rags to riches in fairytales

Observer | In fairytales, as in dreams, things both are and are not what they seem to be. After Freud first lifted the curtain to reveal the unconscious mind seething and roiling with hidden desires and fears, and showed how dreams and stories were full of symbols that told quite a different tale from the one on the surface, we've become used to reading both literature and life in a double way; it feels quite natural now to look for – and find – sexual meanings, for example, in the most apparently non-sexual places. It was Bruno Bettelheim who blew the gaff as far as fairytales were concerned: his The Uses of Enchantment (1976) offered a reading of such innocent favourites as Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella that was Freudian enough to make your hair stand on end.

Bettelheim's a little discredited these days, and Freud's influence has retreated to the point where his great insight is no longer a climate of opinion, as Auden put it, but simply one theory among many. However, I'm still persuaded by the notion that it can be both interesting and enlightening to read as if X is not only X but also Y. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but sometimes a frog can be a prince, and sometimes treasure can mean something other than wealth.

In the case of the Cinderella range of stories (one of the largest of all) the wealth she attains at the end is part of a larger acquisition, which is more fully symbolised by her wedding. Specifically, it's nubility: in the course of the story she leaves childhood behind, and becomes ready for marriage and the responsibilities of adulthood.

But not every growing-up story is a Cinderella tale. I once heard an American academic spend a whole lecture trying to show that Jane Eyre was a Cinderella story. She failed, because it isn't: Jane Eyre is a Beauty and the Beast story, in which the physically powerful, sexually potent, threateningly mature adult male, Mr Rochester, is gradually subdued and tamed (not to say shamed and maimed) by the small, weak, delicate, but implacable Jane, who does it all by herself.

And that's the reason it's not a Cinderella story. Cinderella, in every one of the hundreds of variations on the basic story, is not alone: she has a helper. A surrogate mother, in fact: the fairy godmother, a rose tree that grows from her mother's grave, a dove, a cow, the mossy coat in the version here – always, in principle, an older female who has herself safely negotiated the perils of the journey towards maturity and whose task is to help the girl make the same passage.

Bettelheim's point is that fairytales such as this symbolise genuine aspects of our psychological life – moments of transition from innocence to knowledge, and so on – and that they are invaluable aids to a contented and healthy growth. Children need such tales as much as they need food, warmth, shelter and love. I think I agree with that. But whether or not they're psychologically necessary, the greatest tales (and Cinderella is one of the greatest of all) derive their lasting power not only from the multitude of fascinating and unforgettable details that abound in them but from the emotionally satisfying shape they take up. In the Grimms' collection, for example, tale after tale begins enthrallingly and then collapses half way through: rather like most films, most novels, most plays, in fact. The hardest thing with a story of any kind is to bring it to a conclusion that works every time you read it. The best of the Grimm tales do that, and the ones that work best of all are clearly the work of some ancient and anonymous teller of genius, whose power of shape-creation has resisted generations of hamfisted clumsiness and mishandling. Pullman's retelling of the fairy tale of Mossycoat.