Once upon a pamphlet: fairy tales

National Review, August 11, 1997 by Don Rice

Mr. Rice is a writer in Columbus, Ohio.

TWO recently published biographies of Bruno Bettelheim sent me searching for my old copy of Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Inside I found a folded-up copy of John Updike's New York Times review, which I had placed there 21 years ago. I sat down to re-read it.

Updike described Bettelheim's book as a profound work showing us "how cunningly, how lovingly, the anonymous generation of a 'happier age' prepared their children for the challenges of life and guided them toward sexual, ethical health" through the creation and retelling of fairy tales.

"Sleeping Beauty," Updike wrote, "and Beauty and the Beast are active metaphors in our contemporary language of self-understanding, and even (nay especially) a child can sense that the story of Little Red Riding Hood deals with phallic aggression." Further on:

The drops of blood that figure in so many young heroines' enchantments surely are the blood of menstruation and defloration; the resemblance between frogs and toads and male genitals needs only to be pointed out to be assented to. That "Hansel and Gretel" is all about oral greed; . . . that Little Red Cap is reborn into sexual maturity after a dangerous experiment in flirtation; that Cinderella asks to be accepted by the prince in her natural "dirtiness" as she slips her penile foot into his vaginal slipper -- all this appears in retrospect obvious, and indisputably part of fairy tales' perennial weight, menace, resonance, and consolation.

I shook my head just as I had 21 years earlier. Both Updike and Bettelheim had served up a cold -- and old -- bowl of porridge. Why Updike hadn't noted, even in passing, that Bettelheim had overlooked an even richer and much more exciting source of "important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind" is beyond understanding. I refer, as I am sure most have already guessed, to reports and pamphlets published by the United States Government.

Consider, to choose one example almost at random, The First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, published in 1886. It was in 1884 that Congress acted (ovulated), that President Garfield signed the act (the father figure fertilizing it with the ink from his phallic pen), and that the Bureau of Labor became a fetus within the Department of the Interior, eventually emerging in 1888 as a department itself. A long gestation period, but who could deny the symbolic process of birth?

The introduction to the report is liberally sprinkled with words such as "potent," "period," "production," "lay down," and "generation" -- words of such obvious sexual connotation that their mention in any seventh-grade classroom is guaranteed to elicit naughty snickers from the students.

Many of the report's 496 pages are devoted to tables showing the relative wages for men and women in various occupations. This need to sort and classify is indicative of the strict potty training to which so many government employees were then and are still subjected. It is highly appropriate that the sorting and classifying here relate to money. The connection between money and excreta has long been recognized and is reflected in our obsession with financial statements.

Many government reports deal with even kinkier matters. The Second Annual Report of Agriculture Secretary J. M. Rusk, published in 1890, is similar to "The Little Red Hen" in having as its theme the rare perversion of phraterphagy. You recall how the mother (the hen), deserted by her mate, after vainly seeking love from her children (the other animals), resorts to autogeny (or so she pretends); and when she finally gives birth to yet another child (the fresh bread from her "oven") the siblings want to devour it.

One need not go back to the last century to find government publications in which our intuitive sexual impulses are expressed. Read the U.S. Department of Commerce publication Sundials (Circular of the Bureau of Standards, No. 402) in which the gnomon (penis) casts its ominous shadow on the pubescent dial. Then there is the Department of Agriculture's Fireplaces and Chimneys (Farmer's Bulletin No. 1889) with symbolism so obvious it need not be discussed. In the Library of Congress pamphlet Yugoslav Abbreviation (LC 35.2 : Y 9/2/962) the fear of castration is faced boldly and starkly; the threat of homosexual rape is the basic theme of Stratigraphy of the Morrison Formation and Structure of the Ambrosia Lake District (I 19.3 : 1272E). Consider Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (published by the Committee on House Administration per House Concurrent Resolution No. 320). Even the most sexually innocent can recognize this as an oral-sadistic fantasy.

You can see from this meager sampling the incredible amount of material available. It is within the pages of U.S. Government publications that the sexual fears and frustrations of a great nation are unconsciously expressed. Indeed, they may be considered humankind's noblest bibliotherapeutic achievement. I sat in my wingback chair, as I had 21 years ago, wondering why a man of Bettelheim's insight had not given them the analytic treatment they deserved but instead wasted his time on children's fairy tales --and I still had no answer.