness, who disrupts food supplies, the plaintiff’s dark twin who
usurps authority in order to subvert it within the household (Purkiss 97). In this historical
context women were identified with the house in a manner which is probably quite remote to
our own ways of thinking (if not perhaps our affect). It was and identification multiply
overdetermined, based on psychic, financial, social and cultural considerations (Purkiss 98).
The other significant strand is the association of witchcraft and food with motherhood.
The association between the three would have been even more intense in early modern times due to the persistent food shortages already described (99). Suspects in witch trials often used food in order to take over a child’s body, much in the same way that the Queen offers Snow
White the poisoned apple (107). Apples, cakes, bread in particular, along with drinks, were considered Trojan horses through which a witch could gain control over a victim. This was a reversed role of food: instead of sustaining, it caused injury and destruction (108). Bearing in 202
mind the association of the body with the house and the function of food in relation to
motherhood, Purkiss summarises as follows:
In women’s stories, the witch was a woman who sought to enter into an
inappropriately close or quasi-maternal kind of relation with the housewife as
well as with her children, rather than remaining an egalitarian neighbor … the
witch, like the smother-mother, denies the housewife any adult, open role as a
neighbor and tries instead to draw her back into a problematically close
mother-child bond. Women’s stories about witches might express and offer
fantasy resolutions for the daughter’s fear of the mother, as well as the
mother’s fears for and of the child. The witch’s actions replicate those of the
“real” mother, pointing to the ambiguity of maternal behavior as a signifier of
feelings or intentions. What seems like love can destroy. (Purkiss 110)
This should be remembered in conjunction with the fact that the figure of the house and the figure of the body were interchangeable as metaphors for each other in the early modern period, and both the household and the body were interchangeable as metaphors for the community and the polity (Purkiss 120). It is also interesting – and telling – that these associations and elements of witchcraft narrative not only proved durable in time, surfacing, for example in tales such as “Hansel and Gretel”, but were also not confined to the English paradigm, within which Purkiss has conducted her research (111). This is made evident, I believe, if one goes back to the associations presented in the previous chapter concerning
“Snow White”, which derived from Róheim’s studies within a more continental context.
To return to the tale, if the stepmother and the witch are doublings of each other, the witch being a reinforced image of the stepmother, the question then is where is the good mother? Dead, would be the first obvious answer. If the nurturing maternal figure is present, it is manifested in the form of the benign house. 203
As I have previously mentioned, Hansel and Gretel are expelled from their original home due to (oral) deprivation. In my view, there already occurs a split in the maternal imago at the very beginning of the story, where the evil stepmother is counterbalanced (but ultimately not overcome) by the house in which Hansel and Gretel live. The maternal body- house equation does not alter. Hansel, in desperation at their second anticipated sojourn in the forest, lays a trail of breadcrumbs in order to find their way back home; as Bettelheim points out, “Bread here stands for food in general, man’s “life line” – an image which Hansel takes literally, out of his anxiety” (160). This vital life line leading straight back to the maternal body, one’s original home, is built around nourishment and oral impulses, however precariously satisfied.
This symbolic conflation between the children’s first house and the benevolent maternal body can be further consolidated when one considers Hansel’s excuses for looking back at the house before leaving. The first time he claims to be looking back at his little white kitten (an animal also culturally associated with women and witches) and the second time at his little white dove (Grimm 72, 74). As Klein points out in The Psychoanalysis of Children, pets can play the role of a “helping object” in the imagination of children and thus assist in diminishing anxiety (223n1). Birds as magical helpers reappear in the course of the tale leading Hansel and Gretel to the witch’s hut and then back home when their adventure is over
(in the latter case it is a duck which helps the children cross an expanse of water after the witch has been burnt).
This imagery of the house as benevolent presence reaches a peak when Hansel and
Gretel, starving after their three-day sojourn, come across the house in the forest:
They followed [the bird] until they came to a little house that was made of
bread. Moreover, it had cake for a roof and pure sugar for windows. 204
“What a blessed meal”, said Hansel. “Let’s have a taste. I want to eat a
piece of the roof. Gretel, you can have some of the window, since it’s sweet.”
Hansel reached up high and broke off a piece of the roof to see how it
tasted, and Gretel leaned against the windowpanes and nibbled on them. Then
they heard a shrill voice cry out from inside:
“Nibble, nibble, I hear a mouse?
Who’s that nibbling at my house?”
The children answered:
“The wind, the wind; it’s very mild
blowing like the Heavenly Child.”
And they did not bother to stop eating or let themselves be distracted.
Hansel ripped off a large piece and pulled it down, while Gretel pushed out a
round piece of the windowpane, sat down, and ate it with great relish. (Grimm
75)
It is not, in my view, a coincidence that this house too is made of bread, in an echo of the breadcrumbs earlier used by Hansel in order to lead him back home. In addition, as
Bettelheim points out, the house is a symbol for the human body – in Kleinian terms a metonymy for the all-powerful breast of infancy:
A gingerbread house, which one can “eat up”, is a symbol of the mother, who
in fact nurses the infant from her body. Thus, the house at which Hansel and
Gretel are eating away blissfully and without a care stands in the unconscious
for the good mother, who offers her body as a source of nourishment. It is the
original, all-giving mother, whom every child hopes to find again later
somewhere out in the world, when his own mother begins to make demands
and to impose restrictions. (Bettelheim 161) 205
As Hansel and Gretel eat away, their (justifiable) hunger gradually slides into greed – or, to use a Kleinian term, into destructive introjection, which aims at scooping out and sucking dry the good breast (Klein, EAG 181). When the two children first come to the house, they
“taste” the roof and the window: Hansel breaks off a piece of the roof, Gretel “nibbles” on the window pane. Soon, however, and despite the warning heard from within the house, they go on an oral rampage, tearing down a large piece of the roof and knocking out a round piece from the window pane. The voice coming out from the bread house in nursery-rhyme form reinforces the sense of the house-as-body: it is as if the house has acquired a voice. More importantly, it reinforces the mother-house equivalence, in that it sounds like a rhyme one would recite to a cradled infant, a rhyme recited when pretending to eat or nibble at the baby, as parents and babies often play at.
Bearing in mind the primitive retributive morality characteristic of the paranoid- schizoid position, it is no wonder that the oral-sadistic attack against the (symbolic) mother is soon to be revenged, with the witch revealing her plans to eat up Hansel once he is plump enough to make a good meal (and Gretel into the bargain, although she does not reveal this intention immediately, reducing the girl to the status of scullery maid for a while). What is interesting here is that, despite the witch’s declared intention of eating Hansel, the situation in the house is one of (precarious) balance. The children are fed, kept safe from harm in the forest, even if Gretel gets nothing but crab shells, while Hansel is fed, albeit with an ulterior motive in mind. In other words, this short symbiosis reflects – even if distortedly – the initial sequence of the tale, the family life Hansel and Gretel led before their sojourn in the woods.
In my opinion, it is not coincidental that this balance is threatened and overturned once the witch allows her greed to get the better of her, ultimately becoming her downfall. First, she decides not to wait any longer before eating Hansel, even though he seems as scrawny as 206
ever. She has decided to eat Gretel too and tries to trick her into entering the red hot oven, in
order to see whether it is ready for the bread to bake:
The witch intended to close the oven door once Gretel had climbed inside, for the
witch wanted to bake her and eat her too. But Gretel sensed what she had in mind
and said, “I don’t know how to do it. How do I get in?”
“You stupid goose,” the old woman said. “The opening’s large enough.
Watch, even I can get in!”
She waddled up to the oven and stuck her head through the oven door. Then
Gretel gave her a push that sent her flying inside and shut the iron door and bolted
it. Whew! The witch began to howl dreadfully. But Gretel ran away, and the
godless witch was miserably burned to death. (Grimm 77)
To return to Purkiss’ account of the witch for a moment, I would like to point out that by early modern standards Gretel’s act of pushing the witch into the oven is an exaggerated form of countering witchcraft, as this process involved heating up or burning objects which were considered suspicious. Gretel’s action could be described as an unwitching fantasy taken to its extreme, which allows her to reclaim the domestic authority usurped by the witch.61 In the context of a society where witchcraft via food or the usurpation of domestic authority was common knowledge, “Hansel and Gretel” functioned in a way similar to that of warning tales against “stranger danger” today (Purkiss 278-79).
On a psychic level, claims Purkiss, the stakes in witchcraft involve – among other things – the delineation of boundaries, markers, distinctions, insides and outsides, the limits
61 Tatar also points out that the burning of the witch in the oven has been read as a portent of the horrors of the
Third Reich. This is made even more ominous by the fact that the witch was often portrayed with stereotyped
Jewish characteristics in twentieth-century illustrations. 207 of bodies and also that which breaches those boundaries (120). What it all boils down to is the threatening power of formless or boundless female bodiliness:
The female body as formless spillage is a product of the infant’s perception of
the maternal body as coextensive with its own. In order to be a Cartesian
subject, culture insists, the infant must acknowledge its own separation from
the maternal; at the same time, separation is always a precarious achievement,
and the adult retains a trace of fear at being re-engulfed by the endless body of
the fantasy-mother. In classical psychoanalysis, the girl fears re-engulfment by
the fantasy-mother more than the boy, because her separation from the mother
is less complete. (Purkiss 120)
In this light, this becomes in the end Gretel’s tale, and the witch’s burning in the oven
(another symbol of the “bad” mother, the deathly – as opposed to the life-giving – uterus) marks the ultimate separation and retaliation against an all-consuming maternal presence, a presence threatening destructively to introject, to cannibalise her own offspring. Paid back in the same way, the witch is consumed or cannibalised by yet another threatening symbolic maternal presence.
Once this is done, it is telling that the two children take to exploring the house and find treasure:
Since they no longer had anything to fear, they went into the witch’s house, and
there they found chests filled with pearls and jewels all over the place.
“They’re certainly much better than pebbles,” said Hansel, and he put
whatever he could fit into his pockets, and Gretel said, “I’m going to carry some
home too”, and she filled her apron full of jewels and pearls. (Grimm 77)
Once the witch, the embodiment of the evil maternal imago is destroyed, the children are at liberty not only to explore the good maternal imago, the house, but also to find treasure in it. 208
As I have mentioned in relation to the phantasied contents of the maternal body, these include
milk, good feces, the good penis and unborn siblings. Hansel and Gretel recover these
treasures, which literally become pearls and jewels, as opposed to the pebbles (interpretable
as symbols of aridity) Hansel had managed to glean when he and Gretel were deprived of
their first home.
With the improvement in living conditions in the West symbols such as Snow White’s
apple may be repeated in the tales, but their significance in view of their early modern
context has been lost. In addition, due to increased affluence, anxieties about food, its
consumption and concerns with the boundaries of the body have been deflected onto
controlling the greed of children (Purkiss 279-80). This is most evident in the reading of
Bettelheim, who, like the male folklorists who transcribed the tales, was (inevitably) biased
by his own preoccupations, predilections and cultural agenda (Purkiss, 276). Bettelheim talks
about a gingerbread house, whereas the tale in the original German talks about a house made
of bread. 62As Purkiss points out, this shift from bread to gingerbread essentially denotes a
transformation of two peasant children who seek vital nourishment, into two middle-class
children who indulge their greed (280). The witch in this context becomes a retributive force
of oral greed, in a rhetoric of uncontrolled orality of which the witch becomes both a sinister
reflection and a punishment (281).
62 It is interesting that in his bibliography Bettelheim gives a translated edition of the tales as one of his primary sources, more specifically a Pantheon 1944 translation of the tales, for which no translator is mentioned, as is also the case with a 1960 edition he uses. It seems odd, given that Bettelheim’s mother tongue was German, that he should cite a translation as his primary source, particularly given that he cites a French source for Perrault’s tales. The reasons for this are not stated and beyond my scope to determine. It would be interesting to know whether this slip originated with Bettelheim or whether he was merely using a trope already present in the
Anglo-Saxon paradigm in order to avoid confusing his audience (or because he simply didn’t make much of this difference) – especially as Bettelheim had declared the specific tale to be his favorite one. 209
This was not lost on Tatar, who criticized Bettelheim for tweaking both story and reading in such a way as to lay the blame on the victims of oral deprivation. For her part, she questioned both Bettelheim’s dehistoricised reading of the tale and Klein’s almost exclusive emphasis on the child within the child-mother dyad. She pointed out, along with other historians of fairy tales like Marina Warner, that certain aspects of the relationship to the maternal which had been interpreted as primarily indicative of psychic processes were actually historical occurrences (as I will be discussing in the chapter on “Cinderella”).
Concerning Klein, she points out that, although as an analyst she writes with great sympathy about the murderous rage of the child towards the mother, she does not do the same about the murderous rage that the mother may feel towards her child (Tatar, Off With Their Heads
204).
In The Hard Facts of the Grimm Fairy Tales (2003) Tatar had offered an alternative view in order to account for the tale’s vitality and poignancy. Like “Little Red Riding Hood”, which shares some of its aspects, she points out that the tale’s basic structure can be reduced to a struggle between any two entities with competing interests – in this case, an innocent protagonist and a predatory force (51). This predatory quality appears as cannibalism, occurring on both a literal and a symbolic level, initiated by the stepmother, practiced symbolically by Hansel and Gretel as they eat away the house’s walls, and culminating in the cannibalistic cravings of the witch. If the stepmother first attacks through oral deprivation, then the two children retaliate on a symbolic level by eating the bread house; when the witch threatens to devour them, she in turn is devoured.
What I believe is visible here is an oscillation between the good and bad breast, the good and bad maternal part-object, in a way that corresponds very well to the psychic processes at work during the paranoid-schizoid position. The aggression in the text is constantly reciprocated between the protagonists, in a textual balance and a negotiation 210 throughout the story which in my view diffuses it, not in a didactic sense, but more in the form of psychic relief. In addition, this is a tale more therapeutic than didactic, since it provides readers of all ages (but especially younger ones) with the consolation that they can use their wits to overcome the issues that bedevil them (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 209).
As Tatar puts it:
We will probably never be able to determine the exact extent to which the fear
of being devoured can be traced to anxieties rooted in the reality of aggressive
parental behavior or to guilty fantasies projected to mothers and fathers.
Clinical experience and personal observation, mythological texts and fairy
tales, along with psychological case histories and psychoanalytic theories all
tell us that a child’s fears are always linked to parental figures – fathers and
mothers seemingly invincible in their stature and power. What is important to
bear in mind is that the psychoanalytic theory and its revisionist interpretation
are not necessarily incompatible – they could be seen to take the form of a
thesis and antithesis that cry out for a synthesis. Acknowledging the realities of
children’s experienced sense of parental aggression and withdrawal (no matter
what form it takes) does not rule out the possibility that the child also harbors
feelings of aggression. The power of the parent/child relations derives its
power from an emotional double helix, though this does not rule out the very
possibility that, in specific instances, the flow of hostility and aggression is
stronger from one side to the other. (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 205)
To return to the text, this oscillation stops as the children, pockets stuffed full of treasure, decide to make their way home. Before long, they reach a lake across which they are helped by a white duck. To Bettelheim this is indicative, on the one hand, of their ability to control and sublimate their (oral) impulses and of their ability to exhibit self-reliance. Their 211 crossing the lake indicates a newfound maturity and independence, a transition, a new beginning on a higher level of existence (164). As he writes: “Having overcome his oedipal difficulties, mastered his oral anxieties, sublimated those of his cravings which cannot be satisfied realistically, and learned that wishful thinking has to be replaced by intelligent action, the child is ready to live happily again with his parents. This is symbolized by the treasures Hansel and Gretel bring back home to share with their father” (165). It is interesting how Bettelheim here does not acknowledge the fact that the stepmother has been eliminated from the family, so that it now consists of the two children and the father, much like in the end of “The Juniper Tree”, where the evil stepmother is killed in retribution and then everyone sits down to have dinner.
“The Juniper Tree” and “Hansel and Gretel” have many elements in common, even though they belong to different tale types. Both stories are matricentric from beginning to end: “The mothers serve as progenitors of more than the children – they are the ones who, in their affiliations with origins and endings, generate the action that constitutes the plot and who, through their association with nature at one extreme and with artifice at the other, engender a complex chain of signification” (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 221). Why, then, do both tales, but in this case “Hansel and Gretel”, end with the elimination of the mother and the return to the father? This has been a question in Chodorow’s landmark book, The
Reproduction of Mothering (1978), where she posits that it is the fearsomeness of the Oedipal phallic mother, her seeming omnipotence and her role as a primary caretaker and thus prohibitor which creates a sense of fear and powerlessness in the child, leading it to turn to the father as a representative of autonomy and of the public and social world (qtd. in Tatar,
Off With Their Heads 225-26). Bearing in mind that in the end “Hansel and Gretel” becomes the story of Gretel, it is interesting to see her return to a protective home without a rival for her father’s affection. In other words, Gretel enters the Oedipal stage in the Freudian sense, 212
and it is now time, after a brief sojourn with Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in the
woods, to see her getting ready to attend a ball in the dress of Cinderella.
II
“Everywhere you look in fairy tales,” writes Cashdan, “someone is either looking for a meal or trying desperately not to become one. The search for food and all that is associated with it – hunger, starvation, and simply making sure that there is enough to go around – forms the basis for some of the most riveting stories in fairy-tale literature” (64). The consumption of food may take many forms, from Snow White’s reservedly eating just a morsel from each dwarf’s plate to her stepmother’s desire to devour the girl’s internal organs, from Hansel and Gretel’s nibbling at the bread house to the witch’s cannibalistic intentions: and then there is Little Red Riding Hood’s wholesale consumption by the wolf (Cashdan 64).
Of all animals depicted in tales, the wolf has the most voracious appetite and is a widespread symbol for uncontrolled craving (Cashdan 78).
“Little Red Riding Hood” (AT 333) is a fascinating tale, not only because of the plot and structure and imagery which it employs (these certainly do account for the tale’s perennial popularity), but also for the complex substratum of variants which underlie the
Grimm version which is the most popular and widely known today. To my mind, these variants can well be described as the Grimm tale’s repressed unconscious, both in terms of chronology (being older variants) and in terms of content. This was not lost, of course, on
Dundes, who commented that Perrault and the Brothers Grimm were unable to stifle the underlying content of the oral variants in circulation before the specific variants were put to paper (Dundes, “Interpreting” 44). Once again, a diachronic overview will be useful in the attempt to offer a Kleinian reading. 213
Anderson’s survey of the ancient world in search for motifs akin to those of well- known fairy tales proves insightful. Although he does not locate a fairly straightforward ancient variant of the tale, he finds elements in written texts which point towards the basic components of “Little Red Riding Hood” as we know it today. The most comprehensive narrative analogue is one included in Pausanias about a famous boxer, Euthymus of Locri, in southern Italy. Euthymus was informed of a custom during which a young virgin “bride” had to be offered to a local spirit annually, the spirit of one of Odysseus’ crew who had been stoned to death as a rapist (Anderson 94). In one version of the custom the spirit called for a bed and ordered those who brought the girl not to look back. Euthymus entered the shrine, took pity on the girl, accepted her offer of marriage if he saved her and fought off the spirit.
In an illustration of Euthymus’s feat this spirit is pictured as dark and frightening and donning a wolf skin. As Anderson says, while there is no actual swallowing of the heroine and no red in her clothing, there is an implicit association with the color red here, since this story was most probably linked to a defloration rite: “Otherwise we have everything we need: deaths for the wolf-man involving first stoning then (presumably) drowning; Euthymus as the
huntsman; an enclosure with a bed, as in the fairytale’s cottage scene; and a sexual motif. We
have the wolf named in the picture as Lykas (Mr Wolf); but the girl that got away remains
unnamed” (Anderson 94).
This is what Anderson describes as one good clear “take” on an early variant, although
there are other partly converging elements and narratives from various literary and
mythological sources surrounding a girl with a name associated to the color red (“Pyrrha”,
meaning “flame”). These offer a skeleton of a story in which a child, male or female, is
threatened (raped or eaten) by a predatory figure (a wolf or in some versions an ogress), then
disgorged or in some way saved with or without the substitution of stone, while the wolf-
figure is killed or drowned. In addition, in some of the narratives there seems to be a hint of 214
“allegories of adolescence”, as Anderson phrases it, since the role of the wolf is often tinged with sexual overtones (Anderson 96-97).
It is evident, then, that “Little Red Riding Hood” by no means originated with Perrault, although his version is perhaps the most celebrated early modern one. It was crafted by
Perrault, certainly, but he made (idiosyncratic) use of variants found in oral circulation well before he decided to record and rework the tale. At any rate, Perrault was the narrator who provided the heroine with the red cape, thus firing the imagination of subsequent narrators, and making it an indispensable element of later variants, illustrations and interpretations, psychoanalytic or otherwise.
Working from a postmodern perspective, Christine Bacchilega explores modern retellings of fairy tales, at the same time, however, providing valuable information as concerns their folkloric and literary ancestors. As she writes, Perrault’s version of “Little Red
Riding Hood” was the first printed version of the tale, which also proved to be highly influential, since in Germany this tale was not particularly well-known till the Brothers
Grimm collected it from a narrator familiar with the Perrault tales (Bacchilega 54). “Little
Red Riding Hood” also began to circulate in a British literary and folkloric context after the
1729 translation of Perrault’s tale by Robert Sambers (54). In France too Perrault’s version
(including the red hood and the moral he appended to the tale) became the norm. During the nineteenth century, however, folklorists had collected a number of oral variants, particularly in the area from the basin of the Loire in France, Tirol and northern Italy, where the tale was very popular. These versions may have functioned as Perrault’s sources in his formulation of what Bacchilega terms his “fairly atypical but authoritative text” (Bacchilega 54). She also provides a useful concise summary of the pre-Perrault oral tradition:
a peasant girl would, on her way to visit her grandmother, meet a werewolf
(loup-garou) or wolf. One then takes the “path of the needles”, while the other 215
takes the “path of the pins”. Having devoured the grandmother, the wolf in
disguise waits for the girl and welcomes her with something to eat and drink:
some of the grandmother’s flesh and blood, presented as sliced meat or local
specialties and wine. In most versions, the girl accepts. Then she strips, one
item of clothing at a time, and following a formulaic sequence, she burns her
clothes in the fire and joins the wolf in bed. Finally, after the ritual exchange
which reveals the wolf’s intentions (“The better to eat you, my child”), the
wolf gobbles the girl up or the girl escapes by pretending she needs to go
outside to answer the call of nature. (Bacchilega 54)
As it can be seen, the tale has two potential endings, an unhappy one, where the heroine gets eaten up by the wolf or werewolf, and a happy one, where she escapes either by means of her wits or, in the Grimm version, with the help of the huntsman. There has been debate over this double closure. Some scholars like Darnton consider the tale as a reflection of social and historical conditions of the era, or simply highlight the tale’s warning function against predators of all sorts, whereas others like Zipes opt for the happy ending as the most typical folklore ending (Bacchilega 55). Christine Bacchilega, in turn, accepts the significance of the coexistence of both variants as the basis for her own reading and genealogy of postmodern texts.
Thus, in the case where the girl gets eaten by the wolf, there is a clear instance of a tale belonging to the didactic tradition, making it a cautionary tale. As historians have pointed out, wolves were an actual danger during winter in the French, Tirolian and Italian Alps for both the peasants and their children especially (Bacchilega 55). Thus, as a warning tale
“Little Red Riding Hood” took on actual objects of fear, making the unhappy ending fit in well with the warning tale tradition (55). It should be noted here that when the attacker was 216 construed as either a werewolf or a devil pitted against a female victim, this took on sexual connotations (much, it seems, like in the tale of Euthymus) (55).
There have also been anthropological interpretations of the variants which end unhappily. These view the heroine’s encounter with the wolf as a fictional rite of passage, an initiatory tale which emphasizes the knowledge and skills necessary to women’s survival.
Thus the heroine must enter and leave the grandmother’s house successfully, negotiating the older woman’s aging and death and also performing involuntary and sympathetic cannibalism, eating the grandmother’s flesh and blood (Bacchilega 56). This sacrifice on the part of the older woman ensures that cultural knowledge will be passed on to the next female generation, bringing about a symbolic rebirth of the young woman. The wolf in this approach does not play a central role, as he can be construed as either a mediator or a symbolic representation of the aged woman (Bacchilega 56).
Perrault’s most influential tale combined these two functions, warning and initiatory, in a narrative which, while foregrounding sexual components of the tale, simultaneously sanitized them, since seduction in Perrault’s version takes place by means of words and manners while the flesh remains concealed and repressed (Bacchilega 56). As Bacchilega points out, Perrault narrows down the oral tale to a heterosexual scenario in which the victim’s complicity is implied in her red garment, a complicity which justifies the tale’s violent outcome. Moreover, since this was also meant as a civilizing tale addressed to the young members of the French aristocracy, the body in its corporeality is downplayed in relation to the oral version of the tale (57).
Consider, for example, the same scene involving the wolf’s arrival at the house, the devouring of grandmother and the girl’s subsequent arrival at the scene. In the oral version, as recorded in the nineteenth century by eminent folklorist Paul Delarue, the narrative pace is brisk, the content grisly: 217
the wolf arrived at granny’s, killed her, put some of her flesh in the pantry and
a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The little girl got there and knocked at the
door. “Push the door,” said the wolf, “it’s latched with a wet straw.” “Hello,
granny. I’m bringing you a loaf of hot bread and a bottle of milk.” “Put it in
the pantry, my child. Take some of the meat in there along with the bottle of
wine on the shelf.” There was a little cat in the room who watched her eat and
said: “Phooey! You’re a slut if you eat the flesh and drink the blood of
granny.” “Take your clothes off, my child,” said the wolf, “and come into bed
with me”. (Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales 10)
There then a follows a description of the heroine taking off each item of clothing at the wolf’s
admonition, and throwing them into the fire, because, as the wolf tells her, she will not be
needing them any longer (Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales 10). This is followed by the famous
exchange between girl and wolf.
Perrault is more elaborate when it comes to the wolf’s wiles to deceive both
grandmother and granddaughter, making Neighbor Wolf, as he calls him, courteous and
cunning, deceiving Little Red Riding Hood by pretending to race her and deceiving
grandmother by feigning the girl’s voice. He then enters the cottage:
The wolf pulled the bolt, and the door opened wide. He threw himself on the
good woman and devoured her in no time, for he had eaten nothing in the last
three days. Then he closed the door and lay down on Grandmother’s bed,
waiting for Little Red Riding Hood, who, before long, came knocking at the
door: Rat-a-tat-tat. (Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales 12)
When Little Red Riding Hood reaches the house, he admonishes her to leave the cakes and the little pot of butter on the bin and to come to bed with him: “Little Red Riding Hood took off her clothes and climbed into the bed. She was astonished to see what her 218
grandmother looked like in her nightgown” (Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales 13). After the
familiar wolf-girl repartee, “the wicked wolf threw himself on Little Red Riding Hood and
gobbled her up” (Tatar, Classic Fairy Tales 13). It is evident, I believe, that the second
rendition is much less offensive to contemporary sensibilities in narrating the devouring
scene.
I contend, then, that the gorier aspects of oral narratives were, in Perrault’s version,
displaced onto and condensed in the red garment of the heroine. In contemporary
interpretations the red item of clothing has primarily been construed as linked to sexuality,63
in the form either of menarche or defloration. This supposition also tallies well with the
ancient legend of Euthymus:64 the two interpretations are by no means mutually exclusive.
63 In a number of electronic sources, whose authority I am not able to verify, I have come across the information that seventeenth-century prostitutes were obliged to wear red as distinctive of their profession. If this is historically accurate, then it would have certainly been known to Perrault and moreover brings a different perspective to the interpretation of the tale.
64 In contemporary adaptations the red cloak or hood accentuates the heroine’s visibility. In Little Red Riding
Hood, a film released in 2011 which was directed by Catherine Harwicke and featured Amanda Seyfried in the part of the heroine, the red cloak merely serves as a sumptuous contrast to a snowy, frozen landscape in an otherwise bland film. In both the Perrault and the Grimm versions, the tale is set in spring or summer, as Little
Red Riding Hood or Little Red Cap, as is her German name, walks through the woods and is enticed by the beautiful flowers. Both Grimm and Perrault versions involve an interesting visual contrast, the green of nature contrasting with the red of the manufactured item of clothing, a textile which would have to be dyed in order to become red, as opposed, for instance to the natural color of linen or wool that peasants of the day would probably have worn. It is also interesting to note that red and green are complementary colors on the color wheel: when combined with additive, light-based color processes, they form the color white (Riegelman 61).
More importantly, complementary color pairs accentuate each of the colors in a simultaneous contrast, causing them to vibrate next to each other (Riegelman 70). Bearing this in mind, it is possible to think that, along with the very powerful connotations red had and continues to have both during the tale’s recording and in the periods 219
It is also clear how the scene in grandmother’s bed is foregrounded in the second
rendition. In the oral narrative the implication seems to be that the wolf is more preoccupied
with the feeding process, taking his time storing the grandmother’s flesh and blood as if he
were a diligent housewife collecting leftovers from a meal. Also, in a grotesque parody of
hospitality and (grand)motherly nurturance, he insists that the girl have something to eat. In
the oral version, the wolf does not await the heroine in bed but simply invites her to join him
there. On the contrary, in Perrault’s version it seems that the wolf is anxious to have a quick
snack before retiring to bed to await – and savor – the main course: not only is there no offer
of food, but the wolf also dismisses the food Little Red Riding Hood has brought, only to
have her join him without a moment’s delay.
The Grimm version of the tale retains the sexual politics and gender ideology expressed
by Perrault, although on the surface it seems like quite a different tale (Bacchilega 58). It is
different to Perrault’s in its happy ending, an ending which is more in conformity with the
tradition of oral tales. To this end, the Brothers Grimm combined “Little Red Riding Hood”
(AT 333) with the tale type “The Wolf and the Kids” (AT123) (Dundes, “Interpreting” 24),65
which meant that the Brothers Grimm, to the extent that they had become aware of the oral
of its subsequent retellings, the choice of red may also involve juxtaposition between nature and culture, a
hypothesis which works well with the initiatory interpretations of the tales.
65 These tales Dundes describes as cognate tales, since they share a large number of elements and are primarily differentiated by whether the child protagonist goes to the house of the predator or the predator invades the house of the child (once the parent, usually the mother, is absent) (Dundes, “Interpreting” 24). The hypothesis of their common root finds unexpected evidence in the existence of Asian tales (Chinese, Japanese and Korean in origin) which form hybrid tale types combining elements in tale types AT123 and AT 333 and involve the cannibalistic eating of a relative’s flesh, a suggestion on the part of the predator that the child defecate in bed and the escape by tying a rope around a substitute object (Dundes, “Interpreting” 22-23).
220
French narratives, did not choose to have the heroine escape by means of her own courage
and ingenuity. Nor did they allow for the maternal intervention which saves the kids in the
story about the mother Goat and her seven kids in tale type AT 123. Rather, if Little Red Cap
(as she is called in the Grimm version) survives, it is only because she is helped by a male
savior, at least in one of the endings provided for the tale (Bacchilega 58). This works well
within the didactic and moralizing tradition in which the tale was being rewritten. As Tatar
points out, the Brothers Grimm seem to have taken a leaf out of Perrault’s book and
attempted to enforce the didactic aspect of the tale. The scene where Little Red Riding
Hood’s mother prepares and warns her about her journey in the forest is relatively drawn out
in comparison to that of Perrault (in the oral tale it does not exist):
One day her mother said to her: “Look, Little Red Cap. Here’s a piece of cake
and a bottle of wine. Take them to your grandmother. She is ill and feels weak,
and they will give her strength. You’d better start now before it gets too hot,
and when you’re out in the woods, walk properly and don’t stray from the
path. Otherwise, you’ll fall and break the glass, and then there’ll be nothing for
Grandmother. And when you enter her room, don’t forget to say good
morning, and don’t go peeping in all corners of the room.” “I’ll do just as you
say,” Little Red Cap promised her mother. (Tatar, Classic Tales 14)
Where an interdiction is articulated, a violation is sure to follow. Nevertheless, of all the advice and warnings her mother has issued, Little Red Cap only disobeys when it comes to straying off the path; she does not break the glass, she does not forget to say “good morning” on entering her grandmother’s house, she does not peep in all corners of the room
(Tatar, Off With Their Heads 36). If these were the rules of etiquette at the time, then Little
Red Cap is complying with them all, and also brings flowers to an invalid, a gesture consistent with bourgeois propriety. There is no clear causal connection between the violation 221 of the mother’s prohibition and the punishment of being eaten by the wolf, not to mention the fact that the punishment is hardly suited to the crime (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 36).
Perhaps it does not make sense to ask for logic in a genre which is based on the supernatural, yet fairy tales do have ground rules which lend some predictability to the plot, and something at this point of the tale seems to be slightly off course. As Tatar points out, prohibitions lead to violations and the consequences are usually stated along with the prohibition. The heroine’s mother does not forecast the consequences of the girl’s transgression, thus indicating that something is not quite right in the tale. The question, then, is whether Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm tampered with the tale, including elements which did not square with folkloric facts (Off With Their Heads 36).
The answer is yes. This misfiring didacticism is one of the gaps in the text, concealing and simultaneously being undercut by a repressed (folkloric) part, as it were. In the preceding oral versions there is a clear-cut and fairly direct (psychic) reasoning at work behind the plot, which becomes more tangled and less clear as the variants are reshaped by middle-class male authors, thus allowing for multiple and at times conflicting interpretations.
The oral variant once again centers on a female protagonist and her developmental concerns. In Proppian terms, when the mother sends the girl out into the woods she functions as a dispatcher. In psychic terms, Dundes comments, the heroine suffers an enforced separation, in a sense similar to the oral deprivation encountered in “Hansel and Gretel”
(“Interpreting” 42). As already mentioned, in the Kleinian infantile universe any kind of
(inevitable) deprivation is experienced by the infant in the throes of the paranoid-schizoid position as an active attack by the bad maternal imago. It is no wonder that, in line with retributive phantasies, the girl indulges in (unwitting and unconscious) cannibalism once she reaches grandmother’s house, the grandmother being an extended form of the maternal imago
(Dundes, “Interpreting” 41). This is made particularly evident in some of the oral variants, 222
where the girl often eats the old woman’s breasts or internal organs and always drinks her
blood in an act of cannibalistic assimilation (Bacchilega 159n16). And once this happens, it is
not surprising that the girl is threatened by a ravenous wolf. As Róheim argues:
Ferenczi (1924) has said that in the oral stage the tooth is the tool used by the
infant for boring itself back into the womb. This means that aggression is
combined with regression and it follows that the idea of being swallowed, being
eaten, is the talio [sic] aspect of this aggression. The cannibal child creates a
cannibal mother. (Róheim 152)
This is further intensified by – and also explains – the famous dialogue between Little
Red Cap and the wolf, for which Róheim provides an interesting explanation (it should be
noted that this exchange is a vital component of all variants under examination). In the
Grimm variant it runs as follows:
“Oh, Grandmother, what big ears you have!”
“The better to hear you with.”
“Oh, Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
The better to see you with.”
“Oh, Grandmother, what big hands you have!”
“The better to grab you with!”
“Oh, Grandmother, what a terribly big mouth you have!”
“The better to eat you with!”
No sooner did the wolf say that than he jumped out of bed and gobbled up
poor Little Red Cap. (Grimm 127)
According to Róheim, the big eyes and the big mouth are essentially one and the same, unconsciously conflated: “The infant eats the breast, the infant eats and sees and desires and 223
is, therefore, the original aggressor … In reverse form ogres are not only cannibals but
frequently have big eyes” (153).
The wolf in this light can be construed, if not as a female wolf, then as an aspect of
both child and maternal imago, which is repressed, cut off from conscious thought and
projected onto the external world, in this particular symbolic form which emphasizes its
genesis in oral-sadistic aggression. As oral fairy tales more often than not feature intense
same-sex rivalry, with donors too moving along the same gender lines, there is tremendous
antagonism in “Little Red Riding Hood” between the two female protagonists (as signified by
the cannibalism) (Dundes, “Interpreting” 41-42). In this sense, the wolf’s invasion of the
cottage can be described as uncanny, the return of the repressed.
The question then remains, why is the wolf usually (if not always) perceived as male?
Again, Kleinian theory here may help shed some light on this apparent contradiction. Two aspects of the oedipal complex as described by Klein seem to be particularly useful here.
The first aspect concerns the original “confusion” of the primal object, “confusion” in
its etymological sense, of the fusion of two otherwise distinct elements. Klein contended that
children are innately aware of the existence of their genitalia and their reproductive organs
(thus interpreting the fantasy of the phallic mother as a defensive phantasy, one version of the
combined parental imago) (LGR 108). In the beginning of psychic life the maternal imago is,
as already mentioned, viewed as the source and locus of everything desirable, including the
father’s penis (Klein, LGR 107). Simultaneously, the child senses the libidinal link between
the parents and projects onto them its own libidinal and aggressive desires. The inevitable
feelings of deprivation trigger anger, jealousy or even envy, as the child phantasizes that the
parents exclude it from their continuous mutual gratification. This brings about the child’s
attacking them with all the phantastic means at its disposal (Klein, LGR 103-04). 224
The second useful aspect of Kleinian (following Freudian) theory pertains to the
libidinal aims of the Oedipus complex, which vary according to each phase of development;
they move from the oral incorporation of the breast and the penis to the satisfaction of anal
and urethral desires and finally to full genital desire. The transition from one phase to the
next is not smooth and unhindered, since the inevitable frustration of desires leads to a lot of
fluctuation and regression, until genital supremacy is established. Then the child has to
contend with the ramifications and the implications of full genital jealousy (Klein, LGR 110).
Till then, the desires of each phase are tinged with corresponding impulses, such as sucking
or biting during the oral phase, urinating or defecating (as a form of either punishment or
reward) and genital pleasure during the last phase. Anxieties bring about regressive moves
until genitality is fully established (Klein, LGR 112), although this fluidity does not abate
completely:
But of course nothing in the development of the individual is ever fully
overcome or ever fully lost, so that the genital oedipal situation will bear traces
of earlier desires, including their symbolical representations … the genital act
will be seen to incorporate and symbolize all earlier forms of relationship.
(Klein, LGR 112).
Both the combined parental imago and the permeability of the phases of libidinal development indicate a possible interpretation for the figure of the wolf in “Little Red Riding
Hood”, which may be construed as an overdetermined and condensed symbol both of the combined parental imago and of the desires at work in the tale. The existence of the combined parental phantasy (maternal imago containing the penis, a little later the parental
couple locked in ever gratifying intercourse, where milk, feces and pleasure are continuously
interchanged yet made unavailable to the child) may partly explain how the wolf can
simultaneously symbolize both maternal and paternal aspects. Since it fuses both, it offers the 225 potential for different effects and interpretation, according to the teller (in oral versions) or the (re)writer, and the audience or readers respectively. Moreover, the wolf condenses aspects of both orality, anality (in the oral versions, since he is the one who orders the child to defecate in the bed, thus, like a parent, attempting to regulate the process in ways both physical and metaphorical) and genital sexuality, as is made more evident in the written versions by Perrault and the brothers Grimm.
Dundes too points out the sequence of oral, anal and genital trends incorporated in the oral versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, which render a psychoanalytic reading of the tale appropriate and useful, and concludes that the tale is full of infantile wishes (“Interpreting”
43). In “Little Red Cap” the infantile wishes reflecting oral and anal desires are repressed in the text, a repression which actually extends to that of the body in all its functions, as
Bacchilega explains:
in the Grimms’ version, all bodies must be regulated, contained or rendered as
unfeeling and sterile as the wolf’s stone-filled belly. The girl never undresses,
never lies in bed with the wolf, and never eats anything … Even the wolf’s
devouring of the two females is a punishment with no blood-spilling, no
crunching of bones, thus allowing the bodies to emerge intact from the wolf’s
belly precisely because their consumption is not an experience of the flesh. In
the two most popular literary versions of “Red Riding Hood”, then, the wolf is
either a “smooth-tongued” seducer, covertly associated with the devil, or the
natural instrument of lawful punishment; the girl is either too naïve to survive
or so unreliable that she must be saved from herself; and the grandmother is
simply an appetizer. The traditional lore of wolves and werewolves is
suppressed, the girl is stripped of her wits and courage, the grandmother’s 226
knowledge and body are robbed of their nurturing possibilities, and the flesh is
deprived of its life and blood. (Bacchilega 58)
An exception to this downplaying of corporeality in “Little Red Cap” can be seen perhaps in the phrase which ends the wolf’s feast, and which seems to conflate both oral and genital satisfaction, satiation in the sense of both oral and sexual appetite. This is made more probable not only because the wolf falls immediately asleep in a post-coital manner, but also because the narrator uses the plural form of “desire”: “After the wolf had satisfied his desires, he lay down in bed again, fell asleep, and began to snore very loudly” (Grimm 127). In my view, oral trends in the Grimm variant are evidently at work in the mere presence of the devouring wolf, whereas anal trends are repressed (it may be argued that they resurface in the
[sublimated] form of the advice and instructions Little Red Cap receives from her mother, whose interdictions delineate proper behavior and limit the fulfillment of the pleasure principle).
Genital sexuality, on the other hand, comes to the fore and is highlighted, a process that is evident both in Perrault (where it is more overt) and in the Grimm variant (where it takes on a different aspect due to the presence of the huntsman). Along with the repression of pre-
oedipal psychic trends and mother-daughter interaction, the manipulation by male writers of
an otherwise girl-centered tale leads to tales in which female genealogy, initiative and
sexuality are repressed, narratives in which female sexuality is either viewed as transgressive
and punishable (Perrault), or beyond the control of a naïve girl, who has to be rescued (Zipes
qtd in Dundes, “Interpreting” 38):
Viewed in this light, Little Red Riding Hood reflects men’s fear of women’s
sexuality – and of their own as well. The curbing and regulation of sexual
drives is fully portrayed in this bourgeois literary fairy tale on the basis of
deprived male needs. Red Riding Hood is to blame for her own rape. The wolf 227
is not really a male but symbolizes natural urges and social non-conformity.
The real hero of the tale, the hunter-gamekeeper, is male governance. (Zipes
qtd. in Dundes, “Interpreting” 38)
Bettelheim too views the tale as one revolving around the male figure of the tale, split into a terrifying wolf and a benign savior, whereas the female figures of the grandmother and the mother have a secondary role. The tale is interpreted as a projection of the girl’s unresolved oedipal conflicts, hence the importance of the two male figures (172). Whereas the wolf embodies both the male seducer and the asocial, animalistic tendencies within, the
red in the girl’s clothing also connotes passion, sexuality, blood and violence. This
symbolism and imagery, writes Bettelheim, point in the direction of the arousal of premature
sexuality (173). Bettelheim discusses the regressive side of premature sexual awakening,
acknowledging that adolescent reawakening also stirs up – apart from repressed oedipal
affects – earlier desires and anxieties, thus providing an indirect point of convergence
between his interpretation and Kleinian theory of the paranoid-schizoid position and the early
onset of the oedipal struggle, which is in this way tinged with early oral and anal tendencies.
Nevertheless, Bettelheim too ultimately reads the tale as one where what is at issue is
sexual danger: “[Little Red Riding Hood’s] experience convinced [the young female reader]
of the dangers of giving in to her oedipal desires. It is much better, she learns, not to rebel
against the mother, nor try to seduce or permit herself to be seduced by the as yet dangerous
aspects of the male. Much better, despite one’s ambivalent desires, to settle for a while longer
for the protection the father provides when he is not seen in his seductive aspects” (181). In
this light, then, the tale, despite its happy ending(s), squares well with the (gender-specific)
didactic tradition earlier described.
To return to the repression of corporeality: this unnatural representation of the body as
absent in the tale is confirmed and intensified by the masculine cesarean at the end of the tale, 228
which is performed on an unfeeling body and presented as an instrument of deliverance (in
contrast to the French oral narratives which stress the concrete violence of the wolf’s actions,
of a wolf that devours, gobbles up, munches on his prey) (Bacchilega 160n20). The famous
scene of Little Red Cap’s and Grandmother’s rescue by the huntsman is considered essential
to any contemporary retelling:
[The huntsman] happened to be passing by the house and thought to himself,
The way the old woman’s snoring, you’d better see if anything’s wrong. He
went into the room, and when he came to the bed, he saw the wolf lying in it.
“So I’ve found you at last, you old sinner,” said the hunter. “I’ve been
looking for you for a long time.”
He took aim with his gun, and then it occurred to him that the wolf could
have eaten the grandmother and that she could still be saved. So he did not
shoot but took some scissors and started cutting open the sleeping wolf’s belly.
After he made a couple of cuts, he saw the little red cap shining forth, and he
made a few more cuts, the girl jumped out and exclaimed, “Oh, how
frightened I was! It was so dark in the wolf’s body!”
Soon the grandmother came out. She was alive but could hardly breathe.
Little Red Cap quickly fetched some large stones, and they filled the wolf’s
body with them. When he awoke and tried to run away, the stones were too
heavy so he fell down at once and died. (Grimm 127-28)
In his comment on the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” in the context of his paper “On the
Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), Freud refers to infantile sexual theories of birth by the anus or by splitting the belly or navel, and to the male envy of pregnancy to which the previously quoted text attests (qtd. in Dundes, “Interpreting” 30). 229
Within Kleinian discourse this image may also be viewed in the light of phantasies and anxieties pertaining to the Oedipus complex for both boys and girls (thus also providing a partial explanation as to why the wolf can be construed as both a male and female presence).
Assessing the history and the significance of psychoanalytic play technique in 1955, Klein provided concise presentations of the leading anxiety situations in both girls and boys. For girls, “the mother is felt to be the primal persecutor who, as an external internalized object, attacks the child’s body and takes from it her imaginary children. These anxieties arise from the girl’s phantasied attacks on the mother’s body, which aim at robbing her of its contents … and result in the fear of retaliation by similar attacks” (Klein, EAG 133). In a similar way, this fear of the mother’s attack on the inside of the child’s body (and the damage this may cause to one’s childbearing capacity and creative potential) to an extent underlies and certainly reinforces male castration anxiety:
The analyses of boys and men fully confirmed Freud’s view that castration
fear is the leading anxiety of the male, but I recognized that owing to the early
identification with the mother (the feminine position which ushers in the early
stages of the Oedipus complex) the anxiety about attacks on the inside of the
body is of great importance in men as well as women, and in various ways
influences and moulds their castration fears. The anxieties derived from
phantasied attacks on the mother’s body and the father she is supposed to
contain, proved in both sexes to underlie claustrophobia (which includes the
fear of being imprisoned or entombed in the mother’s body). (Klein, EAG 135)
In this light, Little Red Riding Hood’s placing of stones in the wolf’s body is not merely an imaginative punishment on her part. Rather, in another talion aspect, as Róheim would describe it, the girl performs an act of retribution when she places stones in the wolf’s belly, as a travesty of the childbearing capacity of the mother. Retribution reaches its extreme 230
as not only the ability to procreate, but life itself becomes unsustainable, with the wolf
dropping down dead. And since this attack on the maternal body and the subsequent fear for
one’s own bodily integrity is also a masculine fear, preceding and enhancing male castration
anxiety, this grotesque parody of pregnancy (evoking as it does Cronus’s swallowing of his
own children and his subsequent swallowing of a stone in the place of his son Zeus) can be felt as relevant to both boys and girls.
In closing, I would add here that “Little Red Riding Hood” is not only a tale attempting to circumscribe and regulate sexuality on a social and political – in its broadest sense – level,
it is also a tale whose evolution (and study) through the ages reflects or parallels changes in
analytic thought and individual development. The tale as we know it today represses older
oral versions which emphasize orality and mother-child centrality and dualism in favor of a
triangular discourse (particularly in the Grimm version, with the huntsman’s intervention)
featuring the classical oedipal triangulation. It is striking that in the older versions elements
which Klein could have used to illustrate or consolidate some of her theoretical concepts
(such as defecating in the bed) occur at the surface level of the tale, with less distortion or
displacement.
As variants succeed each other through time and across space, they seem to move in
parallel with individual psychic development, where phantasies, as a primitive way of
thought combining mental representations and bodily sensations, are gradually repressed and
forgotten. In a similar way, older variants of the tale are in a sense repressed in the Perrault
and Grimm variants, which are today – particularly the Grimm variant – the authoritative
texts on which (post)modern versions, responses and rewritings have been based.
Nevertheless, to the extent that some of these re-appropriations of the tale are sexually or otherwise explicit, it shows that the unconscious substratum of the tale remains very much active (Dundes, “Interpreting” 44-45). Kleinian theory exhibits a striking affinity with 231 elements found in the earlier oral versions, while at the same time providing a point of entry to the better known versions (by Perrault or the Grimm), to their contemporary appeal and their reworkings. 232
Chapter Nine. “All Fur” and “Cinderella”: The Depressive Position
Having explored fairytale structures and motifs pertaining to the paranoid-schizoid position,
as well as aspects of the maternal which predominate in many of the most popular fairy tales
today, it is now time to turn to “Cinderella”, or “Aschenputtel” as is the German name of the
tale. In his study of the folktale source of King Lear Dundes describes the “Cinderella” tale
type as one of the most popular in the world (Interpreting Folklore 216). Bettelheim also claims that “Cinderella” is full of unconscious material, hence the tale type’s impressive
geographic diffusion and its diachronic popularity among boys and girls alike (239). It is
also, from a Kleinian point of view, perhaps the most appropriate tale to be read in light of
the theory of the depressive position, as in my view it condenses in its structure and plot, in
its imagery and symbols, psychic processes of mourning, reparation and creativity.
Today, Perrault’s “Cinderella” (on which Walt Disney based his 1950 film version) is
considered the authoritative version and the Grimm variant “Aschenputtel” has been
marginalized. Perrault’s version is much tamer in comparison to many other variants, which
retain, however, remarkable structural similarities and common concerns, despite their wide
geographical and temporal diffusion. While the oldest written version of “Cinderella” comes
to us from ninth-century China, Anderson refers to literary instances from classical antiquity
which give us recognizable variants of tale type AT 510A (“Cinderella” in its currently more
familiar form).
As is the case with “Snow White”, a proto-variant of the “Cinderella” tale can be pieced together from fragments of Sumerian texts which have survived to our day: the reconstructed variant bears a remarkable resemblance to Basile’s “La Gata Cenerentola”
(“The Cinderella Cat”) (Anderson 39-41). Likewise, two tales contained in the works of
Herodotus and Strabo about a heroine named Rhodopis provide us with a tale in which a slave (in Herodotus’ version a courtesan) marries a king when an eagle drops her beautiful 233
and tiny sandal into his lap. The story follows the classical rags-to-riches trajectory, after a process of identification by means of the shoe (Anderson 27-29). There are also other instances of similar tales in classical texts, in addition to medieval sources, which provide a rich historical and geographical backdrop to the tale (Anderson 42).
It should be noted here that tale type AT 510 is categorized into two subtypes, AT510A
and AT510B. Whereas the first subtype is “Cinderella” as it is more commonly known today,
the second subtype is named “The Dress of Gold, Silver and Stars”, a tale which in its
variant as recorded by the brothers Grimm is known as “All Fur”. Other names include
“Catskin” or in Perrault’s version, “Peau d’ Ane”, “Donkeyskin”. This classification of the
subtypes indicates that the two tales are probably cognates (Dundes, Interpreting Folklore
214).
From a psychoanalytic point of view they are certainly linked, their close connection
having been pointed out among others by both Bettelheim and Dundes. As Maria Tatar points
out, when German tales depict the persecution of a girl by her stepmother and her stepsisters,
the father recedes into the tale’s background. Likewise, when the story is about a father’s
incestuous passion for his daughter, (step)mothers and daughters tend to vanish from the
foreground:
Yet the father’s desire for his daughter in [“All Fur”] furnishes a powerful
motive for a stepmother’s jealous rages and unnatural deeds in [“Cinderella”].
The two plots conveniently dovetail to produce an intrigue that corresponds
almost perfectly to the Oedipal fantasies of female children. In this way fairy
tales are able to stage the Oedipal drama even as they disguise it by
eliminating one of its two essential components. (Hard Facts 150)
As Marian Cox had pointed out in her pioneering nineteenth-century study of the
“Cinderella” cycle, the tales are roughly divided in number, so that the daughter was as likely 234 to suffer either from the incestuous desire of the father or from the ill will of a mother.
Moreover, the amorous father and the jealous mother rarely coexist in the same tale (Tatar,
Hard Facts 153).
However, tales revolving around father-daughter incest have largely been forgotten (or repressed) in the recent cultural context. As folklorists point out, oral tales remain in circulation via the audience’s approval, simply by being selected for retelling. The same holds true, although with less consistency, for written tales, which also undergo a process of selection, approval and retelling according to individual preferences on the part of the
(re)teller but also in accordance with cultural norms of the day (Tatar, Hard Facts 152).
Despite its diversities, Western culture on the whole seems to favour storylines involving a rags-to-riches-through-marriage trajectory, which moreover highlight female villainy in the form of the maternal or quasi-maternal presence (Tatar, Hard Facts 152). Tatar comments:
“Interestingly, however, our own age has suppressed tales of paternal incestuous desire even as it has turned stories about maternal evil into cultural icons” (127).
It will be useful, therefore, to return to the tale of “All Fur” (in conjunction with
“Cinderella”) in order to get a fuller appreciation of psychic development as it is portrayed in fairy tales. It should be noted here that there are “Cinderella” tales featuring male rather than female protagonists. Nevertheless, like most tales which are considered integral to the contemporary fairytale canon, “Cinderella” tales revolve around and chart female psychic development, even though, as Bettelheim points out, they appeal to both boys and girls (239).
“Once upon a time”, begins the tale of “All Fur”, “there was a king whose wife had golden hair and was so beautiful that her equal could not be found anywhere on earth”
(Grimm 316). The queen falls ill and on her deathbed extracts a promise from the heartbroken king: that he remarry if and only if he finds her equal in beauty, someone who has golden hair like hers. The king agrees to comply with this restriction, and the queen dies (Grimm 316). 235
After the king has overcome his grief, his councilors persuade him to remarry, yet they fail to find a solution to the problem of the king’s deathbed promise – until the king notices his own daughter, and considers the problem solved:
Now, the king had a daughter who was just as beautiful as her dead mother,
and she also had the same golden hair. When she was grown-up, the king
looked at her one day and realized that her features were exactly the same as
those of his dead wife. Suddenly he fell passionately in love with her and said
to his councilors, “I’m going to marry my daughter, for she is the living image
of my dead wife.” When the councilors heard that, they were horrified and
said, “God has forbidden a father to marry his daughter. Nothing good can
come from such a sin, and the kingdom will be brought to ruin.” (Grimm 316-
17)
The same initial sequence occurs in the analogous tales of Straparola, Basile and
Perrault: the father turns to his daughter as a potential marriage partner after the death of his wife, whose match either in physical beauty or qualities cannot be found. The only match for the dead wife can be found in the daughter. Like a “Cinderella” in reverse, this identification of the daughter as the appropriate marriage partner in some variants takes place with the help of some sort of talisman which belonged to the mother. In “All Furs”, as quoted above, the mother requires that the king’s new wife have the same golden hair as she does, whereas in
Straparola’s “Tebaldo” the dying queen bequeaths her husband a ring, which she instructs him to use as a means of choosing the appropriate bride. In Basile and Perrault there is no such token per se but the daughter’s beauty which equals and even surpasses the mother’s is proof enough of the appropriateness of the match.
Commenting on the variants of the “Cinderella” cycle, Dundes utilises his concept of projective inversion in order to discuss the possible psychoanalytic significance of the tale for 236
its audience. As he comments, “Cinderella” is a daughter-centred tale. The “All Fur” variant,
in particular and more evidently, is structured around father-daughter incest, or more accurately, writes Dundes, on daughter-father incest. In the tale not only is the queen dead – a wish-fulfilling fantasy – but it is also she who has indirectly demanded that the daughter take her place (Interpreting Folklore 216-17). This view has also been expressed by
Bettelheim, who, aware of the existence of the “Cinderella” cycle as a whole (rather than focusing exclusively on a given variant), attempted to provide a psychoanalytically plausible sequence for the tales. Thus he posited a sequence where “All Fur” type tales (logically and chronologically) precede “Cinderella” type tales, in that the father’s excessive and incestuous love for his daughter provides a motive and an explanation for the daughter’s debasement and humiliation at the hands of her (step)mother and (step)sisters. Nevertheless, Bettelheim notes that chronological precedence cannot be verified, as in the oral tradition ancient versions coexist with more recent ones, and written tradition, being of relatively late vintage, does not provide conclusive evidence (247).
Bettelheim also clarifies that in sum the variants of the “Cinderella” cycle may well both express the daughter’s (projected) feelings about her oedipal entanglement with the father, but also stir the father’s unconscious feelings for his daughter (Bettelheim 246).
Hanna Segal makes a relevant comment on the misgivings often expressed when attributing any sort of responsibility to the victims of incestuous abuse. In an interview with Jacqueline
Rose, Segal actively distinguishes unconscious desire from desire for its realization. While
stressing that responsibility and blame for any such occurrence undoubtedly lies with the
parent since it is in the nature of children to be seductive, Segal also draws attention to
unconscious desire as well as unconscious guilt at work within the child’s psyche in such
cases, affects which cannot and should not be discounted in the provision of psychological or
analytical support (H. Segal, Yesterday 246). 237
In any event, the princess in “All Fur” is horrified by her father’s suggestion and tries to buy time by requesting three dresses, “one as golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, and one as bright as the stars” (Grimm 317). She also asks for a cloak “made up of a thousand kinds of pelts and furs, and each animal in [the] kingdom must contribute a piece of its skin to it” (317), in the hope that her father will not be able to accomplish the tasks and therefore will be diverted from his intentions. Seeing that her father manages to obtain the dresses and the cloak of furs, All Fur packs her wondrous dresses in a nutshell, dons the cloak of furs, takes with her a ring, a tiny golden spinning wheel and a little golden reel and flees into the woods, where she finds shelter in the hollow of a tree till she is discovered by a king’s hunting party and is taken to the palace kitchen as a scullery maid (317-18).
It seems odd that All Fur would ask for a number of gowns, “celestial” as folklorist
D.L. Ashliman terms them, and then for a cloak of all animal furs. In the case of the gowns,
Ashliman makes a good case when he claims that the father’s ability to get the gowns made intensifies his uncanny ability to overcome every hindrance placed between him and marriage to his daughter, thus symbolically reflecting the emotional and physical problems which may plague an abused child throughout its lifetime: “The fact that the father can easily acquire these dresses patterned after the celestial bodies must lead her to believe that the heavens themselves have joined in a conspiracy against her, leaving her no alternative but to flee”
(Ashliman).
There may, however, be another aspect to this request for the three gowns and the cloak of all furs (or the donkey skin in Perrault) alike. The gowns are presumed to be impossible to make: only the highest craftsmanship can achieve the effect of mimicking or surpassing the beauty of nature. By contrast, the cloak of all furs (in Perrault it is the hide of a magical donkey which excretes gold coins and is the source of the king’s wealth) is the most primitive of garments, reminiscent of hides worn in prehistoric times or in antiquity, and having 238
undergone none but the most rudimentary processing. In short, there is the sharpest of
antitheses between artifacts which could well point in the direction of a nature-culture dichotomy, a theme linked to the issue of incest at the heart of the tale.
Marina Warner provides a point of entry to the tale’s possible significance when she recounts the tale of Saint Dympna, a seventh-century princess. “Her life”, writes Warner, “is a fairy tale, except in the matter of her ending, yet her cult has been kept fervently in this part of Catholic Europe [Geel, Belgian Flanders] since the fourteenth century at least, spreading from there through Belgium, Holland and Westphalia” (From the Beast 336-37). Dympna’s life is an easily identifiable variant of “All Fur” (more similar to Straparola’s “Tebaldo”). In order to flee her desiring father, Dympna disguises herself as a minstrel and escapes with the help of the court fool (whose cap of bells often sported asses’ ears); she crosses the Irish Sea and the Channel safely and then makes her way into the forest till on the outskirts of the village of Geel she clears a space and makes a hut of trees and branches, in order to become a hermit (335-37). After her father tracks her down and kills her when she refuses to give in,
Dympna is venerated as the patron saint of the insane. As Warner comments:
This leap, from the father-daughter incest tale to the care of the mentally ill,
arises from a profound medieval perception of the affinity between mental
distress and incestuous transgression … Dympna’s patronage of madness
reveals imaginative associations at work in the minds of her votaries … Incest
in her tale does not belong in a tribal chronicle about appropriate partners for
carrying on the line. Nor does it inscribe a philosophy of fate and divine
justice. It tells of a private fantasy of omnipotence which does harm; the
passage of the story about an incestuous father into a healing cult represents a
vital moment in the history of attitudes to such passions. (Warner, From the
Beast 339) 239
There is a universal law prohibiting mother-son and daughter-father incest; this may at times expand to other degrees of kinship but in this most rudimentary state “it always remains a founding binary opposition on which the structural foundations of society are laid”
(Warner, From the Beast 319). In anthropological terms, All Fur loses her exchange value as a “gift” to be given away in marriage, hence her loss of social status and relegation to the lowest social sphere (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 134). Moreover, if the incest taboo is one of the primal, universal taboos and distinctions, then its (threatened) transgression undermines all processes of categorization and blurs all boundaries, cultural and psychic alike, making confusion inevitable.
As Hanna Segal points out, the actualization of incestuous oedipal phantasies is additionally devastating in causing the breakdown in the distinction between phantasy and reality:
the terrible thing for the child if they have got unconscious fantasies which the
parent acts out, is that then they cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality
and that goes for violent abuse too. Every normal child at times projects onto
the parents that they are violent monsters, but then the parent behaves
differently and gradually you distinguish your fantasy from reality. Now when
your parent acts out your worst, or best fantasies, it is the worst thing that can
happen, not just because of the suffering but because it obliterates the very
distinction on which our sanity depends. … As Glover puts it, our worst
phantasies can come true and obliterate the achievement of having worked out
what’s a nightmare and what’s reality. (H. Segal, Yesterday 246-47)
This confusion, in its literal and etymological sense, of nightmare and reality, nature and culture is embodied, in my view, in the cloak of all furs that the heroine asks for and then uses for protection. Not only does it hide her physical attractiveness, it also refutes any 240 categorization: the question is not “who are you?” but “what are you?”, since this creature cannot be recognized by the hunters of the kingdom into which All Fur wanders: in short, it cannot be named. And the cloak transforms the heroine into an indeterminate, liminal creature which is neither human nor animal, neither female nor male:
The huntsmen obeyed the king’s command, and when they returned to him,
they said, “There’s a strange animal lying in the hollow tree. We’ve never seen
anything like it. Its skin is made up of a thousand different kinds of fur, and
it’s lying there asleep.”
“See if you can catch it alive,” said the king. “Then tie it to the wagon, and
we’ll take it with us.”
When the huntsmen seized the maiden, she woke up in a fright and cried to
them, “I’m just a poor girl, forsaken by my father and mother! Please have pity
on me and take me with you.”
“You’ll be perfect for the kitchen, All Fur,” they said. Come with us, and
you can sweep up the ashes there.”
So they put her into the wagon and drove back to the royal castle. There
they showed her to a little closet beneath the stairs that was never exposed to
daylight.
“Well, you furry creature”, they said, “you can live and sleep here.”
(Grimm 318)
It should also be noted here that in different variants the heroine’s disguise – the fur cloak, the suit of leather, the donkey skin, the hut in the forest, the wooden cloak – accentuates the heroine’s voluntary outcast state (Warner, From the Beast 377).
Simultaneously, however, this outcast’s disguise reproduces the iconography of the passion she is fleeing: “Animal hairiness, tails and beards identify the phallic satyrs of Greek myth, 241
embodiments of lust;”, Warner comments, “they lent their features, their donkey-like and
goatish parts, to conventional Christian representations of the Devil” (From the Beast 355).
The hearth cat (associated more with “Cinderella” and also a witch’s familiar), the donkey,
the bear (into which Basile’s heroine is transformed in his tale), were all ascribed a certain
predilection for pleasure, as well as carnal knowledge (356). Their hairiness indicates an
animal nature, is a distinctive sign of wilderness and its inhabitants, carrying the freight of
Judaeo-Christian ambivalence about instinct and nature, fertility and sexuality (Warner, From
the Beast 358-59). This compact symbolism of the animal hide, of both animal sexuality and
outcast state, strengthens the argument of those who see the daughter’s incestuous desire as
well at work in the plot. And bearing in mind the workings of the paranoid-schizoid position,
All Fur’s flight into the woods takes place after her father’s retaliatory (sexual) attack on her person.
Having fled her original home, the protagonist is seen to dwell in spaces which combine the maternal and the liminal. Her first refuge is a hollow tree, which functions
(albeit very briefly) like the hearth in “Cinderella”, as a place of warmth and protection, symbolic of the maternal womb.66 When she is taken to the palace, All Fur is provided with a
room under the stairs (another dark and enclosed space), in which to dwell and find
temporary shelter. Even in this tale which revolves around the father-daughter relationship there is a split, however faintly present, in the maternal imago, where the biological mother
66 In “Tebaldo” the heroine hides in a magnificent, hand-carved chest, which is kept in her mother’s room and in which the heroine Doralice keeps all her precious jewels and clothes. With the help of her nurse, Doralice enters the chest and she is given by the former a magic powder which enables her to survive for a long period of time without any other food. The chest is then cast into the sea (Zipes, GFTT 28). In “Donkey Skin” the princess first seeks out the help and advice of her fairy godmother that lives in a grotto of coral and pearls (Zipes, GFTT 40).
In these two tales the heroine finds temporary relief and sanctuary in a space symbolically associated to the maternal. 242
inadvertently becomes the bad breast in her deathbed demand, and her good aspects are
projected either onto the figure of the fairy godmother or onto the nurse, or in the case of All
Fur, onto Mother Nature. In “All Fur” the heroine flees into the forest, as is often the case in
the Grimm tradition, yet she enters a wilderness in more senses than one.
Kleinian analyst Elizabeth Spillius, having originally trained as an anthropologist, has
transferred some of these insights to the analytic process. One of these is leading
anthropologist Edmund Leach’s concept of the “wilderness”, the basic structure of which is
based on a binary pair, the sacred and the profane. Each term of this binary opposition exists
only by virtue of its opposition to the other term (other such pairs would be this world/the
other world, everyday/special, ordinary/extraordinary etc); sometimes the basic duality of
these binary pairs may be modified by the introduction of degrees of difference between them
(Spillius, Encounters 21).67 Leach termed “wilderness” the space or time in which the two
binary opposites overlap: “the wilderness belongs to this world and to the other world, to both
and to neither; its properties are different from both and similar to both, depending on one’s
perspective. In this respect it is somewhat similar to certain aspects of Winnicott’s idea of
transitional objects and transitional space” (Spillius, Encounters 21). Access to the wilderness
involves rites of passage, in which an individual undergoes a symbolic death of one status (a
rite of separation), spends some time in a special, marginal or liminal status and then is
reborn into ordinary society with a new status (Spillius, Encounters 21-22).
Spillius uses this concept in order to discuss affinities between psychoanalysis and
anthropology. It is also, I believe, a concept pertinent to that of “All Fur”, from both an
67 Like Dundes, anthropologist Edmund Leach points out the existence and insistence of binary schemata in the organization and categorization of human thought, an organization which parallels the organization of phantasy and affect during the paranoid-schizoid position.
243 anthropological and a psychoanalytical perspective. All Fur literally enters a wilderness when she enters the forest in flight from her father, entering a space which is neither quite human
(being the domain of Nature) but also not completely Other, as it is often the place where donors and magic objects (from a Kleinian viewpoint projections of the good internal object and hence always already human) are to be encountered in the fairytale universe. The space under the stairs of the palace is also a liminal one, neither here nor there, signifying in the most concrete spatial terms the heroine’s transition from one phase of life to the other.
Bearing in mind the historical realities of the time in which the tale was recorded, All Fur also enters that transitional phase in life between girlhood and marriage, something like a no-
(wo)man’s land where she is neither the one (a child) nor the other (a sexually active woman).
In Kleinian terms, this wilderness may well be associated to the depressive position which is linked not only to reparation and creativity but also to oedipal configurations. It may be useful here to remember Klein’s summary of the depressive position in relation to the infant’s object relations. Klein describes the depressive position as melancholia in statu nascendi; the object mourned is the mother’s breast, and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand for, namely love, goodness and security (LGR 345). Moreover, she makes explicit the connection between the depressive position and the Oedipus complex:
Further distress about impending loss (this time of both parents) arises out of
the Oedipus situation, which sets in so early and in such close connection with
breast frustrations that in the beginnings it is dominated by oral impulses and
fears. The circle of loved objects who are attacked in phantasy, and whose loss
is therefore feared, widens owing to the child’s ambivalent relations to his
brothers and sisters. The aggression against phantasied brothers and sisters,
who are attacked inside the mother’s body, also gives rise to feelings of guilt 244
and loss. The sorrow and concern about the feared loss of the “good” objects,
that is to say, the depressive position, is in my experience, the deepest source
of the painful conflicts in the Oedipus situation, as well as in the child’s
relations to people in general. In normal development theses feelings of grief
and fears are overcome by various methods. (Klein, LGR 345)
These methods may take various forms but in healthy psychic development they share a common characteristic of (symbolic) reparation of the object attacked in phantasy, processes which are very much linked to sublimation and all that it entails.
It thus becomes easier to provide a reading of the significance of the objects the heroine takes with her on her flight and quest for a suitable husband, as well as of her flight into the wilderness. The celestial gowns as supreme examples of craftsmanship stand in diametrical opposition to the pelts All Fur wears every day. When All Fur asks for and gains permission to look into the ball taking place at the castle, she changes her furry pelt for a sublime dress:
All Fur took her little oil lamp, went to her closet, took off her fur cloak, and
washed the soot from her face and hands so that her full beauty came to light
again. Then she opened the nut and took out the dress that shone like the sun.
When that was done, she went upstairs to the ball, and everyone made way for
her, for they had no idea who she was and believed that she was nothing less
than a royal princess. The king approached her, offered her his hand, and led
her forth to dance. In his heart he thought, Never in my life have my eyes
beheld anyone so beautiful! When the dance was over, she curtsied, and as the
king was looking around she disappeared, and nobody knew where she had
gone. The guards who were standing in front of the castle were summoned and
questioned, but no one had seen her. 245
In the meantime, the princess had run back to her closet and had undressed
quickly. Then she blackened her face and hands, put on her fur cloak and
became All Fur once more. When she went back to the kitchen, she resumed
her work and began sweeping up the ashes. (Grimm 318-19)
The change from the pelts to the dress which shines like the sun is so compelling that, like in
“Cinderella”, the princess is unrecognizable: she has moved from one end of the cultural continuum (the pelt) to the other (the unsurpassable dress), from all but raw material to an artifact which is the product of the most sophisticated in human labor. By donning this superb cultural artifact, moreover, she also moves from being on the outside of the exchange circuit to being its most desirable commodity. The same holds true for her next two appearances in the silvery and star gowns.
This pattern of transition from the raw to the processed becomes more evident in the sequence that follows All Fur’s appearance with the gowns, as she is required to cook the king’s soup after the ball. All Fur brews a bread soup to the best of her abilities, and places her golden ring in the bowl. The king, delighted with the soup and puzzling over the ring, first has the cook, then All Fur, brought to him but he cannot get the information he seeks
(Grimm 319):
When All Fur appeared, the king asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m just a poor girl that no longer has a mother or a father.”
Why are you in my castle?” the king continued.
“I’m good for nothing but to have boots thrown at my head,” she replied.
“Where did you get the ring that was in the soup?” he asked again.
“I don’t know anything about the ring,” she answered. So the king could
not find out anything and had to send her away. (Grimm 320-21) 246
Consistent with Propp’s trebling schema, this sequence is repeated two more times, as
All Fur appears at the ball in her silvery gown and the gown as bright as the stars, and after
her hasty departure, makes the bread soup for the king, placing the golden spinning wheel
and the golden reel in his soup. In the meantime, she continues her menial tasks in the palace
(Grimm 320-21).
The act of cooking and feeding68 are reparative tasks par excellence. From an
anthropological perspective, cooking is the transformation of the raw into the cooked, a
process not only necessary for survival but also for the designation of boundaries. From a
psychoanalytic perspective, providing food is perhaps one of the greatest markers of love,
care and – on a deeper level – reparation (hence terms like “comfort food”). All Fur’s
preparing the food for the king is an act of both creativity and reparation. Like the bread
crumbs in Hansel and Gretel, which Bettelheim describes as a “lifeline”, All Fur provides the
most elementary of foods, a soup consisting of the most basic ingredient for sustenance. Yet
she does it in such a masterly way that it draws the king’s attention; he is certain that this
soup has not been made by the cook, as, he says, it is different from her usual soup and much
better cooked (Grimm 319).69 Moreover, the spinning wheel and the reel that he finds in the
soup, are directly linked to the transformation of raw materials into human artifacts (wool
into thread and thenceforth into cloth), yet also to female labour and creativity.
During the third ball the king slips a ring onto her finger, which All Fur does not notice
in her hurry to get back to the kitchen and prepare the soup. When the king discovers the
golden reel, he summons All Fur and sees the ring he had placed on her hand:
68 The same holds true for housework, a theme associated with “Cinderella” type tales, which will be discussed in the second part of this chapter.
69 The cook in tales is usually a mother substitute, therefore this comparison which favours the daughter over the mother is yet another (faint) echo of mother-daughter oedipal rivalry at work in the tale. 247
Then he seized her hand and held it tight, and when she tried to free herself
and run away, the fur cloak opened a bit, and the dress of bright stars was
unveiled. The king grabbed the cloak and tore it off her. Suddenly her golden
hair toppled down, and she stood there in all her splendor unable to conceal
herself any longer. After she had wiped the soot and ashes from her face, she
was more beautiful than anyone who had ever been glimpsed on earth.
“You shall be my dear bride,” the king said, “and we shall never part from
each other!”
Thereupon the wedding was celebrated, and they lived happily together
until their death. (Grimm 321)
The (heterosexual) union at the end of fairy tales corresponds to the successive negotiation of the depressive position according to Kleinian theory, a relationship where one’s reparative capacities can be culminated in sexual fulfillment and reproduction.
Nevertheless, the abusive and incestuous aspects continue to reverberate throughout the tale. Commenting on the description of the fleeing daughter’s rescue, Ashliman states that it adds credence to the interpretation of the tale’s concern with father- daughter incest because the king who actually marries the girl is not much different from the father king. Apart from the fact that a king (rather than a prince) finds the heroine (the king being a fairly consistent symbol for fathers in fairy tales), the recognition scene as described above, where the king rips the cloak off the heroine to expose her beauty, evokes sexual violence. As he writes:
The man who discovers and ultimately marries the runaway princess closely
resembles the girl’s own father. He too is a king, exerting despotic, patriarchal
authority over his household. Even the exceptions to this rule support the
argument that the father and the future husband are easily identified with one
another. The Finnish variant, “The Merchant’s Daughter”, for example, breaks 248
with tradition by casting the threatening father as a merchant rather than as a
king. And significantly, the man who discovers and later marries the runaway
daughter is also a merchant. Not only do the young women’s future spouses
resemble their fathers in rank and disposition, in addition the tales are often
told in such a way as to make it easy to confuse the identities of the first
master and the second master (if indeed the two are different). (Ashliman)
More importantly, in some of the variants (and in some of the manuscripts by the
Brothers Grimm), the threat of abuse in the heroine’s parental home forms a prelude to the abuse she endures in her new abode. The following quotation, found in the Grimms’ manuscript collection, paints a picture of the relationship between the heroine and her new master which creates some uneasiness:
When she came to his room the king said, “You are a very beautiful child;
come sit in my chair, so I can lay my head in your lap, and you can louse me a
little.” All-Kinds-of-Fur was ashamed, and for awhile she could say nothing at
all. “I am nothing but a poor child whose father and mother are dead.” But he
insisted, until she at last sat down and loused him, and from that time on, she
has to cook his soup for him and louse him every day. (Brothers Grimm, qtd in
Ashliman)
The version published by the brothers in the first edition of their tales was less sexually explicit, yet it did contain an allusion to the nature of the relationship between king and heroine (prior to the ball), in that All Fur has to go to the master’s chamber every night and take off his boots, which he then throws at her head, an episode of which the Grimms retained traces in their later renditions in All Fur’s response to the king’s questioning
(Ashliman). 249
Interestingly, despite Wilhelm Grimm’s editorial interventions, his variant was considered so blunt that one English translator altered the initial sequence, obliterating the incest scene altogether (Ashliman). Another stratagem employed by authors of fairy tales in order to make the issue of incestuous thereat more palatable to refined audiences or to young ears was to shift the blame for this unnatural urge to marry one’s progeny from the father to the mother. As we saw in “All Fur”, it is the dying queen whose admonition has led the king down such paths of folly, by her transparent attempt to keep the king from replacing her in his affection. As Tatar comments, critics of all persuasions bend over backwards to prove that this is a tale about a “seductive” daughter, while writers of the past used the ploy of the mother’s collusion in the daughter’s plight (Off With Their Heads 130). Moreover, with perhaps the exception of Tebaldo in Straparola’s tale, who is severely punished (yet in the tale he is responsible not only for attempting to molest his daughter but also for murdering her children and then attempting to lay the blame at her door), the fathers in the “All Fur” tales are often portrayed as being reconciled to their daughters after the latter’s marriage takes place, having repented for their unnatural desire. In the case of the Grimm “All Fur”, the father king simply disappears from the tale: we never hear of him again (Tatar, Off With
Their Heads 132).
Until the eighteenth century, fairytale audiences accepted the existence of incestuous fathers in tales such as “All Fur”. After this time, the tale clearly began to arouse anxiety in disseminators of the genre, particularly when addressed to children; the tale is then tinkered with, evaded, suppressed and gradually forgotten (Warner, Beast 347). As Warner explains, when psychological realism is at work in the mind of the teller and audiences, a tale structured around father-daughter incest becomes unacceptable, not because it is impossible, but because it has been known to happen: “It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring, rather than the other way around” (From the Beast 349). 250
The “All Fur” tales yield insight into the minds and experiences of adolescent women and
their fathers, into erotic fantasies and conscious and unconscious desires at work on both
sides. At the same time, the tales express fear of actual incest and actual violation, thus
producing disquiet to prospective audiences (Warner, From the Beast 350-51).
“The Maiden Without Hands” is also a tale revolving around father-daughter incest and abuse, in which a father or father-substitute (the devil in the Grimm variant, a brother in
Basile) requests the heroine’s hand in marriage. The heroine’s response is to sever both her hands and send them to her aspiring suitor, who in some variants then proceeds to sever her breasts or her tongue (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 121). This physical maiming is performed, in characteristic fairytale fashion, in a very matter-of-fact manner, with no descriptions of otherwise indescribable physical anguish. Much in accordance to Dundes’ formula of the literal being translated into the metaphorical within the contours of the genre, this maiming takes on a highly symbolic aspect, as it renders literal the giving of one’s hand in marriage, or desexualizing the daughter’s female body, or literally silencing the victim of abuse (Tatar, Off
With Their Heads 122). Despite the fact, however, that ours is a culture which does not shirk from violence, it is interesting that it has suppressed these tales of paternal incestuous desire, simultaneously highlighting tales which figure maternal evil at their core, turning the evil stepmother into a cultural icon (Tatar, Off With Their Heads 127). It is time for Cinderella to enter the tale.
251
Her mother was dead and buried but felt
perfect exquisite pain of love when she
looked up through the earth and saw the
burned child covered in ashes.
Angela Carter, “Ashputtle, or The
Mother’s Ghost”
II
Whereas the triangular relationship of father-husband-daughter is able to weather even
the threat of incest, the mother-daughter dyad in “Cinderella”, as in most fairy tales, does not
tolerate a third element before it slips into a husband-daughter dyad (Tatar, Off With Their
Heads 132). From a Kleinian viewpoint “Cinderella” is, to my mind, the tale most clearly
structured around the depressive position and its psychic processes: the establishment of the
good internal object and the capacity and willingness for reparation. The “Cinderella” variant
included in the Grimm collections provides a comprehensive symbolic portrayal of the
child’s general psychic development. Before, however, attempting a psychoanalytic reading,
it is useful to explore some of the historical realities which could account for the absence of
the biological mother at the beginning of the tale.
The absent mother can be read as a feature of family life before the modern era, where
death in childbirth was a common occurrence, and children in the rare cases of divorce were
not conceded to the care of their mothers but to their paternal homes, to be raised by relatives
or other wives. Moreover, actual evil stepmothers of Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian dynasties plotted against rival heirs in order to secure the advancement of their own progeny.
In short, “[w]hen a second wife entered the house, she often found herself and her children in 252
competition – often for scarce resources – with the surviving offspring of the earlier
marriage, who may well have appeared to threaten her own children’s place in their father’s
affection too” (Warner, From the Beast 213).
Another factor contributing to the absent mother trope could be the existence of an
extended network of quasi-maternal figures in the lives of many children in past eras, because
mothers, wetnurses, foster parents, guardians and godparents interpenetrated and combined
with the biological family (Warner, From the Beast 235). As opposed to contemporary
notions of motherhood, which (ideally) restrict the role of the mother to the biological
relationship, the notion and the terminology of motherhood in previous eras were more
convoluted. The term “mother” was conferred onto biological mothers, of course, but also
onto women charged with the care of others, such as nuns, midwives, layers-out and even
bawds (235-36). And then there was the nurse, a figure whose role could not be ignored even in the foundation of psychoanalysis. Freud, for example, recalled his own nurse in his self-
analysis and credited her with instilling in him a high opinion of his own capacities, in
addition to a great deal of information about hell and God Almighty, and teachings in sexual matters (236). As Warner comments, “If any of these maternal substitutes had told their nurslings stories, the mother might well have been absent; again the differences in rank between the wetnurse in the village and the mother in the town are reflected in so many fairy tales’ frank assault on women with power over others and affection for others with less authority” (From the Beast 236).
This becomes more pertinent when one considers female vulnerability and dependability in patrilineal households. Bearing in mind that to a large extent fairy tales were reproduced orally (and not only read), it is important to remember the role and the identifications of the narrator of the tales, who may well have been a dependent female. Often the narrator identified with the absent good figure, thus attempting to secure the love and 253 loyalty of the younger members of the household and therefore retaining, however precariously, her position in the household and her right to shelter and assistance in old age, bypassing the authority or the ill-will of the parental figure (230).
Finally, dead mothers could also be dead from a symbolic point of view. In the tales revolving around nubile heroines, as is the case with “Cinderella” but also “Sleeping Beauty” and “Rapunzel”, the wicked stepmother may be a thinly disguised metaphor for the mother- in-law (219). “Rapunzel” is a good case in point, since in previous eras daughters-in-law were often placed under the mother-in-law’s close supervision (223). This is a possibility which tallies well with the psychoanalytic contention that infantile oedipal configurations are revived and renegotiated in adolescence: the confrontation with the evil stepmother may well reflect both the initial object relation to the primal objects, as well as its renegotiation in the encounter with a substitute object.
If this split into the good and bad maternal figure was based on both historical and psychic conditions, maternal evil was most certainly intensified by the narrative choices of those retelling the tales in the ages to come. Female hatred and cruelty were not created by male writers but they were certainly confirmed and intensified by male renditions (207). In more familiar retellings of “Cinderella” this emphasis on maternal ill-will was also the result of the dissociation of the dead mother from the magical object, even though in most variants of the tale this connection is explicit and powerful. In his “Cinderella Cat” Basile first performed this severance, by having the mother dead and the magical assistance coming from a date tree given to the heroine by fairies (206). This disjunction between the maternal and the magical object, which is replaced by the familiar motif of the fairy godmother, is now the prevalent trope in the tale. Walt Disney, whom Warner describes as the spiritual heir to
Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, did much (perhaps more than any other artist) to naturalize this imagery of maternal malignancy in the imagination of children worldwide. (206). As 254
Warner points out, Bettelheim’s further endorsement of the importance of the bad mother figure in fairy tales from a psychoanalytic perspective all but eliminated the historical reasons for the cruelty of stepmothers. This elimination resulted in the portrayal of hatred as an intrinsic component in the mother-child relationship, making the ensuing strife in the fairy tale appear therapeutic: but “this archetypal approach leeches history out of fairy tale”
(Warner, From the Beast 213).
Be that as it may, it is indisputable that Cinderella is a child in mourning for her mother:
her penitential garb is ash, dirty and low as a donkeyskin or a coat of grasses,
but more particularly the sign of loss, the symbol of mortality, which the priest
uses to mark the forehead of the faithful on Ash Wednesday saying, “Dust
thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” … The lays and romances of medieval
literature are thronged with bereaved heroes and heroines who will not wash,
or cut their hair or beard, but hug the dirt to keep close to their lost loved one,
to be outcast as they are in death, to keep their own personal Lent, wearing
sackcloth and ashes. The knowing Basile writes that mourning lasts as short a
moment as pain in the funny bone, but Cinderella in her rags, in her sackcloth
and ashes, is a daughter who continues to grieve. (Warner, From the Beast
206-07)
Whereas Basile, Perrault and Disney omit the scene of the mother’s death, the Grimm tale begins with a moving description:
The wife of a rich man fell ill, and as she felt her end approaching, she called
her only daughter to her bedside and said, “Dear child, be good and pious.
Then the dear Lord shall always assist you, and I shall look down from heaven
and take care of you.” She then closed her eyes and departed. 255
After her mother’s death the maiden went every day to visit her grave and
she remained good and pious. When winter came, snow covered the grave like
a little white blanket, and by the time the sun had taken it off again in the
spring, the rich man had a second wife, who brought along her two daughters.
(Grimm 106-07)
To add insult to injury, the two stepsisters, beautiful but cruel, not only relegate Cinderella to
the lowliest and hardest menial tasks, they also taunt her with meaningless ones such as
sorting peas and lentils from the hearth ashes, or taking away her bed and having her sleep
next to the fireplace (Grimm 107).
A brief comment on the stepsisters is necessary here. They remain unnamed in the
Perrault and Grimm variants, with no characteristics whatsoever to distinguish them, being so
closely identified to the mother that they become fused with her (Bettelheim 248). This is
implied in the Grimm narrative when the two sisters actively turn Cinderella into a scullery
maid, scattering peas and lentils in the ashes for her to sort out. Later in the narrative this is
the very same task that the stepmother will demand from Cinderella if she is to go to the ball.
From a Kleinian point of view an additional point needs to be kept in mind. Since every split in the object is accompanied by a split in the self, the two stepsisters can also be construed as a split in Cinderella herself, embodying all the unpleasant and ultimately envious aspects of the heroine. Moreover, the split in the maternal object is simultaneously reflected in the split in Cinderella herself as the ragged girl in the beginning of the tale and the radiant princess she becomes in the end (J. Segal, Phantasy 61). What is more, here is yet again another instance of projective inversion, as “the ugly, envious feelings a real little girl cannot avoid when contemplating her mother’s and older siblings possessions are attributed to the ugly sisters when, at the end of the story, it is Cinderella who is the object of envy and admiration” (J. Segal, Phantasy 60). 256
Sibling rivalry forms an important component in the tale. According to Bettelheim,
“having to live among the ashes” is a widely diffused symbol of being debased in relation to
one’s siblings, irrespective of gender (236). However, he notes, sibling rivalry is rooted in the
parent-child relationship (238). It is also an affect which is more accentuated in modern and
contemporary versions, as opposed to the older ones, where mother-daughter rivalry formed the crux of the tale, and sibling rivalry was much less prominent (247). Aware of the different variants and the cognate tales of the “Cinderella” cycle, Bettelheim states that the earlier variants highlighted oedipal motives, whether these were the father’s sexual intentions, as discussed in the first part of the chapter, or the girl’s competition with the mother (and her sisters) for the father’s attention as is the case with the “Cinderella” variants (247-48).
In the more popular versions today, however, he points out that oedipal desire for the father is completely repressed, as is the girl’s desire to replace the mother. This desire is displaced and projected onto the (step-)maternal figure, who not only becomes a malevolent presence, but also desires to get rid of the child much as the child wishes to get rid of her
(249). Emphasis on sibling rivalry further intensifies the displacement from the oedipal core in the plot. Bettelheim explains: “as happens frequently with complex psychological phenomena which arouse great guilt, all that the person consciously experiences is anxiety due to the guilt, and not the guilt itself, or what caused it. Thus, ‘Cinderella’ tells only about the misery of being degraded” (249). However, neither emphasis on sibling rivalry nor the overemphasized innocence and sweetness of some Cinderellas (Perrault’s for example) completely override oedipal affects or oedipal guilt; oedipal affects are still stirred in the tale’s audiences (Bettelheim 250).
It is necessary, then, to focus on the mother-daughter plot at work in the tale. As already mentioned, the maternal imago becomes split into two components at the tale’s beginning, the good but dead biological mother and the evil stepmother. What differentiates 257
“Cinderella” tales from other tales in this respect is the overt and emphasized link between
the good mother and the magic helper and objects which form vital structural and symbolic
components in all related variants. After the primal split between the good and the bad
maternal imago, the child displaces its affects onto the external world, while equating objects
in the process of symbolization, as I have already explained in the first part of this thesis.
Simultaneously, it introjects and incorporates the primal good object, which will then form
the core of psychic identity and health.
In “Cinderella” the split of the primal maternal object into the dead mother and
stepmother is followed by the introduction of the basic good objects, three in number: the
hazel tree which grows on the mother’s grave, the little white bird on the tree and the hearth.
There are also the birds that help Cinderella in separating the peas and lentils from the ashes,
as well as the two white pigeons at the end of the tale, which warn the prince of the false
brides and peck out the eyes of the stepsisters.
Perhaps the most poignant (and transparent) symbol of the establishment of the good
object is the planting of the hazel tree. In a scene reminiscent of “Beauty and the Beast”, the
heroine’s father prepares to go on a journey, and after receiving requests from his
stepdaughters for clothes and jewels, he also receives Cinderella’s request for the first twig
that will brush against his hat on the way home (Grimm 107-08). A hazel70 twig brushes off
her father’s hat, and once her request is granted,
70 It is interesting to note the associations the hazel tree may have had for pre-modern audiences. It was a food source, as hazelnuts are plentiful and a good source of protein; they were often ground-up and put into bread in order to make it more nourishing. Hazel wood was reportedly used for druid staffs (in Celtic folklore hazelnuts were associated to wisdom, insight and creativity), wands and medieval implements of self-defence, such as walking sticks and shepherds’ crooks. Forked hazel twigs were used by diviners, and the wood on the whole is pliable enough to be used for making baskets or furniture (wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel, 258
she thanked him, went to her mother’s grave, planted the twig on it, and wept
so hard that the tears fell on the twig and watered it. Soon the twig grew and
quickly it became a beautiful tree. Three times every day Cinderella would go
and sit beneath it and weep and pray, and each time, a little white bird would
also come to the tree. Whenever Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird would
throw her whatever she had requested. (Grimm 108)
The integral link between the magical object and the maternal body is made obvious in
the passage, as the magical hazel tree grows literally out of the mother’s body and grave.71 To
Bettelheim the tree is one of the most psychologically important images in the tale, as it
represents the idealised mother of infancy, the all-giving, bountiful mother, whose unconscious memory can prove sustaining even in the most trying circumstances (257).
Although he draws on Erikson’s notion of basic trust, Bettelheim’s comment on the significance of the magical tree can very well apply to the established Kleinian good object:
“The helpful animal or the magic tree is an image, embodiment, external representation of this basic trust. It is the heritage which a good mother confers on her child which will stay
www.nativetreesociety.org/ myths/hazel_in_celtic_folklore.htm, 17/01/2012). In short, it was a tree associated to nourishment and creativity in literal and metaphorical forms.
71 In variants from other national traditions, this link is made even more evident. In some Greek variants, for example, three daughters wager, while spinning with their mother, that they will slaughter and eat the one whose thread breaks first. The mother’s thread breaks and the daughters agree to overlook it three times, because, as they say, she gave birth to them and she breastfed them and raised them, but once the thread breaks again, they claim that “a bet is a bet” and proceed with their gruesome plan, much to the consternation of the youngest girl, who refuses to partake in this feast. The heroine then sifts through the ashes with a spoon, looking for her mother’s bones, which will later in the tale provide her with the golden slippers that will lead her to the king
(http://www.pofa.uth.gr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70&Itemid=32, 12/07/2012).
259
with him, and preserve and sustain him in direct distress” (258). In a similar vein, Cashdan
points out the significance of magical objects in tales which shelter the protagonists from
evil, not only introducing a wondrous element into the narration but also addressing the
power imbalance between the (child) heroes and the all-powerful adversaries (110).
If the first symbolic image in the tale is an unequivocal representation of the good maternal object, the hearth, while certainly associated to the maternal, is a more ambiguous and complex symbol. Bearing historical associations to the Vestal Virgins of Rome, the hearth is associated both to the dirt and ashes of mourning (an unkempt appearance and lack of personal hygiene are often signs of clinical depression), as well as to the warmth and comfort of the maternal presence (Bettelheim 254-55). As Bettelheim points out, before the age of central heating, the hearth would have been the coziest, warmest seat in the house, a privileged spot for one to sit (255).72 I would also add that it would be the place where a lot
of the cooking would take place, thus indirectly making it a place of nourishment as well.
“Because of this combination of images”, writes Bettelheim, “the hearth evokes strong
feelings of empathy, reminding us all of the paradise in which we once dwelt, and how
radically our lives changed when we were forced to give up the simple and happy existence
of the very young child, to cope with all the ambivalences of adolescence and adulthood”
(255). From a Kleinian perspective, however, this mourning and this ambivalence as
materializing in the symbol of the hearth does not pertain to some eternally lost individual
Arcadia, a repressed memory of a simpler time in life (ambivalence is experienced from life’s
inception in the Kleinian universe) but, as already mentioned, inherent to the human
72 Within the Greek cultural context the seats by the fire would normally be reserved for the elderly or the senior members of the family, in fairly strict order of precedence (grandparents first). In this light, a child sitting by the hearth or fireside was likely to be the family pet, a much-loved or even spoilt member of the family, or the physically weakest (and hence more in need of assistance) rather than the underdog. 260 condition. The tale may begin with the portrayal of an idealized maternal imago (the dying mother, the tree granting all wishes) but proceeds to a rendition of the primary object which embodies this complexity of affect as time goes on.
The entry into the depressive position involves the gradual integration of the self and the (primal) object, a process which in the tale is indicated by the complexity of possible associations to the hearth. The negotiation of the depressive position, moreover, involves, as I had discussed earlier, active effort on the part of the subject in order to achieve the aforementioned integration. It is desirable that the subject respond to this psychic crisis in a way which at the same time demands and enables sublimation and creativity.
In fairy tales, as I have already argued, there is no in-depth psychological analysis, as one would expect in a novel or a short story. On the contrary, all psychic phenomena are manifested in very concrete terms as actions. In the case of “Cinderella”, as well as with other variants the world over, these actions initially take the form of household drudgery: if debasement is a common denominator in all variants, then this almost always involves heavy manual labour within the limits of the house. Undoubtedly, this is firstly linked to historical and cultural realities and expectations in the milieus in which the tale was told; nevertheless, it takes on an additional psychic significance both in everyday life and in the tale. The description of Cinderella’s tasks is telling:
[Her stepmother and stepsisters] expected her to work hard there from morning
till night. She had to get up before dawn, carry the water into the house, make
the fire, cook, and wash. Besides this, her sisters did everything imaginable to
cause her grief and make her look ridiculous. For instance, they poured peas
and lentils into the hearth ashes so she had to sit there and pick them out. In
the evening, when she was exhausted from working, they took away her bed, 261
and she had to lie next to the hearth, in the ashes. This was why she always
looked so dusty and dirty and why they all called her Cinderella. (Grimm 107)
From a Kleinian point of view, cleaning and sorting are linked to processes of reparation. In the same way that the child is required to classify and discern, and make sense of its psychic reality as it proceeds from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position in the initial year, but also later on in life as situations may require it, so too Cinderella spends an inordinate amount of time cleaning and separating. In Love, Hate and Reparation Klein and Riviere discuss the everyday ramifications of the psychic processes described in more clinically oriented papers. While focusing on the way in which feelings of love and identification became strengthened and stabilized, it is necessary, they state, to bear in mind that aggression and love always interact. Aggression is active even when the capacity for love is strongly developed. In these cases, it is sublimated and used constructively, in housekeeping for example:
There is actually no productive activity into which some aggression does not
enter in one way or another. Take, for instance, the housewife’s occupation:
cleaning and so on certainly bear witness to her desire to make things pleasant
for others and for herself, and as such is a manifestation of love for other
people and for the things she cares for. But at the same time she also gives
expression to her aggression in destroying the enemy, dirt, which in her
unconscious mind has come to stand for “bad” things. The original hatred and
aggression derived from the earliest sources may break through in women
whose cleanliness becomes obsessional. We all know the type of women who
make life miserable for the family by continuously “tidying up”; there the
hatred is actually turned against the people she loves and cares for (Klein and
Riviere 66n1) 262
Cinderella does not seem to fall into the latter category: her cleaning (although
imposed) could be indicative of reparative tendencies at work, involving the sublimation of
aggression. Also, bearing in mind the symbolic association of the maternal body to the house,
this cleaning could be read as an attempt to undo the effects of the paranoid-schizoid attacks on the inside of the maternal body. This, in my mind, is indirectly (and unconsciously) acknowledged in most versions of “Cinderella” which are currently popular. In Perrault’s version Cinderella’s kindness to her stepsisters is unfathomable (almost unbearable), as she prepares them for the ball, after having finished with her usual chores. In the Disney film
Cinderella all but relishes her chores, not only performing them dutifully but also finding time to name and sew tiny clothes for the mice lodging with her in the attic.
Cinderella’s task of sorting out the peas from the ashes in the hearth also points in this direction. To my mind this is a very significant, if highly condensed, symbolic activity in the tale. As already mentioned, it is a task which imperceptibly links the stepsisters with the stepmother in the tale, indicating if not their full identification then at least the integral narrative link between them. It is also a task which occurs three times in the tale, in accordance to Propp’s observation of trebling. In the case of the sorting out, the task is accomplished twice, with the help of turtledoves, pigeons, and all the birds under heaven:
The maiden went through the back door into the garden and cried out, “Oh,
you tame pigeons, you turtledoves, and all you birds under heaven, come and
help me pick
“the good ones for the little pot,
the bad ones for your little crop.”
Two white pigeons came flying to the kitchen window, followed by the
turtledoves. Eventually, all the birds under heaven swooped down, swarmed
into the kitchen, and settled around the ashes. The pigeons bobbed their heads 263
and began to peck, peck, peck, peck and all the other birds also began to peck,
peck, peck, peck, and they put all the good lentils into the bowl. It did not take
longer than an hour for the birds to finish the work, whereupon they flew
away. (Grimm 108-09)
It should be noted here that the birds as magical helpers echo the motif of the white bird in the hazel tree, which forms a type of extension of the maternal object.
The birds’ repeated assistance tallies well with the Kleinian notion of the effort required for the infant in order to work through the depressive position. In the first part of this thesis I
have commented on Klein’s description of the psychic workings during the depressive
position, which imply a repeated, active effort on the part of the infant to overcome the
paranoid-schizoid position and come to terms with the phantasied damage done to the
primary object(s). This active psychic effort is reflected here not only in the tediousness of
the menial tasks Cinderella has to perform, but also in that she has to discern and distinguish
between the useful and the useless, the good and bad lentils, which have been strewn into the
maternal hearth/body. This may be read on a first level as the attempt to separate the good
from the bad, the nutritious (seeing that lentils are part of the staple diet of many European
peoples) from the non-nutritious.
Bearing in mind that seeds can be linked to the paternal as an image for semen, it could
also be argued that the image of the seeds in the hearth also stands for parental intercourse.
Within a Kleinian framework, Cinderella may be said to be attacking and separating the
parental couple, a hypothesis which corresponds to the Oedipal conflicts at work in the tale. It
should be noted, however, that while ashes are a symbol of mourning, as described above, in
practice they were also used as fertilizer in agriculture, a detail which I assume would not
have been lost on audiences more aware of and informed about agricultural procedures; in
this, then, ashes are simultaneously associated with creativity and regeneration. 264
When the ego does not feel its capacities to be sufficient to overcome guilt and anxiety,
it may resort to is obsessional repetition (a process which may be observed in adults as well),
this being an aspect of the repetition compulsion (Klein, LGR 350). As Klein points out,
“When the defences of a manic nature fail (defences in which dangers from various sources
are in an omnipotent way denied or minimized) the ego is driven alternately or
simultaneously to combat the fears of deterioration and disintegration by attempted
reparations carried out in obsessional ways” (LGR 351).
Cinderella’s repeated separation of pulses from the ashes, as well as her three
appearances73 at the royal ball, point in this direction. The ballroom scene has captured the imagination of contemporary audiences and is now considered an integral part of the tale, even if it is a detail susceptible to influence by the cultural milieu in which the tale is told (in the Greek variant referred to in a previous note, for instance, Cinderella makes her grand
appearance at church). In all three instances it is certainly a scene of triumph for Cinderella,
as her beauty makes her unrecognizable even to her closest family. Resorting to her mother’s
grave yet again, she utters a spell in order to get what she desires:
When they had all departed, Cinderella went to her mother’s grave beneath the
hazel tree and cried out:
“Shake and wobble little tree!
Let gold and silver fall all over me.”
The bird responded by throwing her a gold and silver dress and silk slippers
embroidered with silver. She hastily slipped into the dress and went to the
wedding. She looked so beautiful in her golden dress that her sisters and
stepmother did not recognize her and thought she must be a foreign princess.
73 The three appearances at the ball comply with Propp’s trebling schema not only because they occur in repetition but also because they occur cumulatively too, each appearance being more impressive than the last. 265
They never imagined it could be Cinderella; they thought she was sitting at
home in the dirt picking lentils out of the ashes. (Grimm 109-10)
The triumph is completed, of course, when the prince notices her and monopolizes her attention all evening, dancing with her and turning away all other potential suitors with a very possessive “She’s my partner” every time somebody else asks her to dance (Grimm 110).
Feelings of triumph may also be linked to defences at work during the depressive
position. Klein considered triumph as an element of the manic position, one closely linked to
affects of contempt and omnipotence, which may jeopardize the vital effects of reparation.
Omnipotence, explained Klein, is so closely linked to sadism in the unconscious (because it
was originally connected to sadism), that the subject repeatedly fears its ability to overcome it
and handle it, that sooner or later sadism will get the better of it (LGR 350). One of the ways
of mastering this fear is the obsessional behavior described earlier on. Another affect which
may interfere with attempts at reparation is the desire to control the object, the sadistic
gratification to overcome it and humiliate it, to triumph over it: as a result, “the ‘benign’
circle started by this act becomes broken. The objects which were to be restored change again
into persecutors, and in turn paranoid fears are revived” (Klein, LGR 351).
Unconscious elements of triumph, Klein explained, also play a part in the child’s
burning desire to outgrow its shortcomings, to achieve equal status with its peers and even
reverse the parent-child power equilibrium. To some extent this unconscious triumph is
associated to desires directed at the attainment of success: “A time will come, the child
phantasies, when he will be strong tall and grown up, powerful, rich and potent, and father
and mother will have changed into helpless children, or again … will be very old, weak, poor
and rejected. The triumph over the parents in such phantasies, through the guilt to which it
gives rise, often cripples endeavours of all kinds” (Klein, LGR 351-52). 266
If the ball scene stirs up the most primitive feelings about being chosen, about being the parents’ golden child, as Cashdan points out (91), it is also a fairly straightforward fantasy of triumph over one’s parents and siblings. The reversal in fortune is complete, the stepmother and stepsisters merely look on, as Cinderella has gone from the lowliest of the low to exotic, extravagantly radiant princess. Dancing, however, takes on another very interesting and relevant dimension in the light of Kleinian theory. Using ideas from Kleinian thinker Ella
Sharpe’s “Certain Aspects of Sublimation and Delusion” (1930), Joan Riviere wrote an article in 1930 in which she corroborated Sharpe’s views that “dancing was a magical performance associated in its origin with food (life) and death” (Sharpe qtd. in Riviere 53).
Ella Sharpe contended in her paper that dancing can represent the recreation of a dead object, of magically bringing it to life again; moreover, the dead could be made alive again by the magical acts of the dancer (Riviere 53-54). Riviere offered her own non-clinical evidence in support of this view, by relating anecdotal evidence of a young girl who was trying to cope with her powerful affects of jealousy at the birth of a sibling. The child’s mother, well versed in anthropology but, according to Riviere, not particularly well disposed towards psychoanalysis, reported the girl’s play at eating pretend food with her. When the (imaginary) food had been consumed, the child would get off her chair and perform a complicated ritualistic dance, carefully executed, around the table; after this, she would sit down to eat again, as she had thus managed to replenish the imaginary food (Riviere 53-54).
Bearing in mind, then, Cinderella’s obsessional reparation attempts as they are evinced in the separation of the pulses from the ashes, as well as in the repetitive dancing at the three balls, in correlation with Klein’s views on omnipotence and triumph, it becomes easier to interpret both the father’s and the stepmother’s behavior in the tale. Klein contended that objects to be restored turned into persecutors if the reparation was not achieved. This would explain Cinderella’s persecution by her father after the ball. The prince follows the beautiful 267
stranger home at the end of the first and second ball, with the hope of finding out more about
her identity:
But she managed to slip away from him and got into her father’s dovecote.
Now the prince waited until her father came, and he told him that the unknown
maiden had escaped into his dovecote. The old man thought, Could that be
Cinderella? And he had an axe and pick brought to him so he could chop it
down. However, no one was inside, and when they went into the house,
Cinderella was lying in the ashes in her dirty clothes, and a dim little oil lamp
was burning on the mantel of the chimney. (Grimm 110)
The same thing happens the second night, when Cinderella hides in the beautiful pear tree,
which her father also cuts down (Grimm 111). As Warner points out, the father’s complicity
with the prince, as well as his extreme reaction, are problematic aspects of the tale: “This
Cinderella hides from both prince and father, though why the latter should pursue her so
savagely has been scrambled and fallen out of the tale. However, such silences help the
stories to reverberate as the father’s crazed contact sends shivers through the listener or the
reader” (From the Beast 348). Although Warner links her perceived audience reaction to the
Oedipal undercurrent of the scene, this may well be intensified by the persecuting aspect
Cinderella’s father assumes after his daughter’s failed attempts at reparation.
If Cinderella’s father reacts in such a violent manner after Cinderella’s flights from the
prince, this violence is mirrored or extended in the stepmother’s ordering her two daughters
to mutilate their foot in order to make it fit the slipper. In this variant there is no
proclamation, the prince does not seek far and wide for the bride whose foot will fit the slipper. Instead, having had the palace stairs coated with pitch to catch Cinderella in flight, he takes the lost slipper and marches straight to Cinderella’s father: 268
Next morning he carried it to Cinderella’s father and said, “No one else shall
be my wife but the maiden whose foot fits this golden shoe.”
The two sisters were glad to hear that because they had beautiful feet. The
oldest took the shoe into a room to try it on, and her mother stood by her side.
However, the shoe was too small for her, and she could not get her big toe into
it. So her mother handed her a knife and said, “Cut your toe off. Once you
become queen, you won’t have to walk anymore.”
The maiden cut her toe off, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the
pain, and went out to the prince. He took her on his horse as his bride and rode
off. But they had to pass the grave where the two pigeons were sitting on the
hazel tree, and they cried out:
“Looky, look, look at the shoe that she took.
There’s blood all over, and the shoe’s too small.
She’s not the bride you met at the ball.” (Grimm 112)
In another instance of trebling within the tale, the prince returns with the false bride, only to
have the same sequence repeated with the second sister, who is instructed to chop off her
heel. In the same way the two pigeons in the tree warn the prince of the second false bride,
till he returns with Cinderella on his horse.
Like the ball, the slipper test is an integral part of the tale. According to Bettelheim, the
attractiveness associated with tiny feet pointed towards the tale’s Asian origins, as is evinced
by the Chinese practice of footbinding (236). He also refers to an ancient German custom of
the groom’s offering the bride a shoe as a token of betrothal,74 while simultaneously
74 Within Greek tradition (which of course varies locally) it is customary to present a bride-to-be or a new bride with slippers and shoes during the courtship period. The bridal shoes are often paid for by the groom and his family, while before the wedding ceremony it is customary for the groom’s unmarried friends to present the 269 providing a classic Freudian interpretation of the slipper test as signifying sexual intercourse and defloration (265). As Bettelheim comments, this motif of foot mutilation is not found in
Perrault, but it was certainly common in most “Cinderella” variants. It could also be construed as a form of castration, an attempt to make one’s self more feminine (267-68):
In the slipper ceremony … he selects her because in symbolic fashion she is
the uncastrated woman who relieves him of his castration anxiety, which
would interfere with a happy marital relationship. She selects him because he
appreciates her in her “dirty” sexual aspects, lovingly accepts her vagina in the
form of the slipper, and approves of her desire for a penis, symbolized by her
tiny foot fitting within the slipper-vagina. (Bettelheim 271)
While foot mutilation is a familiar motif linked to castration, from a Kleinian viewpoint there is also another aspect to the slipper ceremony, that of integration between the split-off parts of Cinderella: “The pairing of the shoes at the end also hints at Cinderella’s need to bring two parts of herself / her object together. It suggests, perhaps, that the little girl will be able to bring these parts of herself together when she is old enough to have her own husband” (J.
Segal, Phantasy 61).
What I would like to focus on in conjunction with the mutilation and the slipper ceremony is the role of the birds, which appear repeatedly in the text. Not only do the two pigeons warn the prince of the deception, they also undertake to punish the stepsisters for attempting to ingratiate themselves with the new couple at the wedding:
When the bridal couple set out for the church, the older sister was on the right,
the younger on the left. Suddenly the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of
them. And as they came back from the church later on the oldest was on the
wedding shoes to the bride. On her part, the bride refuses to wear them, ritualistically claiming that they are too large, and must be stuffed with bank notes in order to make them fit. 270
left and the youngest on the right, and the pigeons pecked out the other eye
from each sister. Thus they were punished with blindness for the rest of their
lives due to their wickedness and malice. (Grimm 114)
As opposed to the ending of Perrault’s version, where the stepsisters beg for forgiveness and
Cinderella more than willingly bestows it on them by having them marry two great noblemen
of the court, “Cinderella” ends with “an eye for an eye” scene of revenge, which is performed
by the magic helpers in the form of birds. Blindness as a motif is of course also linked to
castration within the psychoanalytic context.
The punishment administered by the birds at the end of the tale leads me to the important role they play throughout, as they appear at three junctures. In the first instance, there is the white bird in the hazel tree, which acts as magic donor. This is followed by the assistance of all the birds under heaven, which allows Cinderella to accomplish her tasks in time in order to go to the ball. Finally, the two pigeons in the hazel tree not only point out the deception to the prince, but also avenge Cinderella at the tale’s end. As I have argued earlier,
the birds can be said to function as displaced extensions of the good object, since some of the
birds in the tale sit in the hazel tree.
Birds have often been associated with the souls of the dead, as Margaret Atwood points
out in a piece written as part of a revisiting of favorite childhood fairy tales. Although
commenting on the theme of birds in “The Juniper Tree” and “Fitcher’s Bird”, where the
protagonists are changed into birds and then return to their original form, some of Atwood’s
observations and associations are pertinent to the birds in “Cinderella” as well. Birds, she
writes, have been associated to souls time and time again, one possible reason being the
airiness, the wings, the singing, their perceived weightlessness (Bernheimer 35). Yet birds,
like all animals in myth and folk tradition, exist in a borderland between the world of the
living and the world of the dead. Drawing on and quoting from the work of Italian historian 271
Carlo Ginzburg, Atwood refers to ancient shamanistic practices of sending the soul in animal
form to visit the world of the dead, either for information useful to the living or in order to
commune again with those departed (Bernheimer 35). Atwood places the bird-transformation
tales by the Brothers Grimm within a much larger structure, where going to the beyond, the
world of the dead, and returning from the beyond, forms the ur-motif, the elementary
narrative nucleus which has accompanied humanity since the beginning of time as a
distinguishing characteristic of human mentality. “No wonder then”, writes Atwood, “that
these bird-stories, these stories of the journey into death and back from it, intrigued me as a
child. They are part of the story that has intrigued us all, as human beings, for much longer
than anyone can remember” (Bernheimer 35-36)
Atwood’s comment on the significance of the bird symbolism in the specific tales provides a point of entry to a Kleinian reading of the birds in “Cinderella”. They are certainly displacements of the good maternal object, and in a sense they do move back and forth from the land of the living to the land of the dead, in that they enable the transition from the primal object, the object of Kleinian matricide, to more integrated psychic states and more complex and integrated symbols of the depressive position, the dead mother’s grave to the tree, to the hearth, to the ball via repetition and triumph. The birds in the tale help Cinderella’s transition from one psychic state to the next, from the hearth to the ball and then to the palace, where the quintessential fairytale wedding takes place. Once the punishment of the stepsisters has taken place, justice has been served and the story has been told. Or, to use Angela Carter’s closing of her “Ashputtle or the Mother’s Ghost:” “‘Now I can go to sleep,’ said the ghost of the mother. ‘Now everything is all right’” (Burning 396). 272
That change from strong personal ambition
to the devotion to something which is above
my own prestige is characteristic of a great
deal of change that went on in the course of
my psychoanalytic life and work. … In spite
of the skepticism which I said was quite
characteristic of a large part of my analytical
life, I have never been hopeless, nor am I
now. It is a mixture of resignation and some
hope that my work will perhaps after all
survive and be a great help to mankind.
(Klein, qtd. in Grosskurth 435)
Epilogue. Klein’s Legacy and the Relevance of the Grimm Tales Today: Transitions
Between 1953 and 1959 Klein worked intermittently on her autobiography, which to date remains unpublished. Grosskurth describes this text as marked by an elderly person’s repetitiveness and idealization of past memories, ultimately trailing off as if Klein were preoccupied with her impending death (on 22 September 1960) (435). It is in her autobiography that Klein expresses the above-quoted hope that her theory remain useful beyond her own lifespan. In this she would not have been disappointed: both during her lifetime and in the years to come Klein’s theory remained a pervasive influence on the scene of British psychoanalysis. Not only did the British Psychoanalytic Society accommodate and offer formal training in Kleinian theory and technique, but her ideas were made accessible to a broader public or broke new ground in many relevant areas of expertise.
Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Adrian Stokes and Esther Bick, for example, were Kleinian or post-Kleinian thinkers whose use and further development of the existing theory impacted 273
the British (and continental) psychoanalytic and cultural scene in various ways. Susan Isaacs
(1885-1948) not only wrote a landmark paper on the nature of Kleinian phantasy, but in her
capacity as teacher and writer of books helped popularize Kleinian notions of children’s
phantasies and their effect on everyday interaction with their environment. She also held an
advisory position in the planning of government policy related to child developmental issues
during the 1930s and after World War II (Sayers 41-45). Joan Riviere’s (1883-1962) landmark essay “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1928), a text often referred to in the context of gender studies, is also written from a Kleinian viewpoint, as Riviere drew attention to the dynamic between external sex-typed behavioral display and internal fears of rage and retribution (Sayers 57). Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) was an art critic who employed Kleinian ideas to explore the value of art as an outwardly light and stable counterpoint to what is often dark and psychologically unstable within (Sayers 69). Esther Bick (1902-1983) introduced mother-infant observation as a means of studying the interaction between the internal and the external world (Sayers 135). 75
Two of the most prominent Kleinians were Hanna Segal (1918-2011) and Wilfred Bion
(1897-1979), while Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), although eventually breaking with the
Kleinians, nevertheless made use of Kleinian theoretical constructs in his work. They all in their own ways extended Klein’s views on the processes of symbolization, including artistic creativity and impact.
As I have demonstrated earlier, it was Hanna Segal who extended Klein’s views on symbolization most considerably and linked the artistic impulse to the impulse to repair, as in
75 Other eminent (post-)Kleinians include Herbert Rosenfeld (1910-1986) who was one of the first psychoanalysts to work with schizophrenic patients (Sayers 91); Frances Tustin (1913-1994) who worked primarily with anorexic and autistic patients (149); and Ronald Britton (1932-), whose theories of “outer loss” revolve around the acknowledgement of our exclusion from our parents’ sexual relationship and are informed by the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats and Rilke (Sayers 193). 274
the depressive position, the internal world shattered by aggressive paranoid-schizoid
impulses: “This is what every major artist does – creates a world” (Segal, Dream 86).76 In
Dream, Phantasy and Art and elsewhere Hanna Segal draws attention to the unconscious resonance of artistic creations, which evoke in the recipient preverbal affects of the most archaic kind, and are primarily symbolic in nature (81). Moreover, much in accordance to the workings of the paranoid-schizoid position where the life and death drives collide, works of art adhere to aesthetic standards of harmony or rhythm yet simultaneously acknowledging and incorporating aspects of ugliness in the result (94).
As we have seen, fairy tales deal primarily with schizophrenic content within the context of a highly integrated product, an artistic creation which very fully symbolizes early infantile anxieties and wishes. As such, they resonate with their audiences’ unconscious, stirring conflicts and phantasies, while simultaneously providing a narrative space in which these can be worked through and ultimately transformed into a narrative. Fairy tales, in other words, can be viewed as textual incarnations of the anxiety and pleasure of the paranoid- schizoid position, as well as the simultaneous symbolic mirroring of the depressive position
(both in the form of sexual love attained, the establishment of a new family unit at the end of a tale, and in the creation of a narrative).
With this in mind it is possible to link fairy tales to Winnicott’s transitional objects and phenomena, as well as with Bion’s relationship between container and contained.
Winnicott’s concepts provide us with a post-Kleinian matrix within which to consider the function and impact of narratives and art in general. In his seminal paper “Transitional
Objects and Transitional Phenomena” Winnicott designates transitional objects and phenomena as intermediate areas allowed to the infant between primary creativity and
76 A good example is the more or less self-contained worlds in works of literary fantasy, for example in the
works of writers such as Tolkien or J.K. Rowling, with reference to whom I began this dissertation. 275
objective reality based on reality testing, as objects or phenomena which provide a neutral
locus of experience which will neither be verified nor challenged (264). This intermediate
area of experience, where it is not necessary to define whether something belongs to internal
or external reality, is retained beyond infantile life in the intense experiencing that belongs to
the arts, religion, imaginative thinking and creative scientific work (Winnicott 264).
Narrative experience can also be compared to Bion’s notion of the container and the contained, a psychic relationship and process structured around the infant-primary caretaker dyad. According to Bion, the infant’s first projections form a primitive means of communication, whereby the infant projects and expels inchoate, concrete feelings experienced as things, such as hunger or pain (H. Segal, Psychoanalysis 90). If the mother’s response alleviates these experiences, the infant reintrojects them modified by understanding.
At the same time the infant introjects the breast that can contain and modify introjections: this modifying breast transforms the unthinkable (what Bion termed “Beta elements”) into the thinkable (“Alpha elements”) (90-91). The introjection of this relationship between the container and contained, along with the introjection of the container, provides the developing infant with mental space, a space wherein one can contain one’s thoughts and feelings and work through them (H. Segal, Psychoanalysis 91).
Both these concepts bring to mind Warner’s comments in relation to the narration of fairy tales during the seventeenth century. She writes:
Behind the old who tell the stories lurk the children they once were, listening, and
with that fantasy there rises the memory of the story teller, the mother,
grandmother or nurse who stood in loco parentis. She brings back the voice heard
in childhood, its mixture of authority and cajolery, its irresistible formative view
of the world. The film theorist Kaja Silverman has called the maternal voice an
“acoustic mirror”, which acts to reflect and mould the child’s developing identity 276
… The testimony of fairy tales as well as the imagined account of their origins
reveals how intense the memory of this voice remained. There are reasons,
psychological as well as social and literary, for the eclipse of the Scheherazade
type of storyteller by the crone figure of Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, or
Gammer Gurton. (Warner, From the Beast 190)
Warner’s description of fairy tales as an “acoustic mirror” held up to children by female
narrators is reminiscent of the primary mother-infant relationship, which is the locus from which individuality and identity emanate. If individual identity, in its conscious aspects and its unconscious phantasies emerges in both pain and bliss from the mother-infant dyad, then social identity (and scholars in other fields, Jack Zipes being the most prolific and well- known among them, have written extensively on the use and exploitation of fairy tales as vehicles of social conditioning) is partly forged (or portrayed as being forged) within a narrative matrix involving maternal or quasi-maternal female narrators and young children.
With the function of fairy tales as textual transitional objects or containers in mind, it is
fitting, I believe, to (re)turn to Klein for her own appraisal of the psychic factors which
contribute to the greatness of some works of art. Klein’s “Some Reflections on The Oresteia”
is a paper published posthumously in 1963, one of the very few pertaining to non-clinical
issues. It is a reading of Aeschylus’ trilogy in terms of the variety of symbolic roles in which
the characters appear (EAG 275). Klein is described by those who knew her as an avid reader
of literature and a keen theatergoer, and the Oresteia paper is a powerful application of
Klein’s views on a literary text, even though the focus is on the exemplification of her own
theory (Rustin, “Klein” 25). In the concluding paragraphs she writes:
The creative artist makes full use of symbols; and the more they serve to
express the conflicts between love and hate, between destructiveness and
reparation, between life and death instincts, the more they approach universal 277
form. He thus condenses the variety of infantile symbols, while drawing on the
full force of emotions and phantasies which are expressed in them … The
connection between symbols and artistic creation has often been discussed, but
my main concern is to establish the link between the earliest infantile
processes and the later productions of the artist. (Klein, EAG 298-99)
Klein attributes universal appeal to two aspects: an underlying binarism in the form of
the structuring of narratives around deeply buried conflicts of drives, and the evocation of
primal, infantile affect which in turn generates symbolization. The diachronic and cross-
cultural appeal of Aeschylus’ dramaturgy, Klein writes, can be attributed to the portrayal of
the gods in a variety of symbolic roles, as well as to Aeschylus’ ability to tap into the
inexhaustible depth of the unconscious when creating rounded characters to appear on stage.
This combination, she proposes, may account for the greatness of many other works of art
(299).
I would like here to focus on the importance of the infantile primary caretaker-infant
relationship which remains a constant and salient feature of (post)Kleinian theory and suggest
a potential link between this and the appeal of fairy tales as a genre. In his reevaluation of
Klein’s opus from a contemporary standpoint, Michael Rustin points out that Klein
developed her theory as an analyst of the second generation, drawing from (and also
challenging) her psychoanalytic fathers (“Klein” 27). However, she also worked within a
gendered matrix as a woman and a mother, a biological and cultural reality vitally important
to the contributions she made to psychoanalysis (28). “Klein’s imaginative brilliance”, continues Rustin, “was to extrapolate from her understanding of the core experience of mothers and infants theoretical conjectures which were radically to change the understanding of human nature” (“Klein” 29). 278
Klein’s insights on the complexity of early infantile life have been confirmed by subsequent research in disciplines such as ethology or evolutionary biology. Patterns of infantile attachment behavior (such as the characteristics which render infants attractive to their mothers or to other caretakers, innate suspicion of strangers or innate sibling rivalry) were essential for survival in hunter-gatherer societies, in which human genetic endowment became more or less fixed, and these remain templates for human behavior today (Rustin,
“Klein” 29-30). Many of Klein’s conjectures concerning infantile mental life were made during the 1920s and were considered fanciful – or even appalling – by many of her contemporaries as well as later thinkers. Yet they seem to be validated by subsequent research in fields other than purely psychological or psychoanalytic. Today, writes Rustin, a paradigm of human development is emerging that is fully relational in nature and links neurological conditions, states of mind and social interaction. This comes into contrast with one-dimensional models of development, irrespective of their relative emphases. While Klein was not the first and only thinker to initiate this paradigm shift, she was certainly one of the earliest and most influential (“Klein” 30).
Rustin, in my view, makes an interesting point in connecting psychic and mental evolution to realities which are socially overdetermined in an astounding multiplicity of ways, when he points out that biological reality must be factored into the evaluation of Klein’s contribution.
With this in mind, and in conjunction with Dundes’s observation on the possible universality of dualist thought as an integral component of fairy tales, I believe it is possible to consider fairy tales as primal narratives. By this I mean narratives that have not only been with us from time immemorial, as Graham Anderson’s work has shown, but whose essential structures and recurring motifs remain remarkably stable despite kaleidoscopic variations occurring across cultures and through time. Fairy tales retain a core structure which renders them (readily) recognizable in a multitude of realizations, indicating their resonance with aspects of psychic 279 development and function as described from a Kleinian point of view. Moreover, they exhibit a protean ability to adapt to external cultural circumstances, functioning, in my view, much like transitional phenomena or containers in the Winnicottian and Bionic senses respectively.
In the introduction to this thesis I used Derek Brewer’s definition of fairy tales as symbolic stories with fairytale protagonists forming a composite of what could be called the total mind of the tales. I would like to add here that fairy tales – the Grimm tales prominently among them – can be considered symbolic in the sense of what poet, artist and analyst
Marilyn Charles describes as “conceptual anchors” (81). Like all symbols, fairy tales, as we have seen, provide release of and relief from anxiety. At the same time, their nature as primarily symbolic narratives allows us to retain an affective distance from the issues incorporated therein, thus allowing us to think more freely about their structuring concerns and imagery, while taming their more anxiety-provoking aspects (Charles 81).
It has been my contention throughout this thesis that fairy tales as symbolic stories function on two levels: their structures and symbols are often (condensed) metaphors for psychic processes, and at the same time, incorporating as they do structures of psychic conflict and reparation, they function as textual containers enabling us to project into them and (re)identify with aspects of our own psyche. Stripped down to their bare essentials, they are structured around tensions generated by primal human conditions: birth, sexuality, aggression and death. Bearing in mind the Kleinian emphasis on the importance of the integration of internal and external reality as indicative of mental health and balance, a process which takes place throughout one’s lifespan and makes itself particularly felt during transitions and crises, fairy tales may well offer an important means of sustaining mental well-being and balance on a quotidian level (and not only at a young age, as Bettelheim pointed out), helping the subject establish a true relation to reality carved out from the “unreal reality” (Klein, LGR 221) of one’s phantasies. 280
As I have claimed in the introduction to this thesis, a reemergence of the fairytale genre
is taking place, with the tales by the brothers Grimm center stage. It should be noted that fairy
tales, in their aforementioned capacity to contain and symbolize conflict, have made their
presence particularly felt in times of historical unrest. They served Perrault and the French
conteuses in their efforts to counter the Ancien Régime and to carve out a space for
themselves as writers and as autonomous individual women. They were collected and
recreated by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in an effort to (re)define, refine and sustain German
national identity during the colossal shift of Romanticism within whose matrix and
repercussions our era’s Weltanschauung was partly created. The Kinder-und Hausmärchen were branded as second only to the Bible before the appalling catastrophe of the Second
World War, only to be considered formative in the atrocities committed by German troops after the war had finished. Appropriated by Walt Disney, fairy tales became both shortly before the War and shortly after it vehicles of ideology considered particularly restrictive for the female members of the audience, while simultaneously broadcasting North American values to cultures well beyond the influence of Western culture. They have been reread and rewritten by writers and poets such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton and
Olga Broumas, who have questioned and redefined aspects of femininity in dialogue with older and new fairy tales.
While writing this dissertation, Europe and the rest of the Western world find themselves in the throes of a crisis which is financial, political and cultural. When swept into the vortex of change, it is difficult to see either clearly or from a long distance, to make sense of the changes occurring, whether they be seismic or simply minor adjustments. Perhaps the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (and the others they implicate in the long trajectory they have taken to reach us even in this crystallized form) have reemerged in just such another moment of transition and crisis, to assist us, both on an individual and on a collective level, to 281 integrate our paranoid and schizoid anxieties and to help us achieve creative solutions and new paths to take into the future. 282
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