Skip to main content

Fairy tales at the British Library

The British Library hosts an exhibition on fairy tales, which brings to the fore the common elements of folk tales across cultures, such as the fable as a way of advising the reader about how to live their lives, the plot as the battle between good and evil, magical powers as a way to transcend the limitations of human agency, and transformations as a reflection on identity.


The Beast, Belle and her father
in the classic tale of The Beauty and the Beast

The exhibition starts with editions of the works by Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered many folk tales from friends and family and put them in writing, preparing versions for adults and for children. Stories include Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Perrault lived in France over 300 years ago and he is attributed Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty.


Edition of Brothers Grimm fairy tales


One section of the exhibition concerns villains, and features prominently giants, goblins, stepmothers, wolves, dragons, lions, and witches. Some villains are ill-intentioned humans, some are talking animals, and some are monsters. The wolf is a very common villains, as the forest or the wood is typically a place of danger where main characters get lost or need to face challenges. The big bad wolf appears in The Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Wood, and many other stories, reflecting the fact that at the time wolves were considered scary predators.


The Wolf


There is a wonderful Japanese edition of Girl with the Kneading Bowl, a version of Cinderella, where young Hachikazuki is mistreated by her stepfamily. Before dying, her mother had given her a bowl to wear on her head to hide her beauty and the bowl is removed only when the girl marries.


Girl with the Kneading Bowl

In many contemporary fairy tales, traditional villains are portrayed as good characters with plenty of redeeming features, which shows that we should not judge a book by its cover. One example is that of the good witch: in Disney’s version of the Ice Queen story, Elsa is not a selfish character but a hero. In the movie The Bad Guys there are some highly stigmatised animals (Mr Wolf and Mr Snake among others) who are thieves but then become good and even collaborate with the police to catch the real “bad guys”.


The wolf huffs and puffs

Finally, the section on transformation is very interesting (there is also a sequence from Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece, Howl’s Moving Castle). What happens when a character transforms into something very different, such as the princes who turn into frogs and beasts, and the young woman in Howl’s Moving Castle (Sophie Hatter) who spends most of the story in the body (and mind) of an old lady? It is clear from the details of these stories that the transformations are not merely cosmetic, and cannot be compared to wearing a disguise. The person being transformed acquires some of the dispositions of the creature they turn into, while preserving some of their own features. Beast is more impulsive and aggressive than the original prince and Sophie is more calm and assertive as a 90-year-old woman than she was a young woman.

There is plenty for a philosopher to think about in an exhibition on fairy tales, including the way in which such tales can be conceived as powerful arguments that (just like thought experiments) engage both reason and imagination.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Read more

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...
Read more

Models of Madness

In today's post John Read  (in the picture above) presents the recent book he co-authored with Jacqui Dillon , titled Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. My name is John Read. After 20 years working as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, mostly with people experiencing psychosis, I joined the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. There I published over 100 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g., child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis. I also research the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health. In February I moved to Melbourne and I now work at Swinburne University of Technology.  I am on the on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis and am the Editor...
Read more