This semester I decided to take a class called Fairy Tales. I did this because I like them, and I thought “oh cool.” However, what I didn’t realize, was that there were many books that analyze fairy tales and that the alleged meanings were…quite interesting. Amanda originally convinced me to take the class and, knowing her, I’m starting to wonder if she knew ahead of time what fairy tales really mean. In a previous post Rilla wanted to know what we actually did in this class.

Well, for our midterm, we had to write fairy tale. Sounds fun, however, it had to keep to the form of a Grimms fairy tale as laid out by two texts we had to read that analyzed fairy tales. Then, we had to write an analysis of the fairy tale that we wrote. Hear that? An analytical essay analyzing and picking apart your own writing. Needless to say, this fairy tale isn’t what I would normally write and, when I did write it, I was not putting these meanings in there because I believe its what they mean. It’s what my mind has been warped into having to think. O_O

You can read my tale here. It’s called “Weeping Willow”. And you can read the analysis below.


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In (Skye’s real name)’s fairytale, “Weeping Willow,” the author stays true to many elements of the fairy tale’s form according to the writings of Bruno Bettelheim and Max Luethi. In the tale, a wife visits a weeping willow tree and asks it for a child. A polar bear arrives and grants her wish, giving her twins, in return for possession of the wife once the children are born. The wife bears the children, leaves with the polar bear, and the husband remarries. Years later, when the children reach puberty, they visit the forest and meet a dwarf who later forewarns them of their imminent death by their stepmother. Knowing what is going to occur, the children save themselves but the stepmother dies instead. Afterwards, the polar bear returns the wife to her family.

In the first scene, the wife visits the weeping willow. In olden times, people believed that weeping willow trees symbolized fertility and this carries over into the tale as the wife enters the cave-like seclusion of the tree’s branches, representing her womb. It is there (under the tree, in her womb) that she meets the polar bear, who gives her children. Though the children are eventually raised by their father, the polar bear is there as a father figure, keeping with Bettleheim’s statement that bears represent fathers. Whereas the father they know (the husband) is almost always gone (working) and not protecting the children from the stepmother, the polar bear is the one who both creates them and brings their mother (the wife) back to them. Bettelheim states that animals in fairytales are always either “all devouring or all helping.” In the case of the polar bear, he is all helping.

As the mother sits under the tree, she is uncontrovertibly sad. However, emotions are rarely portrayed in fairytales—as Bettelheim states—and, instead, are externalized to nature and the environment the character is in. Instead, the rain pours down around the tree to represent her sadness and the tears she should shed. Later in the story, when the stepmother is angry at the girls, that anger is externalized as the wind blowing heavily. These emotions are shown superficially because of what Luethi calls depthlessness. The characters in the stories are figures that could be anyone, taking the shape in the mind of the children as whoever they subconsciously want them to be. They are interchangeable and can fit in many different tales; the “characters are figures without substance, without inner life, without an environment.”

Luethi goes on to state that tales have no relation to time at all. Likewise, in the tale, it happens “once upon a time” or “years later” rather than specific times. Seasons are shown, however seasons are eternal. Likewise, to aide in the interchangeability of the characters, as is done with their depthlessness and lack of time, names are not given unless they have a purpose. In the story, it is the husband, the wife, the stepmother, the polar bear, and the dwarf. Only the two girls have names but those are to differentiate between them, as is done in the tale “Snow White and Rose Red.” Eabhar means ivory and she is the one that is “white as snow” whereas Dubh means black and she is the one as “dark as the sky before the sun rose.”

As Bettelheim has stated, when there are two or more children in a fairy tale, the children are all representative of one child, portraying different sides of one. Though the tale does not go into this in depth, Eabhar and Dubh are the light and dark of one child. It is the same with mothers and stepmothers, who are both representative of one mother and her two sides: the good mother and the bad mother, respectively. In the tale, when the wife goes to the Arctic with the polar bear, the husband remarries. The good mother has gone away and the bad mother has taken her place. This is shown throughout the tale.

When the girls go into the forest (to explore the possibility of their awakening sexuality, as the forest represents), they meet a dwarf (all of the stereotypical “bad” of the emergence of puberty). The stepmother (the bad mother) does not want the girls to speak with the dwarf. She does not want them to go through puberty, grow up, and accept this naturally, simply because she is the bad mother. However, this growth is a natural and essential part of puberty and growing into an adult. When the bad mother wishes to kill the girls, she is really intending to kill this new sexual emergence in them. The dwarf, who is representative of this growth, warns the girls and they save themselves, which resulted in the death of their stepmother—the bad mother—and the reemergence of the wife—the good mother. Thus, they were given a task (saving themselves) in order to bring back the good mother, who will help them healthily achieve their sexual awakening. This is also portrayed in the final scene as the wife brings the girls to the weeping willow (her womb, fertility, etc.).

The characters keep to the fairy tale form, according to Luethi’s points. Besides the aforementioned depthlessness, the characters are also one dimensional. The tale is inhabited by polar bears that can speak and grant children and dwarves. However, the world in which these beings inhabit and the world of our tale have been merged and the characters are not surprised when a polar bear comes out from behind a weeping willow tree or when a dwarf appears warning of looming death. The characters merely accept this as truth.

The story also contains a lack of realism (abstract style). For example, when the stepmother’s head gets chopped off, she merely dies; no blood, no gore, no further mention. The characters go on like nothing has happened. Both of these also represent Luethi’s statements on isolation: the characters are not surprised, these things just occur. Characters, scenes, and settings are also like this. Luethi refers to it as sublimation but it is the fact that each character, each scene, each place, each occurrence can be switched, moved, and replaced and the story will flow and work. It is the same with this tale. Scenes from other tales could be substituted and the tale would go on; it may go in a different direction, but it would still work in the form of fairy tales. The tale was not meant just to entertain; it has myriad meaning behind everything.

Throughout the tale, “Weeping Willow” kept to the form and meanings inherent to the fairytale, as written by Bettelheim and Luethi.