Bruno Bettelheim Fairy Tales

Fairy tales teach more than just princesses and dragons. In “Introduction to The Uses of Enchantment”, Bruno Bettelheim utilizes ethos, juxtapositions, and punctuation to express the importance of reading on young minds and emphasizes that fairy tales provide the most positive impacts morally. Bettelheim provides details about his professional experience, which provides ethos and validity to the author’s argument about the benefits of reading fairy tales. The author also uses two comparisons to build his argument that fairy tales are beneficial to young readers, one comparing the differences between amoral fairy tales and the other comparing modern stories to fairy tales. The author also inserts phrases separated by dashes that portray his
The first juxtaposition is between the lessons that standard fairy tales teach and the lessons that amoral fairy tales teach. Standard fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, serve as examples where an extreme good defeats an extreme bad because “polarization dominates the child’s mind” (26), therefore a child is able to understand the differences in the positive and negative moral characteristics. Meanwhile, amoral fairy tales, such as Jack and the Beanstalk, provide lessons about success and having hope. Together, these two types of fairy tales enable the child to the character whose “condition makes a deep positive appeal to him” (27). Meanwhile, Bettelheim also compares fairy tales with modern children’s literature. While fairy tales depict a wide range of positive and negative components, modern children’s literature averts from negative themes, which is detrimental to the overall impact on its readers because it generates a sheltered mindset for the readers. If readers are not exposed to negative themes, such as ones that are represented in fairy tales, it can be limiting to his emotional growth and ability to act in personal and social conflict. Through the use of juxtapositions, Bettelheim is able to