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Fairy Tale Lives of Celebrity Plutocrats
Andrew Carnegie & “Jack and the Beanstalk”
Since the appearance of Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment,(1) more attention has been directed to the way fairy tales may be put to use in early education. Among other things, Bettleheim argues that fairy tales can supply plots which give order to the inchoate fantasy lives of children and that the tale’s heroes and heroines provide models that children can emulate when working through their own problems. Such pragmatic and therapeutic uses of the fairy tales are, however, not a boon available only to children; James Hilman, the Jungian therapist and thinker, explains that adults may use the tales for similar benefits.(2)
the “life-story” or “life-plot’ someone has chosen for himself
Besides suggesting ways to shape a life, fairy tales can also be used by psychological historians and biographers in a reverse fashion — to understand the ways a life was shaped or (to use the fashionable language of some recent bestsellers) to understand the “life-story” or “life-plot’ someone has chosen for himself. Perhaps no work lends itself so well to this technique as Andrew Carnegie’s Own Story for Boys and Girls,(3) a book that used to be quite popular in the early part of this century and was a familiar item in…
