Hansel
and Gretel and the Fairytale Motif of Starvation in the Dark
Ages
One of the
most loved fairy tales of all time “Hansel and
Gretel” shares its general
outline with some of the most endearing and disturbing fairytales in
existence.
For this motif shows both the potential cruelty of parents, the
darkness of a
world without food and the ability of children to work together to
overcome the
impossible. The world of the Dark Ages is different from what we often
portray
it, people did not wish for greatness, adventure, and love people
wished for
food. It is not coincidence that the French Revolution occurred during
a bread
shortage, or that the Russian Revolution came on the heals of
starvation. Those
with high sounding ideals in both these cases had fought for years to
get
people to rise up for freedom, but freedom as always takes a back seat
to food
and security. For peasants the threat of starvation is very real, and
life is
very dark indeed.
It is
perhaps the need for food that causes the idea of cannibalism to be so
prevent
in Folklore, from witches to the wicked step mother in “The
Juniper Tree”
folklore is ripe with those who would eat others especially children.
And so it
is with the “Hansel and Gretel” motif, where
desperation for food drives people
to do the most despicable of acts, abandoning children to die and
attacking them
for food. One can argue now that it was the step mother who sent the
children
off to die, but this was just not the case in the original story, the
Grimm’s
Brothers it seemed could not stand the dark reality of the life the
stories
came from and so switched the mother for the stepmother.
Molly
Whuppie shows this dark reality in perhaps one of the starkest ways
possible,
for parents who have too many children abandon them to the woods to
die. It is
interesting to note how easily the children forgive the children in all
of
these tales however, for when the children make their fortune
overcoming the
cannibalistic intents of the woodlands they typically return to the
parents or
at least one parent. It is always interesting to note that while the
parents
abandon their children to die the villain of these stories in normally
a
wealthy creature in the woods who the children must kill in the
ultimate eat or
be eaten game.
Molly
Whuppie’s story stands out as one of the greatest examples of
this game, for
the starving children find a kindly women who takes them in and tries
then to
protect them from her monstrous husband. In return The oldest of the
three
girls plays the ultimate series of tricks, getting the father to slit
the
throats of his daughters and later to beat his wife to death, even as
the wife
freed Molly from certain death. Certainly the giant husband had tried
to murder
Molly and her sisters, but the sisters had done nothing to deserver
their
death. Nor had the wife to deserve hers for she had tried to save the
children
from starvation. The message of this story then it would seem is that
when
starvation hits the children should play off the sympathies of the
rich, or
steal from them, for they have whole houses of food. Then the children
should
trick these wealthy benefactors to their deaths, so as to steal their
treasures. For such are the dark realities of the fairytale world in
which we
once lived.
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