ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tales as if they were dreams. The forbidden room, a theme that resonates with suspense and sometimes horror in many a fairy tale, fascinates adults as well as children. The tale is “Our Lady’s Child” from The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, collected in the early 19th century from carriers of old oral traditions. S. Freud, Jung, and Rank have all attested to the timelessness, crosscultural similarity and symbolic significance of myths and fairy tales. Melanie Klein, Ella Freeman Sharpe and Bruno Bettelheim have attributed the continued popularity of fairy tales to their speaking to the unconscious. Freud said in Totem and Taboo, “It seems quite possible to apply the psychoanalytic views derived from dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales”. The theme of the fairy tales examined is the nexus of conflicts every girl must encounter in differentiating herself from her mother.
