Rehabilitating the witch: An ecocritical reading of “Hänsel and Gretel”

This examination takes as its premise Maria Tatar’s (2003, xxii) assertion that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm “did transform the fables, yarns, and anecdotes of an oral storytelling tradition into literary texts destined to have a powerful influence on cultures the world over.” This chapter also accepts the points made by Melissa Ashley (2019); that when the Brothers [Jacob and Wilhelm] Grimm began their project of collecting and publishing folktales in the nineteenth century, they dismissed the authenticity of the fairytale traditions established by the seventeenth century French female writers, known as conteuses (women storytellers), concluding instead that not only were their stories unrepresentative of the voices of the common “volk,” but asserting the theory that fairytales had a direct and linear relationship to folktales. In this sense too, the Grimmian tradition seemed not only reliant on the oral culture of women, but involved distorting elements of their oral narratives at the level of dialect, philology, story, structure, lexicon and ideology (including religiosity) to better awaken, contribute to, and distil, a sense of German nationalism and spirt (Tsaliki 2016, 40). Indeed, extensive scholarly research into fairy tale traditions reveals that the sources of the Grimmian tales “were saturated in the French tradition, which itself goes back to the Italian, and the Arabian, and the Indian, and the Chinese, and so forth—of all branches of literature, fairy tales offer the strongest evidence of bonds in common across borders of nations, race, and language” (Warner 1994, 87). While scholars nowadays concede that the Grimms tales distill nationalistic (Franke 1918; Snyder 1978; Roberts 2010; Norberg 2022) and masculinist (Thomas 2017; Coles 2018) ideologies, essentially replicating Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of German idealism, in pursuing a principle of Deutsche Nationalerziehung, by adapting the original tales orated largely by women to shape Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812) into an Erziehungsbuch (educational guide) (Tully 1997, 136–137), these appropriations and biases themselves prove the fruitful ground upon which to advance ecofeminist readings of women and nature generally, and matured femininity and ecology specifically.