A Study On Teaching Function Of British Fairy Tales

British fairy tales not only have a glorious and long tradition, but also have led the development of children’s literature in the world so far. Based on a close reading of the text, this dissertation is to study nine classic British fairy tales with the approach of Ethical Literary Criticism, and to illustrate the function of ethical education that fairy tales have in the growth process of children. This dissertation consists of three chapters.Chapter one expounds on the ethical enlightenment of fairy tales in the ethical chaos stage of children, through the textual analysis of The World of Winnie-the-Pooh, World of Peter Rabbit and The Witches. There is no essential difference between children in ethical chaos and any other animals, except that children possess human bodies. The World of Winnie-the-Pooh vividly reflects the thinking pattern and behavioral traits of children under the state of ethical chaos. In this fairy tale, Winnie-the-Pooh does many "silly things" and "bad things". However, his "silliness" is not so much the result of low intelligence as that of weak rational consciousness and lack of rational judgment. As a result, driven by powerful instincts, Winnie-the-Pooh has done many silly things without considering the consequences. Similarly, his "badness" does not really originate in bad moral traits, but because he has not acquired the basic ethical and moral ideas in the human society, Thus, he cannot make right judgments on his own behavior. Winnie-the-Pooh’s "silliness" and "badness" represent human beings’childlike innocence, which will never come back again after the stage of childhood. They also fully show the necessity and inevitability for children to end the state of ethical chaos by accepting ethical enlightenment. Fairy tales with personified animal images have tremendous advantages in the ethical enlightenment of children, which is clearly demonstrated in Beatrix Potter’s World of Peter Rabbit. Children usually understand the world according to their personal experience. This thinking pattern enables them to regard the personified animals in fairy tales as real existence, thus they accept the animal stories as real life experience. What’s more, fairy tales convey abstract moral sense through concrete animal image, which fits children’s receptivity. Furthermore, the personified animal image in fairy tales could help children preliminarily realize the difference between human and other animals. To be more specific, the moral enlightenment of fairy tales for children is always conducted through moral discipline and by setting moral examples. The purpose of the former is to restrain children’s innate animal instinct, while that of the latter is to help children acquire the basic rational consciousness and ethical and moral ideas that a human being should have. After children accept the preliminary ethical enlightenment and then have basic ethical and moral ideas, transformation fairy tales like Roald Dahl’s The Witches can help them realize the essential difference between human and animal in an intuitive way through stories of transformation of a human being into an animal or conversely. The episode that "I", the protagonist in The Witches,have transformed into an animal is a vivid representation of children’s powerful animal instinct. It shows the obstacles of children’s animal instinct to their development. However, Dahl breaks the narrative convention of fairy tales in The Witches, and let "me" keep the animal body in the end. Through the sharp contrast between "my" animal body and human soul, Dahl makes it more clearly that the essential difference between human and any other animals is that human is able to control his/her own animal instinct with ration and ethical consciousness, and that the difference between human and animal is both biological and ethical.Chapter two studies, through analysis of the texts of the three fairy tales including Peter Pan, Five Children and It and Mary Poppins, how fairy tales offer correct ethical education to children and make them reach maturity in ethical awareness after their acceptance of ethical enlightenment, and how fairy tales help adults realize the responsibility they have and the role they should play in the moral development of children. Peter Pan written by James Barrie vividly reflects children’s mental state in which rational will and free will coexist after children experience ethical enlightenment. Free will, the embodiment of all human instincts and desires, is featured by the pursuit of absolute freedom, unconditional satisfaction of all sorts of desires and the ignorance to the requirement and bondage of the norms of moral ethics; while rational will is composed of ethical and moral values and rational judgment made by people based on those ethical and moral values, and is mainly used to restrain free will. The power of free will is well embodied in Peter Pan, which contributes to the eternal charm of the image of Peter Pan. However, the possible harm of children’s unrestrained free will is also clearly reflected through him. The image of Wendy reflects children’s rational will that becomes mature gradually after ethical enlightenment. The text tells readers the importance of rational will and love from family members and the society to the growth of children, through the comparison between Peter Pan and Wendy. Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit integrates three common narrative elements of fairy tales, namely, magic,’repetitive’narrative structure and’collective figure’image, and reflects the function of ethical education that fairy tales have in the moral development of children in a concentrated way. The major reason why children are attracted to magic in fairy tales is that magic touches the repressed desires in children’s deep heart, in other words, magic is actually a reflection of children’s various desires. While describing the magic of the Psammead that attracts the readers, Nesbit explains the harm of indulgent desires, and the importance of restraint of desires with ration. This fairy tale, with the’repetitive’narrative structure, describes the moral development of the five siblings, i.e., Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and Hilary, which reveals the common aspects of the moral development of children:the key to the moral development of children is to learn how to restrain free will with rational will, and the moral development of children is a gradual and repeated sharpening process. The advantage of ’collective figure’ is its ability to reflect the particularity of different individual children in the process of moral development. The shaping of a collective figure enables fairy tales to be applicable to a larger audience and enables more readers to obtain edification beneficial to their growth during reading. Fairy tales usually view children as the target audience, but Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers also targets adults. The author explores the responsibility that adults should shoulder in the growth of children and the positive role that adults should play in children’s moral development, and puts forward instructive suggestions on how adults should help children grow up properly.The third chapter, through the analysis of The Happy Prince & Other Stories, At The Back of the North Wind and How to Train Your Dragon, probes into how fairy tales improve the ethical and moral status of the society through children after they have acquired mature ethical and moral ideas.In fairy tales by Oscar Wilde, like The Happy Prince, the commonly seen narrative mode of fairy tales---virtue is rewarded---has been overturned, thus the gap between the moral ideal expressed in fairy tales and the moral status in real life is revealed. Meanwhile, Wilde points out in The Selfish Giant that children are the hope for change of those undesirable moral phenomena in real life. It can be found that, through analysis of Wilde’s fairy tales, moral criticism in children literature has three distinctive features, compared with that in adult literature. Firstly, despite reflecting undesirable moral phenomena in society, children’s literature does not need to analyze the underlying causes. Secondly, children’s literature cannot lay its major emphasis on revealing the dark side of the society, but it must highlight the value of goodness through the existence of evilness. Thirdly, a tragic ending should be avoided in children’s literature, in which the tragic effect should be buffered by some means even if the story ends in tragedy. At the Back of the North Wind, written by George MacDonald, shows ambiguity in terms of its style, because it can be regarded as either fairy tale or novel. The reason for this is that MacDonald chooses an "unreliable narrator" for the text, which resolves the authority of the narrator. As a result, MacDonald not only gives the right to judge the style of the text to the readers, but also makes his particular narrative intention come true, namely, telling the readers that the value of fairy tales is not to reflect what a real life is, but to depict what an ideal life should look like. Therefore, children should have faith in fairy tales, and put the virtues in fairy tales into practice in daily life. They should also reinforce their moral and ethical ideas that they have learned from fairy tales through practice, so as to make special contributions to the purification and improvement of the ethical environment in the actual life. In How to Train Your Dragon by Cowell Cressida, the traditional ethical idea that only strong Vikings can survive has obvious drawbacks, even though it hold water to a certain degree. However, Viking adults turn a blind eye to the draw backs because they have been deeply influenced by the traditional ethical ideas. Little Hiccup, who boldly abandons the traditional ethical ideas of Vikings, not only defeats the dragon and saves the tribe, but also opens a new space of development for the future of the Vikings. Being less fettered by traditional ideas and thinking pattern, children can perceive new things more easily. Thus the fairy tale, through the abandonment of the traditional ethical ideas by little Hiccup, proves that the growth process of children is also a process during which human beings constantly try new ways for developing civilization. Therefore, fairy tales should not only impart various ethical and moral ideas to children, but also encourage children to imagine boldly, be willing to try and continue to innovate, so as to continuously provide an impetus for the development of the human society.The conclusion part summarizes the main idea of the dissertation, and makes a comprehensive review of the ethical education that fairy tales offer to children. Based on this, the dissertation points out that the most important function of fairy tales is its ethical education, for which aesthetic function is the prerequisite, and adults can also get beneficial ethical education from fairy tales.