An Impossible Project

Robert Darnton—Although I support, in spirit, his project and methodology, there is from the selection in "The Meaning of Mother Goose" to be analyzed through it. Apart from briefly explaining his methodology, in cursory manner to be sure, Darnton does relatively little aside from express the futility of the psychoanalytic method of analysis and show how, in two particular cases, it failed—a project which I have addressed elsewhere and verified*. This shortcoming is, of course, through no fault of his own but that of the collector, Maria Tatar, and her motivation for including the excerpt, which, as demonstrated by its proximity to the Bettelheim selections and the limitations of the content, was clearly to offer an academic contrast to and argument against the psychoanalytic analysis of fairy tales.

His explication of the project of Aarne and Thompson was a very worth while and important to the understanding of folk tales as well as the way that they are interpreted from a folklorist's perspective; however, there is great difficulty and subjectivity in the project of comparative analysis in order to find the important or relevant aspects of a given group of people. Problems in this approach arise from a few primary sources, which must be addressed.
First, the use of fairy tales as a medium through which to understand a culture, although it recognizes fairy tales as dynamic, fails to respect the dynamic, incongruous nature of a culture, resulting from the use of an article to help define a culture at a given time even though the artifact is of far more ancient origins. This form of analysis runs the risk of attributing achronistic details to a specific snapshot of a culture at a specific time—assuming that the cultural artifacts are present and correctly interpreted. This undermines the aim of the project and reduces the ability to infer cultural patterns in the motifs and symbols.
Second, the differences in tales' versions, however clear they are, cannot be directly translated into cultural difference. This process is a very subjective process and makes almost impossible any ability to verify the conclusions drawn.

The real productivity of this process is in analyzing the effects of literary tradition on the oral tradition of the fairy tale genre and vice versa. By analyzing tales that were not directly influenced by the literary fairy tale, the intent and purpose of the author of the literary fairy tale, as well as his/her society's biases or projects, become clear. Of course, it must be taken still with a grain of salt, since the author of a tale is not always indicative of the society as a whole, and quite frequently is the counterculture's response to the mainstream. These distinctions are important to note, though hard to decipher without a very clear a priori context being established.



*See "Psychoanalysis: What Everyone Knows and Has Heard Repeatedly"