Hansel and Gretel: Enter the Witch
  <1> "Hansel and Gretel" is the natural companion piece to the discussion of "Little Red Riding Hood," as many of the same themes and infantile needs are addressed in both tales, and both share a similar structure. In each, a child (or children) are alone in a wood, away from parental influence, and must, through their wits, find a way to navigate the forest and avoid danger. Both also deal with cannibalistic themes, abjection and the splitting of good and bad mothers. Much less criticism exists on "Hansel and Gretel" as tale. Perhaps this is because its origins are not as diverse as LRRH. Perhaps it is because the tale has not been as intensely edited for content as LRRH. "Hansel and Gretel" has not, however, escaped the revision process performed by the Grimm brothers on all their tales during the editions they produced.  
  <2> The major change effected by the Grimms during the revision process from the 1810 manuscript edition to the final product lies in the reshaping of the parental figures. In an early version of the tale, both (natural) parents can be seen as "evil" in that they each contribute to the abandonment of their children actively. In subsequent editions, the roles begin to subtly shift so that the father slowly emerges as reluctant victim to the step -mother's evil designs-the "witching" of the female begins. In the manuscript version (1810), the tale begins:
There was once a poor woodcutter, who lived in front of a great forest. He fared so miserably, that he could scarcely feed his wife and his two children. Once he had no bread any longer, and suffered great anxiety, then his wife said to him in the evening in bed: take the two children tomorrow morning and take them into the great forest, give them the bread we have left, and make a large fire for them and after that go away and leave them alone. The husband did not want to for a long time, but the wife left him no peace, until he finally agreed (Ellis 176).

  <3> Here we have the "real" mother plotting to abandon her children and the father as complicit. The boy takes pebbles with him the next morning, having overheard the plot, and the two are able to follow the stones back to the house, once left in the forest. When they return home, "The father was glad, for he had not done it willingly; but the mother was angry" (Ellis 177). Soon the parents attempt to leave the children again in the wood, and the brother tries his pebble trick with bread instead. Birds eat the crumbs and thus the children are left. They wander the forest until finding the hut of a "small old woman." The hut, made of bread and sugar is a welcome sight and the children nibble away. The old woman comes out and asks them in, feeds them and puts them to bed. The next morning, showing her true colors, the woman puts the boy in a stable and prepares to fatten and then cook him. When the oven is hot the old woman asks the girl to crawl in to see if it is ready. The girl feigns stupidity and asks the old woman to show her how it is done. Once the witch is in the oven, the girl slams the door and the woman is roasted. The children then find "the house full of jewels," and gather them to take back home. In this version, the father "becomes a rich man, but the mother was dead" (Ellis 179).  
  <4> In the Grimms' first edition of the tale (1812-15) the children's names are introduced as Hansel and Gretel, the woman is still his wife and natural mother of the children, but suddenly the father appears more assertive in his attempts to resist his wife's scheme. After she unveils her plan to him, he responds: "No, wife...I cannot find it in my heart to take my own dear children to the wild animals, who would soon tear them apart in the forest" (Ellis 179). She badgers him until he reluctantly agrees. When the children return home, the father is glad (as per the manuscript version) and the mother is angry, but in this version she "pretended" she was also glad of their return. On their second foray into the forest as the parents again try to abandon the children, this time it is explicitly the mother who "took them even deeper into the forest, where they had not been in all their days" (Ellis 181).  
  <5> The mother becomes increasingly sinister in the first edition of the tale, but she is not the only female character to be presented as clearly evil; in this edition, the "old woman" of the manuscript edition becomes "a wicked witch" who "lay in wait for children and had built her little house of bread to tempt them, and whenever one of them got into her power, she killed it, cooked it, and ate it, and that was for her a day to celebrate" (182). According to Max Luthi, "the witch in Hansel and Gretel is not a person, but a mere figure, a personification of evil" (15). While in LRRH, the child (unknowingly) cannibalizing the grandmother was shifted and edited, here the cannibalism of the older woman is amplified. She traps and eats children and celebrates their demise.  
  <6> The duplicitous nature of the woman/witch is illustrated by her behavior. Before she reveals her evil nature, she first gives the children a good meal of "milk and pancakes with sugar, apples and nuts" and then puts them into bed. The next morning she puts Hansel in a stable and addresses Gretel: "get up, you lazybones" to direct her to fetch water for cooking. The story progresses as the manuscript draft does, but when Gretel is asked to enter the oven it is "God" who inspires her to shove the witch in her stead. >>  
  <7> The second edition (1819) follows the first almost identically until the death of the witch, after which the children take her jewels and then try to return home but can only do so with the aid of a white duck who ferries them across a water.  
  <8> In the fifth edition (1843), the mother becomes "the wife" and thus a step- mother. She has gained even more zeal to rid herself and her husband of his children, and perhaps to soften the maternal threat to the children, she loses her status as a biological parent. When she first exhorts the children to enter the wood, she is the one who says "get up you lazy bones" thus connecting her with the witch who utters the same phrase. When they return home, the wife blames the children for falling asleep in the wood and being left behind. Again the duplicity of the evil female character is shown, this time in reference to the wife. Much as the wife pretends the children are at fault and pretends that she is happy for their return, so does the witch "pretend to be so kind" in order to fool the children into entering her home. The tale, with some added details, follows the previous editions to its end. This double nature of the female character is corresponds to the split of the child's perception of its mother into good and bad elements.  
<9> Again, this tale, as in LRRH where food is the reason Red gets herself in a bind, revolves around the context of food--here the fact that there is not enough food to sustain the family. Food is the root cause of the dangers the children must overcome. In LRRH, little Red was directed with food to the grandmother's home. In "Hansel and Gretel," lack of food (and temptation to eat) causes their problems. And again in this tale we witness the splitting off of good/bad mothers. The "real" mother who, in the manuscript version presses for the abandonment of the children is too threatening, and is removed, or split. Thus in later versions, the "bad" mother stands in as the one who refuses nourishment to the children. She has become the "Step-mother." The wolf character in LRRH who stands in for the grandmother is much like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" who is another manifestation of "bad" mother. The two bad mothers, stepmother and witch, reflect the twin anxieties of the infant who is denied nourishment and whose basic needs are not met. The step-mother denies, and the witch threatens to retaliate by eating the children.
<10> Another parallel point (in the Grimm's versions of the two tales) is the insertion of the father figure into the story as a kind of hero, saving the child from the potential dangers inherent in relying upon or identifying too closely with the mother. In LRRH, the hunter steps in and rescues the child and the grandmother, and in "Hansel and Gretel," the children are able to return to a father who realizes the fault in his past actions, and who, without the influence of his wife (who is dead by the end of the tale) is able to provide love and safety for the children (Ellis 194).  

<11> Other clear parallels include the turning of tables,on the would-be cannibal aggressor, and an ejecting of that abject figure from the text. In the Grimm version of LRRH, the added scene in which the second wolf is lured into the cooking pot surely resonates with the ending of "Hansel and Gretel" in which the Witch is lured into the very oven (upon which sits a cauldron of boiling water) she prepared for the children. Thus the cannibal is punished by the same means as its own transgression.
  <12> Bruno Bettleheim discusses this text in his Uses of Enchantment as an expression of the fear of abandonment anxiety. He points to the fact that "The fairy tale expresses in words and actions the things which go on in children's minds" (Bettleheim 159). Certainly, abandonment is a very real fear felt by children. But I would argue that this tale also identifies and attempts to allay the fear of the child about the denial by the mother of its needs, or her retaliatory actions in conjunction with the child's own feeding habits. Bettleheim does address the problems of the child's inappropriate oral aggression and the tale seems to serve for him as a means by which the child observes that it must give up its greedy oral needs and move on, or be forced to do so against its will (i.e. left in the woods without food). He states "the story of "Hansel and Gretel" gives body to the anxieties and learning tasks of the young child who must overcome and sublimate his primitive incorporative and thus destructive desires" (160).  
  <13> This is a point well taken. But what is missing from this analysis is the fact that the children are never really orally aggressive in the tale, and never overtly cannibalistic in their eating patterns. Although they attack the witch's house with apparent greed, and relish their feast, (and it is clear the house stands for the body on a more symbolic level) it is the witch herself who evinces the uncontrollable aggressive (cannibalistic) eating patterns. Bettleheim does not discuss this element. Perhaps because it does little to further Bettleheim's view that the tale is about the children, not the witch, and their (the children's) oral greed.  
<14> The pattern established in the revisions of LRRH in which the "good" girl moves from overt cannibalism to more symbolic consumption repeats itself here as the children's eating is not literally cannibalistic, it is only symbolically so. They eat the house because they are starving and have been abandoned. Rejected by the mother, they eat whatever is presented to them. What they eat is a trap set by the "bad" mother so that she may incorporate them into herself (much like Red is trapped by the wolf/grandmother). While many interpretations focus, as Bettleheim's does, on the tale as one that revolves around the child's eating choices, it seems more connected to the concept of addressing the dangers of maternal retaliation and how to avoid them.  
  <15> Much as Bettleheim views LRRH as a tale about the pleasure principle versus the reality principle, he also reads "Hansel and Gretel" as a kind of choice making journey: here's what happens when you do not control your oral impulses. For Bettleheim, the witch figure serves not to represent the bad/feared mother, but to represent "the destructive aspects of orality" (162). Again, there is no need to dispute this fact. This tale deals at some points with the idea of oral development, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. It must also be credited with representing more deeply held psychic anxieties about the role of the mother as a split object, one who could retaliate, and also represents attempts at reparation (in the form of jewels). Her death, symbolic or not, is the only way the children can be released from their conundrum (Kristeva 1989, 27-8). In the end we have the death of both "mothers": the very active murder of the bad-mother/witch and the "natural" death of the (step) mother. The children leave the witch's house with her "treasure" or her best parts and thus with that are able to live comfortably once they return to the father.  
<16> Is there ever really a "good" mother present? The Good mother in both LRRH and "Hansel and Gretel" lives a shadowy existence. In LRRH, she is barely mentioned, as the grandmother becomes the stand-in for her (and the wolf after that). In "Hansel and Gretel," the good mother is erased completely from the final version of the tale. The split of the mother is clear in the first edition of the tale as the biological mother is shown to be deceptive and "two-faced" appearing to behave one way outwardly and another inwardly. When the children return after the first abandonment attempt, "the father was heartily glad, when he saw his children again, because he had not wanted to leave them alone, the mother also pretended that she was glad, but secretly she was angry" (Ellis 180).  
  <17> According to Marina Warner , the duplicitous nature of the female is entrenched not only in tale but also in myth. In her Six Myths of Our Time, she asserts, "In the folklore of the past, classical and medieval, the female beast, like the velociraptors, has sometimes cunningly--and purposely concealed her true nature" (8), and again that "male beasts...or male devils...don't possess the same degree of duplicity" (9). <<  
  <18> It is instructive to analyze both the mothers and their "good" and "bad" behaviors in the Grimm versions in order to chart development and characterization, but the Grimm versions cannot provide material to analyze the more "mythic" or universal themes of the fairy tales since the tales were expanded from their original form and censored by the Grimm bothers. It is valid to look at what the Brothers Grimm did to the stories as the changes represent not only the brothers' own psychosexual peccadilloes, but also represent the brothers' beliefs as informed and shaped by a certain cultural consciousness. However, it is simply not valid to use their constructed and altered texts as the "most authentic version."  
  <19> The closest one can come to an uncensored text of "Hansel and Gretel" comes from the manuscript version of the tale that existed before the Grimms published their Kinder-und Hausmarchen. That version offers a biological mother and a complicit father, both intent on abandoning the children. The context is that of a lack of nourishment whose idea it is to cut off the children so that they (the parents) can survive. The children, while smart enough to evade their fate initially, eventually illustrate their inability to provide for themselves. This version appears to represent both the child's fears in fantasy that the mother will in some way seek to harm the child as well as representing the cultural construction of the "evil" mother.  
  <20> Once they enter the wood, which can be seen as symbolic of an unconscious or mental construct, they force a splitting off of the mother who becomes bad and good. The children find the magical house made of food, and are first treated to a feast by the woman of the house. They consume her offerings only to be duped into (a) a refusal of food for Gretel and (b) the threat of consumption for both. The dual infantile anxieties are played out in terms of the two children.  
<21> In both "primary" versions of LRRH and "Hansel and Gretel" the children learn responsibility and choice-making skills that remove them from the threat of death, abjection and reincorporation. In LRRH, the girl refuses the suggestions of the wolf, and is able to escape, after her "last temptation" into regression, back to her home. In "Hansel and Gretel," the children are able to trick the witch and deny her cannibalistic need to incorporate them and return to their father. In both tales, the bad mother is eliminated or avoided (ejected) and thus the child or children are able to continue on their path.  
  <22> While the pushing of the witch into the oven has been read by Roheim as a kind of cannibalistic impulse on the part of the child, I would disagree with such a reading (Roheim 170). It is apparent that the children are working through the stages of psychological maturation while in the forest; grappling with a mother that cannot be both bad and good at the same time. Thus split, it is only in the murder of the bad mother that the children can successfully continue. There is no evidence, in this light, that the children wish (however unconsciously) to eat the witch. They want to kill the witch, and thus rid themselves of the bad mother.  
<23> Much as the wolf seems locked in a very primitive state (a state he tries to lure and hold Red Ridinghood in) in terms of defecation and cannibalism, the witch is also locked in primitive behavior in her cannibalistic inclinations towards the children. She perhaps serves a dual purpose in representing both the primitive orality of the infant and "wrong" food choices, and the retaliatory aggression of the bad mother.  
  <24> Bettleheim sees the good mother as present in the bad mother/ witch in the form of the treasure the children are able to claim as their own: "Then it turns out that the good giving mother was hidden deep down in the bad destructive mother because there are treasures to be gained" (162). But Bettleheim does not go on to explain this process as Klein and Kristeva might, including the reclaiming or re-shaping of the mother who was split off into negative and positive entities, and the "reclaiming" as a process of reparation.  
  <25> In "Hansel and Gretel," once the children enter the wood, the good mother, introjected into the child's consciousness is not reclaimed literally or explicitly in the tale, but is rather symbolically reclaimed in terms of the treasure found in the witch's house at the end. The bad mother then, created out of the anger of the child at being abandoned, is projected upon the character of the witch who seems to act out the very unconscious fears of the child as if in a dream/nightmare. The dual infantile anxieties are played out in terms of the two children.  
  <26> In the realm of the unconscious forest then, the children's object relations anxieties are played out on a court devoid of other adult intervention. Any access to "home" is denied or fraught with danger. The child's "natural" home (or mother's body) is hostile to them and expels them into the forest, denying nourishment and support. The children return only to be thrust out again into the wood to fend for themselves. In the wood they come upon another house. This house appears to offer nourishment but is actually a trap. Thus the dangers of "returning home" are clearly outlined. The children must show independence and deal effectively with the bad mother image before they can return to their house, a house that no longer stands in for the maternal body, which is dead. They must find a way to remedy the split mother, to somehow deal with the anxiety of being eaten and to emerge with a fully integrated image of the mother. The way to do this (as Kristeva notes in Black Sun [1989]) is through matricide, which is exactly what occurs in the shoving of the witch into the oven. After the bad mother is killed the children are free to emerge from the forest and return to the father resuming a natural life, a life without the fears and anxieties presented by the split of the mother, whose "best parts" are represented by the jewels taken from the witch. They have (much as Little Red does) turned from primary identification with the mother through matricide, which Kristeva posits is the clearest path to autonomy (Kristeva 1989, 27).  
<27> In both "primary" versions of LRRH and "Hansel and Gretel" the children learn to be responsible and make careful choices that remove them from the "depressive" state. In LRRH, the girl refuses the suggestions of the wolf, and is able to escape, after her "last temptation" into regression, back to her home. In "Hansel and Gretel," the children are able to trick the witch and deny her cannibalistic need to incorporate them, and return to their father. In both tales, the bad mother is eliminated or avoided and thus the child or children are able to continue on their path.
<28> And where is the father when all of this is going on? In terms of object relations and early development, the father is not an essential figure. As previously mentioned, in Melanie Klein's theory the father is simply seen as an extension of the mother. This is shown in the tale as the father simply agrees with the mother's plan in the initial manuscript version of "Hansel and Gretel," and as the total absence of a father in the oral variant of LRRH. The father becomes important only after the action had taken place, after the "tale" had ended. In some sense, the Grimm brothers follow this line of reasoning as they add to the original tale in LRRH. They write the "next chapter" in which the father appears, but his actions are muddled and confusing, in the sense that it is not the father who should bring about the death of the bad mother, thus completing the child's movement from the depressive position, but the children themselves. No strangers to displacement, perhaps this is too disruptive a theory for the Grimms who displace the action of the child onto the hunter, much as they (and Perrault) displace Little Red's cannibalism onto the wolf.  
  <29> Thus far this study has explored two maternal tales: one in which the child must outwit and out maneuver primitive or regressive impulses offered it by a cannibal wolf; and another in which two children must remedy a split mother figure, dealing with retaliative cannibalistic impulses of a bad mother, mending the split mother image and returning home. In both tales, cannibalism appears as a primary theme.  
  <30> It is through the connection of women with birth and through the Kleinian theory of the threat of the mother's retaliation that an intensely interesting moment occurs when female (maternal) cannibalism is represented. Marina Warner argues that much of the cannibalism in tales and myth has been perpetrated by males. This may be true, but the context in which male cannibals appear is quite a different one, and is hardly as invested with layers of meaning as it is in regard to female cannibalism which occurs almost exclusively in a maternal or quasi-maternal context.  


Little Red Riding Hood


Hansel and Gretel


Snow White

Conclusion