Conclusion

<1> The varying contexts in which maternal cannibalism takes place seem to be dependent upon the age of the children in question. Very young children risk being swallowed whole or eaten completely by their 'mothers', or maternal stand-ins, in an attempt to reabsorb them in some idyllic state. Older children, females in particular, seem to fall prey to more symbolic cannibalistic moments. These moments are more clearly linked to a kind of greed or sexual jealousy; a kind of death wish by the mother that the child never reach adulthood. In both contexts there is a risk involved in the child's ability to maintain or achieve autonomy, to live a separate existence from the mother who wishes either reattachment or death of the child. The mothers in these tales suffer themselves for their wishes and almost uniformly die at the end (with the exception of Virgin Mary's child in which the woman repents and is given her children back).

<2> The tales in which younger children are in danger of being fully consumed by a female maternal type appear to share the following characteristics. First, the children at some point enter or are forced into a forest. Second, in each tale there exists a definitively evil female who threatens the child. Third, the child's body in its entirety is to be eaten. Fourth, there is an intervention of male agency in the form of father or father substitute who appears and saves or reclaims the child during or after their ordeal. Fifth, the evil female is punished by death, usually a death connected in some way with her plot to kill (and eat) the children. The contexts here are more than coincidence. They represent, I would argue, very specifically psychological moments connected with mother/child attachment, separation and anxiety. The ways in which boy and girl children appear in "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Juniper Tree" make possible a psychoanalytic reading that speaks to the unique threat of the maternal in each case. The boy children in these tales are the primary victims of the evil women; Hansel is the first to be singled out for consumption and the boy child in "The Juniper Tree" is cooked by the step-mother with the aid of her daughter. In these cases, the girl children are forced to become the agents or co-conspiritors in the cannibalistic scene, only to revolt and reclaim their brothers. It is possible to read these tales as expressions of revolt against the 'bad' mother, and assertions of the girl children's autonomy when pitted against consumptively threatening women. In this way, the girl children in these stories connect to Little Red Ridinghood, who also must 'choose' correctly the path of suitable consumption. I argue that the boys in the two tales appear as victims of the threatening maternal and thus are at risk as the girls are. However, the gender of the girl children complicates their position as they represent not only victims (as children) but potentially threatening maternal figures themselves as adults. Although both boy and girl children experience anxiety surrounding maternal threat, as adults, the boy child is later also threatened by the female body during intercourse, while the girl becomes a women and thus potentially threatening herself (both sexually and as a mother). The girl is able to occupy both psychological positions: the cannibal victim and the potential cannibal.