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The Powers of Temptation: Psychoanalysis of Hansel & Gretel
Ian C. Glover Ms. Fairchild Folktales/ Mythology Period 3 1 April 2014
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Glover 2 Ian C. Glover Ms. Fairchild Period 3/ Folktales 1 April 1, 2014
The Power of Temptation: Psychoanalysis of Hansel and Gretel
From Bruno Bettelheim to Carl Jung, there is no question that folktales are a
primary factor of our development as a child. The structure built inside the child’s mind is one that will follow them for the rest of their life and development on the material plane on Earth. One folktale that seems to have given this world a structure for modern society aside from Cinderella and Snow White is our favorite Hansel and Gretel. Grimm’s popular tale has permeated the structure of modern society and our perception on strangers and nature forever. It also reinforces the concept of evil in women, which seems to be a major component of folktales told to children at an early age. What exactly are we really telling our children these days?
As Bettelheim has brilliantly stated in his introduction for the book The Uses
of Enchantment, a folktale manages to stay inside the “conscious, unconscious, and preconscious mind of a child” when the folktale is read to them. The same occurs with dreams as dreams begin to influence our plan of action as we move on in life. A
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Now this tale sounds quite innocent on the outside but the effect it has on the
consciousness of a child is quite immense indeed. It states that women are witches with bad intentions, as most folktales have a thing with women and being evil, and to never talk to strangers. Now we have Pinocchio to teach that lesson for us, but nonetheless, the impact of Hansel and Gretel has influenced modern behaviors and prejudices to a shocking point that cannot be ignored. The importance of survival as a team is overstressed in this tale because of reliability. This tale also shows the innocence of children and how often the destruction of innocence becomes introduced with manipulation by adults and strangers; they are the real danger to the world that children live in today. With this folktale we explore society’s many insecurities and fears, for we have projected now the tale into a modern social
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Glover 4 normality, where danger is perpetuated by the unconscious fear of kidnap, programmed by the news, to which most Americans are programmed to.
Fear is the factor leeched off of from the folktale in dramatic ways and it is
sad to watch a nation tear itself apart by resorting to material electronics as a way to not go outside and live, like children do. In the story of Hansel and Gretel, we see a modern-‐day Recession hitting to where a hard working family can no longer provide for the kids and must only provide for themselves. The instability created by lack of food is so great that the mother of the children suggests to get rid of the children: “I’ll tell you what… Tomorrow morning we will take the children out quite early into the thickest part of the forest. We will light a fire, and give each of them a piece of bread; then we will go back to our work and leave them alone. They won’t be able to find their way back, and so we shall be rid of them” (Cole 145). If we lead with our heads and reach the conclusion that kids decrease our productivity in life, then we will throw them out like Hansel and Gretel. If we lead with our hearts we may learn the lesson of the tale, which maybe is to listen to the children and see through their eyes, for children see all.
There are many ways to go about looking at the tale of Hansel and Gretel.
There is the factor of deception and how it is a woman and not a man that deceives the children for chocolate, candy, and abduct the children for her own personal satisfaction. As Mel D. Faber observes, “It is (the witch’s) ‘evil design’ that finally obliges Hansel and Gretel to ‘recognize the dangers of unrestrained oral greed and dependence.” If we observed this concept that women are the ones who deceive and
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Glover 5 destroy the innocence of children, then where have we gotten to as a society because of it? Typically for women you see them suffering from either “The Cinderella Complex” or the “Snow White Syndrome”. The Cinderella Complex, as Colette Dowling would love to put it, is the “wish to be saved” by a Prince Charming, for she is the damsel in distress. The Snow White Syndrome is where the innocence of a women is the only world she lives in, oblivious to the danger around. In truth, both of these are adamant traits in society today, but neither of these help validate the perception that women deceive and destroy the innocence of children.
So the question remains for the tale of Hansel and Gretel, why is the women
evil, just as the step-‐mother in Cinderella is evil, or the queen in Snow White is full of cruelty and malice, or the Baba Yaga, also a women? The world have had a universal problem with women, it seems, and throughout almost every tale, women are tempted by what seems like the devil, in the contexts given for each tale. Hansel and Gretel in particular shows the luring of children and how they are insensitive to danger until it has pounced upon them. The women brings in the children to her home in the forest, offering them a motherly care: protection, warmth, food, all things that in the early times were required of women. It seems that America has not dropped this perception in the public eye in the slightest.
For instance, in modern day horror movies that contain supernatural demons
or exorcisms, it has always been the women in touch with the spirits or being susceptible to possession by a demon. This implies the strong and negatives spiritual powers that women possess. But the insecurity of women being evil stems
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Glover 6 not just from folktale, but the inner struggle that man seems to face when unable to look at himself for his own corruption. As much as men rule this earth, it is the women who control it. This is shown through the power of sexuality and the suppression of emotion, as trained by male psychology dating back to the times where women said good-‐bye to the soldiers before they left for war. Now, times have changed, where women are much more vocal with their emotions, even if they are often only through the social media, but nonetheless, the evil woman in the story of Hansel and Gretel seems to show itself almost everywhere in almost every known folktale and in the rare occasions in modern society.
This folktale has taught people how to run and find their way back home to
stability by always leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for themselves. Recently, in pop culture during an episode of BBC’s Sherlock from Season Two, Moriarty leaves Sherlock clues to find some missing children who had been kidnapped through the use of the fairy tale!!! He also used breadcrumbs to symbolize that the children were in a living reenactment of Hansel and Gretel. By reading the tale, Sherlock cracked the case and found the kids. Clues are a constant riddle in society, and in truth, Hansel and Gretel is such an influential piece of literature that we have based our society on the structure to stick together, never get lost, never talk to strangers because they will lead you astray.
If strangers are on the side of the devil, then how are friends ever made? Can
we honestly believe that good is not in the hearts of those you meet across the street or in the wilderness? Where is the real insecurity but in the way we raise our
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Glover 7 children AND ourselves? It is necessary, yes, to acknowledge the evils and terrors of the world, but by projecting at every corner you perpetuate the likelihood of your actions being less safe, therefore drawing attention to the very thing you are running from – possibly yourself, if you consider it. The tale forces us to think and listen, to trust our intuitions, because it is our gut feeling that has led us to truly survive the bitter tests in life, as every person is tested, some more harshly than others.
If we are to believe that Hansel and Gretel is a fairytale told to children for
some basic morals and entertaining value, then we are all kidding ourselves, for it is in truth a larger-‐than-‐life tale that forces us to face what we avoid at night when we are alone, just like the dark of the night where Hansel and Gretel slept in before going into the shelter of evil. Perhaps the moral of the tale is to understand that we guide the child in us to overcome our own massive hurdles. After all, the great Joseph Campbell once said, “Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the high road to the soul’s destination.” Maybe the child is the symbol of our courage, the courage we refuse to muster up in times of desperate need. When will this society stop projecting its problems and face it head-‐on? That is when we shall evolve, when we understand who we are, what we read to our kids, and what we’ve programmed in ourselves, because WE create society. What society do you wish to live in? A society based on fear or a society based on love?
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The simple truth is that the projections of evil women in modern society all
stem back to folktales like Hansel and Gretel. The tale also touches on the nightmare of abandonment, because their mother and father abandoned Hansel and Gretel into the dark forest where they encounter the evil witch. Psychologically, when a child first hears a folktale on this level, it affects the child’s mental configurations on three levels: conscious, sub-‐conscious, and unconscious. These three planes of comprehension rule our mind and our decisions in our daily lives, because as Carl Jung says, “What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate”. It is on these planes of mental existence where trauma is kept, built upon, and configured.
If a child is brought up to live in nightmares with strong morals, then we
raise these children to fear nature and fear the world we live in. And perhaps rightly so given the circumstances in the world today, with mass suffering and idiocy programmed by the very technology that was created to help us. But fear is a destructive factor, and the first destructive factor in the tale of Hansel and Gretel is the fear of neglect from parents to children, the anticipation of abandonment. The way children have coped with these subtle traumas is to isolate themselves in technology and make-‐up.
If it had not been for folktales like Hansel and Gretel this world would be a
very different place entirely. Maybe we would be more social and less kept to ourselves. Through tales like Cinderella or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, women have developed two other types of personalities, which remnants are shown in the tale of Hansel and Gretel. For Cinderella, women developed a wish to be saved
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The connection of these three tales is the evil in the older, commanding
women, magic, and in the innocence of children. For instance, in all three folktales you have either an evil Queen, Stepmother, or Witch. You also find three young women, all forced to make a life-‐altering decision in someway. And each central character share innocence in common. Hansel and Gretel are children and their curiosity led them through the forest and their innocent intelligence led them to escape the witch and find their way home. Snow White is a young princess who uses her innocence to find shelter and care in the forest… but gets tempted with a poison apple, which is her downfall, only to be resurrected by the innocence of love’s first kiss. And then the famous Cinderella, where being in rags and scrubbing floors matters not, teaching us all that from the most unfortunate circumstances, the most depressed people are often the most beautiful and innocent. It is from her where people truly see you can go from having nothing to having it all when you follow your heart.
Then, who can forget magic, which is what universally connects all folktales?
Hansel and Gretel there is the magic of the witch and the magic of circumstance. Cinderella there is the magic of the Fairy Godmother, who aids Cinderella with her
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The purpose for all these folktales has been education and the configuration
of the human psyche. It is also to re-‐enforce the concept and truth about spirituality, and keep it alive as we transition from the spiritual world to the entrapments of the material world. The preservation of supernatural and spiritual elements are vital in the construction of folktales, because the day humanity turns away from spirituality, that will be the day where Earth will no longer sustain stability. Folktales have provided us with three different views on women: desperate, innocent, and evil. Although it is hardly focused on, the awareness in the back of your head is important to reflect on.
In a closing statement, our society is forever changed with the ever-‐
expanding realm of folktales that are told to our children today during bedtime. As the child sleeps, remnants of the tale previously spoken enters the dream world and lead the children to develop the life and imagination they want to create in the future. Without the creation of imagination, there could not be intelligence and there could not be innocence. To live in a world as powerful as magic is to manifest on the material plane creations that have never been dreamed before.
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Outline for Research Paper
Introduction – Hansel and Gretel reinforces the concept of evil in women. Why is there so much evil directed at women and why are we saying it to our children? I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
What folktales do to children and summary of Hansel and Gretel
A. Influence on kids
B. Summary of Hansel and Gretel
Effects of Hansel and Gretel from children to society
A. Despite innocence, it is provocative and controversial
B. Impact on raising kids in Modern Society
Family Fears
A. Fear has permeated society, now we don’t live
B. Motherly dismissal of the children
How to analyze Hansel and Gretel
A. Evil design of the witch in women
B. Contrast to the Cinderella Complex
Why are women evil in these tales?
A. Universal theme of women and the devil
B. Destruction of Innocence in children from women
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VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
Horror Movies and the Power of Sexuality
A. Roles associated with evil or damsel in distress
B. Power of Sexual Energy
Always Return Home
Hansel and Gretel is NOT a light-‐hearted bedtime story
A. Facing what we don’t want to face
B. Joseph Campbell and our courage
A. BBC’s Sherlock
B. Moral structure in society
Why are we so insecure?
A. Unnecessary shelter
B. Other lessons from the tale
Evil women stem back to Folktales
A. Abandonment factor
B. Collective unconscious
The Damaged Effect on Children
A. Children now live in constant fear of living
B. Hiding in Materialism
Walt Disney
A. Different world without Hansel and Gretel
B. Walt Disney – Snow White and Cinderella similarities
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XIV.
XV.
Tale connections
A. Evil commanding women
B. Summary of three heroes
The Magical Connection
A. Magic connects all
B. Examples of the magic manifestation
Purpose
A. Importance of preservation of spirituality
B. Review on the three different views provided
Conclusion – Our society is forever changed by folktales and the creation of the ever-‐ expanding world of imagination.
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Works Cited
1. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010. Print. 2. Faber, Mel D. Modern Witchcraft and Psychoanalysis. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1993. Print. 3. Cole, Joanna. Best-‐Loved Folktales of the World. Anchor Books, 1983. Print. 4. Dowling, Colette. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. Pocket Books, 1982. Print. 5. Campbell, Joseph. Hero With A Thousand Faces. New World Library, 1949. Print. 6. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Random House, 1963. Print.
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