Marie-Louise von Franz: The Problem of Evil in Fairy Tales
Most Fairy Tales hinge on the struggle between good and evil.
As Max Lüthi said in his excellent work on the subject, fairy-tale style is characterized first and foremost by a simple, unshaded opposition between black and white, good and evil.
Within the hero himself we find no psychological conflicts; he is not partly this and partly that—each quality is personified in the simplest form: courage is opposed to cowardice, envy to innocence, kindness to malice, renunciation and self-sacrifice to unrestrained lust or greed.
Evil is almost always punished, usually by destruction, though sometimes it is only driven away—the good triumphs or is saved by supernatural aid.
The hero attains his goal by courage, guile, humor, or luck; the heroine by perseverance amid suffering, fidelity, guile, or luck.
Often the evil principle condemns or does away with itself at the end of the story, or it may unconsciously choose its own punishment.
Lüthi observes that fairy tales are poor in concrete detail and reality; they reflect little depth of experience, little of the complexity of human relations, little shading, but in compensation for this poverty of content, they are clear and incisive in form.
Fairy tales, he writes, perceive and describe a world which grows up in opposition to an uncertain, confusing, unclear, and menacing reality . . . fairy tales crystallize forms, they give us firm lines and rigid unchanging figures. . . . Behind the growing and fading forms of perishable reality stand the pure forms, immobile and yet effective.
From the standpoint of Jungian psychology, we may say that fairy tales do not recount consciously experienced human events, but that these pure forms make visible fundamental archetypal structures of the collective unconscious.
This accounts for the nonhuman or, as Lüthi puts it, abstract character of the figures; they are archetypal images behind which the secret of the unconscious psyche is hidden.
By the collective unconscious we mean that part of man’s unconscious psyche which, regardless of all the differences between individuals, remains the same in all men and women, just as certain aspects of the anatomical structure of Homo sapiens are the same in all individuals precisely because they are human.
Since fairy tales throughout the world disclose certain common themes and structures, we may assume that they spring from this most universal substrate of the human psyche.
They might be termed the dreams of humankind, sprung from the deepest layers of the unconscious, and for this reason it is not at all surprising that the ethical problems of our cultural consciousness, which we know and discuss in other contexts, have no part in them.
What we might, on the other hand, find in fairy tales is the guidelines of an ethos of the unconscious, that is, of nature itself.
Lüthi writes aptly that fairy tales are concerned not with the justice but with the rightness of actions.
With their abstract approach they aim to reflect not reality but the essence underlying it.
Translated into our psychological idiom, this means: Fairy tales represent natural events in the unconscious psyche.
And here the question becomes acute: Is ethics an achievement of conscious man and his culture—or is there already an ethic in the unconscious and preconscious psychic structure of man as such?
It is not difficult to give a general answer: Most fairy tales do indeed contain a kind of natural morality which is elucidated in the course of the action—an ethic of appropriate behavior which leads to a happy end, in contrast to inappropriate behavior, which leads to disaster.
Accordingly, André Jolles speaks of a naïve moralité in fairy tales, in accordance with which everything that happens is in keeping with what we expect and demand of a just course of events.
They contain an ethical judgment that is concerned not with action but with process.
Thus fairy tales present a contrast to the world as we actually experience it.
But what are the right modes of conduct glorified in fairy tales, and can we really regard them as ethical?
Let us first consider the problem of guile and honesty: Innumerable are the tales in which a peasant or shepherd outwits the Devil by making an agreement with him that everything above ground in his field belongs to the Devil while everything below ground belongs to himself—and proceeding to sow turnips.
When the outwitted Devil reverses the pact for the coming year, the peasant sows wheat and again cheats the Devil, who finally goes off in a rage.
It is generally known that the Schöllenen Bridge in the St. Gotthard Pass came into being as a result of such a trick.
The moral would seem to be that we should combat evil with guile.
And yet, what of the tale about the bearskin?
Here a young soldier faithfully keeps his pact with the Devil and makes no attempt to get around it.
For seven years he goes without washing and wears his bearskin; the Devil rewards him amply for his fair play, and he too makes no attempt to circumvent the agreement.
In the first example unscrupulous trickery in dealing with the Devil triumphs; in the second it is shown that honesty is rewarded, even in dealings with the Evil One.
Thus the question of the morality of fairy tales does not appear to be so simple.
And what about courage?
On first thought we might suppose this to be one quality that is never lacking in the fairy-tale hero—and yet we find countless stories in which appropriate conduct consists in so-called magical flight.
A good illustration of this is provided by a fairy tale of the Siberian Jukagirs. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 76-78
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