I don’t remember ever being read the story Hansel and Gretel when I was younger. I always knew that storyline behind it, but I don’t think I ever actually read it until right now. I’m glad that I waited until I was my age to read it because there’s a lot of in depth material in this tale that most children won’t pick up on. To most kids, this is just another story that in ends up happy in the end. However, there is a lot of female distrust in it as well. For example, in Brothers Grimm version Hansel and Gretel, the step-mother in the story, convinces the father of the children that they cannot feed the children any longer and in order to save themselves, they must abandon the children in the forest.
“‘Tomorrow at the break of day we’ll take the children out into the darkest part of the woods. We’ll make a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread. Then we’ll go about our work and leave them alone. They’ll never find their way home, and then we’ll be rid of them'” (pg.184).
Although the father of the children in this story is very reluctant to leaving them, he eventually gives into his wife and goes along with her plan of abandoning the kids in the forest. To many kids, this may just seem like another part of the story when they are young enough to not understand, but to me at least, this story is very cruel. In The Juniper Tree, also by Brothers Grimm, the nasty step-mother actually kills the young boy in the story by decapitating him when he goes to reach for an apple.
“When the little boy bent down, the devil prompted her, and bam! She slammed the lid down so hard that the boy’s head flew off and fell into the chest with the apples” (pg. 190).
This follows along with the common theme in fairy tales that step-mothers cannot be trusted, and that they are usually very cruel to children that are not theirs directly. Another woman that was thought to be trusted in the beginning is the witch that the children encounter in the woods when they are lost. She takes them in and feeds them and gives them nice beds to sleep in while they stay there. But, she is only doing this to fatten them up so that she can eat them when she wants to. Although it has a happy ending of the children finding their way home and the step-mother not being around anymore… it’s still not something I would have wanted to be read to me before bedtime when I was young.
Skylar Nerone 