Happily Ever After: The Aid of Fairy Tales in Children's Societal Assimilation
             The fairy tale has existed for many centuries and has been handed down from generation to generation for the pleasure and education of children in every culture and nation of the world. In modern times, however, the age-old oral tradition of storytelling has been replaced with mediums that are capable of reaching a far wider audience much faster, such as magazines, books, television shows and movies. This increased exposure of society to fairy tales, and the inevitable evolvement of multiple versions, has led many researchers to conduct examinations of the influence that fairy tales exert on a child's views of themselves, and of their place within the world. One such researcher that analyzed this field extensively was Bruno Bettelheim. Utilizing the criteria set forth in Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, one can critically analyze the Grimm versions of the classic Cinderella and Snow White stories, "Aschenputtel" and "Snow White" by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, in order to determine how their stories serve the needs of society.
             Arguably, the most fundamental of Bettelheim's findings is that fairy tales confront many of the basic human predicaments, such as the death of a parent, which many other, modern, children's stories seek to avoid. The claim that, "many fairy stories begin with the death of a mother or father; in these tales the death of the parent creates the most agonizing problems, as it (or the fear of it) does in real life," (Bettelheim, 216), addresses a universal predicament which is faced by children, and adults, in every form of society and culture. In both "Snow White" and "Aschenputtel", the grief of losing a parent is tackled within the opening paragraph, which serves to indicate the importance of this event, not just ...