Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world
16-20
July 2001 The University of Melbourne, Australia
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Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world |
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In 1999 I supervised an MA student called Linette
Wallbank whose project was a ‘research essay’ of 12 000 words based on a group
of fairy tales of type AaTh425A (Tales of the Animal Bridegroom). The
essay was a comparison of the rather unusual role of the heroine in these tales
to that of the ‘hero’ of myth and legend described earlier in the century by
Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, and Joseph Campbell. Wallbank's comparison, using three
literary (and one film) versions of AaTh425A produced for children, proved
interesting and produced a worthwhile essay, but even more interesting to me
was Wallbank's idea of fairytale. Her expectation that a fairy tale is a
parable of individual growth and self-fulfilment - and her parallel expectation
of personal development from working on fairy tale - was the origin of her
interest in the topic and stimulated her work on it.
What is the reason for the success of this widespread idea of the fairy tale,
associated, today, with such books as Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of
Enchantment or Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run with the Wolves?
Academics who work on fairy tale are often made nervous by late
twentieth-century approaches to fairy tale via ‘psychological health’ and
‘personal growth’. Nevertheless, Wallbank's - and others' - readings of fairy
tales in such contexts carry conviction, can be illuminating, and certainly
merit attention.
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