Evil in fairy tales across cultures : a study of Turkish and British fairy tales from a psychological perspective

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2013

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Büyü, Gül

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The thesis analyses the concept of evil in Turkish and British fairy/folk tales from Melanie Klein and C. Fred Alford’s psychoanalytical point of view. The study concentrates on Naki Tezel and Joseph Jacobs’s collections of fairy/folk tales and examines twenty-nine Turkish and thirty-nine British tales. The thesis argues that evil in these fairy tales results from the feeling of envy, jealousy, greed, dread or the struggle for power and superiority. In these selected tales, evil is observed in the form of theft, violence, torture, transformation or even murder. The research shows that to have a superior position and power, the characters enter into endless struggles with others, which lead them to commit evil. As Klein and Alford claim, these tales may play an important role in the development of children as they may encourage children to get rid of their problems. Therefore, the thesis also argues that by revealing the motives of evildoers, children may learn to cope with their latent fears and anxieties and re-establish their integral world after reading or listening to these tales.

Subject Keywords

Fairy tales., Fairy tales in literature.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12615996/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/22840

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

G. Büyü, “Evil in fairy tales across cultures : a study of Turkish and British fairy tales from a psychological perspective,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2013.