Learning through Metaphor

by Paula Davidoff

Fitcher's Bird illustration by A. Rackham

I have been realizing that one of the most important things the storytellers of SAI do for our student audiences is to teach them the importance of thinking and speaking metaphorically. We visit classrooms, from pre-school to high school, in daycare centers and youth detention centers, where, week after week, we offer metaphors for the real-life events our students witness and experience. Metaphor is critical to understanding abstract concepts. It helps people build conceptual bridges between schemata and it aids understanding by creating an image that helps explicate an unfamiliar concept or idea. Mastery of metaphor is essential to both linguistic and conceptual development. The metaphors in folk and fairy tales give students a way to view their personal experiences in terms of the broader human condition. 

Since the beginning of the year, Julie Della Torre and I have continued to work with teen girls at Oasis. We’ve been telling traditional tales and encouraging the girls to write original poems and stories suggested by characters and themes in the ones we tell. Because the girls expressed frustration at the heroine’s lack of autonomy in two of the Red Riding Hood stories we told on our first day with them, we have been choosing to tell stories with strong heroines. In one workshop, I told the Grimm Brothers’ Fitcher’s Bird. 

The story is a Bluebeard-type tale in which the villain, a sorcerer who enchants and abducts young women, takes three sisters, one at a time, to his home “deep in a dark forest.” After some time during which he treats his captive kindly, the sorcerer goes away, leaving the girl alone with the keys to the house, and telling her that she may have access to every room except one. He also gives her an egg to watch over. The first two girls enter the forbidden chamber out of curiosity. In the process, each drops her egg into a basin of blood that is just inside the door. When the sorcerer returns, he discovers the girl’s trespass because her egg is stained with blood, and he kills her, chopping her body into pieces. When the third sister is left alone with the keys and the egg, she puts her egg in a safe place and enters the forbidden room purposefully, looking for clues to the disappearance of her sisters. She finds their body parts and reassembles them, miraculously bringing the sisters back to life. Then, because her egg remains spotless, the sorcerer loses his power over her and she is able to save herself and her sisters. 

In the post-story discussion, some of the girls indicated that they were familiar with the character of Bluebeard, the villain of the eponymous Perrault tale, although they were vague about the plot of the story, itself. One difference between Perrault’s maiden-killer story and the Grimms’ Fitcher’s Bird is that, in the Grimm tale, the maiden saves herself and her sisters. (This difference is recognized in the Aarne-Thompson classification system. The tale of Bluebeard is type 312; Fitcher’s Bird is type 311.) 

When they began talking about the story, some girls condemned the youngest sister for allowing herself to be seduced by the sorcerer because, they said, she should have been suspicious of strange men after the loss of her two sisters. At this point, I became more pedantic than either Julie or I like to be in our discussions of story and suggested to the girls a way of analyzing the tale in which the three sisters represented three experiences of the same girl. In this explanation, the reassembly of the first sisters becomes a metaphor for surviving and learning from mistakes, for “getting yourself (or your life) back together.” 

To expand the story metaphor, one can see the egg as a symbol for the girl’s potential. An egg contains the potential for new life and, in this case, her handling of the egg could represent the girl’s failure or success in realizing her potential as a mature woman. Blood symbolizes life, but when it is spilled, life is lost; the blood-stained eggs of the first two sisters indicated that their potential won’t be realized. The third sister has, in fact, learned from the experiences of the first two. She safeguards the egg before searching for the knowledge that will free her from the sorcerer’s spell. At the end of the story, the third sister escapes from the sorcerer’s home disguised as a great white bird, the Fitcher’s Bird of the story’s title, as if she has hatched her new self from the egg she so wisely guarded. 

The Oasis girls were impressed by our analysis of the story symbols. I think it reinforced for them the idea that the stories we tell have deep meaning. I hope that it will serve as a reminder that mistakes can be learning experiences, not failures. 

Every human experience is a composite of sensory perception, movement, situation, and emotion. We don’t experience things in discreet pieces. Instead, we flow from one state to another so smoothly that we are often not aware of the transition. Because the edges of distinct experiences tend to be fuzzy, words do not have distinct, sharply delineated meanings. Instead, they are subject to connotation and open to interpretation. The continuity of our experience and the variability in the meaning of the words we use to describe it makes metaphor a necessity of linguistic communication. Metaphor allows people to communicate without having to verbalize the minutiae of experience. By giving our students access to the metaphors in folk and fairy tales, we give them an essential tool for understanding the world and communicating their ideas about it to others.