Tuesday, 20th January 2009.

Eat your heart out, Fred West

On Saturday evening, I had something of an epiphany.

It came to me in the closing moments of Hansel and Gretel, a story that I was reading to Josh, at his suggestion. It's a Ladybird edition that pulls no punches when it comes to its subject: the matter of the witch's cannibalistic nature is not glossed over, nor is the fact that she dies a horrible death when Gretel pushes her into the oven. I'm always quite pleased when they stick to the real story, rather than saying, as in one edition of Jack and the Beanstalk (which is admittedly aimed at toddlers), that "Jack chopped down the beanstalk, so the giant couldn't follow them". It's like comparing Gatchaman with Battle of the Planets - the latter being a more sanitised, 'pleasant' version of the story that's suitable for smaller children, with all its foul language and references to death and cross-dressing hermaphrodites removed, becoming in the process a pale imitation of the real thing.

But I digress. The bottom line was that some of the Ladybird editions, inherited en masse last year when my parents cleaned out their loft, are downright horrible. Their rendition of Pinocchio, in particular, is ghastly, with bullying, mindless vandalism and mutilated feet that got too close to the fireplace. The Old Woman and her Pig, in which an elderly pensioner concocts an incredibly convoluted scheme - of which Heath Robinson would have been proud - to get her pig to jump over a stile, isn't much better. (Why on earth she couldn't have carried him in the first place is beyond me.) The Three Billy Goats Gruff, on the other hand, is fantastic, building in pace to a terrific climax that always has the two of us shouting into the book, rendering it a firm bedtime favourite (although arguably not the best way of calming down your child before they settle down for the night).

I'd kept Hansel and Gretel at arm's length until last weekend - in many ways it's no more grizzly than most other fairy tales, but something about its cacophony of wilful abandonment, appalling parental figures (was there ever a man with less backbone than Hansel and Gretel's father?) and cannibalism tended to put me off. This was until Saturday, when I found Joshua sitting on the floor in the spare room, book in hand, turning the pages methodically and examining the illustrations with great interest. So we read it, and enjoyed it.

There's one part of the narrative that's always jarred with me, and that's the scene in which Hansel and Gretel return home after a period of absence that, we're led to believe, is no longer than a month, or two at the most. Having arrived back at the cottage, they find their grief-stricken father who, according to this edition, "had not had a single happy moment since abandoning his children in the forest" (I should think so, you spineless wimp) and who is overcome with joy when reunited with a son and daughter who seem rather too quick off the mark to forgive him. And, of course, they all live happily ever after, thanks to the jewels that the plucky pair managed to procure from the witch's gingerbread cottage.

However, what is most interesting about this is the fact that the wicked stepmother (or mother, in some earlier versions of the story) has mysteriously died. No mention is made of how or when this occurred, and it is not alluded to again. It makes a lot of sense, in a way, to write her out, because her mere presence in the household - even one that no longer struggles financially and will therefore no longer be plagued with the debts that caused Hansel and Gretel's parents to resort to dumping them in the forest in the first place - is enough to nullify or at best severely dampen the book's happy ending. There's no way that she can be there, even if they're happy, because she was a wicked woman who did not deserve to live.

But what happened to her? Mysterious deaths are not uncommon in fairy stories; Snow White's wicked queen meets an unfortunate end when, having learned that the girl has married her handsome prince, she becomes so enraged that she drops like a stone, presumably of a heart attack. Nonetheless, aside from the appearance of an uncommonly friendly swan, there's a relatively strong dose of realism in Hansel and Gretel: the house made of gingerbread is a culinary masterpiece and an architectural improbability, but not impossible. What's more, the witch herself does not resort to magic during the course of the story, which makes her assignation of mistress of dark arts something of a moot point: she might just as well have been the crazy old lady in the middle of the forest, the lonely girl who turned cannibal after some childhood trauma which she might have dealt with better if she'd had access to proper counselling.

So there's no real reason to suggest that the wicked stepmother just dropped dead, a victim of forces supernatural. It's quite possible, of course, that she might have been the victim of a freak bear attack, or from eating poisoned mushrooms that she'd procured from the woods to solve the family's food crisis. Such an outcome might be decent karmic retribution, laced (in the latter case, at least) with a heavy dose of irony. There's another school of thought that suggests that she and the witch were, in some way or another, psychically connected or even the same person, much like the despicable Almira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West.

But here's my theory. It's a quiet cottage in the middle of the woods. By all accounts interaction with the outside world is limited by trips to market to sell the wood that's been chopped that week: Hansel and Gretel seem to have no neighbours on whom they can rely for financial aid, or even a cup of sugar. The house's isolated rural location, and their father's trade as master of the axe, render only one plausible explanation: he killed her. Stricken with grief, numbed by guilt and forced to choose between turning his anger inward (whereupon it becomes depression) or finding an outlet, Hansel Senior chose not to blame himself for his shortcomings, but instead to lash out at the despicably amoral woman that he married.

It's macabre, but it makes perfect sense. Given her strong sense of self-preservation (she is the only one of the four who makes a practical, pragmatic choice as to how the family might survive, in whatever capacity) it is inconceivable that the stepmother died of hunger. Freak accidents are possible, but death by hatchet, presumably in a moment of rage that followed the mother of all domestic arguments, is surely the most likely outcome. Following this, Hansel and Gretel's father buried his wife under the patio, Brookside style, or (if you want to get really unpleasant) broiled her up with a few fava beans and a nice Chianti. It would explain how he had managed to survive four to six weeks of having no food in the house, while his wife, somewhat mysteriously, had not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I neglected to mention any of this to Josh when I was reading him the story. I am saving that for next week, after we've discussed Catholic child-bearing doctrines and correlations between population density of single parent families and distribution of state benefits, within the context of The Big Pancake.