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received: 2023-08-19                   DOI 10.19233/ASHS.2023.33
SOCIALIST »USES OF ENCHANTMENT«: FAIRY TALES, SEXUALITY, AND 
SLOVENE NATIONAL IDENTITY IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Ksenija VIDMAR HORVAT
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of Sociology, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
e-mail: Ksenija.vidmar@ff.uni-lj.si
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the relationship between fairy tales, sexuality, and national identity in socialist Slovenia. 
Theoretically, it builds on the canonical work by Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. The main objective 
of the analysis is to interrogate the Freudian sexual script in relation to Slovene national identity formation. For this 
purpose, I study two fairy tales from the socialist period, France Bevk’s Peter Klepec and Moj dežnik je lahko balon 
by Ela Peroci. The concepts of family romance and infantile citizenship are applied.
Keywords: sexuality, national identity, fairy tales, family romance, socialism, infantile citizenship
L’USO SOCIALISTA DELL’INCANTO: FIABE, SESSUALITÀ E IDENTITÀ NAZIONALE 
SLOVENA IN UNA PROSPETTIVA COMPARATIVA
SINTESI
Il contributo esplora la relazione tra fiabe, sessualità e identità nazionale nella Slovenia socialista. Dal 
punto di vista teorico, si basa sull’opera canonica di Bruno Bettelheim Il mondo incantato. L’obiettivo 
principale dell’analisi è interrogare i copioni sessuali freudiani in relazione alla formazione dell’identità 
nazionale slovena. A questo scopo, l’autrice studia due fiabe risalenti al periodo socialista: Peter Klepec di 
France Bevk e L’ombrello volante [Moj dežnik je lahko balon] di Ela Peroci. Vengono utilizzati i concetti di 
romanzo familiare e cittadinanza infantile.
Parole chiave: sessualità, identità nazionale, fiabe, romanzo familiare, socialismo, cittadinanza infantile
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INTRODUCTION
This paper investigates the relationship between 
fairy tales, sexuality, and Slovene national identity. 
Fairy tales are fictional narratives for children. Apart 
from offering an early literary form of entertain-
ment and initiation into the reading culture, fairy 
tales provide the child with moral instructions and 
guidelines to apprehend the world of the adults. 
Moreover, according to the canonical work, The 
Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)1, 
fairy tales contain imaginary tools for the child to 
solve the conflicts of growing up. The conflicts are 
numerous, spanning from separation anxieties (the 
motif of dead parents or wicked stepmothers) to the 
Oedipal complex and the predicaments of discover-
ing sexuality more broadly. Their appeal lies in the 
fact that they “start where the child really is in his 
psychological and emotional being”, Bettelheim 
describes their success with the young reader. 
“They speak about his severe inner pressures in a 
way that the child unconsciously understands, and 
– without belittling the most serious inner struggles 
which growing up entails – offer examples of both 
temporary and permanent solutions to pressing dif-
ficulties” (Bettelheim, 1976, 13–14).
Fairy tales, however, are written by the adults 
(Rose, 1992). Accordingly, they could be consid-
ered as regressive in their vision of the child and 
childhood. The vision, Rose argues, is a projection, 
and not necessarily an accurate study of the child’s 
psycho-social needs. It is a fantasy which envelops 
the yearning for the “age of innocence” in which 
the child (in us) is still untainted by gender and 
sexual “impurity” of the adult phase. For Rose, the 
drive to ignore the bio-historiographic fact that the 
“innocence” is irreversibly lost calls for an inquiry 
on its own. The key question, in this regard, would 
be to which needs fairy tales indeed (co)respond; to 
whom they are written; and by which motives.
This question, indeed, has been raised by various 
feminist informed accounts (Burcar, 2007; Garber, 
1991; Rose, 1992; Sugiyama, 2004; Zipes, 1983). 
However, the concern of this paper is how fairy tales 
can be read into the broader social, political, and 
cultural context and their place in collective life. 
Freud’s theory of sexuality has already been used to 
study broader social and political processes which 
surpass socio-sexual biographies of the individuals. 
Most notably, Lynn Hunt (1992) used the Freud-
ian model of the “family romance” to explain the 
political unconscious of pre-revolutionary France. 
The Freudian repressive mother figure has played 
prominently as concerns the formation of Slovene 
1 Bettelheim’s work has been an object of critique, especially as regards his (mis)appropriation of Freud. In this paper, I treat Uses of 
Enchantment as a source of psychoanalytical reading that falls within patriarchal script of sexual formation of boys and girls.
national character and its socio-sexual pathologies. 
The mother of key national literary icon Ivan Cankar 
has been deemed responsible for the writer’s weak 
and indecisive psychic constitution. Appearing 
most notoriously in the short story A cup of coffee 
(1910), an obligatory reading in Slovene primary 
schools, this figure is also considered a literary 
reflection of the alleged ill-formed relationship of 
Slovene sons with their mothers in actual history 
of the nation. She is the target of Slavoj Žižek ’s 
early work (1987), in which he reads her oppressive 
impact on the collective identity, in particular the 
drive to parochialism, fear of the Other, and resist-
ance to cosmopolitanism. Lately, her imprint on 
Cankar, and the Slovene culture more broadly, has 
been reiterated in a highly popular comic show on 
national TVS “A si ti tud not padu” (2010). The hosts 
of the show perform “A cup of coffee” in a rock 
video version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, with 
Jure Zrnec in the role of “Ivan” and Lado Bizovičar 
dressed as his mother.
As this brief review indicates, literary parental 
figures and their creators, be it that they are situ-
ated in fairy tales or in fiction for adults, have a 
place in reading the nation. They not only partake 
in the formation of national fantasies; they figure 
in the construction of the collective identity and 
its socio-sexual cartography. In my study, I bring 
the two strands of research together. I first refresh 
the selected theories of fairy tales, especially those 
that focus on the Oedipal complex; for the purpose 
of my analysis, I compare Slovene editions of Little 
Red Riding Hood (Rdeča kapica,1968) and Prokof-
iev’s Peter and Wolf (1996). Next, I revisit Žižek’s 
thesis on Cankar’s Mother, and introduce Freud’s 
concept of the family romance as an analytical 
corrective to the original narrative of (regressed) 
sexuality. Simultaneously, to test the relevance of 
the Freudian sexual script in relation to Slovene 
national identity formation, I turn to two fairy tales 
published in the socialist era, France Bevk’s Peter 
Klepec (1988) and Moj dežnik je lahko balon by Ela 
Peroci (1998). Finally, I propose some revisions of 
“the enchantment” thesis which stem from the so-
ciological study of the historically specific contexts 
of its use in socialism. For this last step, I borrow 
from Lauren Berlant’s notion of infantile citizenship.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS OF FAIRY TALES
Fairy tales play an important social, psychologi-
cal, and cultural role in the life of the growing child. 
They are the child’s first encounter with the reading 
culture. They are containers of early information 
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about family relations and the social world. They 
provide imaginary tools for resolving the conflicts 
in the child’s developing unconscious. Last but 
not least, as Bruno Bettelheim’s title of the book 
reads, they tackle all the above tasks by providing 
the child the experience of the enchantment. Fairy 
tale “offers meaning on so many different levels and 
enriches the child’s existence in so many ways,” 
Bettelheim writes, “that no one book can do justice 
to the multitude and diversity of the contributions 
such tales make to the child’s life” (Bettelheim, 
1976, 20).
Bettelheim deciphers the fairy tales as silent 
communicators with the child’s developing self. 
They address the child’s inner world of wonder, 
fear, and confusion. They are also a source of reas-
surance that, as the heroes in the fictional stories, 
he (sic!) would be able to find solutions, overcome 
the barriers and, most importantly, reconcile with 
the negative perception which, due to (alleged or 
real) failure to meet parental expectations, he often 
holds of himself. Strictly realistic depictions of the 
world provide useful knowledge and may prove to 
become helpful instructions. But it is the dream-like 
world of the fairy tales, embroiled with the magical 
and the fantastic, which speaks to the chaos in the 
child’s unconscious mind.
Fairy tales tackle the issues of illness, death, 
abandonment, neglect. Often, they start off with 
the death of the parent(s). Substitute step-parents 
are by default the negative opposite of the birth-
parent. Stepmother in particular wishes the adopted 
children bad luck, tries to push them out of the 
domestic haven, plans their abduction, or even 
death. Hansel and Gretel is the case-book of the 
familial dissonance brought about by the death of 
the mother, and the father’s remarrying to an evil 
woman. She sends them to the woods with a piece 
of bread, knowing that their attempt to mark the 
way back to home by the crumbs will be sabotaged 
by the hungry birds. After getting lost, embarking 
on the episode with the witch who tries to bury 
them alive but ends up being pushed by the two 
into the furnace herself, the kids return home. The 
stepmother is defeated.
Hansel and Gretel does not problematize the 
weak father figure who betrays his paternal func-
tion of protection of the offspring. The victorious 
coming home of the two children indicates that this 
is indeed a drama that concerns them. Despite the 
obviously dramatic turmoil which the two children 
have to endure, it is enveloped in the scenario of 
comfort. As Bettelheim interprets it, it tells the child 
that he will need to let go, and start a journey to 
independence; that this will be a challenging trip; 
but at the end, he will make it – and become an 
autonomous adult.
In Bettelheim’s study, fairy tales are treated as 
being part of the cultural toolkit to assist in form-
ing their sexual identities. They govern the child’s 
desire and help resolve the Oedipal conflict, dif-
ferently for the boys and differently for the girls. 
Little Red Riding Hood is a good example of the 
cultural kit, given to the girls. The little girl goes 
to visit her sick grandmother on the other side of 
the woods. Mother’s strict instructions are not to 
talk to anyone on the road (Rdeča kapica, 1968, 
1–2). On the road, she encounters the wolf and, 
naively, instantly reports all the information about 
her ill grandmother. Typical of the children’s talka-
tive phase, her sharing of delicate family secrets 
will be the cause of her trouble later on. The 
consequences are imprinted with moral lesson. 
Namely, by not obeying the parent, children will 
be punished. Girls particularly severely, by being 
eaten by the wolf.
The fairy tale opens a chapter in girls’ sexual bi-
ographies of the early school age. At this stage, her 
unconscious still struggles with the Oedipal desire 
for the father. The male figure is split between two 
options: “It is as if Little Red Cap is trying to under-
stand the contradictory nature of the male by expe-
riencing all aspects of his personality: the selfish, 
asocial, violent, potentially destructive tendencies 
of the id (the wolf); the unselfish, social, thoughtful, 
and protective propensities of the ego (the hunter)” 
(Bettelheim, 1976, 220). The red colour connotes 
sexual lust, but the hood is too big for the girl, indi-
cating that she is not ready for the sexual encounter. 
Henceforth, she regresses back to the pre-Oedipal 
impulses where she has no competence for rational 
action.
PETER AND THE WOLF
In Bettelheim’s reading, by facing dangers within 
herself, Little Red Riding Hood leaves her naïve 
childishness. She evolves from the experience with 
the wisdom that belongs only to those who have 
been “twice born.” She has been given another life, 
and another chance, to overcome her “own nature” 
and from then on, she will master the episodes of 
improper desire and seduction. “When she is cut out 
of the wolf’s belly, she is reborn on a higher plane of 
existence; relating positively to both her parents, no 
longer a child, she returns to life a young maiden” 
(Bettelheim, 1976, 228). The passage to maiden-
hood occurs without her active involvement. In 
the final scene, the father hunter arrives at the two 
powerless females, the grandmother and her grand-
daughter, shoots the wolf and liberates them from 
the seductive beast. The two women are, by this act 
of transgenerational rescue, reunited in their being 
dispossessed of (sexual) agency and power.
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“’Little Red Cap’ in symbolic form projects the 
girl into the dangers of her oedipal conflicts during 
puberty, and then saves her from them, so that she 
will be able to mature conflict-free” (my emphasis). 
In Peter and the Wolf, the opposite scenario of res-
cue is in place. Peter is a young boy who, in the early 
morning, opens the door of the house and steps into 
the yard in front. He greets his bird friend, sitting on 
the nearby tree. The duck joins them and engages 
in an innocent quarrel with the bird. The scene is 
tranquil and harmonious, until Peter notices a cat. 
She may take advantage of the two birds quarrelling, 
Peter anticipates, and instantly warns the little bird 
to take off. At that moment, the grandfather appears 
at the doorstep, mildly angry with Peter, who left the 
garden gate wide open. This is a dangerous place, he 
instructs Peter, for there may be a wolf coming from 
the woods. Peter ignores the warning, reassuring 
himself with the words that young boys like him are 
not afraid of wolves.
Regardless, the grandfather grabs Peter’s hand 
and takes him back into the garden, closing the door 
behind them. The wolf indeed appears, runs after 
the duck, swallows her, and then moves toward the 
tree where the cat and the bird find their safe place. 
Peter, who sees it all, runs to the house, fetches the 
rope, climbs onto the tree, and, with courage and 
wit and some help from the bird, catches the wolf 
by his tail. At that moment, the hunters come from 
the woods, with their riffles targeting the wolf. “No 
need to shoot,” Peter calms them down; the wolf 
has already been caught. “Let us take him to the 
zoo.” The scene that follows apparently amuses the 
narrator. “And, now, please, imagine this glorious 
procession,” he narrates. Indeed, a transgeneration-
al procession is moving through the woods: headed 
by Peter, the hunters (fathers) in the middle, and the 
grandfather at the end (Figure 1). The grandfather 
is still concerned, contemplating a less fortunate 
scenario. The story ends with the sound of the duck 
from the wolf’s tummy, indicating a happy ending 
for her, too.
Sergei Prokofiev wrote this story as a musical 
play in 1936. Commissioned by Central Children’s 
Theatre in Moscow, the play was to introduce to 
the children the sounds of the symphonic orchestra 
instruments. The political context was Bolshevik 
Russia: the ideological message depicted the trium-
phant new generation of sons (Peter the Pioneer) 
defeating the old (the grandfather) and the nature 
(the wolf) (Morrison, 2009). The musical piece 
became popular worldwide: in 1938, it was per-
formed by the Boston Symphonic Orchestra, and 
since then, numerous recordings followed. Eleanor 
Roosevelt and celebrities like Alice Cooper, Anto-
nio Banderas, David Bowie, Sting, etc. featured as 
narrators. In the 2003 version, Sophia Lauren, Bill 
Clinton, and Mikhail Gorbachev joined Russian 
National Orchestra to narrate the version of Wolf 
Tracks and Peter and the Wolf. Disney’s animated 
version, following the theatrical play a year earlier, 
was released in 1946. In 2007, a coproduction of a 
British-Norwegian-Polish edition by director Suzie 
Templeton won an Oscar for the Best short ani-
mated film at the 80th Academy Awards. A Slovene 
translation was published as a hardcover book with 
illustrations by Matjaž Schmidt in 1996.
Featuring the wolf and the young boy and insert-
ed in the transgenerational setting with the grand-
father’s house, the story and its socio-sexual script 
can easily be compared to Little Red Riding Hood. 
There is a similar opening of the story, with the 
adult warning the young not to give in to the allures 
of the pleasure principle. As Little Red Riding Hood, 
Peter does not obey. In contrast to the girl, he does 
so consciously (rationally), in a way awaiting the 
test of his male bravery to present itself (in fact, in 
Walt Disney’s version, Peter and his friends already 
know that there is a wolf nearby and are determined 
to catch him). He, therefore, is already almost past 
the Oedipal phase, replacing both the grandfather 
and the father figures. Moreover, he makes both 
redundant. In the reverse parental role-playing, 
they are the ones who follow his instructions not to 
shoot the wolf. He is the one who leads the “victory 
parade” while marching ahead of the generations of 
fathers and grandfathers. He is not punished for his 
disobedience and in no need for the “second birth.” 
To the contrary, his encounter with Nature (and the 
id) is awarded by social recognition and agency.
Strikingly, in this story, there is no female figure. 
We do not hear about Peter’s parental figures and 
can only speculate that his father is among the 
hunters in the procession. The sexual composition 
of the drama pertains entirely to the conflicts among 
the males, detached from the immediate familial 
context. It suggests a struggle to assume the place 
of control in the patriarchal hierarchy of masculine 
power in the outside world. Headed towards the 
zoo, the group of males also enacts the domina-
tion of nature, indicating the arrival of the new era. 
The socio-sexual order is restored, and passed on 
to the next generation of sons, while the pleasure 
principle (the captivated wolf) is safely contained 
within modernity and its institutions.
THE HOUSE OF INNOCENCE
The socio-sexual composition of the resolution 
of the conflict in Peter and the Wolf calls for a closer 
inspection of the interplay between the fictional 
material and its ideological context (of the social-
ist era). I will return to this point later, but first, 
another dimension needs to be addressed. Namely, 
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the two harmonious sexual scenarios of conflict and 
resolution (of the drive of girls and boys towards 
the pre-Oedipal pleasure principle) are a product 
of adult fantasy. As Jacqueline Rose has stated, 
children’s fiction does not exist. There is no child 
behind the category “children’s fiction,” she argues, 
other than “the one which the category itself sets 
in place, the one which it needs to believe is there 
for its own purposes” (Rose, 1992, 10). Children’s 
fiction is about the relationship between adult and 
child, hiding within the text all that is uncertain and 
unsettling between the two of them. The clue to the 
enigma of this uncertainty is the aura of innocence, 
which, in Rose’s reading, is not a property of child-
hood but a fantasy projection shot through with the 
adult desire.
The desire can be deciphered from the immedi-
ate biographic context of the authorship. Rose uses 
the case of Peter Pan as a testing ground. Peter 
Pan by J. M. Barrie was first written for an adult 
audience; it appeared in his novel The Little White 
Bird (1902) and was only later adapted to become 
a children’s fiction. Peter is an eternal child. He is 
a literary figure who comes from the real Llewellyn 
Davies boys, whom Barrie adopted (Garber, 1991). 
The boys are drawn into the story of Peter Pan. Lewis 
Carrol had a similar attraction for young girls whom 
he, too, wished to stay in the place of child. Not 
long ago, the photograph of the young girl, the real-
life template for Alice has, made it to the catalogue 
of the major scandals (Girardin & Pirker, 2008) in 
the history of photography (Figure 2). But Alice in 
Wonderland has been saved as a non-controversial 
classic. After all, as we have learned from Bettel-
heim, the fantasy of the father desiring the daughter 
has been legitimized as the young girl’s stage in the 
Oedipal complex.
The desire of a man for a little boy is more deli-
cate. Allegedly, Barrie had no sexual interest in the 
boys but was preoccupied with his own sexuality. 
“The sexual act which underpins Peter Pan is (...) an 
act in which the child is used (and abused) to repre-
sent the whole problem of what sexuality is, or can 
be, and to hold that problem at bay,” Rose argues 
(1992, 4). In this sense, the fictional character only 
pretends to speak to children, whereas in reality, it 
functions as a terrain created by Barrie to repress 
(and temporarily resolve) his own sexual question.
This reading comes close to Marjorie Garber’s ac-
count of the Peter Pan story. In Vested Interests, Garber 
is even sharper in her dissection of the fantasy played 
upon the image of the child. As Rose, she, too, reiter-
ates the fact that, on stage, Peter Pan was traditionally 
played by a woman. This was due to the legal restric-
tion that prohibited the use of minors under fourteen 
on stage after 9 p.m. (Garber, 1991, 166). Garber 
seems to find a deeper message in this collision of 
legal history and drama: “Why is Peter Pan played by a 
woman? Because a woman will never grow up to be a 
man” (Garber, 1991, 168). “[N]o one is going to catch 
me and make me a man,” Peter repulses Mrs Darling’s 
attempt to touch him. Peter is, theoretically and 
Figure 1: The victorious promenade: Peter and the Wolf as illustrated by Matjaž Schmidt 
(Prokofijev, 1996).
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culturally, a transvestite, Garber infers, a pan-erotic 
object of (Barrie’s) desire (Garber, 1991, 170). Barrie, 
Garber recollects biographic accounts, “longed for a 
boyhood that never was – a boyhood that could only 
be staged in Neverland” (Garber, 1991, 169). Moreo-
ver, “Barrie, as many critics have pointed out, wrote at 
the same time as Freud and was as good an instinctive 
Freudian as was his classic candidate for Freudian 
analysis” (Garber, 1991, 167). Garber emphasizes the 
effeminacy of Peter Pan and points to the transvestism 
as indeed being the main (sexual) script of the play. 
She calls it “transgression without guilt, pain, penalty, 
conflict, or cost.” Peter Pan is “the boy who is really a 
woman, the woman who is really a boy, the child who 
will never grow up; the colony that is only a country 
of the mind” (Garber, 1991, 184).
In a similar direction, Garber targets Red Riding 
Hood and the wolf. Is The Red Riding Hood a feminist 
fairy tale about a little girl’s initiation into sexuality, 
the wolf a human being located at the border be-
tween civilization and wilderness, she asks. Garber 
refuses the simplicity of the above explanations and 
digs deeper into the wolf’s cross-dressing. In the 18th 
century European public mind, “to don the garments 
of the opposite sex was to enter a world of sexual 
deviance” (Casle, in Garber, 1991, 381). It was as-
sociated with transvestism and homosexuality. In his 
therapy with the Wolf-man, Freud himself traced the 
wolf phobia of his patient to two fairy tales, Little Red 
Riding Hood and The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats. 
In both, Garber notes, the wolf presents itself as an 
impostor: dressed in the old woman’s nightgown in 
the former and painting his pawn in white (to imitate 
mother goat) in the latter. Garber crosses the puzzle 
of the Wolf-Man with the puzzle of the wolf in the 
fairy tale. Wolf, the cross-dresser in Little Red Rid-
ing Hood, reiterates the primal scene as the scene of 
cross-dressing. It speaks not the truth of the sexual 
act (and its aggression) but rather the truth of gender 
and sexuality. It is a testimony of gender confusion, 
covered up as children’s fiction.
THE FAMILY ROMANCE AND THE POLITICAL 
UNCONSCIOUS
Fictions of children (for the children) do not only 
convey the predicaments of the world of adult sexual-
ity; they also trespass into the terrain of the broader 
political context. Childhood serves “as a term of 
universal social reference which conceals all the his-
torical divisions and difficulties of which children, no 
less than ourselves, form a part” (Rose, 1992, 10). This 
includes broader social fantasies where sexuality and 
body politics meet to pave the way to the desire for a 
particular socio-sexual order. Both Rose and Garber 
point to the racial, gender, and class undertones of Pe-
ter Pan. As they see it, its story is dressed in the specific 
historical mantle of yearning for imperial greatness, as 
well as racial and moral purity. The first title of Peter 
Pan, offered by Barrie, was The Great White Father(!).
Freudian reading of the Oedipal scenarios of sexu-
ality and gender identity and its relation to the socio-
sexual order can be expanded to study real political 
events. In The Family Romance of the French Revolu-
tion, Lynn Hunt (1992) takes a step further, introducing 
to historical analysis of revolutionary France Freud’s 
concept of the family romance. According to Freud, in 
puberty, the Oedipal complex returns to haunt young 
boys (in particular!) when they have to negotiate once 
more their relationship with the parents and, through 
the resolution of the conflict, finally enter a state of 
autonomy. The fantasy of the family, the real and the 
desired, becomes a terrain for imagining the social 
order. In contrast to the first episode of the Oedipal 
complex, which revolves entirely around sexuality, the 
second phase contains a social fabric. The adolescent 
wants to replace his parents, of whom now has a low 
opinion as concerns their social (and economic) sta-
tus: he pictures the other children’s families as more 
desirable and wants to change his familial affiliation.
Hunt takes off from this episode in the life of the 
adolescent to encompass the political unconscious, 
entering the terrain of the collective psyche. Uncon-
scious images of the familial order came to underline 
the revolutionary politics whereby French people 
symbolically assumed the role of the children and 
the King and the Queen the role of the parents. In 
the 18th century, fashioning the rulers as fathers and 
the nation as family was a cultural standard. “This 
familial grid operated on both the conscious and the 
unconscious level of experience” (Hunt, 1992,  xiv). 
In the pre-revolutionary period, however, cultural no-
tions of what constitutes a good parent changed. In 
contrast to the ideology of absolutism, which allowed 
the father figure to exhort unrestrained power over the 
national family, the new social contract demanded the 
principles of equality, justice, and autonomy. Once 
they killed the father (and beheaded the mother), a 
political vacuum emerged, which demanded a new 
kind of collective imagination of the socio-sexual 
anatomy of the new political order. “The French, in a 
sense, did wish to get free from the political parents 
of whom they had developed a low opinion, but they 
did not imagine replacing them with others who were 
of a higher social standing. They imagined replacing 
them – the king and the queen – with a different kind 
of family, one in which the parents were effaced and 
the children, especially brothers, acted autonomously“ 
(Hunt, 1992, xiv).
Hunt’s reading of the political unconscious 
through the concept of family romance provides a 
useful ground to appropriate it to the political context 
of the socialist period in Slovenia. At first glance, 
this may seem a strange appropriation, given that the 
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Freudian patriarchal family scenario should not sit 
well with the socialist family model. In fact, socialist 
gender and family politics were formulated in direct 
opposition to the patriarchal family model of the 
bourgeois West. Gender equality between men and 
women was emphasized as the utmost ideal, serving 
as the evidence of a classless society free of exploita-
tion and domination. The sexual contract ran contrary 
to the idea of a wife’s submission to the patriarchal 
arrangements of household and family. Women were 
invited to assume their roles in public life where, as 
both producers and leaders, they would demonstrate 
women’s liberation and emancipation in action (Vid-
mar Horvat, 2013; 2021).
To the socialist state, children were of special 
public concern. Especially in the immediate postwar 
period, still under the great impact of the Soviet 
model of socialism, the investment in the child as the 
revolutionary force prevailed. While American Freud-
ians instructed the parents to monitor the differential 
gender upbringing of their offspring through obligatory 
Oedipal complex (Vidmar Horvat, 2013), the social-
ist paternal state arranged for the toddler’s nursery 
homes, called “the houses of play and work”. There, 
the children would learn the principles of socialist 
collectivism and the value of labour. For the mothers, 
the task of careful selection of reading literature for the 
children was openly promoted.
It is beyond the capacity of this analysis to dis-
sect the relationship between children’s fiction and 
the Freudian gender and sexual politics in socialism. 
With a much more modest ambition, in the remain-
ing pages, I do want to focus on two fairy tales that 
were published at the height of the socialist era and its 
Figure 2: Lewis Carrol, Alice as a Beggar Child, 1859 (Girardin & Pirker, 2008, 31).
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zeal to reform family and gender relations. It turns out 
that they can be read through the lens of the Oedipal 
complex, whereas its second coming in the shape of 
the “family romance” episode provides an especially 
indicative entry into the “enchantment” of the socialist 
fairy tales.
PETER KLEPEC AND THE SLOVENE MOTHER
Peter Klepec is originally a folktale about the 
young and weak shepherd who, through a magic 
transformation, grows into a hero who defeats the 
Turks. His home is around the Kolpa river on both 
sides of the Slovene-Croatian border. In 1957, 
Slovene writer France Bevk published his version, 
one of many appropriations of the story (ranging 
from the Habsburg era to the 20th-century adap-
tations by comic book artist, animated film, and 
ballet directors)2. In Bevk’s fairy tale, Peter lives 
in a single-parent household with his mother. His 
initial condition can be described as residing in the 
realm of the oral phase; burdened with hunger and 
poverty, his mother is forced to send him away to 
serve in a nearby village. His physical weakness 
makes him a perfect target for the village boys to 
demonstrate their own masculinity. As a desire for 
revenge grows in him, one day, while looking for 
the lost sheep, he encounters a beautiful young girl 
sleeping unprotected under the hot sun. He makes 
her a shade of leaves, for which the girl, when she 
wakes up, takes him to the waterfall and offers him a 
drink from her palms. Peter instantly begins to grow 
in height and strength. Realizing his new powers, 
he returns to the village; beats up the boys; quits 
the job; and returns to his mother. To her worrying 
inquiry, when she sees the son, now bigger (and 
hungrier), coming back home, by which means they 
would live and survive, he self-confidently reas-
sures her that it will be him who will provide for 
both (Figure 3). Contrary to the original, in which 
Peter Klepec marries, in this story, Peter remains 
single. Geographically away from the outside social 
world, he is ready to take over the farm and become 
the chief breadwinner of the household of the two.
Bevk’s version of the mother figure comes close 
to resembling the iconic mother figure of writer Ivan 
Cankar. In popular understanding, much of Cankar’s 
personal drama (as a writer and as a biographic 
personae) has to do with his oppressive mother. 
Her pressure is depicted in terms of a silent suffer-
ing figure. She is not a wicked female who would 
demand her son’s unconditional love and service. 
To the contrary, she withdraws soundless from his 
space when he rejects her, be it in public or in the 
privacy of their home. Short story A cup of coffee 
2 For the review of various adaptations, and corresponding meanings, of this hero (cf. Moric, 2015).
contains all the pain and guilt, experienced by the 
son who puts his writing above the obligation of 
catering to maternal love when, in the middle of the 
writing turmoil, he refuses her gesture of comfort.
Slavoj Žižek spells out the verdict as concerns 
the relationship between the two, and its future im-
pact on the Slovene national socio-sexual character. 
In one of his earliest works, Language, Ideology, 
Slovenes (1987), Žižek discusses the psycho-sexual 
structure of the socialist society. In the “normal” 
resolution of the Oedipal complex, social integra-
tion occurs through the Ideal-Ego, or the Law of 
the Father. When the symbolic identification with 
the Ideal-Ego, represented by the father figure fails, 
the child turns back to the maternal, pre-oedipal 
mother ego. This ego is masochistic in the sense 
that it demands from the child masochistic sacrifice 
and tending to the suffocating mother figure. This 
is, according to Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, the 
dominant trait of the postwar US consumer society 
and its male subjects. Pathological narcissist fol-
lows the maternal imperative to fulfill her desire 
in multiple phantasmatic forms, ranging from com-
plete servitude, excessive indulging in pleasure, or 
pursuing social success. The (absent) father, in this 
scenario, appears as an invisible competitor. This 
situation keeps the subject in permanent anxiety 
(Žižek, 1987, 156).
In the socialist libidinal economy, maternal 
super-ego and paternal super-ego coexist. The fig-
ure of the “Slovene mother” keeps the subject in a 
masochistic state of guilt. Her maternal super-ego 
issues a symbolic mandate that demands sacrifice: 
social success in the “foreign land” is considered 
a treason of both the homeland and the silent suf-
fering Mother. Consequently, it is within the alien 
world that the son “realizes” the value of “roots”, 
recognizes his debt to the homeland, and rejects 
foreign knowledge and culture. The world “out 
there” appears rotten, filthy, and decadent. The 
Father resides in the socialist (Stalinist) ideology 
in the form of a Super-Ego (rather than Ideal-Ego), 
preventing the son from acquiring full, independent 
subjectivity (Žižek, 1987, 157–158). The subject is 
in a state of hysteria.
THE SOCIALIST FAMILY ROMANCE
At first glance, Peter Klepec can be interpreted as a 
story of a son’s failure to exit the family romance (with 
the mother) and begin the life of an economically and 
sexually independent adult male. Instead, he regresses 
into the first Oedipal phase, while maintaining the so-
cial fantasy of the good provider of the second phase. 
He substitutes for the (absent) father figure: he takes his 
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place as well as – by pulling himself and the mother 
from poverty – upgrades its social status. Not unlike 
Peter of the post-revolutionary Russia, he makes the 
fathers redundant.
It is worth noting, however, that the romance 
unfolds in the rural area. In the context of socialist 
modernity, favouring rapid urbanization and proletari-
anization of the peasantry, the folktale scenery denotes 
a disappearing world. Family farms were by no means 
in the centre of the socialist project, apart from the 
state orchestrated efforts to keep them on the verge of 
sustainability and transgenerational survival. The rural 
world belonged to the past. At the same time, since the 
“discovery” of the ethnographic fibre of the Slovenes 
during the late 19th century Habsburg era, nature, the 
rural world, and its people constituted a fabric of the 
genuine national identity. Adaptation of the story in 
the height of the socialist era henceforth speaks of the 
ambiguous fantasy of social initiation into manhood 
and national citizenship. While disseminating admira-
tion for the young boy’s strength and sense of justice 
(compatible with the socialist social agenda), the tale 
contains the subject in the idealized enclosure of tradi-
tion, family, and domesticity with no father (consistent 
with Žižek’s thesis of masochistic guilt).
Moj dežnik je lahko balon is about little girl Jelka’s 
initiation into adulthood. Written by Ela Peroci in the 
same year as Bevk’s Peter Klepec, it was first published 
with illustrations by Marlenka Stupica in 1962. The 
plot begins when Jelka plays with a new (red!) ball 
in the garden in front of her urban bloc dwelling in 
Ljubljana. An extended family of father and mother, 
grandfather, grandmother, and aunt observe her from 
the window, evidently worried about her reckless play 
Figure 3: Bevk’s Peter Klepec upon return to his mother (Bevk, 1988).
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with the ball. Not responding to the father’s warning 
finger, she indeed loses the ball. To avoid angry faces 
from the window, Jelka closes her eyes and imagines 
that the nearby umbrella she has used as a shelter is 
indeed a balloon. As she daydreams, holding on to the 
umbrella, she takes off from the ground. After a scenic 
flight over Ljubljana, its castle, and the surrounding 
neighbourhoods, she lands in the “Land of the hats”. 
In this magic courtyard, where hats grow like flow-
ers, Jelka meets all the friends she is not allowed to 
play at home. The children tell her that the hats have 
a transformative power: they fulfil the desires of their 
owners and change them accordingly. One of the 
boys in the group wished for visionary powers and 
now can see faraway places. With his help, Jelka finds 
her lost ball. She then picks up the hats for her family 
members and flies back home. She first shows her lost 
ball and, before anyone can express any anger, begins 
delivering the hats. To her delight, the mother becomes 
a noble lady. The grandfather turns into an officer, a 
lifelong dream coming true. The grandmother takes 
off her headscarf and, with the splendid new cover, 
transforms into a handsome young woman. The father 
graduates to become a professor; the aunt rejoices 
as she turns into a movie star (Figure 4). When the 
happy choir asks Jelka where she has a hat for herself, 
she assures them she does not need one. She has her 
umbrella and with the umbrella, she can fly.
The fairy tale contains the elements of Little Red 
Riding Hood, the fantasy of flying Peter Pan, and the 
motif of the powerless child returning as a grown-up 
tending to her parents’ needs in Peter Klepec. Yet, 
while like Little Red Riding Hood, Jelka undergoes 
all the trials of the narcissistic pleasure principle, she 
is the heroine of her own, as well as of her family’s, 
rescue. Stronger than her family members, who one 
after another regress to imaginary figures of the narcis-
sistic stage when given gifts, she is autonomous, free 
– and above the vanity of the mundane semi-bourgeois 
household. The last hat she has in her possession from 
the trip, is for her sister – “so small, so tinny that we 
have not noticed her so far”, the narrator conveys.
INFANTILE CITIZENSHIP
The closure of the last fairy tale sits uncomfortably 
with the usual happy-end format of the conventional 
fairy tale narrative structure. It plays no role in the 
Oedipal complex, where siblings reconcile with each 
other hesitantly only to ensure their own love from 
the parents. Jelka endorses her little sister on the last 
page of the book, away from the sight of the family. 
Is this a gesture of generosity, tender sisterly love, or 
a pact of solidarity between the two sisters? An act of 
recognition of the weak and the invisible, “so tinny” 
that they appear on the margins of even the socialist 
enchantment for children?
Marjan Horvat has discussed the relationship 
between selected Slovene fairy tales, their cogni-
tive matrices, and deliberation with respect to the 
common good in the socialist era. As he argued, the 
folktales were inserted into the strategic narrative of 
creating a new social order (Horvat, 2022a, 1202). 
The potentially religious contents of the folk tradi-
tions were removed, while depictions of difficult 
pre-revolutionary socio-economic conditions were 
highlighted. However, from the mid-1950s onwards, 
strictly ideological motives in the fictional formula-
tion of socialist childhood gave way to anthropo-
logical and psychological concerns. In addition, 
after the break-up with Stalin, Western pop culture 
crossed the borders of the Yugoslav state. The new 
mixture of political, theoretical and cultural influ-
ences may account for the special socialist type of 
modernity, found in the two fairy tales discussed 
above. As Horvat underlines, a key condition which 
allowed for the political-ideologically motivated 
appropriation of folk tales was in finetuning the 
oral folk tradition temporality with ideological nar-
ratives. The “authenticity” of certain ways of life, 
enveloped in the tradition, for instance in the ad-
aptation of Peter Klepec and its rural world, served 
as legitimation for the (socialist) social change in 
the urban sphere. In another paper, Horvat (2022b) 
also proposes to see fairy tales as proto-political 
sites where key principles of deliberative democ-
racy – inclusion, moral respect, argumentation, and 
notions of common good find their modern ground 
(Horvat, 2022b, 605). Drawing on the work of cog-
nitive historian Dunér (2019), Horvat reiterates how 
previous knowledge and experience of the commu-
nities are stored in stories (including folktales) and 
shape the meaning of the life of the contemporary 
generations. The plethora of these literary sources 
is “essential for understanding the separation of 
people into ethnic communities, classes, attitudes 
towards the Other, and so on, while the analysis of 
the literature can explain the level of intersubjec-
tivity, for instance, the role of empathy within the 
community and towards members of other cultures” 
(Dunér, in Horvat, 2022b, 611).
However, as argued in this paper, when consid-
ering children’s literature, we need to take into ac-
count the interplay between the text and its (adult) 
author. To tackle the issue of the fantasy construct, 
running between the child in the fiction and the 
(child in) author, Lauren Berlant (1997) has proposed 
the concept of “infantile citizenship”. As she con-
veys it on the case of the United States, the infantile 
citizen has appeared in political writing about the 
nation at least since Tocqueville. In Democracy in 
America, he advocates that citizens should love the 
nation the way they do their families and fathers 
but warns at the same time that this form of love 
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could also take a negative turn towards infantiliza-
tion and a passive stand against the power of the 
state (Berlant, 1997, 27). There is confusion in this 
formulation of political subjectivity, as Berlant 
extracts it, one which at once promotes servitude 
to the nation (based on the genuine belief in the 
state and its operation toward the common good); 
and fears the regression into political infancy. 
Moreover, “citizen adults have learned to ‘forget’ 
or to render as impractical, naïve, or childish their 
utopian political identifications to be politically 
happy and economical functional” (Berlant, 1997, 
29). Confronting the tension between (childhood) 
utopia and history (of adult citizenship) provides 
the infantile citizen a tool to unsettle the contradic-
tions within the national life. With their stubborn 
naivety, the children can disrupt and reframe the 
political and social norms of the nation, but, due to 
their political and ideological illiteracy, they also 
allow for the expression of nostalgia for the time 
when they were still unknowing.
This helps explain the puzzle of Jelka’s family ro-
mance with her kin. Jelka is in her early adolescent 
stage, testing the limits of independence and au-
tonomy. Contrary to Freud’s scenario, she does not 
wish her parents to be of higher social standing but 
recognizes (rightfully) that this is indeed their own 
dream. Namely, the dream of the evolving socialist 
middle class, who does not possess the means to 
fully indulge in consumer culture; or possess the 
courage to fantasize about the glorious age of the 
(Habsburg) past. The illustrations are indicative: the 
elegant long, 19th-century woman’s dress and the 
grandfather’s uniform connotate the Franz Joseph 
era. The grandmother’s head scarf at the opening 
scene bears a mark of rural culture but also a subtle 
trace of the early postwar socialist working class 
thrift. The transformation of the family in their so-
cial status and public presence should, read from 
the perspective of the socialist state, indeed call for 
a scandal. In a safe space of the “kids’ stuff”, the 
fairy tale and the author survived the test of loyalty. 
Peroci and Stupica climbed to fame already in the 
socialist era. This may be because Jelka, by reveal-
ing the triviality of her own bourgeois family, posits 
herself as a politically active socialist female, freed 
of her own sexual desire and the need to be initi-
ated in the patriarchal family scenario. It may also 
be that through this act of “infantile citizenship”, 
public fantasies for an alternative space of defying 
both the socialist maternal and the paternal super-
ego, found their channel of expression.
Figure 4: Transforming identities: Moj dežnik je lahko balon (Peroci, 1998).
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CONCLUSION
Fairy tales are intended for children, but their 
perimeters of fantasy and enchantment are far from 
enclosing only this population of readers. In critical 
cultural reading, they are, in fact, storages of adult 
desires. Written by the adults, they reorchestrate the 
narratives of sexuality in a way that both articulates 
confusion and allows the escape from the potential 
scandal. Because they are considered “kids’ stuff”, 
they do not present a threat to the cultural anatomy of 
the hegemonic socio-sexual order.
In my analysis, I have combined cultural and 
political theory to further the understanding of the 
social function of fairy tales. Classical Freudian 
analysis posits the fairy tales in the domain of the 
“enchantment” which allows the maturing child to 
recognize and adopt culturally approved gender 
roles and sexual identities. The fantasy structure 
of the enchantment indeed pertains to the adult 
desire whereas, as critical reading suggests, the 
child serves as a pretext to entertain alternative 
scenarios of the subject’s sexual formation. When 
the classical Oedipal complex theoretical narra-
tive is observed from the perspective of the Freud-
ian “family romance”, the psychological function 
of the fairy tales makes room also to observe it 
in its political performance. Again, residing in the 
domain of children’s fiction, fairy tales open up a 
safe space to fashion a political desire for another 
social order. In the ideological confinements of 
the socialist state, this fashioning is based on the 
appropriation of past legacies of social solidarity 
and the quest for justice. At the same time, operat-
ing within the terrain of infantile citizenship, they 
also allow nostalgia and a memory of a desire for a 
different public life. This, in fact, could be consid-
ered the ideological core of the “socialist enchant-
ment”: the coexistence of past values of common 
humility and resilience; and the glorious fantasies 
of the burgeoning self – a winning combination by 
which Yugoslav socialism managed to maintain its 
international fame of open society – and allow its 
citizens to endure in its project.
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SOCIALISTIČNA »UPORABA ČAROBNOSTI«: PRAVLJICE, SPOLNOST IN SLOVENSKA 
NACIONALNA IDENTITETA V PRIMERJALNI PERSPEKTIVI
Ksenija VIDMAR HORVAT
Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta, Oddelek za sociologijo, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija
e-mail: Ksenija.vidmar@ff.uni-lj.si
POVZETEK
Članek obravnava razmerje med pravljicami, spolno in nacionalno identiteto v socializmu. Teoretično se 
opira na kanonično delo Bruna Bettelheima The Uses of Enchantment, v katerem avtor zagovarja stališče, 
da pravljice igrajo pomembno vlogo pri spolnem razvoju otrok. Bettelheimov argument je analiziran skozi 
feministično-psihoanalitično perspektivo, ki problematizira Freudovo predpostavko o gladkem prehodu k 
diferencialnemu spolnem oblikovanju fantov in deklet. Glavni cilj analize je preučiti Freudov spolni scenarij 
v povezavi z oblikovanjem slovenske nacionalne identitete. Slavoj Žižek je trdil, da je slovenski nacionalni 
značaj uokvirjen z zatiralno in posesivno fikcijsko materjo. V pričujočem članku obravnavam Žižkovo tezo 
skozi branje dveh pravljic iz socialističnega obdobja, Peter Klepec Franceta Bevka in Moj dežnik je lahko 
balon Ele Peroci. Pri tem ugotavljam, da lahko z dodajanjem Freudove ideje o family romance in političnega 
koncepta infantilnega državljanstva k analizi otroške fikcije pridobimo nove vpoglede v konkretne politične 
in socialne napetosti, ki podpirajo “uporabo čudežnega” pri otrocih v socializmu.
Ključne besede: spolna identiteta, nacionalna identiteta, pravljice, družinski roman, socializem, nedoraslo 
državljanstvo
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