August Rubrecht's Research Projects
An Environmentalist Reading of “Hansel and Gretel”
As textual theorists keep reminding us, no text ever simply transmits the message intended by the person who produced it. Writers and speakers also identify their social and regional affiliations and suggest their relationship to listeners or readers. They structure what they say or write according to deeply ingrained patterns that reveal their social class and their religious and philosophical assumptions. Without taking special pains, neither the sender nor the receiver of a text will notice those embedded assumptions at all. Even so, the text will confirm and reinforce them because it makes them seem part of the natural order. This is the most common—and most effective—way we preserve cultural values. Whenever we sing an old song or tell an old story, whenever we sing new songs or tell new stories on the old patterns, we contribute to the process. Take one set of assumptions in the German tale “Hansel and Gretel,” for example. Relationships between the human characters in this tale and their natural surroundings say that human beings are essentially separate from nature. In fact, the plot pits them against each other; people exploit their environment, and natural forces thwart human aims. This antagonistic relationship shows up not just in this fairy tale; in fact it exists there because it permeates European literary tradition.
Consider the very first line: “At the edge of a forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children” (Grimm 142). Cutting wood does not of itself indicate separation from the environment or a lack of concern for it. Homo sapiens of all tribes have used fire for cooking and warmth, and wood has always been the premier renewable biomass fuel. But notice that this family is not living in the forest as part of the forest ecosystem, using only enough wood to meet their own needs. The man is identified as a woodcutter, meaning that he cuts wood to sell. His role in life is to extract a natural resource from the forest and transfer it to the human economic system. He lives “at the edge of the forest,” implying that there exists a clear boundary between the human and natural realms and that his proper place is on the human side. The folk who heard and retold the tale would assume he chose to live at the edge only to be close to his work. <Historical Notes>
The plot of “Hansel and Gretel” reinforces the dichotomy established in its exposition and capitalizes on the old idea that the natural world is not only alien, but also downright dangerous. When the stepmother proposes exiling Hansel and Gretel to the forest, she assumes (and her husband accepts the assumption) that they will die there. The children, overhearing the plan, make the same assumption. Since the only way to avoid death in the wilderness is to find their way back to the human realm, Hansel blazes their trail with white stones. This act is significant. The children do not decide to learn the forest and discover its inherent order—to pay attention to the terrain, to memorize landmarks, to note natural sources of food and shelter. The only order they know is human order; in the forest they perceive only chaos. As far as they—or the adults, for that matter—can see, the only way to insulate themselves from chaos and survive in the hostile environment is to carry in products of human industry (bread), establish a human outpost (fire) and arrange natural materials into a human design (trail of stones).
The first time the children are abandoned in the woods, they do make it back home with these techniques. But on their second exile, nature (in the form of birds) swallows up the human product (bread) they resort to for trail markers, and their wanderings take them “deeper and deeper into the forest” (145)—that is, farther and farther from human order. This is the appropriate domain for the witch, who lives in solitude and aspires to the ultimate destruction: devouring not just the product of human labor, as the birds had done, but human beings themselves. <Historical Notes>
Deep in the woods, against all reason, all expectation, the children find what looks like a human home built out of the very commodity that was so scarce at their own home: food. And no ordinary food, either. This food is hypercivilized. Not mere bread, but gingerbread, flavored with spices transported from afar through human trading networks and decorated with confections of sugar and other flavorings extracted—that is, removed—from their natural sources. No bait more cunningly suited for lost, hungry children could be imagined.
Precisely because this is the bait the witch uses, she does not personify nature nearly so clearly as Grendel and his mother do. Perhaps in folklore she derives from some ancient mythical pagan figure that did, but in this version of the tale she has no obvious nature-goddess trappings except “a keen sense of smell” (146). She is in the forest but not of the forest. She represents some psychological or spiritual or social evil the children struggle against, and the forest is an appropriate setting for this evil simply because it is remote from human order. When the children figure out how to counter her tricks with tricks of their own, when they resist her evil and overcome it, they pass an important personal and social milestone, but they are not yet out of the woods. <Historical Notes>
After Hansel and Gretel overcome the witch, they begin their journey home again, laden with “pearls and precious stones” (146) they have recovered from the witch’s house. By the way, these treasures are perceived as purely human artifacts. Their original source in creatures of the sea or in the earth is too remote for tellers or hearers of the tale to see them as tokens of nature’s bounty. Partway home, the children do seem to meet nature on new terms, however. They need to cross “a big body of water,” and they enlist the help of a duck that comes across from the other side to give them a ride. Hansel invites Gretel to sit on the duck’s back along with him, but she objects, “[T]hat would be too much for the poor thing; let her carry us one at a time” (147). Here is a bird assisting, instead of impeding the children, and Gretel is tenderly looking out for its welfare; the scene seems to imply the children are at last reconciled to nature and integrated into it. That implication turns out to be misleading.
The bird is not wild and cannot represent nature, at least not nature in its free state. It is white, the color of a domestic duck, so it must have a human owner on the other side of the water. Furthermore, within the story itself, white repeatedly points the way to or identifies human habitation. Hansel uses white stones to mark the way back home and when questioned by his stepmother claims to be looking back at his white kitten on the rooftop (143). On the second exile, he says he is looking back at his pigeon. He does not mention the color of the pigeon, but since his stepmother says he is seeing only sunlight glinting on the chimney (144), as she had said about the kitten, we can assume it too is white. The bird that leads the children to the witch’s house is white (145). All these contextual and textual clues tell us the children are returning to human society rather than harmonizing with nature. This implication in the imagery is confirmed in the action when the children exploit the duck as a beast of burden. In their European world-view, it is only natural for the duck to serve human needs willingly. After all, humans have dominion over the rest of creation, by divine decree. The reason to treat other creatures with care is simply that they represent valuable assets. <Historical Notes>
Let me emphasize again that neither the Grimm brothers nor the folk they collected the tale from intended to tell a tale about the dangers of the natural world. If they had, they would have made the witch symbolize nature by giving her more obvious beastly traits or dressing her in leaves. Instead, they were telling a story about a process of maturation, and the witch may represent a range of social, psychological, and spiritual perils. The Grimms’ additions and modifications to the folk version (especially the “baptism” when the children cross a body of water on the return trip) specifically mark the path toward Christian salvation, implying that the witch stands for Satan or his agent. Remember, though: texts communicate far more than their makers intend. People who told and listened to “Hansel and Gretel” lived in a world sharply divided into the human and the natural spheres. They were taught so, either explicitly or implicitly, by everything in their daily life—by the layout of walls and fences, by laws and contracts, by religious precept, by songs and stories, by the tenor of everyday conversation. Even when they had no particular motive to communicate this idea, they did it without meaning to.
