was thirteen, and we both shared the same bedroom. In large families, it is rare that a child sleeps in a room or bed alone. For all of their years prior to high school, my sisters, three years apart, slept in the same bed. Until I was a sophomore (and my two older brothers had moved away), we rotated three single beds in a variety of arrangements. In the first home that I can remember, we all slept in the narrow second-floor room of our small cape cod. After we moved, I was for a short time in the same room as my second oldest brother. When my first of two younger brothers came along ten years later, I soon became the older sibling sharing a room and occasional stories with the younger.
When I began the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel from memory, I did not yet understand that bedtime stories fraught with evil risked restlessness and worked against the task at hand: ushering a child to sleep. Even now, I still feel the gut check of the sudden suspicion that the impending cruelty might be too much for my brother. I remember moving past the wickedness of the stepmother and the cowardice of the father; I lingered instead upon the ingenuity and wit of Hansel’s effort to leave a trail and the magical features of the gingerbread house. I congratulated Gretel for her bravery and overlooked the oven’s flames and witch’s shrieks. With the ending, I painted a joyous reunion. (Looking over Grimms’ published story, I realize that I had also forgotten much, including the jewels retrieved from the old woman’s gingerbread house.) Perhaps I even invented a kind mother and left my brother imagining Hansel’s and Gretel’s full stomachs, warm beds, and forgetful slumber. But of all that comes back to me in the traces of this memory, I am still surprised by the vivid emotional echo of the storyteller’s dilemma, the sudden worry of unleashing first-time fears like evils from Pandora’s Box.
My grandmother also used to tell my older brothers, sisters, and me Grimms’ tales. My father’s mother lived in a small cottage on the east side of Storm Lake, the side that caught the snow blown across the ice during long Iowa winters and left six to ten foot drifts between homes. Bitter winds made her windows moan and whine in mid-January. In the spring, big-leafed rhubarb bordered her back yard, and in the damp, shady places beneath bushes and trees, a strong aroma of weedy flowers invaded the air. Inside, the small kitchen smelled of tea and cinnamon, the cupboard always seeming to hoard a pan of bread or graham cracker pudding atop wax paper. I learned to love the texture of soft foods like bread pudding with raisins, covered in thick cream. At some point during our visits, in the time after outside exploring and before our mother picked us up, my grandmother would sit us beside her on the couch or alongside a chair capped with cross-stitched doilies and tell stories. In these years, I heard “Hansel and Gretel” but also another Grimms’ tale, “The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean.” Spiced with a Liverpool accent, so exotic to the ear of an untraveled, midwestern boy, my British grandma told this brief tale of a precarious camaraderie forged after a chance escape from an old village woman’s fire place and cooking pot. In the fragments of my remembering, I catch my innocent lingering upon the lesson of self-sacrifice: the thin straw’s willingness to lay his body across a stream to allow for his friends’ escape.
Curious to hear again this favorite story and to read the full version of “Hansel and Gretel,” I tracked down an edition of Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales. In addition to reading of the redemptive reunion between the father and his children, of the jewels and precious stones, I learned that Straw did not experience a happy ending. Rushing upon his thin comrade as he lay stretched and hopeful across the brook, the hot-headed Coal paused fearfully when hearing the water below and burned Straw in half. Both plunged to death in the brook. Bean, having held back, burst his seam laughing and was later stitched back together. So, after all these years, why did I hold on so tenaciously to the moral of self-sacrifice? Had my grandmother altered the ending to soften its harshness? Did she field the inevitable questions of her grandchildren in ways that eased the hardness or uplifted the heroism? What would it have meant, after all, to imagine Straw’s sacrifice as no more than a prelude to a meaningless fall or mocking laughter? As my grandmother looked into my eyes, she might have seen a child’s need to believe in the possibility of such sacrifice; perhaps she knew that the story told only a partial truth, that it had forsaken goodness in the midst of evil, that death had erased Straw’s generous impulse. So much, after all, can occupy that imaginative space. What should we remember and who should we praise: selfish Coal, cautious and unsympathetic Bean, or self-sacrificing Straw?
All storytellers face the problem of just how much to tell and just how to tell it. How much should be left out or let in? How piercing should the teller paint the evils of the world? How much of the tale changes in what the listener can understand and what the storyteller knows can be told at any given time?
My curious journeying back to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s book made me wonder how they wrestled with such questions and whether they spoke of this tale-teller’s dilemma. Having listened to, recorded, and revised the hard-edged narratives, they must have considered, like any father sitting in the storyteller’s chair or on the bed’s edge, how they opened a world of fear and abandonment within the sanctuary of a family’s sleeping quarters. In reading their preface to the second volume of the tales’ first edition, we hear them express such a concern. “There are those,” they write, “who do not even want [their children] to hear bad things about the devil” and parents who “might not want to put the book into the hands of their children.” But, not surprisingly, they err on the side of the telling, concluding that they “do not know of a single healthy and powerful book used to educate the people (and that includes the Bible) in which such delicate matters do not actually appear to an even greater extent.” In the folk tales, they see a “document of our hearts.” If so, for both the storyteller and the listener, the document is of a kind that haunts as it heals. The stories that keep calling us back are also the ones that may keep us up at night.
In my years of learning about stories and how to read them, I remember once coming across the name of Bruno Bettelheim in relation to fairy tales, and so, in my library browsing, I sought out where this recollection might lead. Just as my grandmother sought to frame how to read Grimms’ tales, Bettelheim must also have offered some insight into the stories. How might he illuminate these tales of famine, estrangement, and loss in the intimate home of memory and desire? Sitting down with The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, published in 1976, the same time as my bedtime storytelling to my brother, I read of Bettelheim’s fascination with the harsh realities of Grimms’ fairy tales and their important role in educating children. The hard facts represented in literature and especially fairy tales, Bettelheim cajoled readers, stimulate and enrich children’s imaginations and consequently their developing minds and emotions. Seeing the world through a Freudian lens—and the psychoanalytical bogeymen of unconscious desires, “oedipal dilemmas,” and “sibling rivalries”—he emphasizes the significance of Grimms’ stories in the growth of identity and self-worth. To deal with inner tribulations and achieve self-understanding, children must engage in dream and fantasy: “[A child] can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams—ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures.” In this way, it seems, self-understanding is not possible without stories and storytelling. We often make use of the short time before sleep to narrate the day in the context of near and far off fears.
It is not a bad thing, then, for parents and teachers to encourage children to sleep with all that might lead to sleeplessness. In important ways, a listener’s unscripted fears and chaotic fantasies can be given shape through such troubling narratives as “Hansel and Gretel.” With this kind of tough love, Bettelheim rejects what he sees as the widespread cultural desire to pretend that the “dark side of man does not exist” and asserts that “only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.” In the 1970s, The Uses of Enchantment must have seemed timely, an odd solace in the face of the era’s violence within and beyond the nation, of alienated sons and daughters, of disillusioned citizens attempting to “wring meaning” from so much that was falling apart. Having survived time in
