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Every year during the holiday season in theaters around the world, an old woman is pushed into a roaring oven. As she screams in agony, children on stage and in the audience shriek with delight. Not confined to grand opera, this scenario has been played out in countless tellings of “Hansel and Gretel,” voted Germany’s favorite fairy tale in 1997 (Zipes Happily 38). That most in the audience are not too troubled by the old woman’s fate has much to do with the circumstances of her demise, in particular the fact she had been holding the children captive for weeks with the clear aim of killing and eating them. By way of explanation the Grimm Brothers provide an even more damning reason why we should not feel sorry for the woman in the oven: she was, they write, “a wicked witch” (81). While many readers have found much to admire in “Hansel and Gretel,” others have found it to be disturbing in the extreme. 1 The tale has recently made its way into the judicial reasoning of the highest court in the land: writing the majority opinion that overturned California’s ban on the sale of violent videogames to minors, Antonin Scalia noted that “Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven,” (Brown 8).
Whereas recent cognitive literary theorists have tended to stress the beneficial aspects of fiction,2 this essay will investigate the possible dark side of “narrative transport,” a term coined by Richard Gerrig to describe what happens in the mind when we become swept away by a story. As such highly influential narratives as “Hansel and Gretel” demonstrate, the engendering of prosocial behavior is often conditioned by the narrative construction of radical evil, a process by which the simplifying tendencies inherent in story-telling play a key role in demonizing putatively disruptive groups or types. Techniques typical of narrative transport — stereotypical characters and situations, vivid imagery, suspenseful problem solving — immerse readers of the fairy tale in a world in which prospects of abandonment, treachery, and death are overcome through cooperation, ingenuity, and justified violence to create a parable ripe for nationalist appropriation. The historical relationship between the classic fairy tale and nationalist ideology provides an instructive example of how evolutionary predilections and cultural practices could interact to set the stage for cruelties and horrors unimaginable even by the Brothers Grimm.
As Jack Zipes has pointed out, debates over the value and influence of fairy tales have been ongoing since the eighteenth century (Art 138). Since the 1970s, much of this scrutiny has focused on the potentially pernicious influence of degrading gender stereotypes on young minds. Marcia Liebermann writes,
If we are concerned about what our children are being taught, we must pay particular attention to those stories that are so beguiling that children think more as they read them ‘of the diversion than of the lesson’; perhaps literature is suggestive in direct proportion to its ability to divert (184).
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Harshbarger, Scott. “Grimm and Grimmer: ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and Fairy Tale Nationalism.” Style, vol. 47, no. 4, 2013, pp. 490–508. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.47.4.490. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020.
Wilhelm Grimm was the principal editor of the Children's and Household Tales following their inititial publication. The most significant changes were made already in the second edition (1819), although Wilhelm continued to revise the stories until their final edition (1857).
The most substantive alteration in the text of "Hansel and Gretel" is transformation of the children's mother into a stepmother. In both the manuscript version (1810) and the first printed edition (1812) of this well-known tale, the woodcutter's wife is identified unambiguously and repeatedly as "the mother." The second edition (1819), which saw numerous changes in the formulation of many tales, is equally clear in identifying the woodcutter's wife as Hansel's and Gretel's mother. However, with the fourth edition (1840) the Grimms introduced the word "stepmother," although they retained the word "mother" in some passages. The Grimms' final version of the famous tale (seventh edition, 1857) refers to the woodcutter's wife once as "the stepmother," twice as "the mother," and about a dozen times generically as "the woman."
Whereas the children's mother/stepmother grows harsher in succeeding editions, their father grows more introspective and milder, perhaps too mild, for he is unwilling or unable to stand up to his domineering wife. "It would be better to share the last bit with the children." he thinks, in a passage added already in the 1819 edition, but his wife will not listen to him.
In keeping with revisions made to other tales, Wilhelm added numerous small embellishments to "Hansel and Gretel," making the tale more dramatic, more literary, and more sentimental in succeeding editions. The most prominent example in this regard is the addition of the episode describing the children's escape from the sinister woods across a large body of water, one at a time, on the back of a duck.
In the story of Hansel and Gretel, these include:
GOOD CHARACTERS
In the Hansel and Gretel story the good characters are Hansel and Gretel.
(Source of picture: Easy makes me happy)
THE BADDY
The obvious bad character in this story is the witch who captures Hansel and Gretel.
(Source of picture: Childrens Stories)
MAGIC
One of the main features of this story is the magical house made of cake and candy.
(Source of picture: Picture Book)
OBSTACLE OR TASK
A fairy tale usually includes an obstacle or task which the characters must tackle with to reach their happy ending. Can you think of the obstacles which Hansel and Gretel have to overcome and any tasks they perform?
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
The children manage to get away and return to their father, the wood cutter, who is delighted to see them and they all live happily ever after...
(Source of picture: Childrens Stories)
