so-called stepmother tales, and the fairy tales in which the mentally or physically, weak- and feeble-minded are the heroes.
If we take these fairy tales as such they must be conceived at once as wish dreams or other corresponding wish structures of the rejected maidens or the simpletons. A similar relation can be worked out as with the motive of "The Little Tear Jug." What can be for the individual a healing, wish-fulfilling surrogate for reality, can also be generalized as a wish product of a whole set of people, of an entire category of people living under the same conditions, in which connection the appropriateness is not as important as the psychological tendency to think in the sense of the wish.
Is it otherwise with our poets? Think, for example, of Gottfried Keller as mentioned by Bleuler.
We have seen that it is precisely those who have been disappointed in their social or in their love relations who put wish structures into their poetry.
Later we will see that the stepmother fairy tales are only a special group of tales with sexual wish fulfillment. The stepmother (in other fairy tales the corresponding rôle is generally played by a giantess or a witch, the stepmother is thus also in this relation a special case) is the enemy, the marplot in the sexual wish structure, who is vanquished. In many fairy tales she herself, in others her daughter, is the sexual rival. The first category shows, still clearer than the latter, her rôle in the fairy tale wish structure. (A further interpretation of the figure of the stepmother will be noted further on.)
In the oriental fairy tales the stepmother perhaps cannot play this rôle because the relation in the sexual domain is otherwise than with us.
"Cinderella" with its variations serves best as an example of a stepmother fairy tale; also "Dame Holle" (Grimm, No. 24). An Icelandic Cinderella, where the stepmother is relatively secondary, we find in Rittershaus,[1] No. 66, with parallels to this theme. There is also a sexual symbolism contained in it (dog, fire, giant, burning the giant's skin), to which we will later return.
A peasant pair had three daughters, Ingibjörg, Sigridur and
- ↑ A. Rittershaus, "Neuisländische Volksmärchen." Halle a. S., 1902.
