1. For Dickens’ remarks about “Little Red Riding Hood” and his views of fairy tales, see Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), and Michael C. Kotzin, Dickens and the Fairy Tale (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1972).
2. Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
3. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909). C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).
4. “Jack the Giant Killer” and various other stories in the Jack cycle are printed in Katherine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk Tales, 4 volumes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). British folk tales mentioned in this book can be found there. Another important collection of English fairy tales is that of Joseph Jacobs: English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1890) and More English Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1895).
5. “The mighty hopes that make us men.” A. Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXXXV.
6. The discussion of “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is based on Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
“The Spirit in the Bottle” is one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and published with the title Kinder- und Hausmärchen. This book has been translated many times, but only a few of these translations are true to the original. Among those which are acceptable are: Grimm’s Fairy Tales, New York, Pantheon Books, 1944; and The Grimm’s German Folk Tales, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.
All of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales are discussed in respect to the origins of each story, its different versions all over the world, its relation to other legends and fairy tales, etc., in Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols., Hildesheim, Olms, 1963.
“The Spirit in the Bottle” illustrates how parental attitudes induce a child to engage in fantasies about gaining powers which will make him superior to his father. The story’s hero has had to leave school because of the family’s poverty. He offers to help his poor woodcutter father with his work, but the father thinks little of his son’s abilities and tells him: “That’s too hard work for you; you are not accustomed to such strenuous labor; you can’t bear it.” After they have been working all morning, the father suggests that they rest and eat their noon meal. The son says that he prefers to walk about the forest and look for some birds’ nests, at which the father exclaims, “Oh, you jackanapes, why do you want to run around? Afterwards you will be so tired you won’t be able to lift your arm.” Thus, the father belittles his son twice: first, by doubting his ability to do hard work; and, even after the son has displayed his stamina, by contemptuously dismissing his ideas about how to spend the resting time. After such an experience, what normal pubertal boy would not embark on daydreams about showing his father to be wrong, and proving that he is much better than his parent imagines?
The fairy tale makes this fantasy come true. As the son walks about looking for birds’ nests, he hears a voice that says, “Let me out!” Thus he finds the spirit in the bottle, which, however, at first threatens to destroy him, in retaliation for having been incarcerated for so long. The boy cleverly induces the spirit to return into the bottle, much as the fisherman does in the Arabian Nights tale, and releases him only after being rewarded with a rag, one end of which heals all wounds, while the other changes everything rubbed by it into silver. By turning things into silver, the boy provides himself and his father with a good living, and because “he could heal all wounds, he became the most famous physician in the whole world.”
The motif of the evil spirit locked up in a bottle goes back to very ancient Judean-Persian legends according to which King Solomon often imprisoned disobeying or heretic spirits in iron caskets, copper flasks, or wineskins, and dropped these into the sea. That “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is in part derived from this tradition is shown by the Jinny telling the fisherman of his rebellion against Solomon, who had as punishment shut him up in the bottle and thrown it into the sea.
In “The Spirit in the Bottle,” this ancient motif has merged with two different traditions. One, though itself traceable ultimately to the legends of King Solomon, is a medieval account concerning the devil, who is similarly incarcerated by some holy man, or else freed by him and forced to serve his liberator. The second tradition originates in tales about a historical person: Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, a renowned German-Swiss physician of the sixteenth century whose allegedly miraculous cures stimulated the European imagination for centuries.
According to one of these stories, Paracelsus hears a voice coming out of a fir tree which calls his name. He recognizes it as the voice of the devil which, in the form of a spider, is locked in a tiny hole in the tree. Paracelsus offers to free the devil if it will give him medicine which cures all sickness, and a tincture which changes everything into gold. The devil complies, but then wants to rush off to destroy the holy man who had incarcerated it. To prevent this, Paracelsus doubts aloud that something as big as the devil could turn itself into something as small as a spider. The devil, to show that it can do so, changes back into a spider and is again locked up in the tree by Paracelsus. This story, in turn, goes back to a much older one about a sorcerer named Virgilius (Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.).
7. The most comprehensive enumerations of fairy-tale motifs, including that of the giant or spirit in the bottle, are those presented by Antti A. Aarne, The Types of the Folktale (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961), and Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 volumes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955).
In Thompson’s index, the spirit being tricked into making itself small to return into the bottle, etc., is motifs D1240, D2177.1, R181, K717, and K722. It would be tedious to give these data for all the fairy-tale motifs mentioned in this book, particularly since the distribution of a particular motif can be easily ascertained from these two reference works.
8. The discussion of the myth of Hercules and of all other Greek myths follows their rendering in Gustav Schwab, Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946).
9. Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958); Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). See also Paul Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles (Paris, 1923), and Jan de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Märchen, besonders in seinem Verhältnis zu Heldensage und Mythos (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications No. 150, 1954).
10. A collection of articles discussing fairy tales on a depth-psychological basis which has the merit of adequately representing the various schools of thought can be found in Wilhelm Laiblin, Märchenforschung und Tiefenpsychologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969). It also contains a reasonably complete bibliography.
11. There is as yet no systematic discussion of fairy tales from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Freud published two short articles in 1913 dealing with this topic: “The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” The Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids” play an important role in Freud’s famous “History of an Infantile Neurosis,” which has become known as “The Wolf-Man.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953 ff.), volumes 12, 17.
Fairy tales are referred to in many other psychoanalytic writings, too numerous to enumerate here, but almost always only in cursory form, such as in Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1946). From among the many papers dealing more specifically with fairy tales from a Freudian viewpoint, the following may be mentioned: Otto Rank, Psychoanalytische Beiträge zur Mythenforschung (Vienna: Deuticke, 1919); Alfred Winterstein, “Die Pubertätsriten der Mädchen und ihre Spuren im Märchen,” Imago, Vol. 14 (1928).
In addition, a few fairy tales were discussed psychoanalytically—for example, Steff Bornstein, “The Sleeping Beauty,” Imago, Vol. 19 (1933); J. F. Grant Duff, “Snow White,” ibid., vol. 20 (1934); Lilla Veszy-Wagner, “Little Red Riding Hood on the Couch,” The Psychoanalytic Forum, vol. 1 (1966); Beryl Sandford, “Cinderella,” ibid., vol. 2 (1967). Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language (New York: Rinehart, 1951), makes some references to fairy tales, particularly to “Little Red Riding Hood.”
12. Fairy tales are treated much more comprehensively in the writings of Jung and Jungian analysts. Unfortunately, little of this vast literature has been translated into English. Typical for the approach of Jungian psychoanalysts to fairy tales is Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales (New York: Spring Publications, 1970).
Probably the best example of the analysis of a famous fairy tale from the Jungian point of view is Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche (New York: Pantheon, 1956).
The most complete discussion of fairy tales from a Jungian frame of reference is to be found in the three volumes of Hedwig von Beit, Symbolik des Märchens and Gegensatz und Erneuerung im Märchen (Bern: A. Francke, 1952 and 1956).
An intermediate position is taken by Julius E. Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (Springfield: Charles Thomas, 1963).
13. For different versions of “The Three Little Pigs,” see Briggs, op. cit. The discussion of this tale is based on its earliest published form, printed in J. O. Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London, c. 1843).
Only in some of the later renderings of the story do the two little pigs survive, which robs the tale of much of its impact. In some variations the pigs are given names, interfering with the child’s ability to see them as representations of the three stages of development. On the other hand, some renderings spell out that it was the seeking of pleasure which prevented the littler ones from building more substantial and thus safer homes, as the littlest one builds his house out of mud because it feels so pleasant to wallow in it, while the second uses cabbage to build his abode because he loves eating it.
14. The quotation describing animistic thinking is from Ruth Benedict’s article “Animism” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
15. For the various stages of animistic thinking in the child, and the dominance it exerts up to the age of twelve, see Jean Piaget, The Child’s Concept of the World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929).
16. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is a Norwegian fairy tale. A translation can be found in Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, c. 1889).
17. “Beauty and the Beast” is a very old story, existing in many different versions. Among the best known is that of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, to be found in Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).
“The Frog King” is one of the Brothers Grimm’s stories.
18. A summarization of Piaget’s theories can be found in J. H. Flavell, The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963).
19. For a discussion of the goddess Nut, see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). “As vault of heaven she covers her creatures on earth like a hen sheltering her chicks.” How she was depicted can be seen on the lid of the Egyptian sarcophagus of Uresh-Nofer (XXX Dynasty) in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
20. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
21. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” op. cit.
22. While I do not know of any studies showing how distracting the illustrations in fairy stories are, this is amply demonstrated for other reading matter. See, for example, S. J. Samuels, “Attention Process in Reading: The Effect of Pictures on the Acquisition of Reading Responses,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58 (1967); and his review of many other studies of this problem: “Effects of Pictures on Learning to Read, Comprehension, and Attitude,” Review of Educational Research, vol. 40 (1970).
23. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
24. There is considerable literature on the consequences of dream deprivation—for example, Charles Fisher, “Psychoanalytic Implications of Recent Research on Sleep and Dreaming,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 13 (1965); and Louis J. West, Herbert H. Janszen, Boyd K. Lester, and Floyd S. Cornelison, Jr., “The Psychosis of Sleep Deprivation,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 96 (1962).
25. Chesterton, op. cit.
26. Sigmund Freud, “The Family Romance of the Neurotic,” op. cit., vol. 10.
27. “The Three Wishes” was originally a Scottish tale, reported by Briggs, op. cit. As mentioned, with appropriate variations the motif is found all over the world. For example, in an Indian tale a family is granted three wishes. The wife desires great beauty and uses the first wish to gain it, after which she elopes with a prince. The angry husband wishes her changed into a pig; the son must use the third and last wish to restore her as she was originally.
28. The same sequence of events could also be viewed as symbolically expressing that as the danger of giving in to id pressures decreases—the reduction of animal ferocity as represented by tiger and wolf to the tameness as symbolized by the deer—so the warning voices of ego and superego lose some of the power to control the id. But since in the tale brother tells sister in regard to his determination to drink from the third brook, “I must drink, whatever you say; my thirst is just too great,” the interpretation given in the text seems closer to the underlying meaning of the story.
29. The discussion of “Sindbad the Sailor and Sindbad the Porter” follows Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
30. For the history of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and particularly about the meaning of the number 1001, see von der Leyen, Die Welt des Märchens, 2 volumes (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederich, 1953).
31. For the tale that forms the framework within which the 1001 stories are put, see Emmanuel Cosquin, “Le Prologue-Cadre des Mille et Une Nuits” in his Études Folkloriques (Paris: Champion, 1922).
For the frame story of Thousand and One Nights I followed John Payne’s translation in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (London: Printed for Subscribers Only, 1914).
32. For the ancient Egyptian tale, see Emanuel de Rougé, “Notice sur un manuscrit égyptien,” Revue archéologique, vol. 8 (1852); W. F. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, vol. 2 (1895); and Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.
33. The various renderings of the tale of “The Two Brothers” are discussed by Kurt Ranke, “Die zwei Brüder,” Folk Lore Fellow Communications, vol. 114 (1934).
34. It is quite unusual for a fairy tale to be so specific in regard to place names. Those who have studied this problem have come to the conclusion that when a place name is mentioned, this suggests that the tale is somehow connected with an event that actually took place. For example, in the city of Hameln at one time a group of children may have been abducted, which led to the story of the Pied Piper, which tells about the disappearance of children in this town. It is a morality tale, but hardly a fairy story, since it lacks a resolution and has no happy ending. But such a story with a historical reference exists essentially only in one form.
The wide distribution of the motif of “The Three Languages” and the many different versions in which it exists speak against a historical nucleus of this tale. On the other hand, it makes good sense that a story which begins in Switzerland stresses the importance of learning three different languages, and of the need to integrate them into a higher unit, since four language groups form the population of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic. Since one of these languages—in all likelihood German—was the native tongue of the hero, it makes good sense that he is sent to three different places and there learns other languages. What the Swiss listener to the story may overtly comprehend as the necessity of persons speaking different languages to form a higher unity—Switzerland—also refers on a covert level to the need for inner integration of the diverse tendencies residing within oneself.
35. For the custom of blowing a feather into the air to reach a decision on where to go, see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit., vol. 2.
36. Tolkien, op. cit.
37. See, for example, the story of Joey in Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (New York: Free Press, 1967).
38. Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York: International Universities Press, 1952) and The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1954).
39. Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could (Eau Claire, Wisconsin: E. M. Hale, 1954).
40. A. A. Milne’s poem “Disobedience” in When We Were Very Young (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924).
41. The name of the horse Falada suggests an ancient origin of the tale. It is derived from the name of Roland’s horse, which in the Chanson de Roland is called Valantin, Valantis, Valatin, etc.
Even more ancient is the motif of the talking horse. Tacitus reported that among the Germans horses were presumed to be able to predict the future and were used as oracles. Among the Scandinavian nations, the horse is viewed in similar ways.
42. For “Roswal and Lillian,” see Briggs, op. cit.
The motif of the true bride being supplanted by an evil usurper who is finally unmasked and punished, but not before the true bride has undergone severe trials which test her character, is worldwide. (See P. Arfert, Das Motiv von der unterschobenen Braut in der internationalen Erzählungsliteratur [Rostock: Dissertation, 1897].) Details vary both within a culture and between countries, as is true for fairy tales in general, since local features and customs are introduced into the basic motif.
43. A few lines from the same cycle testify once more to the formative impact of fairy tales on poets. Heine, recollecting fairy tales, writes:
My old nurse’s tales, how sweetly they ring,
How dear are the thoughts they inspire!
and:
When the song I recall, the remembrance too
Of my dear old nurse never ceases.
I see once more her swarthy face,
With all its wrinkles and creases.
In the district of Münster she was born,
And knew, in all their glory,
Many popular songs and wondrous tales,
And many a wild ghost story.
The Poems of Heine (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1916).
44. For these other versions of “The Goose Girl,” as for additional information on all other stories of the Brothers Grimm, see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.
45. Tolkien, op. cit.
46. Mary J. Collier and Eugene L. Gaier, “Adult Reactions to Preferred Childhood Stories,” Child Development, vol. 29 (1958).
47. Chesterton, op. cit.
Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1911).
48. For the Turkish fairy tale, particularly the story of Iskender, see August Nitschke, Die Bedrohung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1972). This book discusses various other aspects of fairy tales, particularly how the threat is part of the striving for self-realization and with it for freedom; and the role of the helpful friend.
Vom Vater hab’ich die Statur,
Des Lebens ernstes Führen,
Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur
Und Lust zu fabulieren.
Goethe, Zahme Xenien, vi.
50. The manner in which Goethe’s mother told fairy tales to her son is described by Bettina von Arnim in Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Jena: Diederichs, 1906).
51. “Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen”—Goethe, Faust.
52. Charles Perrault, Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, avec des Moralitez (Paris, 1697). The first English translation which appeared in print was by Robert Samber, Histories or Tales of Past Times (London, 1729). The best known of these tales have been reprinted in Iona and Peter Opie, op. cit. They can also be found in Andrew Lang’s fairy books—“Little Red Riding Hood” is included among the tales of The Blue Fairy Book, op. cit.
53. There is a considerable literature dealing with Perrault and his fairy tales. The most useful work—comparable to what Bolte and Polivka did for the Brothers Grimm’s tales—is Marc Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
Andrew Lang, Perrault’s Popular Tales (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1888). There he writes: “If Little Red Riding Hood ended, in all variants, where it ends in Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the machinery of the story is derived from ‘the time when beasts spoke,’ or were believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known that in the German form, Little Red Cap (Brothers Grimm 26), the tale by no means ends with the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her grandmother are resuscitated, ‘the wolf it was that died.’ This may either have been the original ending, omitted by Perrault because it was too wildly impossible for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or children may have insisted on having the story ‘turn out well.’ In either case the German Märchen preserves one of the most widely spread mythical incidents in the world—the reappearance of living people out of the monster that has devoured them.”
54. Two of these French versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” are published in Melusine, vol. 3 (1886–7) and vol. 6 (1892–3).
55. Ibid.
56. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1937). T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Nightwood, ibid.
57. Fairy Tales Told Again, illustrated by Gustave Doré (London: Cassel, Petter and Galpin, 1872). The illustration is reprinted in Opie and Opie, op. cit.
58. For alternate versions of “Little Red Cap,” see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.
59. Gertrude Crampton, Tootle the Engine (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), a Little Golden Book.
60. For the various Jack stories, including the different versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” see Briggs, op. cit.
61. For the various myths forming the cycle which begins with Tantalus, centers on Oedipus, and ends with The Seven Against Thebes and the death of Antigone, see Schwab, op. cit.
62. For the various versions of “Snow White,” see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.
63. The discussion of “Snow White” is based on its rendering by the Brothers Grimm.
64. “The Young Slave” is the Eighth Diversion of the Second Day of Basile’s Pentamerone, which was first printed in 1636 (The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile [London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1932]).
65. For a discussion of why in the unconscious the number three often stands for sex, see p. 219 ff.
66. Dwarfs and their meaning in folklore is discussed in the article “Zwerge und Riesen,” and in many other articles found in Hans Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1927–42). It also contains interesting articles on fairy tales and on fairytale motifs.
67. Anne Sexton, Transformations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).
68. For the first printed version of “The Three Bears,” see Briggs, op. cit.
69. Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).
70. For Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant,” see Perrault, op. cit. English translations of “The Sleeping Beauty” are in Lang, The Blue Fairy Book, and Opie and Opie, op. cit. For the Brothers Grimm’s tale “Dornröschen,” see Brothers Grimm, op. cit.
71. Basile, op. cit. “Sun, Moon and Talia” is the Fifth Diversion of the Fifth Day of the Pentamerone.
72. For the precursors of “The Sleeping Beauty,” see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit., and Soriano, op. cit.
73. For the fact that “Cinderella” is the best known of all fairy tales, see Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary of Folklore (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950). Also Opie and Opie, op. cit.
For its being the best loved of fairy stories, see Collier and Gaier, op. cit.
74. For the earliest Chinese story of the “Cinderella” type, see Arthur Waley, “Chinese Cinderella Story,” Folk-Lore, vol. 58 (1947).
75. For the history of footwear, including sandals and slippers, see R. T. Wilcox, The Mode of Footwear (New York, 1948).
For an even more detailed discussion, including the edict of Diocletian, see E. Jaefert, Skomod och skotillverkning fran medeltiden vara dagar (Stockholm, 1938).
76. For the origin and meaning of “Aschenbrödel,” and for many other details of the story, see Bolte and Polivka, op. cit., and Anna B. Rooth, The Cinderella Cycle (Lund: Gleerup, 1951).
77. Barnes, op. cit.
78. B. Rubenstein, “The Meaning of the Cinderella Story in the Development of a Little Girl,” American Imago, vol. 12 (1955).
79. “La Gatta Cenerentola” is the Sixth Diversion of the First Day of Basile’s Pentamerone, op. cit.
80. The idea of letting the lid of a chest fall on a person’s neck to kill him is extremely rare, although it appears in one of the Brothers Grimm’s stories, “The Juniper Tree,” in which an evil stepmother thus kills her stepson. It probably is of historical origin. Gregory (St. Gregorius) of Tours in his History of the Franks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916) tells that Queen Fredegund (who died in 597) tried to kill her own daughter Rigundis in this manner, but the daughter was saved by servants rushing to her aid. The reason Queen Fredegund tried to kill her daughter was that Rigundis asserted that she should be in her mother’s place because she was “better”—that is, born as a king’s daughter, while her mother had started life as a chambermaid. Thus, oedipal arrogance of a daughter—“I am better suited than my mother for her place”—leads to the mother’s oedipal revenge by trying to eliminate the daughter who wished to replace her.
81. “La mala matrè” in A. de Nino, Usi e costumi abruzzesi, vol. 3: Fiabe (Florence, 1883–7).
82. Various tales in the center of which stands the Cinderella motif are discussed in Marian R. Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants (London: David Nutt, 1893).
83. This can be illustrated by a famous error which occurred during the early days of psychoanalysis. Freud, on the basis of what his female patients told him while in psychoanalysis—their dreams, free associations, recollections—concluded that as small children they all had been seduced by their fathers, and that this was the cause of their neuroses. Only when patients whose early life histories were well known to him had similar memories—although he knew that no such seduction had occurred in these cases—did Freud realize that paternal seduction could not possibly be as frequent as he had been led to believe. It then became apparent to him—and since then it has been corroborated in innumerable instances—that what his female patients recollected was not something that had happened, but what they wished would have happened. As young girls, during their oedipal period, they had desired that their fathers would be deeply in love with them and so wish to have them for wives, or at least lovers. They had wished it so passionately that they vividly imagined that it was so. Later, when they recalled the content of these fantasies, it was with such intensity of feeling that they were convinced that this could only be because of events which actually had taken place. They themselves had done nothing to provoke the paternal seduction, so they claimed and believed; it had been all their fathers’ doing. In short, they had been as innocent as Cinderella.
After Freud had realized that these memories of seduction did not refer to things that had happened in reality, but only to fantasies, and therefore helped his patients to probe more deeply into their unconscious, then it became apparent that not only had a wish been taken for its having been fulfilled, but that the patients when little girls had been far from innocent. They had not only desired to be seduced and imagined that this was so, but also had tried to seduce their fathers in their childish ways—for example, by displaying themselves or in many other ways courting Father’s love. (Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis,” etc., op. cit., vols. 20, 22.)
84. For example in “Cap o’ Rushes,” Briggs, op. cit.
85. Perrault’s “Cinderella” is reprinted in Opie and Opie, op. cit. Unfortunately, as in nearly all other English translations, the verses setting forth the story’s moral are not included.
For the Brothers Grimm’s “Aschenputtel,” see Grimm, op. cit.
86. “Rashin Coatie,” Briggs, op. cit.
87. Stith Thompson, Motif Index …, op. cit., and The Folk Tale (New York: Dryden Press, 1946).
88. For the ritual meaning of ashes, and for the role of ashes in purifications and in mourning, see the article “Ashes” in James Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Scribner, 1910). For the meaning and uses of ashes in folklore, and its role in fairy tales, see the article “Asche” in Bächtold-Stäubli, op. cit.
89. “Rashin Coatie,” or a tale much like it, is mentioned in the Complaynt of Scotland (1540), edited by Murray (1872).
90. This Egyptian tale is reported in René Basset, Contes populaires d’Afrique (Paris: Guilmoto, 1903).
91. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, Psychological Issues, vol. 1 (1959) (New York: International Universities Press, 1959).
92. In an Icelandic “Cinderella” story, the dead mother appears to the mistreated heroine in a dream and provides her with a magic object which keeps her going until a prince finds her shoe, etc. Jon Arnason, Folk Tales of Iceland (Leipzig, 1862–4) and Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
93. For the various tasks asked of Cinderella, see Rooth, op. cit.
94. Soriano, op. cit.
95. This ridiculing of the Cinderella story he just told is highlighted by what Soriano calls “the bitter irony” of the second morality with which Perrault concludes his tale. In it he says that while it is advantageous to possess intelligence, courage, and other good qualities, these do not amount to much (“ce seront choses vaines”) if one does not have godfathers or godmothers to make them count.
96. Cox, op. cit.
97. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954).
98. The story of Rhodope is told by Strabo in The Geography of Strabo, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1932).
99. Rooth, op. cit.
100. Raymond de Loy Jameson, Three Lectures on Chinese Folklore (Peiping: Publications of the College of Chinese Studies, 1932).
Aigremont, “Fuss- und Schuh-Symbolik und Erotik,” Anthropopyteia, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1909).
101. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,” from the poem “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” in William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956).
102. One might rightly be worried, for example, if a child consciously recognized that the golden slipper could be a symbol for the vagina, as one would be concerned if he consciously understood the sexual content of the well-known nursery rhyme:
Cock a doodle do!
My dame has lost her shoe;
My master’s lost his fiddle stick;
And they don’t know what to do!
And this although the slang meaning of the first word is by now quite well known even to children. In the rhyme the shoe is used in the same symbolic meaning as in “Cinderella.” If the child understood what this nursery rhyme is all about, he would indeed “not know what to do!” And the same would be true if he understood—as no child does—all the hidden meanings of “Cinderella,” only some of which I have tried to spell out, and even those only to a certain degree.
103. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, op. cit.; Identity, Youth, and Crisis, op. cit.
104. “Cinderella” stories in which a ring and not a slipper leads to her recognition are (among others) “Maria Intaulata” and “Maria Intauradda,” both in Archivio per lo Studio delle Tradizioni Populari, vol. 2 (Palermo, 1882), and “Les Souliers,” in Auguste Dozon, Contes Albanais (Paris, 1881).
105. “Beauty and the Beast” is now best known in the version of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, first translated into English in The Young Misses Magazine in 1761. It is reprinted in Opie and Opie, op. cit.
106. The wide distribution of the motif of the animal groom is discussed in Lutz Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974).
107. For the Kaffir story, see Dictionary of Folklore, op. cit., and G. M. Teal, Kaffir (London: Folk Society, 1886).
108. Die Märchen der Weltliteratur, Malaiische Märchen, Paul Hambruch, editor (Jena: Diederichs, 1922).
109. Leo Frobenius, Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen aus Afrika (Jena: Diederichs, 1921–8), vol. 10.
110. Opie and Opie, op. cit.
111. “The Well of the World’s End” in Briggs, op. cit.
112. For the original version of “The Frog Prince” which the Brothers Grimm failed to publish, see Joseph Lefftz, Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Urfassung (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1927).
113. Briggs, op. cit.
114. Sexton, op. cit.
115. For “Cupid and Psyche,” see Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche, op. cit. For the many versions of the story, see Ernst Tegethoff, Studien zum Märchentypus von Amor und Psyche (Bonn: Schroeder, 1922).
A good enumeration of fairy tales of this motif is presented in the discussion of the Brothers Grimm’s tale “The Singing, Hopping Lark” in Bolte and Polivka, op. cit.
116. Robert Graves, Apuleius Madaurensis: The Transformations of Lucius (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951).
117. “The Enchanted Pig” in Andrew Lang, The Red Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), and “The Enchanted Pig” in Mite Kremnitz, Rumänische Märchen (Leipzig, 1882).
118. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” in Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book, op. cit.
119. Here we may recognize once more an allusion to the loss of the hymen, the sacrifice of a small part of the woman’s body in her first experience with sex.
The bones of chickens are such an unlikely magic object, and such a farfetched means of climbing a height, that they seem like a projection backward of the requirement to give up the little finger, or a device to make the idea of its being used to provide the last rung of the ladder more convincing. But, as mentioned in the discussion of “Cinderella,” and one of the many symbolic meanings of the wedding ceremony, for finding complete fulfillment in marriage, the woman must relinquish the wish for a phallus of her own, and be satisfied with that of her husband. Cutting off her little finger, far from signifying symbolic self-castration, may suggest what fantasies the female must give up to be happy the way she is, so that she can be happy with her husband the way he is.
120. “Bluebeard,” Perrault, op. cit. The first English translation is reprinted in Opie and Opie, op. cit.
Long before Perrault there are tales in which entering a forbidden chamber has far-reaching consequences. This motif appears, for example, in the “Tale of the Third Calender” in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and in the Pentamerone, where it is the Sixth Tale of the Fourth Day.
121. “Mr. Fox” in Briggs, op. cit.
122. For “Beauty and the Beast,” see Opie and Opie, op. cit.