PSYCHOSCAPES: Can fairytales have Sinister motives?

The election of President Trump made me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. Instead, I decided to do something utterly unpolitical by turning to fairytales, in particular, the work of Marie-Louise von Franz. She was a Swiss psychologist and a leading collaborator of Carl Jung, who specialized in the psychological interpretation of fairy tales. She argued that these stories are parables about how the unconscious mind interprets reality.

Of course, I understood the danger of immersing myself in the enigmatic world of fairy tales because one never knows what will happen. I might get the opposite of what I expected, and that’s precisely what happened after I read a chilling piece about fairytales by Scott Harshbarger.

He critiqued the fairytale Hansel and Gretel^⁠1 in the journal “Narrative, Social Neuroscience,”^⁠2 pointing out that the original story had a long history in German folklore before it was written down and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. He then gave his take on the plot.

The story takes place during a great famine. A woodcutter and his abusive wife banish their two children, abandoning them in the deep woods because they couldn’t afford to feed them. Without the children to care for, the parents selfishly think they will now have a better chance of survival. The wicked witch comes across Hansel and Gretel and lures the starving children into her gingerbread hut with a candy roof. However, instead of being a good Samaritan, she is salivating over the prospect of eating them.

The point of Grimm’s fairytale is to portray the witch as the enemy. Thus, when she burns in horrible agony after Gretel pushes her into the oven, "everyone lives happily forever after."

According to Harshbarger, Grimm's fairytales like Hansel and Gretel acted to promote German nationalism by switching attention from the Kaiser's ruthless treatment of his people to a more fundamental evil.

That evil, in the eyes of that patriarchy, were women they couldn’t control. The men were afraid of their mysterious powers rooted in nature, including, they claimed, their secret ability to turn into witches.

This scapegoating of women quickly escalated to deadly violence, resulting in the execution of thousands of women. Modern scholars estimate that between 35,000 and 60,000 women were burned at the stake between the 15th and 17th centuries, the most being in Germany. The typical witch was the wife of an agricultural laborer "well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature."⁠^⁠3 (Note: Don’t forget we burned witches in America, too. Remember the Salem witch trials?)

In a particular type of fairytale, there must be a villain, and that’s the kind Trump has propagated his whole career. The only question is, who will be the scapegoat in his new administration?

It’s unlikely Trump will launch witch-trial persecutions against women because that would likely backfire. In spite of that, he has waged a long-standing vendetta against women who dare challenge him, like belittling debate moderator Megyn Kelly with this unbelievable misogynistic slur: “You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”^⁠4

But the ultimate villain in Trump’s nationalistic fairytale will most likely be immigrants, who he calls an invading army of illegal aliens: rapists and murderers from "shithole" countries.

He will make immigrants his scapegoat to divert our attention from his authoritarian push for total power. If he pulls this off, he will destroy our democracy while ripping away the safety net from regular folks everywhere. The only beneficiaries will be Trump and his autocratic buddies.

America has to be careful about blaming innocent groups for the sins of others.: Look at what happened when a German Nationalist named Hitler started scapegoating the Jews.

xxx

Illustration from Showbiz CheatSheet: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/gretel-hansel-why-isnt-there-a-gingerbread-house-in-the-movie.html/

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