동화와 놀이

Fairy Tales and Play

One of the main functions of fairy tales or children’s literature is the edification or socialization of children. And this is why in fairy tales or children's literature there appear so many scenes of compensation and punishment by the rules of everyday life are described. As playing takes a large part of ordinary lives of children, fairy tales employ many play scenes which sometimes affect the structure of fairy tales. As children’s lives are full of play, so the edificatory and socializing elements in fairy tales take the form of keeping/transgressing rules of the play or game. This is what makes rule-involving plays so critical in fairy tale studies. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a typical example in which plays and the attributes of the rule construct not only its plot but also the structure of the work itself. In particular, the non-sensical, illogical “symbolic play” in Alice in Wonderland reveals children’s immature, ego-centric relations to reality, and helps to understand children’s psychology. In addition, the binary structure immanent in the play or rather, keeping/transgressing rules makes up the plot and structure of the whole work. And the pleasure concerning rules themselves found in Alice in Wonderland also helps to understand literature as a kind of play, as Huizinga noted, and to see the pleasure of reading in a new perspective, that is, as problem of rules.