Anthropological and mythical interpreters find in the tales allusions to primitive rituals, especially initiation rites, as well as prescientific and mythic representations of natural phenomena, such as the change of the seasons. For Freud, fairy tales reveal unconscious fantasies like those in dreams. The psychoanalytic approach is most fully developed in a study by Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which contains interpretations of many of the Grimms’ tales. Under the influence of the theories of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, sees in the hero of the tale and his trials archetypes of the collective unconscious, the timeless reservoir of universal human experience. In Morphology of the Folktale, the Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp classifies tales according to a limited number of functions performed by the characters, always in a fixed sequence. The historical-geographic method of the Finnish folk lorist Antti Aarne and the American Stith Thompson traces tales back through variants to their presumed places of origin. Feminist critics try to show how fairy tales reflect and perpetuate patterns of male domination and female subjection and passivity, an argument incorporated into a broader Marxist critique focused on the political and social dimension of the tales by Jack Zipes, a scholar and translator of the tales.

No single theory can account for the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a complex, multidimensional work made up of more than 200 smaller works of varying type and quality, with many layers of intention and meaning. Although the Grimms selected, edited, expanded, revised, and generally imposed their own sensibility on the tales, giving them a certain unity of tone, they did not invent them. The tales come from different times and places and retain the traces of their origins—oral and written, primitive and sophisticated, peasant, middle class, and aristocratic—all filtered through the particular historical and class consciousness, the moral ideals, and the unconscious wishes and fantasies of the brothers themselves. Thus they present difficult problems for criticism. A comparison of two of the most interesting approaches—the Marxist analysis of Jack Zipes and the psychoanalytic explication of Bruno Bettelheim—may cast some light on these problems and on the tales themselves.

Jack Zipes focuses on the social and historical context and consciousness of the Grimms and their work. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, he asserts that in the early folktales “the main characters and concerns of a monarchistic, patriarchal, and feudal society are presented, and the focus is on class struggle and competition for power” (p. 8). Although injustice and oppression are temporarily overcome to produce the usual happy ending, this happens through magical means, leaving relationships of power fundamentally unchanged. Zipes argues that the Grimms adapted the old tales to the ideals of nineteenth-century capitalism, with the goal of socializing children to bourgeois society:

The male hero learns to be active, competitive, handsome, industrious, cunning, acquisitive. His goal is money, power, and a woman (also associated with chattel). His jurisdiction is the open world. His happiness depends on the just use of power. The female hero learns to be passive, obedient, self-sacrificing, hard-working, patient, and straight-laced. Her goal is wealth, jewels, and a man to protect her property rights. Her jurisdiction is the home or castle. Her happiness depends on conformity to patriarchal rule (p. 57).

The child reader, in Zipes’s view, is being indoctrinated unconsciously to accept these bourgeois ideals. The tales are particularly apt for this purpose just because they are thought of as timeless classics outside the real world of history, politics, and class conflict.

In Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Zipes says that the best-known tales have become myths, thereby taking on a quasi-religious authority that disguises their roots in a particular historical and political context. Following the ideas of the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Zipes claims that this mythification of the tale makes what is contingent, political, and ideological appear natural, true, and universal. In this way, the classic tale has become “dehistoricized, depoliticized to represent and maintain the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie” (p. 6). In a chapter entitled “Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity,” Zipes analyzes the tale of the miller’s daughter who spins straw into gold with the aid of a tyrannical gnome in the context of changes in the manufacture of linen after the invention of the spinning machine in 1764: “The Grimms were making a social-historical statement about the exploitation of women as spinners and the appropriation of the art/craft of spinning by men” (p. 55).

Like Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim also sees folk and fairy tales as influencing the child’s development and relationship to society, but in quite a different way. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim is concerned not with the historical and political dimensions of the tales, but rather with their representation in symbolic form of the child’s inner life, which he sees as essentially timeless rather than rooted in a particular historical context.