Fairy Tales And The Existential Predicament - Bruno Bettelheim

1. How might Bettelheim's ideas help us to understand the purposes of fairy tales?
Bettelheim's ideas help us to understand the purposes of fairytales in many ways. His ideas are represented in both fairytales and stories in The Bloody Chamber, for example in The Bloody Chamber (the title story) at the end the narrator is saved by her mother whereas in the fairy tale it was inspired by (Bluebeard) it is her brothers who save her. What Bettelheim is saying then is that all fairytales lead us to believe that it should always be the man that saves the day because he is superior and that women should not be involved in such things. Also he tells us that children need to have fairytales told to them to help socialize them into believing that it is okay to have bad thoughts. Without these tales, children would grow up naive and unaccustomed to the world. Fairytales are also read to children because then it allows the subtle teachings of what is right and wrong and who is right and wrong in the world, without the ability to tell children this and to help them to understand the big world they live then they would be very innocent and therefore not prepared enough to cope with daily life and what it has to offer.

2. How do Bettelheim's ideas help us to understand the purposes of gothic?
Bettelheim's ideas help us to understand the purposes of gothic in many ways. He leads us to believe that within everybody there is bad, and to repress the badness inside causes it to manifest on the outside. This can be directly applied to the genre of the gothic in many ways because it shows us, subtly, what could happen if the repressed badness comes to the surface. For example, The Bloody Chamber (a gothic text) shows us a lot of ways in which badness is exuded by bad people. The Marquis, even though perceived to be loving and doting from the Narrator's perspective in the first few pages, suddenly becomes this animalistic, leonine man that is controlling and has hints of necrophilia shown throughout his personality. Bettelheim has been able to pinpoint to us the fact that fairy tales are very important in the development of a human, and what a human should grow up to be and behave like. However the theory behind the fairy tales and also be directly related to the need of the gothic; the gothic manages to show it's audience the extreme ends of bad and good, with the use of the traditional stock characters of the 'Byronic Hero' and the 'Damsel in Distress' we are able to see the clear parallels of right and wrong, bad and good. Bettelheim also goes on to say that 'the fairy tale simplifies all situations', and whilst this can be true for the gothic there are also times at which the gothic can be twisted into being a lot more complicated than it appears. Most gothic tales, especially Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, have more subliminal messages that are harder to grasp. So we could say that gothic tales are more so like the 'adult' version of these classic fairy tales that are read to us as children. We are told gothic stories to help us with our adult life and prepare us for the next steps in that journey.

3. Why do you think Angela Carter mixes the fairytale and gothic genres in 'The Bloody Chamber'?
Angela Carter's mix of both the gothic and the fairy tale genre show a clever technique of trying to make these classic stories more relatable for the modern audience. The traditional fairy tales that are read to us before we go to sleep have a sense of 'pristine' about them, the idealistic way of perceiving life (even though they cover dark subjects) and the fact that their dark nature seems sweeter to us as children. Even though we understand the morals at a young age, we only really perceive the 'perfection' in the stories and the beauty of the characters. However, what Carter has done is to show us how twisted these stories are; the fact that women were so repressed in the fact that they only seemed to be there to be a victim for the man to save. The original tales were written in a time where it was completely normal for the role of women to be very inferior and nobody within said society would bat an eyelid at this injustice. What Carter has done however, by mixing the two genres together she has managed to create a subversive look on the role of both man and woman. Seeing the issues that are within all of us and the temptations and desires that are normally repressed. The use of the gothic as well has made it possible for her to leave her stories open ended, with little understanding of the plot of her tales. Her fragmented writing structure that is used throughout the text can be directly related to her use of both of these reality-defying genres. She seems to have had a brain wave with these tales and the endless possibilities of what these genres can do, and how they can make people think.