The Dark Forest as Symbol and Literary Device in Fairy Tales

Introduction: The Forest as Archetype and Literary Device

Fairy tales are rightly seen by many authors and critics — from Jung to Bruno Bettelheim — as repositories for archetypes and for vital social messages. They must also be recognized as a literary genre in their own right, and elements that may be understood archetypically must likewise be considered in terms of their literary function. In this light, one can study the role of the forest in fairy tales both as a reference to the archetype of the dark forest and as a social reference to the land outside civilization, while simultaneously appreciating the way in which the forest operates as a literary device that quickly isolates characters from their familiar world by placing them into another realm.

The ways in which forests function in fairy tales to isolate characters range from the very physical to the very esoteric. The forest isolates characters by nature of its physical properties, placing them outside the confines of civilization and the realm of ordinary human experience, while also symbolizing the subconscious and representing the death and rebirth of the characters. This isolation in turn creates a world in which the improbable and the seemingly insane become both possible and necessary.

The Forest as Physical Disorientation and Boundary of Civilization

Jane Tompkins writes that forests are important in literature because when a person enters one, he or she becomes automatically lost by virtue of not being able to see through the trees. The vertical composition, competitive detail, and obscurity of the shadows lend a sense of physical confusion. This sense of physical disorientation is important in many of the fairy tales recorded by the Brothers Grimm. For example, in the story of Snowdrop (also known as Snow White), the little princess becomes physically lost in the woods, and her physical sense of confusion is a large part of the reason she becomes so vulnerable. She is quickly taken away from everything safe and comfortable and left in a disorienting environment. It is perhaps partly because she is so disoriented physically that she is willing to trust her stepmother in all her disguises so quickly — for any other human in this alien landscape seems somehow more trustworthy than the unknown woods.

According to Robert Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, the forest is important because it has always defined the limits of civilization. Harrison explains that civilization has always taken place in a clearing in the middle of forests, and that this sylvan fringe is what limits and defines it. Civilization ends at the fringe of the forest, and so those who step beyond it symbolically step beyond the protection of the civilized world. This meaning of the forest is apparent in tales such as Little Red-Cap, where the woods between grandmother's house and Red Cap's home are the domain of wolves that would devour the little girl. One line in the Grimm version, as translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes, says that the wolf has "such a wicked look in his eyes, that if they had not been on the public road she was certain he would have eaten her up." The forest from which the wolf emerges is fundamentally opposed to the civilization represented by the road.

The Forest as Symbol of the Unconscious

In addition to such physical aspects as the forest's relationship to civilization and its tendency to confuse wayfarers, the forest is also generally thought to symbolize the subconscious. Bruno Bettelheim speaks of the importance of the forest in fairy tales as a place that symbolizes a great inner darkness that must be confronted. He argues that since the most ancient of times, the impenetrable forest has represented the impenetrable world of the unconscious, and that being lost within the forest is representative of being lost in life without the structure that our socially constructed super-conscious might provide. Those who are able to emerge from this shadow attain a higher and more evolved humanity.

One could theoretically cite any reference to forests in fairy tales as referring to the subconscious and the inner structure of the mind. In particular, this idea of the depths of the subconscious is present in the story of Briar Rose. In this tale, the princess and all her court fall asleep for a hundred years under the enchantment of a fairy. During their sleep, a great forest of briars grows up all around the castle. The sleeping women inside the castle might be seen to represent the slumbering subconscious. The briars that surround the castle are the dangers of transgressing the boundary between the conscious and the subconscious, and the bones among them represent those who have failed to make this journey. The prince leaves the comfort of his own masculine, conscious way of thinking and enters the forest that shelters the feminine unconscious.

Conclusion: Entering and Emerging from the Dark Forest

The forest serves, then, as a literary device that allows the reader to accept the absurdist world of the fairy tale, while separating the characters from their expectations and their normal conscious world. Characters and readers who step across the boundary of the dark forest will never be quite the same again. While most emerge — as did Little Red-Cap or Snowdrop — as more enlightened adults ready to embrace the normal world of marriage and procreation, there seems always to be the lingering fear that, like the Witch, the Grandmother, or the seven dwarfs, some will lose all touch with the world outside the forest and become part of it forever.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1989.

The Brothers Grimm. Grimms' Fairy Tales. Translated by Marian Edwardes and Edgar Taylor. Champaign: Project Gutenberg, 2001.

Cooper, J. C. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.