Hansel and Gretel

Kelly L. Green is the co-editor of the Children’s Literature edition
of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

According to the great child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, “The fairy
story, although it may begin with the child’s psychological state of
mind ... never starts with his physical reality. No child ... is
deliberately deserted in a dense wood, like Hansel and Gretel, because a
physical similarity would be too scary to the child ... when giving
comfort is one of the purposes of fairy tales.” If this is so, Ian
Wallace’s version of Hansel and Gretel is positively frightening.

Wallace has placed his Hansel and Gretel in the “physical reality”
of present-day impoverishment. “In a house by the sea on the edge of a
large forest lived a poor fisherman with his wife and two children,”
the story begins, opposite a dark pencil drawing of a demoralized modern
family. Two exhausted children sit across from a television; mother (we
assume) holds an empty canister of flour. Father is represented in a
corner of the picture by an idle male hand resting heavily on a
bluejeaned knee. The stark reality of this opening continues throughout
the first half of the book. While the text is well written and true to
fairy-tale tradition, Wallace’s illustrations are frightening in their
immediacy and darkness. This Hansel and Gretel are not safely placed in
long ago and far away, but look rather as if they might live in the
house down the street.

Once the children are in the woods, Wallace jumps into true fairy-tale
territory. His drawing of the children running through a field, unaware
that they are being observed by a gigantic witch —who is, in fact, an
embodiment of the trees, roots, and soil of the enchanted forest
itself—is brilliant.

Nevertheless, in this moralistic tale of parental despair and
abandonment, Wallace has created not a book for children but a
cautionary tale for adults. Recommended with reservations for children
aged 8 and older.