The other day I read something about Hansel & Gretel, someone saying it was a story about misogyny, or rife with it. I thought that was an odd take, not because there isn’t a case to be made for it, but because it’s one that could easily be placed on top of nearly any fairy tale, and it often seems that the most low-hanging lens is also almost always the least interesting, and the most superficial.
I thought of how many other things that story could be about. Mostly to me it’s about hunger. The stepmother, hungry for love, willing to kill the children to have the husband’s love to herself. The father, hungry for ease, agreeing. The children, starving in the woods, happening upon the house made of gingerbread and candies, ready to risk safety in exchange for a satisfied stomach. The witch, stoking the fire and fattening Hansel, hungry for children, for a belly full of child. All of them appear to want different things, but in reality want the same thing: satiation. A fulfillment of their desire—for love, security, belonging, family. None of them are wrong, except all of them are. Not because of what they want (or the wanting itself), but because of where it leads them. It’s not the wanting, but the grasping for a shortcut. Choosing the easy way, at great cost.
I can’t remember who it was that said the way to read fairy tales is to see every character and element as fractals of oneself. They said the same thing applies to interpreting dreams. This makes fairy tales amoral. Around every corner, underneath pillows of evil or behind curtains of hero, there is only humanity. The most vivid stories are like this, I think: just to the left of correctness. Taking the audience’s assumptions of right and wrong and tilting them to the side, not so systems of value no longer exist, but to subsume judgement. So we can start to see the life and the death behind every behavior, choice, and existence. The frame becoming fuller, rather than narrower. To see Hansel & Gretel as a story about misogyny is a tight tunnel. To see it as the ravages of hunger blows our cover. Exposes our personal underbelly. Because hunger is honest. It’s inevitable, unavoidable, and pointless to wish away. None of us can get through life without knowing it. And when one is starving, good and bad quickly become beside the point. There is only want and take. There is only choice, and integrity here becomes more and more slippery, less and less apparent.
Stories are also not literal, and it’s rarely useful when we try to make them so. (Beginnings and endings make for an inherent falseness — we all know the Didion quote.) That’s why genre is so effective. Fantasy, horror, dystopian, myth. Heightened metaphor, paradoxically, can be the sharpest way to tell a truth. It’s a sword that cuts through what we think something is about vs. what its core actually reveals. It shows us, instead of tells us. It moves us, instead of lectures us. There’s a reason empathy, not preaching, is what most often changes hearts and minds.
I want interpretations that poke and prod, not ones that allow us to sit comfortably back, from a great distance, and say, “oh, that is happening over there, to those people, and not to me.” Intellectualizing our collective shadow never got us anywhere. And all of this is not to say there’s a right or wrong way to interpret stories, either. But the things I find myself searching for, stomach growling, when I encounter a narrative, are questions like: what version of this is more confronting? Higher risk? What expands, rather than contracts?
Are we the witch or the father? Gretel or the mother? Can we tell? Do we open the oven door, or do we push someone in?