The Missing Father Trope
It is a common trope in most fairy tales where the father is not. very involved in the overall storyline. What is the most interesting part though, is when the father is absent in a story, the wife (usually second wife) has to deal with the children and sometimes they're not even her kids. I think this can be connected with the way men would remarry a lot in the old days because most women would die from childbirth. The second wife tends to be very distant, jealous and rude to the new kids that she must deal with and not have any help from the father, I think it is this lack of a male figure that drives some of the evil women to such extremes.. The fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel,” published by the Grimm brothers, follows a family that is so poor and hungry, the second wife of the woodcutter father convinces him to abandon the kids in the woods. The father does not really make the choice himself, he loved the children and did not want them to go but ultimately ended up caving to his new wife and abandoning them. After escaping a horrible witch in the woods, the children make it back to their house to find their dad happy to see them but their stepmother had “tragically” passed away.
In a different version of Hansel and Gretel, “Little Thumbling” has a few differences in the way the father is portrayed. Perrault had something different in mind when he wrote this story, the father was a much more brute and unloving man. In this story the father and his wife had seven children and needed to abandon them because they were so poor. The twist is that the father was the one who was making the choice to send them into the woods instead of the mother. Every time they would abandon them, the mother would cry and be in a lot of pain but the father seemed to be happier without them. I think this more absent and loveless father made the littlest child (Little Thumbling) want to be the strong one to take care of his family.
New movies have embraced a new type of dad which I would call the above and beyond dad. The best example of this is in the Pixar movie Finding Nemo. This is one of the classics from when I was growing up, it follows the father of Nemo after he sees his son get captured by fishermen. The mother is actually the absent parent in this film which is a rarity. I think the new type of father in movies and in stories comes from the softening of social norms around what it means to be masculine and be a “man”. There can be single dads and fathers who have more of a maternal way of raising their child. I think the old absent father and this new type of over involved father is a good example on how our world is changing and is reflected in the stories and movies that we watch.
