Although I don’t remember how or when I first came across “Hansel and Gretel,” I cannot recall a time when I did not know the tale. As a child, what I understood about the story was that a pair of young siblings, a brother and sister, were lost in the forest and needed to find their way home. There were bread crumbs, birds, and disastrously, the candy house. Inside lived the kind old lady who was in fact wretched, lost in a different way. All my life, I thought the story was about the importance of not being fooled by anything too good to be true. When I read it a couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered other layers: the world Hansel and Gretel inhabit is gravely unsympathetic to them, and every character in the story is either touched or motivated by hunger.
The story begins in “a time of famine” (56), and the step-mother wants to get rid of the children because there is not enough food. She says to the children’s father, “All four of us will starve. You may as well start planing the boards of our coffins” (56). She forms her plan to abandon Hansel and Gretel in the forest.
Worried about her own starvation, she wants to dispose of children she could love and who could love her in return. The famine, her poverty, kills her sympathy. The father doesn’t want to lose his children, but he’s too weak or practical to convince the step-mother of any other course. Once the decision is made, he reflects, “But I still feel badly about the poor children” (56). Perhaps hunger has made him impotent, or prevented him from behaving in any other way.
When the father and step-mother finally succeed in depositing the children in the forest, when Hansel and Gretel are lost and abandoned, the siblings naturally grow hungry. A sense of being forlorn is the first pain, and hunger is the second. We are told, “they were getting deeper and deeper into the forest, and unless help came soon, they were sure to die of hunger and weariness” (59). Is it any wonder they are drawn to a house made of bread, cake and sugar? The old woman who lives in the house must be hungry, too, for she “kill[s], cook[s] and [eats] any child who f[alls] into her hands, and that to her [is] a feast day” (60). Has famine and the resulting hunger deranged her? Or was she deranged to begin with?
Something else to observe is how none of the adults in the story experiences pity for the children. Instead, the adults cruelly manipulate Hansel and Gretel. The one adult who feels sympathy, the father, is too pathetic to act on it. Around the time the story was first told, children were not regarded the way they are now, and after putting the story away, I consoled myself with the thought that such events could never happen today.
But then it struck me how monstrously children can be treated in our present world- employed, sold, starved, lead into conflicts as child soldiers, murdered, abused, neglected, and worst of all, forgotten. And then my heart began to break. Greedy, confused and indifferent adults today still treat children as if they were expendable objects. Hansel and Gretel escape, find their way home to their father, and enjoy a happy ending in which the step-mother is dead. If only the same were true for vulnerable children today—if only there was one single person to outsmart.
Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. “Hansel and Gretel”. Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old. The Complete Stories. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. 56-62.
The Vocation 