Which of the following two essays do you find more productive in helping you to think about fairy tales as more than children's entertainment? Why?
I actually found the Darnton article to be more productive in helping think about folk fairy tales as more than children's entertainment. The Darnton article analizes Bettleheim's arguments regarding the benefics folk fairy tales have for children. Bettleheim seems to show that the folk fairy tales are tools for children to fully develop into functioning adults. Darnton, however, uses the folk fairy tales to discover a lost area of history (the peasantry during the Enlightenment era) and therefore, I think Darnton does a better job at disconnecting folk fairy tales from children's entertainment. Darnton actually removes children all together from the equation whereas Bettleheim, I feel, just rearranges the variables.
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even though it is true that the removal of children does place a new lens of the fairy tales to us through out this course I still found it useful to have the little red riding hood example full thought through and explained really made it easier to see how to approach the fairy tales we shall have to read in the future.
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