Hansel and Gretel as Abandoned Children: Timeless Images for a Postmodern Age

Hansel and Gretel as Abandoned Children: Timeless Images for a Postmodern Age The image of the abandoned child has a long genealogy in Western literature. Our common cultural heritage includes the stories of baby Moses left floating in the bulrushes and the founding of Rome by the orphans Romulus and Remus. We remember learning in school how the Spartans exposed female and weak male babies to the elements, letting only the strongest survive to join their warrior society. John Boswell has provided a more scholarly account of the extent to which children were abandoned by their parents in Western Europe from late antiquity to the Renaissance in The Kindness of Strangers, concluding that it was a ubiquitous practice, institutionalized in many social arrangements, documented in legal records, often celebrated in literature of the period. More recently, the abandoned child appeared as a continuing motif in the didactic literature for children of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A striking example is Babes in the Woods, which appeared first as a broadside ballad, then as a chapbook, and achieved respectability in a picture book by Randolph Caldecott in 1879, in spite of Sarah Trimmer's claim that it was unfit for children (Carpenter 111) . The abandoned child also figures in folk literature. "Abandoned or exposed children" is one of the motifs listed under the classification "Unnatural Cruelty" in Stith Thompson's "Motif Index of Folk-Literature" (409) . Among the folk tale characters most familiar to American children are Snow White, ordered killed by her stepmother; Cinderella, abused if not physically abandoned; and of course. Hansel and Gretel, left to die in the woods by their father and stepmother. My intent in this paper is to focus on "Hansel and Gretel," examining its meaning and relevance to contemporary children. After reviewing the most pertinent critical analyses of this story by contemporary scholars, I will examine four illustrated versions of the story published within the last thirty years. "Hansel and Gretel," one of the tales collected by the Grimm brothers, is an example of a common type of European tale in which children fall into the hands of an ogre, tale type 327A in the Aarne-Thompson classification scheme (Thompson 481) . The story outline is familiar: a woodcutter and his wife (sometimes identified as the children's stepmother) have fallen on hard times. The wife suggests that the children be left to fend for themselves in the woods. Hansel hears the parents planning this and gathers pebbles, which he drops along the way as the children are led deep into the forest. As the moon shines on the pebbles, he is able to lead his sister Gretel home again. When the parents again take the children into the forest, they prevent 322 Hansel from taking pebbles. This time he leaves crumbs of bread along the path. When he tries to follow the bread crumbs home, he discovers that birds have eaten them; and the children are now truly lost. A bird leads the children to a charming house made of cakes and other sweet things. Here the witch entices the children in to eat, then imprisons Hansel, intending to fatten him up before she eats him. Hansel outwits the myopic witch by showing her a bone instead of a finger when she asks to see how fat he is getting. At last, the witch decides to eat him anyway and lights the fire. Gretel succeeds in pushing the witch into the oven, and the children escape, taking with them the treasure which the witch has hidden in her home. A duck leads them across a river and back to their home, where the father now lives alone and welcomes the children back in a happy reunion (Opie 238-44) . Much of the critical commentary on this melodramatic and fanciful tale has emphasized its psychological content. Bruno Bettelheim, of course, is the standard source for psychoanalytic interpretations of the classic European folk tales. In The Uses of Enchantment, he has popularized his idea that fairy tales convey meaning to children, helping children deal with their unconscious, including the dark side of their nature. Like the child's own view of the world, fairy tales polarize...