Broers en zusters. Over familieverhoudingen in sprookjes. Een historisch-sociologische benadering

Samenvatting

Brothers and sisters. About family-relations in fairy tales. A historical-sociological approach. Scientific interpretations of the contents of European fairy tales are numerous and contradictory. The author postulates that these interpretations are often no more than speculations. This can be explained by the great gap in time between our culture and the culture from which fairy tales stem. She presents and demonstrates a historical-sociological method of interpretation, in which the contents of fairy tales are seen as a continuation of the experiences, anxieties and wishes of the tellers of and listeners to popular stories in a pre-modem society. Persons and events in stories do not need to be interpreted only symbolically as parts of the personality and as psychological processes, as Bruno Bettelheim asserts. They can be made very understandable when taken at their face value and placed in their cultural context. The author studied all types of western-European fairy tales which deal with family relations, with the purpose to find out if they can be related to family relations in real life, such as known by the research in family history. As an example the relations between brother and brother, sister and sister, brother and sister and between step-siblings are exhaustively presented, analyzed and explained by comparing them with the facts of family structures as presented by family history. The correspondence is striking. Competition and solidarity between siblings in fairy tales can be explained by structural problems arising from the kind of subsistence, hereditary succession, marriage rules, dowry questions and step-relations. Besides, fairy tales can produce surplus information about the feelings of hate and love arising from structural problems in family life and about wishes to overcome these problems.