The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

“Hansel and Gretel”

The Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel begins with a brother and sister being sent away by their poor parents, who can no longer feed them. Bettelheim writes how this corresponds to a child’s anxiety of being abandoned and left to starve by their caregivers. Hansel and Gretel become fixated on food, and Hansel’s starvation anxiety leads him to make the foolish choice of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs back to the home. The initial intention to return home, in Bettelheim’s view, symbolizes the child’s attempt to return to dependency after being thrust into independence. An intervening bird who eats the bread crumb trail symbolizes the outside world forcing the children out of such regression.

The story’s famous gingerbread house, which Hansel and Gretel encounter in the woods and immediately begin eating, symbolizes the return to an oral stage of development (a developmental stage in Freudian psychology), where the children could rely on an all-giving mother’s body to nourish them. Bettelheim explains that “it is the original all-giving mother, whom every child hopes to find again later somewhere out in the world, when his own mother begins to make demands and impose restrictions” (161). The gingerbread house owner, who initially feeds the children more, seems like a stand-in for the good mother—however, she is a wicked witch who wants to eat the children.