Hansel and Gretel

The German folktale Hansel and Gretel is a story of inter-generational war. The children are forced into conflict with both their parents and against a cohort of their elders, namely those without children of their own who desire to “consume” the young to sustain themselves in old age. The parents have failed to create a shield against this dangerous force - this shield may be considered a function of “civilization” — and have abandoned the children to face it directly, ahead of schedule. They will either be consumed or lose their innocence by killing their elders.

In the story, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their father in the forest at the behest of their stepmother. A famine has come over the land, and so the two parental figures have chosen to sacrifice their dependents to improve their own chances of survival. This practice is true to life, and can be seen in many real-life famines wherein parents will sometimes eat or sell their own children. The stepmother convinces the father that by just abandoning them in the forest - that zone beyond the defenses of civilization — they’ll at least have a chance at survival, and maybe even a better life somewhere else.

And so the children are left to wander in a state of nature, where the structures built to protect them no longer exist. It’s a frightening place, and so their decision to enter the wonderfully decorated home of the witch, famine-proofed as it is with breads and sweets, is an obvious one. You likely know what happens from there — the witch traps them, she fattens up Hansel to eat him, Gretel roasts her in her own over, and the children return to their father with the witch’s treasure. Happily ever after.

As mentioned above, parents and grandparents have been known to eat children during famines and abandon them during times of societal stress. A more recent example of this was the proliferation of orphanages and boarding houses in Britain during the 19th Century — many of those “orphans” were abandoned by parents that had been funneled into the factories of the industrialized urban areas, excess children being an asset on the farm but a liability in the city. So the protection of children by both parents and their extended social networks can break down under strain, which is one of the reasons for the development of stringent cultural norms regarding family formation and parental responsibility. The father in the story fails his offspring under stress from hunger, and the stepmother’s failure is made easier by the fact that the children are not hers. Today, where once childbirth and disease created the one-parent family and the stepparent, now we have divorce and degraded enforcement of parental obligations.

Certain strains of societal decay — declines in family bonds, lowered social trust, resource depletion, excess debt — can also make the elderly generation hostile to children. The old may not mean for this to be so, but when intergeneration trust has eroded they will be much more wiling to sustain themselves to the cost of the young. One can see this manifest in institutions throughout generationally top-heavy modern societies. The entire health insurance system in built upon it, since it reaps the resources of the young — assuming they will need less healthcare — and uses it to subsidize paying for the old. As the federal government has grown larger, it has made this process a writ of state. Since the Affordable Care Act, it has mandated that the young purchase insurance that it hopes they will not need, and uses that to prop up the woefully underfunded healthcare entitlements to the Baby Boomer generation as it passes into retirement. Social Security has long shifted from a trust system wherein you pay in with the understanding that you’ll be able to get it paid back when you need it. The younger generations today will never see Social Security payments in their old age. It’s a resource extraction from the young to pay for the old, who being the most chronically ill elderly generation in history often consume massive amounts of resources to stay alive for additional weeks or months.

All this is not to speak against a system wherein the young support the old. That dynamic is at the heart of the healthy tribal unit within which humans evolved, and many would argue the intent of these state-enforced systems was to mirror those healthy intergenerational dynamics. But the system has overspent, degraded the ties and trust within the family, and has for the past half-century fostered a multicultural Tower of Babel society in which social trust in general reaches new lows every year. When a population is atomized such as ours is, the prospect of state-mandated wealth transfers to those with whom you feel little kinship or shared interests — and which you know are ballooning a debt burden that will one day destroy the wealth of your society — becomes terrifying rather than dutiful.

In the story, Hansel and Gretel face literal consumption, toward which they are lured by an appeal to their own childish appetites. Hansel fails to discipline his appetite - he lets the stress of the present lower his defenses. He is condemned to fatten himself until he’s fit to be eaten by the witch, who offers empty calories and hastened death to the undisciplined youth in order to keep herself alive. Young children believe they can sustain themselves on candy forever. It is their elders who provide for and instruct on nutrition. As in many folk stories and fairy tales, children are made to learn hard lessons on their own. They leave the deadly world of deception behind (the candy house) and have gained wisdom to be wary of antisocial elders who have severed ties with their community and their faith. The children grow into maturity by realizing the importance of their societal strictures and protections because they have witnessed the dangers that arise when those things break down.

The take on this story you’re likely to get in a modern elite university classroom is a deconstructionist feminist one, meant not so much to destroy the story as to wrap it in “critical” jargon and add it to the mosaic of works that supposedly illustrate how bad the Western (European/American) Canon is. They consider this essential work, since subverting that canon (they’ll say “deconstructing”) is one of the driving force behind the Academy. It’s difficult to break down a medieval German folk story along racial lines, so it is problematic because of its portrayal of women, either in the form of the manipulative stepmother or the witch herself - a memorable example of the “old crone” archetype that appears often in folklore and fairy tales. The framing goes that the story seeks to sew distrust in women, especially old childless women living independently, and so Hansel and Gretel is but another slab of regressive art meant to uphold that nasty ole Patriarchy.

The truth is that Hansel and Gretel is very interested in female agency and actualization. Its illustration of intergeneration war concerns not just children against their parents and grandparents, but of young girls against the specters of their potential future selves. It is Gretel who kills the witch and rescues her brother, and when she does so she defeats a frightening glimpse of a sad path she might take — living alone apart from community, without family or any other healthy supportive structure around her in old age. The witch does indeed have her independence, but that version of independence is a common lure of the damnation the witch endures in life and will endure after death. Independence from family, from community, from responsibility, and ultimately from humanity. Very alluring, especially to the young, but this is where it leads. Gretel kills this evil husk of what was once feminine, escapes the deceptive luxury of the house, and returns with wealth to her father, who begs her forgiveness — the stepmother has died, perhaps signaling that the witch was a projection of her. Plenty of agency there, just agency used to defeat evil and build a healthier life. Another woman, the mother, is vital to the story because of her absence. If the nurturing care and exemplar of the mother had been present, perhaps this nightmarish lesson would not have been necessary. Motherhood is lauded through the terrible possibilities that lie in its absence.

The story lives on in the world of horror — that most honest of story genres, whether intentionally or not. You see it in films where the young wander into the lairs of various deviations from or perversions of healthy family and community structures. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a group of young counterculture hippies find out what happens when you come across a real Saturnalian familial cult that takes reversion to ancient ways very seriously. The Witch (2015) presents a colonial America in which the dangerous crone in the forest is very real. The film opens with her stealing an infant of grinding it to mush for a black magic ritual. The daughter in that film is successfully lured from her family and signs a pact with the Devil. She becomes a witch herself after her family has all been killed by the Devil and his servants. It’s worth noting that many in the film community lauded The Witch as a brave feminist polemic upon its release. The family she destroys was indeed pious and domineering, but this was as a shield against the evils they believed lurked beyond their home, evils it turns out were very real. The girl’s newfound independence means she is to lurk in the dark forest and feast on the flesh of infants, with the occasional dance around a fire. To keep things fun.

It’s safe to say that Gretel walked the better path.