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In turning Maleficent into a feminist morality play, Disney subverts the nature of fairy tales and suppresses any sense of magic and moral logic.
For the child—and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us—fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world.
As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim stated in his extraordinary study, The Uses of Enchantment (1976), “the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in the greatest human task, that of finding meaning for one’s life.”
Children who are familiar with fairy tales understand that these stories speak to them in the language of symbols—not the reality of everyday life.
Children know that the fairy stories are not “real,” yet the real events in their lives become important through the symbolic meaning that is attached to them.
They know that the events described in these stories happened “once upon a time,” in a “world far from here.”
The old castles, the magical fairies, and the enchanted forests existed in a unique fairy-tale time—a time described in the opening lines of the Brothers Grimm’s “The Frog King” as a time that was long, long ago, “when wishing still helped.”
Yet these stories are still important.
In fact, they are probably more important than ever as we try to find meaning in our increasingly chaotic lives, and as increasing numbers of children are no longer raised within a community in which Church provides a source of meaning.
Fairy tales speak directly to the child at a time when the child’s major challenge is to bring some order to the inner chaos of his or her mind.
These stories help children understand themselves better—a necessary condition for achieving some congruence between their perceptions and the external world. Continue reading
Source
- Anne Hendershott in The Catholic World Report
Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
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