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Introduction: The Role of Magic and Fairy Stories in Children's Lives
Bettelheim wrote a treatise in 1975 on the uses of enchantment to stimulate a child's mind and facilitate personality development. According to him, the child is able to derive coherence from the turmoil of his or her inner feelings and understand abstract ethical concepts more viscerally through fairy tales. Apart from providing children an escape and a means through which they can find resource in their inner world, Jack Zipes suggested that fairy tales "play a crucial role in the socialization of children over much of the modern world" (110). Fairy tales are also said to function as a "safekeeper of desires" (Hohr 101), as they allow children to develop their social and emotional competence in the face of harsh reality.
More recent research studies point to fairy tales serving as a roadmap helping children find their "pathway to love, power and privilege, while at the same time pointing the way back to safety and serenity of their home" (Tsitsani, et al. 267). Anthony Zehetner emphasized the relevance of fairy tales to a modernized twenty-first-century society, even more so with the many social ills and rapid shifts in global realities that contemporary children need to navigate.
This kind of personal illumination and self-insight becomes more textured and complex when juxtaposed against a long and tumultuous history of colonialism, disempowerment, and the loss of one's voice in a developing country like the Philippines. Reclaiming this power and taking back one's voice through an indigenization of foreign fairy tales lie at the very core of the Stories of Lola Basyang (1925), through which seemingly-innocuous fantasies from the West are painstakingly removed from its context, reconfigured with locally subversive elements and dispositions, and indigenized to redefine Filipino identity. They serve as subtle means through which the so-called colonial subjects navigate the difficult and painful terrains of colonial life (generally referring to more than three centuries of continuities of Spanish and American colonialism and, specifically, to American colonial rule in the first four decades of the twentieth century), where open resistance to foreign rule could pose real dangers to the lives of the subjugated. Thus, cultural strategies of appropriation serve as "weapons of the weak" (Scott), testifying to...