Hansel & Gretel: Between Effort & Grace
Everything in the story of Hansel and Gretel revolves around bread. It’s what the parents can’t provide for the children, which leads to the decision to abandon them in the woods. Right before she is about to do so, the mother hands them a small piece of bread, probably her last, and this is what the children, ill-fatedly, use to mark the path back home. It’s also bread that again rears up, sweet and in full abundance, in the form of the gingerbread house. In the 1812 version of the story, the Grimm brothers placed the motif in the very first sentence: “Next to a great forest there lived a poor woodcutter who had come upon such hard times that he could scarcely provide daily bread for his wife and his two children, Hansel and Gretel.” That line is about many things: family, labor, extreme poverty, the mystery of the woods—but it is food that unites these into a drama. In later revisions, the Grimms deemphasized the inherent power of the image. The 1857 version only mentions bread after it has assured us that there was a great famine that caused the decimation of the woodcutter’s resources. The edits take away the meaning that originally vibrated in the phrase “a poor woodcutter”—the often-disavowed knowledge that whoever earns his living through effort can come to a state where his effort will earn him nothing.
Maybe because it was developed among middle-class households of twentieth-century Europe, psychoanalysis eliminates all these elements when it tries to deal with the story. Bruno Bettelheim’s famous interpretation turns everything into a childhood anxiety: “A small child, awakening hungry in the darkness of the night, feels threatened by complete rejection and desertion, which he experiences in the form of fear of starvation. By projecting their inner anxiety onto those they fear might cut them off, Hansel and Gretel are convinced that their parents plan to starve them to death!” We are back to the old Oedipean impasse between aggression and love that children feel toward their parents, and which they need to overcome in order to participate in society as full individuals. There was never a starving woodcutter, no mother who had to send her children to the devil in order to survive. Instead, Bettelheim presents a child, decidedly a male one, who needs to put a stop to his violent or selfish fantasies and become an industrious adult: "Having overcome his oedipal difficulties, mastered his oral anxieties, and sublimated those of his cravings which cannot be satisfied realistically, and learned that wishful thinking has to be replaced by intelligent action, the child is ready to live happily again with his parents." These psychoanalytic theories view the baby as infinitely greedy, wanting to devour the mother, as Hansel and Gretel devour the roof and windows of the gingerbread house. But this tells us more about the political perspective of psychoanalysts than it does about the child or the human psyche (there is, after all, real deprivation and real insatiable greed in the adult world). In the real world, the baby stops eating when she is no longer hungry.
In fact, the baby will sometimes refuse to eat entirely. From this little observation, Melanie Klein built an entire theory of human behavior. Why does the baby refuse the breast? Because, Klein says, in the mind of the newborn there is not one breast, but two. One is the “good breast,” whose image the baby fills with all the pleasant sensations of being comforted and fed. The other is “the evil breast,” into which the baby projects all the feelings of hunger, deprivation, and pain that appear and build up when the breast is missing. This, she said, is what we are like in essence. Unable to hold two contradictory sensations in mind, we externalize one or the other, holding an object responsible for what is inherently a part of ourselves.
Why does the baby refuse the breast? Consider an alternative to Klein. Could it be that drinking from the breast is difficult work, and the baby, when exhausted and hungry, finds it unbearable to be pushed to perform hard labor? The newborn does nothing for herself, except drawing in milk and pushing out excrement. She is vexed in exactly the same manner when she has too much stuck in her intestines. If this is true—and it certainly is simpler and, to use Klein’s own vocabulary, “projects” less onto the baby’s mentality than the idea of an evil breast—then in our essence we hold a combat between receiving life by grace (gratis) and receiving it by effort. We might say that the foundational desire of the psyche is to reconcile the need to rest in the nourishing flow of the world with the opposing need to constantly exert energy to survive. Let’s call this The Sisyphus Complex.
Let’s run Hansel and Gretel through this Sisyphean prism. The story begins in a house where all grace has disappeared. Nothing is given gratis, because there is nothing left to give, and even to gain that nothing the children and the adults need to do hard labor. Some distance away there is another house, one made of candy, and at first encounter it gives itself free of effort to be consumed and enjoyed. Between these human-made structures spreads the forest, a place of chaos: the birds that eat the breadcrumbs, the wolves waiting to devour children, none of them ask questions about the order of things or what is earned and what is windfall. They are one with the interplay of life and death in nature.
Hansel and Gretel are in essence one person, constantly being divided into two ways of facing the world. Or at the very least they are partners locked in the same fate but splitting the shared labor. When the children, awake with hunger, first hear the parents planning to abandon them, Gretel is the one who cries helplessly, and Hansel, surreally unperturbed, goes outside and spends the night working to gather white stones. Later the roles will reverse, and Gretel will need to work all day in the witch’s house, while Hansel is helpless in a cage. That’s when the Sisyphean drama reaches its height:
Then the witch shook Gretel and cried, "Get up, lazybones! Fetch water and cook something good for your brother. He is locked outside in the stall and is to be fattened up. When he is fat I am going to eat him."
Gretel began to cry, but it was all for nothing. She had to do what the witch demanded.
Now Hansel was given the best things to eat every day, but Gretel received nothing but crayfish shells.
One child slaves and eats nothing, the other does nothing and eats it all. The horror of the situation touches both children equally since there is no happiness on either side of the split. But survival mandates that each play his or her role, until Gretel’s cunning ends the witch’s life by throwing her into the very oven in which she was making bread. In her essay “The Child and the Shadow,” Ursula Le Guin points out the impossibility of moral standards in fairytales: “Do good little girls usually push old ladies into baking ovens, and get rewarded for it? Not in what we call “real life,” they don’t. But in dreams and fairytales they do.” Her interpretation, perhaps, is still locked into a moral vision of the real world. It is not in dreams that moral rules of what is right or wrong are suspended, but in a reality where fortunes are unequally divided.
My father once told me an old family story. It goes back to the famine of 1942, to my grandfather’s house in the village in Kurdistan. They were baking bread in the center courtyard, and a starving woman, her newborn in arms, followed the smell, climbing from roof to roof until she was standing over the women who had gathered by the oven. “Give me bread,” she screamed, “or I’ll throw my baby down!” They handed her a loaf immediately, and she devoured it on the spot. “Give me another one!” And they handed up another loaf. She ate that one too. Now her body seemed to go into shock. She began retching heavily. “Give me another,” she yelled through her spasms. The women took a moment to discuss whether it was right to give her another loaf. In that moment of hesitation, she lifted her baby over her head and hurled him down at their feet.
Hansel and Gretel isn’t a story about independence, it’s about interdependence. The human being sways between the polarities, devising ways of encountering the conditions imposed by chaos and order. But this swaying is not in accordance with a moral code, or the feeling of what you deserve. The complex that we build in ourselves is a realization that pure grace or pure effort are both extensions of helplessness. We rely on cunning, on intelligence, to help navigate the inescapable suffering of choices that spread between grace and effort. And that intelligence, when it’s grounded in the natural propensity for love, shows you how the hunger of another can turn the bread in your mouth to ash.
Houman Harouni was born in Iran, 1982. He is a lecturer at Harvard University, and his writings on education, philosophy, the arts, politics, and history of science have been published in The Guardian, Harvard Review of Education, American Reader, and the White Review, among other venues. His first book of poems, Unrevolutionary Times, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2022.