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<1>
Present in both Grimm and Perrault's tales is a small
constellation of other stories in which this "maternal melodrama"
is replayed, but is not the focus of the tale. While LRRH and "Hansel
and Gretel" revolve around maternal and eating concerns, in the following
tales the maternal conflict exisits but does not necessarily take "center
stage." "Snow White" explores the same loss of the "good"
mother as "Hansel and Gretel." Right after Snow White is born,
her mother dies. The King (another absent father) remarries and Snow White
gains a step-mother. In this tale, the Queen is filled with narcissistic
pride and will not allow anyone to rival her beauty. Both Kay Stone, in
"Three Transformations of Snow White," and Bruno Bettleheim, in
his Uses of Enchantment, work with the tale, expressing clearly the psychoanalytic
motifs present in terms of the psychosexual development of the girl. But
neither deals extensively with the cannibalistic undertones present in the
Queens' desire to eat the girl child, perhaps because it occupies only a
small portion of the text. It is clearly the element most forgotten in the
tale. The Queen fears Snow White is more beautiful than she, and orders
a huntsman to kill the little girl, bringing her Snow White's lungs and
liver as proof that she is dead. The huntsman takes pity on the girl and
delivers a boar's organs in her stead. The Queen, not knowing this, then
orders the cook to "boil them in salt, and the wicked woman ate them
and thought she had eaten Snow White's lungs and liver" (Zipes 1988,
214). |
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<2>
This is a contextual repetition that appears also in the
two previously discussed tales of LRRH and "Hansel and Gretel."
The tales all have something to do with difficulties surrounding the relationship
between mother figure and child (primarily a daughter figure), and the child's
coming to terms with and resolving certain infantile fantasies about the
mother's place as nurturer and supporter. While both boy and girl in "Hansel
and Gretel" are threatened by the maternal, Gretel, not caged, is more
clearly pitted against the witch, kills her and saves her brother. In each
tale, the mother figure is split into good and bad characters. In each,
the child or children are cast or induced out of the home and into a forest.
In Snow White, the girl child must enter the terrifying forest in order
to escape the wrath of her step mother, a context almost exactly molded
to that of the children in "Hansel and Gretel." In the forest
she must learn to fend for herself. >> |
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<3>
Snow White is named because as an infant her mother saw
her as "white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair as black as ebony.
Accordingly, the child was called Snow White" (Zipes, 213). The new
wife of the king is described as proud and "haughty." The driving
impulse behind the cannibalistic moment is not hunger as it is in LRRH and
"Hansel and Gretel," for the Wicked Queen and Snow White herself
are not of a lower class; they are royalty. In this sense, the Queen's desire
to eat of the child enters a more horrific realm. She does not eat to sustain
life, she eats to obliterate Snow White and to, in some way, possess her
characteristics. When the Queen returns to her mirror later in the tale,
she does so feeling "totally convinced that she was again the most
beautiful woman in the realm" because she "believed she had eaten
Snow White's liver and lungs" (216). >> >>
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<4>
The Queen orders the child out into the forest where she hopes to never
"lay eyes on her again" (214). It is Snow White's beauty that
saves her from her fate as the huntsman frees her. Cashdan discusses this
idea in his book The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives as
he questions "does he spare the girl because she is innocent of wrong
doing? Does he allow her to live because he is repelled by the queen's bloodthirsty
habits? Not exactly. He allows Snow White to live because of her beauty"
(47). Although the huntsman doesn't try to help her survive, and is almost
certain that wild beasts will gobble her up, he feels better knowing he
wasn't explicitly involved in her death. >> |
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<5>
The story then involves Snow White's encounter with the
seven little men and their happy home. Here she enters a realm of domestic
tranquillity, in which she cooks, cleans, and washes for the men who adore
her unconditionally, in a way becoming the "good mother" herself. The only
thing she has to fear is the Queen who soon discovers she is not dead. The
Queen devises several schemes to destroy the child: tying her up in "staylaces,"
a comb for her hair, and finally the fated poisoned apple. It is the apple
that causes Snow White to fall into her enchanted death-like slumber. This,
the final edition of the Grimms' tale, much like "Hansel and Gretel"
suffered many revisions. In the first edition, again in keeping with "Hansel
and Gretel," the Wicked Queen is Snow White's biological mother. In
this version the conflict between mother and daughter is very clear. But
its context is also somewhat separate from our previous discussion. While
"Hansel and Gretel" and LRRH operate at a level of development
that focuses on specifically infantile needs, food and shelter and safety,
as well as the fear of maternal retaliation, Snow White seems to have progressed
further. The danger present for Snow White is exclusively the rage of her
mother, and it is not necessarily a rage connected with food retaliation,
or a denial of nourishment. It is instead a
(sexual) jealousy that fuels the mother figure to wish the death of
the child. Thus this tale has little to do with object relations per se,
the context is different, and the child is experiencing a different level
of development: one in which she is in competition with the mother for the
attention of others. Here the cannibalism (which again is not as in the
other tales a recurring motif, but only a brief scene) stands not for the
mother's retaliation in terms of feeding, but rather in terms of a sexual
jealousy. >> |
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<6>
In the Grimm's final version of the tale, Snow is deposited in a glass coffin,
where she is discovered by her handsome prince. As her coffin is carried
away by the prince's servants to his castle, they stumble on some rocks,
dislodging the apple from her throat thus freeing her of the spell. Upon
her re- awakening, the prince promptly asks for her hand in marriage. The
Queen is invited to the wedding, and she feels she must see her, though
it will mean her sure doom. Sure enough when the Queen enters the hall her
fate is made apparent by the iron slippers which "had already been
heated over a fire" in preparation for her doom. Almost without choice,
"finally, she had to put on the red hot slippers and dance until she
fell down dead" (222). |
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<7>
The Queen is not trying to reabsorb or swallow the child whole as is apparent
in the Wolf's and witch's motives in the other tales. The Queen needs only
a symbolic portion of Snow White's body to prove she is victorious. Here
cannibalism and its contexts are somewhat similar in that it is primarily
a mother /daughter drama, but one removed and extended from the previously
discussed tales. In this tale it is apparent that even after the initial
(infantile) danger felt over the mother's desire to retaliate, there is
still (in adolescence) a danger present for the child in the image of the
jealous maternal figure. Again it is through the death of the mother that
the child can live successfully. And again the child must identify finally
with a male, in this final version the prince, while in earlier editions
it is the father who saves her. |
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<8>
The cannibal and cannibalism can come to serve many aims. There is no constant
here except that we find a primary connection in cannibalism (when practiced
by women) that is almost exclusively mother/child oriented. This stands
to reflect the stages of conflict between a mother and her children. While
in two of the tales boy children are present, the conflict between mother
and daughter is central. Object relations difficulties are one facet of
the cannibalistic threat of the mother, but jealousy is clearly another
threatening moment. The cannibalism in these tales also deals with outsider/insider
status and the goal of achieving a separate existence for the child apart
from the mother ,who in some way threatens to destroy the individual and
make it a part of herself once again. In these tales, the cannibal mother
is always presented in a negative light and clearly seen as a type of monster
or witch. Negative attributes like greed, jealousy, and anger and regressive
behavior are traditional and typical for the cannibal character. |
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<9>
Sleeping Beauty is a tale in which mother/ daughter anxiety is played out
with a cannibalistic motif. There are several versions of the tale, one
of the earliest, according to Bettleheim is Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia
which occurs in the fifth diversion on the fifth day of the Pentamerone,
produced in Naples in the seventeenth century. But even Basile's tale, argues
Bettleheim, has its roots in a deeper tradition of "French and Catalan
renderings from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries" (227). |
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<10>
As in tales previously discussed, it seems best to review
the various versions of the tales by the three major translator/authors.
In Basile's tale, Talia is born the daughter of a king and queen. When consulted,
wise men foretold of a danger connected to the spinning of flax. In response,
no flax or hemp was allowed in the kingdom. A woman passing through with
a spinning wheel caught the attention of Talia when she had grown, and curious,
she approached and touched the device. A bit of hemp lodged itself under
her finger and she died. Her father, in his great distress, locked the castle
and left her there to be found accidentally some time later by a passing
king. The king fell in love with Talia, but could not rouse her. He lived
at the castle for a time, then departed. Soon after, Talia gave birth to
two children "all the time asleep" (Bettleheim 227). One of the
children, mistaking Talia's finger for a source of nourishment, sucked the
hemp out and woke her up. The King soon remembered Talia and returned, happy
to see her awake. The King's wife, however, was less pleased, and ordered
the two children to be brought to her, at which time "she ordered them
cooked and served to her husband" (227). As in "Snow White,"
the children were saved by the good graces of a third party, this time a
cook, who prepared goats instead of the children. Finally, the Queen sent
for Talia herself to be thrown into a fire. At the last moment, the King
arrived and, divining his wife's plan, ordered her into the fire and then
married Talia and kept the two children ( 227). <<
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<11>
In the Perrault version, "La Belle au bois dormant," the "wife"
becomes the mother of a Prince, not a King, who finds Sleeping Beauty. It
is in Perrault's version, then that the dangers of the maternal are illustrated
clearly. After the prince finds and marries Beauty (no torrid affairs here),
he secretly continues to visit her, afraid of telling his mother of his
nuptials:
The Queen
spoke several times to her son, to learn after what manner he was passing
his time, and told him that in his duty he ought to satisfy her. But he
never dared to trust her with his secret; he feared her, though he loved
her, for she was of the race of Ogres....and it was even whispered about
the court that she had Ogreish inclination, and that, whenever she saw
little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to
prevent herself from falling upon them. And so the prince would never
tell her one word" (Griffith, 8).
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<12>
Several interesting things happen in Perrault's tale which change, in very
substantial ways, the figure of the mother. There is a certain dilemma presented
by the prince's "duty" to "satisfy" her, which is in
many ways Oedipal in nature. Although she was never seen eating children,
she was assumed to be a cannibal nonetheless, and that this assumption was
"whispered about the court" as rumor. The prince himself appears to believe
the rumors for he fears her. His dual reaction of both fear and love represent
the vestiges of infantile anxiety in regard to the female parent as well.
>> |
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<13>
As Perrault's story progresses, the Queen finds the perfect
opportunity to carry out her desires with regard to Beauty and her children.
During the Prince's absence as the kingdom goes to war, the Queen has the
bride and her children sent to a country home "that she might with
more ease gratify her horrible longing" (Griffith 9). She decides to
consume the children and so goes to the cook with the following commands:
"I intend to eat little Dawn for my dinner tomorrow....and will eat
her with sharp sauce....and this she spoke in the tone of an ogress who
had a strong desire to eat fresh meat" (9). She is deceived when fed
a lamb. Later she decides to eat the boy child and is again deceived by
the kind-hearted cook. And so too Beauty herself is saved when it is her
turn. The scheme appears to work, saving the prince's family until one day
as the queen was "rambling round the courts and yards of the palace
to see if she could smell any fresh meat" she hears the wife and children
of her son (Griffith 10). << |
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<14>
She orders them killed by being cast into a pit of serpents, but when her
son returns at the last moment (the now typical deus ex machina saving of
the womenfolk by the man), she kills herself. She "threw herself head
foremost into the tub, and was instantly devoured by the ugly creatures
she had ordered to be thrown into it to kill the others" (10). |
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<15>
Although the usual evolution of a tale entails the movement of cannibalism
away from the parent and onto a step parent, here we see the consumptive
desire displacement from the "wife " of a king (who was not really
cannibalistic herself, but rather hoped to turn her husband into a cannibal)
in Basile's version, firmly onto the maternal role as the mother/ogress
attempts through the tale to satisfy her "horrible longing." The
mother figure here, while a full biological parent, is removed in some way
as she takes on what we can see as a "witch like" persona (or
ogress in this case). Much like the female cannibal aggressors in LRRH (wolf
in grandma's clothing) and the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" -- the mother/ogress
in this tale of Perrault is punished by the same means she hoped to employ
on the wife /children, via cooking pot, oven and pit of snakes respectively.
Perrault's version adds many macabre details about the ogress including
her horrible longing, her roaming about sniffing for meat, and her sauce
preference when dining on the girl. << <<
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<16>
John Ellis in his One Fairy Story Too Many records four revisions of the
Grimm tale of "Sleeping Beauty," the manuscript version and first,
second and sixth editions. The Grimm version begins with the birth of a
daughter and commencement of festivities, to which twelve fairies were invited
(the thirteenth being neglected as there weren't enough plates). The thirteenth
fairy, peeved at being excluded, crashes the party and prophesies the death
of the daughter from a spinning wound. The other fairies remedy the spell
by amending that the girl should not die, but rather sleep for 100 years.
As promised, in the fifteenth year, the child comes upon a spinning wheel
in an attic and pricks said finger, falling instantly asleep as does the
rest of the kingdom while a thorny bush grows up about it. Finally, many
years later, a prince enters the kingdom, the thorns part, turning into
flowers, and he finds the princess, kisses her, and in so doing wakes her
up. They then marry, and thus The End. In each subsequent revision of this
tale by the Grimm brothers, there is no mention of the "rest" of the tale
present in the Basile and Perrault versions. Thus the cannibalism and the
maternal threat present in the other versions fail to appear. |
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<17>
The generally accepted psychoanalytic "reading" of this tale concentrates
upon the figure of the young girl about to enter puberty and thus a state
of "sleep" after which she will emerge a full woman able to continue her
life in that capacity. Bettleheim discusses this tale at some length, emphasizing
the "long, quiet concentration on oneself" that a girl needs when
entering menstruation (225). This conclusion is reached through various
key moments in the text including the "pricking" and bleeding of the girl's
finger and her "sleep" after which she emerges ready to wed her prince.
Bettleheim comments: "it is thus understandable that a fairy story
in which a long period of sleep begins at the start of puberty has been
very popular for a long time among boys and girls" (225). Thus the
tale for Bettleheim serves a more practical than psychoanalytic purpose
in that it illustrates physiological changes in the female and their end
result. Bettleheim also believes the tale to be instructive as to the dangers
of repressing budding sexual maturation, "despite all attempts on the
part of parents to prevent their child's sexual awakening, it will take
place nonetheless" (230). Despite all precautions taken by the royal
family to remove all dangers from the princess and all things that might
cause the fatal "prick," the daughter will bleed when her time has come.
It is clear there is no stopping this effect as foretold by the fairy. There
is ample evidence to support Bettleheim's assertions, from the onset of
bleeding, to the "flowering" of thorns that welcome the prince at the
appropriate time. But there is no sustained discussion of the cannibalism
present in Basile and Perrault's versions of the tale, except in that Bettleheim
sees no real clear "reasoning" behind Perrault's wicked queen's actions. |
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<18>
It is unclear why the cannibalism remains missing from the Grimm version
of the tale. Perrault himself made several changes, particularly ones that
distance the "King" from marital transgression, and also from the accidental
consumption of his offspring. Bettleheim attributes Perrault's changes to
his sense that such scenes would be inappropriate to be told at the French
court (Bettleheim 229). And indeed those scenes do not resurface in the
Grimm version, but neither does the cannibalism. |
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<19>
"The Juniper Tree" is another Grimm tale (also
called "The Almond Tree" in Griffith and Frey's Classics of
Children's Literature [1987]) that deals with maternal jealousy and
cannibalism. The couple in question is not of the royal class, but is still
"rich." The tale opens much like the previous two tales: a couple
desires a child and waits for it to come. Particularly close to "Snow
White" in origin, the wife in this tale cuts herself while peeling
an apple. As it is wintertime, the blood stands out against the snow, and
"while she looked at the blood before her, she became quite sad. "if
only I had a child as red as blood and as white as snow!" (Zipes 1988,
186). In another typical convention, the woman realizes soon thereafter
that she is pregnant, has a baby boy and dies immediately. Of course, the
husband remarries. He has a daughter with the second wife, who grows to
hate the little boy who would stand in the way of her child's future inheritance.
The mother devises a scheme to kill the boy by slamming his head in a trunk
as he reaches into it for an apple. Just as he is about to reach in he addresses
his step mother: "How ferocious you look!" (187). In this tale
there is clearly apparent the fine threads of other tales woven into the
plot. The opening recalls both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty; the "ferocious"
look on the mother's face recalls the wolf in LRRH, and the apple as instrument
of death makes another appearance as well. << |
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<20>
The woman slams the lid on the boy's head (although "prompted by the devil"
to do so) which flies off "among the apples." Here the head is
already connected with foodstuffs. The mother puts the boy's head back on
by attaching it with a handkerchief. This holds up only until the daughter
accidentally knocks into him, setting his head to rolling across the floor
much to her surprise and terror. The mother pins the murder on the daughter
and thus draws her into the plan to cover up the crime: "There's nothing
we can do about it now. So we'll make a stew out of him" (188). This
makes it patently clear that the Grimms were not averse to discussing cannibalism
in its most hair-raising forms. |
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<21>
As the father comes home and asks where the son is, the wife places the
stew in front of him (a "huge" portion) and makes up some story about him
visiting relatives. Apparently enjoying his feast ("Oh, wife, the food
tastes great! Give me some more!") he finishes every last bit and then
throws the bones under the table. The daughter gathers the bones and plants
them under the juniper tree. Out of the tree a bird emerges and flies around
for the remainder of the tale singing a song about the mother killing it,
the father eating it and the daughter burying it. This torments the wife
until her final demise as the bird drops a millstone on her head. After
this the boy reappears and they all live happily ever after, sans wife,
now dead. |
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<22>
As in "Hansel and Gretel" a boy child is threatened
by an evil mother or witch, and the girl child provides the agency through
which he is saved or revenged. In each story the girl child is forced into
an alliance with the "evil" maternal; Gretel in preparing the oven for her
brother and the girl in "The Juniper Tree" in cooking her brother's
remains. There are two possible readings of this focus on the girl child.
One is that the girl child is in some way indoctrinated into taking her
"place" in the threateningly cannibalistic female position through coersion;
the other is that there is a connection between girls and women and domestic
preparation of food. << |
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<23>
The final tale, "The Virgin Mary's Child" (sometimes
titled "Our Lady's Child"), comes from the Grimm's Kinder-und
Hausmarchen, and conflates many plot moments from both other tales and
religious and mythological lore, with "mistaken" maternal cannibalism
at the heart of the conflict and resolution. This translation comes from
Jack Zipes' edition of the Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
(1988). << |
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<24>
The tale opens with a "poor woodcutter and his wife" (7), mimicking
the opening to "Hansel and Gretel." Similarly, the couple has
very little money or food. The woodcutter goes into the woods and there
meets the Virgin Mary who offers to take the girl child as they can no longer
provide for her. In a similar vein to what happens in "Hansel and Gretel,"
the child is taken by a female in the woods, and is also subject to some
danger. In this tale the danger comes from a warning from the Virgin Mary
for the girl child not to open the thirteenth door in a series of rooms
of which the girl is given a key. (This resonates with Bluebeard and Pandora
as well as Garden of Eden admonitions). The Virgin Mary goes away and of
course the curious girl finally comes upon the thirteenth door which she
is compelled to open. When she does, she sees the Holy Trinity and as she
approaches and touches it, her finger turns golden. The golden finger is
the sign of her transgression, and once noticed by the Virgin Mary becomes
the vehicle for her intense suffering. She is expelled from heaven and her
power of speech is removed, as she fails to be truthful about her opening
of the thirteenth door. Expelled from her idyllic home she lands on earth
"in the middle of a wilderness" and wherever she looked she found
"thick hedges of thorns" (9). The protagonist's position in a
wood both signals a time, in all the tales discussed, during which the female
must come to grips with and understand her situation and also signals a
time of "sleep" as in Sleeping Beauty. |
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<26>
Eventually she is found by a King who takes her as his wife. During the
ensuing years she bears three children. The first two boy children are taken
away by the Virgin Mary as punishment for the woman's continued denial of
entering the room in question. When the children disappear, a curious thing
begins to happen in the court as rumors are spread about the Queen; after
the first baby is taken "a rumor began circulating among the people
that the Queen was an ogress and had killed her own child" (10). As
the Queen is still incapable of speech she cannot deny the charges. The
second boy child is taken by the Virgin Mary and "the people said quite
openly that the Queen had devoured it, and the King's counselors demanded
that she be executed" (10). |
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<27>
It is the arrival of the daughter that finally motivates the townspeople
to action, when the third child is found missing "everyone cried out
openly 'the Queen is an ogress! She must be sentenced to death!'" (11).
She is ordered to be burnt at the stake and only as she awaits her death
does she repent and tell the truth (here her speech is restored) and the
Virgin Mary then returns all her children, thus providing her with a long
and happy life. It is clear that in the eyes of the townspeople the queen
becomes a monster. Without evidence they condemn her as a cannibal and devourer
of her own children. The manner in which their accusations move from rumor
to open outcry reflects the context around historical cannibal encounters,
as does the lack of significant proof. |
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<28>
The fact that the "cannibal" herself is denied voice and unable to exculpate
herself is reflective of the cannibal/accuser paradigm. It is clear in this
tale in particular that the female is so closely connected to possible consumption
of her children that little or no evidence is needed to convict her of that
sin. Like the "uncivilized," the female seems to share the characteristic
of would be cannibal status, and is hopelessly open to being characterized
as such at the earliest possible convenience and with the barest shreds
of evidence. |
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<29>
In several versions of Both "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty,"
the tales contain the wicked queen motif. The mother through sexual jealousy
or vanity wishes not only the death of her "competition" but also to consume
the female in question. In both stories the girls involved are at the moment
of entry into womanhood, crossing the borders from childhood into adult
maturity. This crossing is seen as threatening for the adult female Queens
involved in the story who wish to prevent the maturation at all costs, to
obliterate the threat of the other and to consume them--in itself another
border transgression. In common, the women are powerful and powerfully evil.
They are almost seen as anti-mothers or phallic mothers, invested with character
attributes antithetical to what "true" motherhood entails: nurturing and
protection. As phallic mothers they choose not to give birth but to negate
it; negate it to the point of ingesting rather than expelling the children
in question. If "good mothers" give birth, "bad mothers" take it back.
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