Note: Cynthia's rather soulful take on cannibalism in fairy tales -- and let's not kid ourselves, fairy tales are rife with cannibalism -- may not be evident in the title of her work, but she is, in fact, a pretty deep thinker. She stirred up an interesting brew with this piece. (Please note that because many of the tales students have used in their posts have been linked to already, I will only be linking to newly mentioned sources from this point forward.)
Until recently I took fairy tales at face value because I had not read the origin tales in most cases. Needless to say to anyone who has read them – fairy tales are interpreted, re-interpreted, and theorized about as much as any written works. Along this line of logic I first thought that cannibalism is cannibalism and that’s that. But in fairy tales that is just not so.
In “Snow White” the stepmother ordered the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring her “lungs and liver as proof of [his] deed”. The huntsman does not kill Snow White and instead brought the lungs and liver of a boar. The queen had the organs cooked and she ate them. First of all, the Queen was very misleading to the huntsman for she said she wanted the organs as proof and left out the part where she wanted them for dinner. Secondly, the Queen was quite specific in what organs she wanted. I saw this as just another instance of cannibalism but some further research opened my eyes to new ideas. One of those ideas was by Joan Gould in Spinning Straw into Gold, and she wrote, “the liver is an organ filled with blood, which formerly was thought to be the site not only of life but of the soul, in much the same way that we now regard the heart”. The Queen was not just after Snow White’s beauty and organs she was in pursuit of Snow White’s soul. This portrays the Queen not just as an evil person but like a demon. What at first seems to be a cannibalistic act is now an act of the devil and thus an act against God.
In “The Juniper Tree” we have another instance of familial cannibalism but in this case a father was unknowingly fed his son by the son’s stepmother. What is interesting about this story is that Gould points out that a tribe from the Amazon, the Yanomami “cremate their dead, and some time later grind up the bones and mix them with bananas to make a soup, which each person close to the dead man or woman drinks”. This is very close to what occurred in “The Juniper Tree” but it was not meant to be a proper, loving ritual – it was meant to cover the tracks of an evil woman who murdered a child. The father does not know his son is dead, let alone that he was eating him. The little sister who thinks she is responsible for her brother’s death just sobs and cannot bring herself to eat him for that is not how most people of the West treat their dead.
And finally we have “Grandmother’s Tale” a similar tale to “Little Red Riding Hood” in which the girl unknowingly ate her grandmother’s flesh and drank her blood. Some people see the ingestion of the grandmother as giving the girl some of the grandmother’s wisdom and strengths to outwit the wolf. However, Catherine Orenstein wrote in Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, “Cannibalism is a symbolic reminder that the old will be reborn in the young, in a reversal of the maternal tide. In more literal terms, our bodies carry the genes of our ancestors…”. One way to interpret this is that people often become their parents in behavior and physical appearance no matter how hard they may try not to. Also family members have very close genetic makeup, so children are like newer versions of their parents.
If fairy tales have taught me nothing else, they have taught me that everything means something. Nothing is as simple as it seems. And cannibalism is not what I thought it was. The Yanomami almost make it beautiful for me.
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