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Into the Woods: The Psychological Significance of Forests in Fairy Tales
Throughout literature, a pervasive fear of the woods has found its way into the subconscious of several texts, both ancient and modern. Every Little Red Riding Hood has its wolf in the forest, every Hansel and Gretel its witch in the woods. Psychologists have interpreted such symbols “as an expression of unconscious processes in the mind” (Luthi 83), deconstructing a journey into the woods to be more than just a literal journey through the forest; it is a metaphorical journey into the mind.
Carl Jung elaborated on the persistence of these images when he explained that they are:
“The primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythological imagery. Such processes are concerned with the primordial images [Urbilder = archetypes], and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative language” (Walker 17).
His observation makes us think twice about writing off fairy tales as nothing more than child’s play. Instead, we should see them as subtle ways to teach and prompt the reader and listener to a new level of understanding. Every character we read about that is sent into the woods is likewise brought out, implying that while the woods contribute to the story as a significant obstacle, it is never one that is not eventually conquered. Never the less, the character must still travel through it. It is always the woods that stands between defeat and success. In fact, the woods are oftentimes what make the character’s success possible. They enter the forest with little or no knowledge of how to proceed but come out self-aware.
Mirroring fictional forests to real ones such as the Black Forest in Germany, these literary recreations are often described using words like dark and deep. Jung analyzed this as meaning that they are “essentially culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest recesses of the human psyche” (Walker 4). Not only must our heroes go into the woods but they must go all the way in and confront the darkness that awaits them.
Dating back to the early 19th century, the Grimm brothers’ version of Sleeping Beauty illustrates a variant of this journey into the woods, in…
