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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