Monday, March 31, 2014

The Witch Must Die




The two different subtitles 





Vanity-Snow White
Gluttony-Hansel and Gretel
Lust-Little Mermaid
Greed-Jack and the Beanstalk


Kay Nielsen



Walter Crane





  1. I find the focus on gluttony as an interpretation of the Hansel and Gretel story to be really bizarre. It reads to me as a straightforward story borne from the anxiety of not being able to support and feed one's family, and the guilt which would come with thinking the unthinkable - what if we abandon our children to lighten the load and survive?

    From what I recall of the Grimm version, the section where the children come across the house and deal with the witch is only a small part of the story. Much more is made of the events beforehand, where the children overhear their parents discussing getting rid of them and make attempts to thwart them.

    Then there is the wish fulfillment at the end where the children return with treasures, and the mother, the one who seemed okay with the children being left, has died (everything is okay and the bad, guilt inducing thoughts have been banished), leaving just the father, who had agonised over and regretted the decision.

    From my own memories of reading fairy tales as a child, I wouldn't have been able to tell you why I liked them so much. I can look back now and attempt to apply some analysis, but at the time all I knew is how strangely alluring I found them.

    There's a quote from "The Faraway Nearby" which I think applies here: "Fairy tales are children's stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one."

    My apologies for rambling. I have just stumbled across your blog and am really enjoying your writing.

  2. I absolutely agree with you. It's one of those things I almost felt was too obvious to need a counter argument for.

    That quote is really good! It's true, even if fairy tales were never exclusively children's stories, you can't ignore the cast of main characters mostlybeing young children or adolescents. And a lot of fairy tales can be boiled down to power struggles when you think about it.

    No worries for "rambling"! All good thoughts!

  3. I can see some truth in both sides. I mean, there's definitely more than one way to look at a fairy tale, and it's okay to find truth in something that the author didn't intend to put there. George Macdonald had a great quote about it in his book a Dish of Orts (the ebook is free on amazon). But it isn't okay to claim that what he's gleaned from the story is what the author/s of the story intended, and that anything else is rubbish. It is then that we get a sense of pride and quit learning.
    It seems the author of this book was looking at the obvious instead of looking deeper, despite the subtitle of the book.
    It's interesting though how sometimes the villain in stories mirrors the main character/s, even if it's in a really twisted way.

  4. I'm quite shocked at some of his ideas - they seem a bit 'backwards' in the sense that I thought we'd been there, heard that, and moved on.

    The problem I have with these types of interpretations is that they forget that these stories give children a sense of empowerment just from the child beating the bad guy on their own, not because they're comprehending how to cope with their sins or budding desires or whatever. Maybe that's why the main characters were young people even when the stories weren't intended for children - because children represent people in a position lacking power, yet it shows them overcoming nonetheless. They're an easy way to interpret powerlessness in people?

    These debates do tend to go in circles, don't they! :)

  5. Writer4Christ-Yes, it's absolutely true we can't just throw out all of his ideas because we don't agree with all of them. If nothing else it's helpful to understand how fairy tales have been interpreted in the past and how our culture fits on that spectrum!

    A.L. Loveday-I know, I felt almost foolish having to argue some of his points! Also, I should probably have mentioned that this isn't NEW fairy tale scholarship by any means-this book was published in 1999. And reading back over my other post on Mallet's interpretation of Hansel and Gretel linked above, he's actually gotten a lot more moderate than that 1984 version of child psychology interpretation!

    And I know, his whole analysis is just so counter intuitive and seems to ignore what actually happens in the story. But I'm loving this discussion on power and perspective in fairy tales. Being told mainly by peasants and poor people, they could probably identify more easily with the more powerless children in the stories, especially during times when the government was extra harsh and unfair.