The Absent Father
It is a common pattern in Fairy Tales that the father of the family plays an absent and rather silent role throughout the storyline. The absence of said father figure plays a pivotal role in the plot of the story, paving the way for complex relationships between female authority figures and the children inside of the home. Of course the absent nature of the father places a sense of total domestic responsibility upon the female spouse who in most fairy tales is his second wife. This narrative is derived from a harsh reality of the time these tales were written, where the leading cause of female death was childbirth. This being said, the second wife of these stories is often burdened with the children of her husband’s first marriage, birthing a domestic setting absent of maternal love and biological adversity..
The classic fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel,” was most famously published by the Brothers Grimm. The tale follows the starving family of a woodcutter, whose second wife convinces him to abandon his children in the woods. Although the father loves his children, he demonstrates silence and surrenders to his wife who holds the power in this domestic decision, and ultimately controls the fate of his children- she does this not once, but twice. The children go through the trials and tribulations of abandonment with no paternal aid, and ultimately return home to their fathers embrace- finding that their step mother had passed.
I’d like to focus on a contemporary retelling of the tale in which the father’s absent role is intensified. The film, “An Appellation Hansel and Gretel” tells a strikingly similar story as the Brothers Grimm; The narrator and characters even quotes many of the Grimms version’s lines word for word. A noticeable difference lies within portions of the story that mute the literary tales normalized magic. The witch’s house in the written tale is made of cake and sugar, in the movie it is a wooden cottage. Secondly the film eliminates the portion of the written tale where the children take turns riding across a body of water on the back of a helpful duck on their quest home. Upon their return the stepmother has left instead of passed away. Most importantly to the premise of this essay, the father in the film is mute- not with one line, the role he plays in this film is not a character of substance, but just an allegorical paternal figure.
Nowadays many hollywood movies utilize the absence of one or two parents to solidify the child protagonist as independent throughout the plot. My favorite example is The Hunger Games. The protagonist, Katniss is thrown into the face of adversity brought upon her by a dystopian world. Her absent parents set her up to be a capable fighter in the eyes of the viewer. Her father has passed before the story begins, and her mother’s intense grief following her husband’s loss solidifies her as useless to the plot. The mother’s role in juxtaposition with Katniss’s character sets the tone for Katniss’s ability to confront adversity with action, and causes the audience to view her as a caretaker rather than a daughter.
Links:
https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015.html
https://www.amazon.com/Hansel-Gretel-Grimms-Fairy-Tale/dp/0863156231
