Children's Literature

Since Bruno Bettelheim reminded us in 1976 that "fairy tales depict in imaginary and symbolic form the essential steps in growing up and achieving an independent existence" (73), feminists have turned to myths, fairy tales, and children's stories to discover the gender-related developmental paradigms that Bettelheim leaves out of his analysis. When we do so, we find emblematic representations of gender stereotypes; as Ellen Rose puts it: "In fairy tales, boys are clever, resourceful and brave. They leave home and slay giants, outwit ogres, solve riddles, find fortunes. Girls, on the other hand, stay home and sweep hearths, are patient, enduring, self-sacrificing. . . . They marry and live happily ever after" (209, 210). The tales' economical form and clearcut message has tremendous usefulness for the feminist critic. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, begin their analysis of a "feminist poetics" with a reading of "Snow White," stating that "myths and fairy tales often both state and enforce culture's sentences with greater accuracy than more sophisticated literary texts" (36). As we search for an understanding of female oppression in the familial and social structures that define our culture, as we consider models of female responses to social and psychological constraints, we have a great deal to learn by reading fairy tales.

Theorists of narrative also traditionally turn to fairy tales to illustrate, by means of these paradigmatic and economical texts, how the structures of narrative function. Thus, in his recent book Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Peter Brooks offers a new psychoanalytically based theory of narrative. In this model, plot is the "logic and dynamic of narrative" and its primary attribute is its inherent temporality. Brooks turns to a Grimms' fairy tale, "Allerleirauh" or "All-Kinds-of-Fur," in order to illustrate how temporal unfolding operates to reinforce narrative's function of understanding and explanation. His discussion, a purely formal, narratological analysis of the tale, is very instructive for the feminist critic for, [End Page 163] through Brooks's reading, we can discover not how fairy tales represent women, but how analyses of narrative form can contribute to "culture's sentences."

Brooks summarizes the story of a queen who, before her death, extracts the king's promise that he will not remarry a woman who does not equal her in beauty, a king who can find no one but his own daughter to fit this description, and a princess who, to avoid marrying her father, makes several demands she hopes he cannot meet and, when he does, resorts to fleeing, disguised in a coat made of the furs of a thousand animals. After she serves as a kitchen maid in another kingdom, her beauty is discovered by its young king, who marries her.

For Brooks, the tale offers a perfect example of narrative functioning. Typically, the story "takes on the central issues of culture—incest, the need for exogamy—without commentary" (9). In its progression through several triply repetitive actions (she asks for three dresses, one like the sun, one like the moon, one like the stars; she appears at the king's ball three times; and she cooks into the king's soup three objects brought from home), the story, according to Brooks's reading, "works through the problem of desire gone wrong and brings it to its cure" (9). Temporal progression and generational transmission are both worked out not discursively but in the indirect form of "thinking" that narrative, especially in its emblematic fairy-tale form, exemplifies. "Like a number of Grimms' tales," Brooks asserts, "it seems to ask the question, 'Why do girls grow up, leave their homes and their fathers, and marry other men?'" (9).

In Brooks's reading of this tale, a tale he takes to be an example of narrative functioning in a much broader sense, the subject of desire, therefore the protagonist, is the father. It is his desire that has gone wrong and must be cured; it is he who must hand on his knowledge and possession to another, and presumably younger, king. The narrative model developed here is oedipal and the daughter...