Fairytale Synthesis paper free essay sample

â€Å"Hansel Gretel† by the Brothers Grimm(184-190), â€Å"Molly Whuppie† by Joseph Jacobs(209-211), and â€Å"The Juniper Tree† by the Brothers Grimm(190-197). All adhere to the idea stated by Maria Tartar in her introduction to â€Å"Hansel Gretel,† that â€Å"Food—it’s presence and it’s absence—shapes the social world of fairytales in profound ways. † (179). In all these tales, the main conflict that leads to the triumph is brought out by an issue that is related to food in some way. One story that can definitely attest to the validity of this claim is â€Å"Hansel Gretel. † In the very beginning they are abandoned by their parents in the woods, this conflict appears as a result of their stepmother’s fear of famine because they no longer had enough food to provide for the children. As Bruno Bettelheim says in his criticism of â€Å"Hansel Gretel,† †The mother represents the source of all food to the children, so it is she who now is experienced as abandoning them as if in a wilderness†(273). We will write a custom essay sample on Fairytale Synthesis paper or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This signifies the idea of how the anxiety of starvation, created by the mother, who is metaphorically the source of all food for them, leads them on their journey into the woods, which results in the children gaining a greater sense of independence and overall meaning of life. Through this endeavor they learn how to handle and overcome their own anxieties. They have no other choice but to do so since they have been abandoned in the woods and left to fend for themselves. By gathering the pebbles one night when he heard his parents talking about their plans to leave the children in the woods, Hansel secures his and his sister’s path back to home when they are left in the woods by their parents the first time. He lays out the pebbles on the path whilst on their way into the forest, waits for nightfall, and uses the light reflecting off the pebbles from the moonlight to guide him and his sister back to their house. Though their main goal was to get back to the house by any means necessary, this provides a solution to that problem, but the main issue is still present; the family is on the brink of famine. This makes them feel desperate initially because they do not know how they will fare without the parental guidance, but, as the story goes on, the two children slowly realize that it is necessary for them to make their own calculated decisions for themselves as to how to deal with their problems. When the children are in the forest the second time, and they have been traveling for 3 days at this point, they come across a house made of bread with a roof of cake and transparent windows made of sugar. Since they are so direly hungry at this point, they immediately begin to devour the house. After a while they hear a voice ask them â€Å"Nibble, Nibble is it a mouse? Who’s that nibbling at my house? † they reply â€Å"The wind so mild, the heavenly child,†(187). and she invites them inside. She feeds them a wonderful meal of milk and pancakes with sugar apples and nuts. We later find out that she is a nasty witch who lures children into her home in attempt to fatten them up to be eaten by her. This relates to how food can impact the events in fairytales in profound ways. Since they were starving they did not really give themselves a chance to evaluate the consequences that might arise in their unwittingly devouring a random house in the woods that was made of gingerbread and cake. This is how they come into the situation that creates their having to intelligently strategize ways to outwit the witch in order not to be eaten by her. This ultimately helps them mature and come to an understanding of the fact that you need to face your fears in order to overcome them, and this teaches them the lesson that the power resides in themselves leading them not to be reliant on their parents because of anxiety or fear that was initially created because of the absence of food. In this respect, I think an accurate summation of what the story is trying to convey is shown by Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote, â€Å"By implication the story tells about the debilitating consequences of trying to deal with life’s problems by means of regression and denial, which reduce one’s ability to solve problems. †(274). This is why when they return home the second time the mother becomes more shrewd and evil towards them and immediately wakes them up early the next morning to put them back even deeper into the woods. The way â€Å"Mollie Whuppie† starts is practically identical to the start of â€Å"Hansel and Gretel:† A man and his wife have too many children and not enough meat to feed them all, so the parents take them into the woods and leave them there. So again, the same point can be argued that the central issue of starvation anxiety is what strikes the match for the story just as it did in â€Å"Hansel and Gretel. † Mollie and her 3 sisters walk into the woods and found a house as it was beginning to get dark. They knock on the door because they are desperately hungry. This is also a representation similar to â€Å"Hansel and Gretel† when the children come to the witch’s house. Since the girls were so hungry the only thing they were focusing on at this point was getting food, while overlooking the fact that they were walking up to a random house in the middle of the woods. This encounter sets the pace for the rest of the events that happen in the tale. However, what is different from Hansel and Gretel’s encounter with the witch and the girl’s encounter at the house is that Hansel and Gretel did not really know what they were walking into. They just saw a house made of appealing treats and they were starving, which led them to be unsuspectingly taken advantage of by a cannibalistic witch. In Mollie Whuppie, the giant’s wife, knows that her husband will likely kill the girl’s when he returns home and she lets them know that, telling them â€Å"I can’t do that, as my man is a giant, and he would kill you if he comes home†(209). Therefore, they had more of an understanding as to what possible consequences could arise than Hansel and Gretel did in their encounter with the witch. Also, when the Giant comes home, the wife protects them and tells her husband that they will leave. Having been told not to eat them, the giant orders the girls to stay the night, eats his supper, and falls asleep immediately afterward. This is an example of how food shapes this story because since he ate the dinner and fell asleep it allowed Molly to coordinate a way to manipulate the situation. Her switching of the straw necklaces and the gold chains lead to her and her sisters to being saved from being eaten and allows her to escape and live to tell her story to the king. This sets the stage for the rest of the story. Another fundamental difference between the story of â€Å"Hansel and Gretel† and â€Å"Molly Whuppie† is that Molly is always going back into the woods to test her luck and she usually always outwits her adversary in the giant. Therefore, her character traits are shown as she already exhibits witty qualities that are helpful for overcoming evil monsters, while Hansel and Gretel have to develop those qualities for themselves and wait for an opportunity to push the witch into the oven. Therefore Molly Whuppie definitely has a lot more understanding of what she is getting into before she gets there and Hansel and Gretel become vulnerable only as a consequence of their ease of giving into temptation of devouring the gingerbread house. They have no prior knowledge of the fact that the witch is going to try and eat them, and until she reveals her true intentions they have much less to go on. In order to overcome the witch, they have to develop a plan for how they react as they go along because they do not automatically possess the ability to outsmart evil doers as Mollie Whuppie does. When Hansel and Gretel finish their trial in overcoming the witch, it is implied that they have adapted somewhat of an evolved sense of their ability to solve their troubles by themselves, and that can be signified in the part where the duck takes them home and they each get on one at a time. This can be interpreted to mean that they are both are now the captains of their own ship, so to speak, with their newly acquired realizations of themselves gained through overcoming obstacles, and thus being ready to return home to live with their father. Molly Whuppie’s story does the same thing but with somewhat less cleanliness in the moral because she is being a con artist, stealing the giant’s things and getting her and her sisters married, leading them to living in the castle. One could argue that the only reason she would be doing this is because the giant is evil, but there is kind of a discrepancy in how the lessons of Molly Whuppie and Hansel and Gretel might be interpreted. As Maria Tatar points out in her Introduction to Hansel and Gretel, the difference between the two characters and their stories is â€Å"Hansel and Gretel and The Juniper Tree Give us High melodrama—abandonment, treachery, betrayal, and joyous reunions—â€Å"Mollie Whuppie and â€Å"Tom Thumb† offer comic relief in the form of spunky adventurers who use their wits to turn the tables on adversaries with daunting powers† (184). She adds, â€Å"What George Cruikshank had to say about â€Å"Puss in Boots† goes far in explaining why child tricksters have not enjoyed the success of other fairy tale characters: â€Å"the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying! —a system of imposture rewarded by the greatest worldly advantage—a useful lesson truly to be impressed upon the minds of children! †(184). The stories are seen to convey their messages differently because a lot of what Mollie Whuppie does might be seen by some people as selfish or immoral, and even though they do get the witches treasure at the end the story of Hansel and Gretel is viewed as somewhat more heroic because they are not going back into confrontations with the witches to get something else out of it as Mollie Whuppie did with the Giant. Mollie Whuppie exploits the adversary and Hansel and Gretel learn more of a lesson, overcoming evil rather than trying to take advantage of the conflict for their own material gains. The story of the Juniper Tree relates to the idea of food shaping the social world of fairytales in profound ways but, food is present rather than absent as it was in the previous two tales. The story basically starts out in the â€Å"Juniper Tree,† where the mother wants a child and as she is peeling an apple under the tree. She cuts her finger and begins to bleed, signifying, as this motif did in â€Å"Snow White,† the loss of virginity and thus the conception of the child. It can be argued that the conception of the child comes directly from an interaction with food, being that she was peeling an apple and that was what led her to bleed. The mother dies during childbirth and is buried under the juniper tree as she had requested. The father after a while remarries a woman and they have a daughter. The new â€Å"stepmother† is seen as â€Å"a troublemaker stirring things up and unsettling the family in an unspeakably radical fashion. †(Tatar 182). The mother is consumed by anger and jealousy whenever she sees the boy, she feels as if â€Å"the devil prompted her†(191). and when the boy goes to get an apple out of the chest and slams the lid on his head which decapitates him. She puts the boy in a stew and the when the father comes home he enjoys it so much that he eats the entire thing. â€Å"Oh, Wife†¦ No one else will get any. Somehow I feel as if it is all mine† (192). This idea can be related to the interpretation presented in Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of â€Å"Snow White,† where they suggest that the huntsman bring the boar’s lungs and liver to the stepmother in that story. She believes that she is eating Snow White, who is her sworn enemy; the author’s suggest that in doing this she is devouring her own rage and thus becoming even more enraged. In â€Å"The Juniper Tree,† when the father eats the stew the reason that he finds it so appetizing is because even though he does not know of his son’s demise, by consuming him he is bringing in the energy of his son to himself, so the reason he wants to eat it all is to gain closure. The event of the boy being eaten also eventually leads to his rebirth when his sister brings the bones to the Juniper Tree and buries them. By her doing this a bird comes from the boy’s spirit. This can also imply that since the boy is being buried at the same location that his mother was buried that she is aiding him in enacting his revenge against the stepmother. One of the reasons I feel that the stepmother is so tempted toward her cannibalistic inclinations is that she knows that the family has a lot of money, and therefore that means they have a lot of food. It is made apparent that her greed is a leading factor toward why she wants the boy dead, in part because if you had money in those days, you had food. She knew that the family was in a good position, and she was in such a good position herself to take advantage of their fortunes. When the boy is reincarnated as a bird that blossoms from underneath the juniper tree and he proceeds to get gifts for those people who loved him and if they did harm him like the father eating him it was only because they hadn’t known what they were doing. The mother eventually gets killed by the boy when he is in the form of a bird and drops a millstone on her head. Then he returns to human form and they go sit down and eat as they do on several occasions throughout the story. They live happily ever after, suggesting that their worries are now gone because the stepmother is dead. The message this story delivers to the reader is simple: either you’ll get a gold chain or some new red shoes for behaving well or you’ll get a millstone dropped on your head. All three stories have the idea that food shapes the social world of fairytales in profound ways. Hansel and Gretel’s journey in the forest comes as a result of their parents constructing a plan to abandon them in order to ensure that they themselves do not go hungry, leading the children to, as Bruno Bettelheim puts it, â€Å"Overcome and sublimate their primitive, incorporative and hence destructive desires† (274). This means that they came to a greater state of being, both intellectually and psychologically for themselves as individuals, having been put on this trial by their parents and overcoming their adversary in the witch, making them more apt to conquer any anxieties which they have yet to face in their lives. The journey in â€Å"Mollie Whuppie† is also initiated by the parents of the three young ladies because they, like Hansel and Gretel’s parents are facing a shortage of food. The moral of the story may be represented in a manner that is not as clean as the story of Hansel and Gretel because Mollie Whuppie is stealing, cheating, and lying to the giant in order to get his belongings and have her and her sisters be married to the king’s sons. That is justified because the Giant is a child-eating cannibal, which makes her somewhat of an acceptable character in that regard because the people who she is deceiving probably deserved it in the first place. She is enacting the rules of karma upon the giant, so to speak, and therefore the fact that she ends up living in the king’s castle at the end of the story is probably a sensible resolution in this case The Juniper Tree focuses on the concept of food’s presence and absence shaping the social world of fairytales in that it was the Stepmother’s plan to murder the little boy mainly because she was jealous of the love he got and she preferred her child over him, but the presence of food instilled her with greed and made her feel as if she were untouchable. That’s why it was so easy for her to cook him up in a stew and feed him to his own father. In conclusion, in all these stories the main characters gain exponential growth in the area of self-realization and spiritual growth. They conquer their fears and become better people in doing so. This occurs whether it be by dropping a millstone on the head of your evil stepmother to avenge your own death and thus being reincarnated through that act of revenge as the boy did in the Juniper Tree, or by enhancing ability to solve problems for yourself through being pitted against a cannibalistic witch because you were so hungry that you forgot that, even though it is a fantastic gingerbread house, it might not be wise to impulsively start chowing down on a random structure in the middle of the woods. In Molly Whuppie’s case you might be the daring type of person who would like to test your luck numerous times in stealing from a giant and not learn your lesson until you just narrowly escape the mitts of death. My point is that in all of these stories the message that is conveyed to the child as Bruno Bettelheim writes is that, â€Å"They learn to trust that someday they will master the dangers of the world, even in the exaggerated form in which their fears depict them, and be enriched by it†(279). This is why at the end of all the stories, being that they have accomplished conquering this anxiety, they gain something. For example, in â€Å"Hansel and Gretel† the jewels are symbolic of them being able to handle their own challenges. Thus they are worry-free because with their new found intelligence, which they gained from the encounter with the witch, they are now able to conquer any obstacle. Similarly, in Mollie Whuppie, her and her sisters are married because of Molly embarking on dangerous tasks for the king and ultimately get to live in the castle at the end as a result of Molly’s courage in the face of these adverse adventures. Also in the Juniper Tree the boy is returned to life after he drops the millstone on his stepmothers head because he overcame what opposed him. In all the stories the main conflict is brought about through food and in the end all the characters are greatly rewarded or as Bettelheim puts it â€Å"enriched† for facing what they had once feared. Works Cited: Bettelheim, Bruno Criticism of â€Å"Hansel Gretel. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 1999. 273-280 Print. Grimm, Jacob and Wilheim â€Å"Hansel Gretel. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 1999. 184-190 Print. Grimm, Jacob and Wilheim â€Å"The Juniper Tree. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 1999. 190-197 Print. Gilbert M. Sandra, and Gubar Susan â€Å"Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 199 291-297 Print. Jacobs, Joseph â€Å"Mollie Whuppie. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 1999. 209-211 Print. Tatar, Maria Introduction to â€Å"Hansel Gretel. † The Classic Fairytales Ed. Maria Tatar New York: Norton, 1999. 179-184 Print.