Forests in Children's Lit

The Dark Forest of Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are rightly seen by many authors and critics from Jung to Bruno Bettelheim as repositories for archetypes and for vital social messages. Additionally, they must be seen as a literary genre by themselves, and elements which may be seen archetypically must also be taken 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, and simultaneously be aware of the way in which the forest operates as a literary device to isolate the characters quickly from their familiar world by placing them into another realm. The ways in which forests seem to function in fairy tales to isolate the characters ranges from the very physical to the...
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