One of the most beloved fairy tales of all time, “Hansel and Gretel” shares its general outline with some of the most endearing and haunting fairy tales in existence. Because this motif shows both the potential cruelty of parents, the darkness of a world without food, and the ability of children to work together to overcome the impossible. The world of the Middle Ages is different from what we often represent, people did not want greatness, adventure and love, people wanted food.
It is no accident that the French Revolution occurred during a bread shortage, or that the Russian Revolution came in the midst of starvation. Those with high-sounding ideals in both cases had fought for years to get people to rise up for freedom, but freedom, as always, takes a backseat to food and security. For the peasants, the threat of starvation is very real and life is very dark.
Perhaps it is the need for food that makes the idea of cannibalism so forewarned in folklore, from witches to the evil stepmother in “The Juniper Tree”, folklore is full of people who would eat others, especially children. . And the same goes for the “Hansel and Gretel” motif, where desperation for food drives people to commit the most despicable acts, leaving children to die and attacking them for food. It can be argued now that it was the stepmother who sent the children to die, but this was not the case in the original story, the Grimm brothers could not seem to bear the dark reality of life from which the stories came and so on. she changed the mother to the stepmother.
Molly Whuppie shows this dark reality in perhaps one of the starkest ways possible, for parents who have too many children who leave them in the woods to die. However, it is interesting to note how easily the children forgive the children in all these tales, for when the children make their fortunes by overcoming the cannibalistic attempts of the woods, they usually return to the parents or at least one of the parents. It is always interesting to note that while parents leave their children to die, the villain of these stories is usually a rich creature in the forest that the children must kill in the ultimate game of eat or be eaten.
Molly Whuppie’s story stands out as one of the best examples of this game, as the starving children find a kind woman who takes them in and tries to protect them from her monstrous husband. In return, the eldest of the three girls plays the latest set of tricks, having the father slit his daughters’ throats and then beat her wife to death, even as her wife freed Molly from a sure death. Certainly the giant husband had tried to kill Molly and her sisters, but the sisters had done nothing to deserve her death.
The wife didn’t deserve hers either because she had tried to save the children from starvation. The message of this story, then, would seem to be that when famine strikes, children must play with the sympathies of the rich, or steal from them, because they have houses full of food. So the children should trick these rich benefactors to death, to steal their treasures. For such are the dark realities of the fairy tale world we once lived in.
