Friday, April 5, 2019

Blog Entry 8


The Child as a Hero
            In the various tales we read in class involving Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and others, the children are highlighted as the heroes. In these stories death was a high probability for these children, but they had to work as heroes in order to escape death. For example, in Hansel and Gretel, the brother sister duo had to outsmart their parents to escape death. In The Singing Bones, and Jack and the Beanstalk the children had to uniquely emerge as heroes. It was not as clear as some of the other tales but the children impacted the stories immensely.  

            In The Singing Bones a man and a woman had 25 children. “The man was good, the woman was bad (Tatar, 254).” The husband was afraid of his wife, and ate whatever she made for him. Soon, he noticed that some of his children were missing. The wife lied to him, and said they were staying at the grandmothers’ house. Come to find out, the wife had been killing the children, and feeding them to the husband. The children are the heroes because the dead children had a voice and told the father, “Our mother killed us, our father ate us. We are not in a coffin, we are not in a cemetery (Tatar, 255).” The father then reacted to this news by killing his carnivorous wife, burying the children’s bones, and became vegetarian.
            The children in The Singing Bones may not have been able to escape death due to the mother killing them, but they still emerge as the heroes of this story because they saved the father from the evil mother by communicating what had occurred. The dead children, not only saved the father, but also saved the rest of the children whom were still alive from being murdered by the mother. The dead children did not technically save themselves from death, but they are still heroes for saving the other children, and helping the father realize what he was doing.
            In Joseph Jacobs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack is a child hero. Jack, and his mother lived together and were very poor. They were often hungry. Jack’s mother sent him to sell there cow in order to get money for necessity’s for survival. Jack ran into a mysterious man, and sold the cow for magic beans. When he arrived with the beans, his mother threw them out into the yard, and was very upset that Jack sold there only source of money for a trick. Come to find out, the beans sprouted into a large beanstalk. Jack climbed the beanstalk, and ran into an ogress, and an ogre. The ogress was more motherly toward Jack, but the ogre did not like Jack. Jack had to outsmart the ogre in order to steal multiple gold items from them including a golden egg, hen, and harp. Jack successfully gained the golden items, and brought them back to his mother. They cut down the beanstalk, and now had plenty of money, and Jack even married a “great princess (Tatar, 277).”

            Jack is the hero in this story because even though at first his mother thought he was being a stupid child, and they would starve due to his careless actions, he ended up helping the family become rich. Jack had to be brave in order to face the ogre, and still managed to overcome the challenges as a child, and successfully bring back wealth for his mother.
            Bettelheim discusses the meaning of these stories from a Freudian point of view. His viewpoint is that the stories give insight to “childhood anxieties, and deep disappointments (Bettelheim, 159.)” He also talks about the “consequences of trying to deal with life’s problems by means of regression and denial, which reduces ones ability to solve problems (Bettelheim, 160).” This speaks on both of the stories I analyzed closely. In The Singing Bones the children regressed to the mother killing them before it was too late, and many children already died. Also in Jack and the Beanstalk, he regressed to their problem of being poor for making a careless decision of trading the cow for magic beans. In both stories, the children still emerge as heroes in the end, and solve their problems in unique ways.


Sources: google images

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