Once upon a time

Not so long ago I started this blog out of the curiosity for children’s perception of growing up. The change that is unavoidable and all the talk about how tall we are getting during our childhood is linked with how children’s literature can play around with the process of changing. Only the literature aimed at children can explore the change that children experiences during their childhood in a lot more diverse and bizarre manner. I truly enjoyed writing the posts in this blog because all of the stories presented in this blog in some way or another has a form of transformation happening after consuming something. By eating one can in children’s literature transform I many way, by shrinking, growing tall, falling in a deep sleep, making a medicine or perhaps even expand so much in size that strangers will want to eat you. The food is represented as either something desirable or something dangerous, almost deadly. George’s medicine is dangerous and not very palatable and so is the food represented in the Norwegian tale as well, while Hansel and Gretel and Alice who finds herself in Wonderland are attracted to the sweetness and image of food. They all endure changes in their life, but still the stories end with the characters living  happily ever after either with their pockets full of money or just a bit more knowledge of the world.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.”

Alice attention is caught by the big letters on the bottle that says DRINK ME  and the letters on the box, EAT ME. For a child it is perhaps easier to read when something is labelled in big letters.  In Roald Dahl’s George Marvellous Medicine the form of having the ingredients written in big letters might indicate that the DRINK ME and EAT ME  in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are also ingredients, which in this case transform a child’s wish into reality. When Alice wants to become smaller she magically becomes smaller by drinking from the glass bottle and when she desires to become taller she becomes taller by eating the cake from the glass box. This seems similar to Cinderella's glass slipper, which was created by one wish and some magic. Cinderella only get one chance with her wish… So, it makes sense to believe that Alice also only gets one wish for each magical item. This happens before she goes into the desired garden which makes it thinkable that she is setting up the rules for the food before she ventures in to the unknown. If that is the case, then like everything else in wonderland this is too turned upside down. The next time she drinks from the bottle DRINK ME she becomes taller again and when she eats the cake she become smaller. A curious thing is it not?

 The food is according to Alice palatable, especially the drink which had a “mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.” She consumes it quickly as she is assured by the taste that it is not poisonous.  The drink seems to have a colourful taste; the cherry –tart is red and is a homemade dessert, pineapple is yellow and  is an exotic fruit, roast turkey is nutritional and it is usually remembered as a holiday meal, toffee is brown and sugary, and at last hot buttered toast is soft and warming. I can imagine this being very tempting to drink, because it is several meals in one. What a luxury!

Her transformation is in a way dimensional because the change in her size allows her to enter a new universe. It is also a magical transformation. When she transforms into a taller version of herself it gives the other characters like the rabbit a fright, he runs away when he sees her in her giant form. This frequent transformation is messing with her mentally which makes her cry, this can relate back to reality of a child feeling frustrated about experiencing a bodily change. The next time the rabbit sees her after a transformation he is not alone so he is no longer afraid, but sees her as a problem. Her third change is when she meets the caterpillar who gives her another chance of transforming, this time so she can go back to her natural form.

 ““One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

“One side of what? The other side of what?” thought Alice to herself.

“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar”

The mushroom bits create the quickest and strangest transformation up to this point. By eating some of the first mushroom bit her neck extends until she looks like a serpent, which seems dangerous but she quickly retreats by nibbling at the other bit which lowers her down to a normal size which suddenly makes her safe once more. It is not until she is her normal, perfect size that she can get back to finding the beautiful garden and entering it. Suppose food is here just time consuming. The time lost by the turmoil of changing all the time takes Alice away from the garden, away from her desired goal. So food seems to create loopholes in this world, but it also distracts her and puts her in danger.

                                                            - The End -

Read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland here

Carroll, L. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865

                              Hansel and Gretel

Hans is the character that experiences a transformation in this fairy tale by the Grimm brothers.  Hansel and Gretel comes from a poor family. They have an evil stepmother who convinces their father to lead them out in the forest to die. There seems to be a link between the cruel and guiltless stepmother and the old witch. When the witch dies the step mother dies. When the stepmother is hungry she sends the children out in the forest expecting them to get lost and die. Coincidence? I think not. Even though Hansel and Gretel makes it back, they are lead out into the forest a second time, only this time they have to endure many struggles and pass plenty obstacles before they find their way back. 

One of the obstacles is the candy house in the middle of the forest, when they come across it they are starved and cannot withstand the temptation of a “little house that is made of white bread” (p.56) the roof is of cake and the windows of sugar. So food is represented here by sweets “And they did not bother to stop eating or let themselves be distracted. Since the roof tasted so good, Hansel ripped off a large piece and pulled it down, while Gretel pushed out a round piece of the windowpane, sat down and ate it with great relish” (p.56) The house is so extravagant and their hunger is so bad that the relief and happiness they feel when eating the sweets seems calming. The old lady can therefore trick them very easily into thinking they are safe and then trick them into letting Hansel get turned into the meal. Her choice of feeding the boy instead of the girl seems to be related to the shape of the house’s sweets, nothing is pointy like the phallus. Therefore it seems likely that Hansel will be more attracted to the “milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples and nuts” given to them by the witch. it is all round and magical, deeming it everlasting, feminine and unreal. Round food is also softer to eat, therefore more desirable for children. Freud states in his paper Negation (1925) about the oral that “the pleasure – ego wants to interject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad” (Read Freud's "Negation" here p.237) which could in this case mean that the old witch wants to have Hansel’s male innocence interjected into herself.

The old witch has made the house in a palatable way. With bread as the foundation of the walls and the dessert situated higher up, the children still manage to rip out the sweets and eat them straight away. The witch displays how to tempt the prey (children) to your home, doing so with sweets.  She also displays the culinary method through how to contain or preserve the food before it is cooked:

1. Ideally the food should rest on white sheets for some hours and then you should  choose the thickest and throw it in a cage.
2. The next step is to make the next ingredient do all the work so you can sit back and wait for the thickest and finest ingredient to become even thicker.
3.  Look for a swelling in fingers (make sure you feel the skin if you are a bit blind).
4. The cooking requires a large bowl and lots of water.
5. Light the fire under the bowl early in the morning, it should be extremely hot.
6. Also heat up the oven so you can bake bread as a side dish.
7. Knead the dough and make sure you are the one that ends up in the oven.

       Easy enough right!

Hansel’s transformation is a physical one; he expands in size because the witch intends to eat him and will not have anything but a fat child. He does not grow in height therefore showing an anxiety about sweets slowing down the growth of a child, deeming the child closer to an early death. Sweets are what can make him fat quickly enough. Cake is usually colourful, but it is not described as colourful in this text, perhaps this is because of the blind witch who has made sweet food dangerous, which the hunger that the children experience is making them blind to colours and danger. The moral of eating sweet food in this text is that you should not eat any food that is offered to you by strangers, even if it is sweets given to you by an old and blind lady. There is an anxiety about people who are strangers wanting to eat you. The change in Hansel’s form is received by the other characters in in two ways, good and bad. For the cannibalistic witch the desire for him to become fat is exhilarating while for Gretel it is terrifying. Perhaps this is because throughout the story Hansel has had the responsibility of being Gretel’s protector and now the roles are reversed. Gretel saves the day and happily they have killed an old lady which goes against my belief of respecting your elders, but oh well! The point is that the children and the father live merrily for the rest of their lives.

Read Hansel and Gretel here
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Brothers Grimm. Hansel and Gretel (1812)

O'Neil, M. K. & Akhtar, S. On Freud's "Negation”. Karnac Books. 2011

      East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Like in most fairy tales there are always a fight between the good and the evil and food usually separates the two as the evil characters will always desire what the good characters possess. The fairy-tale was read to me when I was a child. I remember the image at the top of the page as both beautiful and scary and in my mind I might have created the memory of someone reading it to me in this way. I am sitting in someone’s lap in front of a fire place after dinner, which means it is close to bed time. I am stuffed with food and I am safe. The book is filled with scary images of a forest, a bear and a flying man who I am sure will give me a nightmare, but the story is so beautiful that I do not stop the tale from being told.

Østenfor for Sola og Vestenfor for Månen is its original title. The story can be read here

Food is not mentioned as a dish or a meal in this  fairy tale. Food is however spoken of in the terms of lacking it or being fooled or dulled by it. The most prominent moment of food being the element that changes a character is when the lassie has found the Prince who she desire to save from the Princess and her Trolls. It is the Princess who possess the power to handle magic and though she manipulates the other characters' lives with it, it backfires when she desires to own it all. The golden apple and the sleeping potion remind me of the German fairy-tale, Snow White.
 

This is mostly because of the magical sleepy drink which turns the Prince into a slumbering like the apple does to Snow White. Drinking just like eating is consumable, so though the sleepy drink is not actually food, it is still used to transform a character from being wide awake to a character in a slumbering state.

Read the Grimm's version of Snow White here

The Gold apple that the lassie pays the Princess with is significant because it is completely solid. The softness of the food has transformed into something of economic value. It is however inconsumable and though there is a feeling of the Princess wanting to consume everything of value, she cannot transform her own value in the eyes of the Prince because she has captured him and keeps because of her greed (she wants it all remember). That is what destroys her in the end, the greed. The fact that the Princess desires something that is not consumable shows that she wants to consume what she is not. The Princess is ugly while the lassie is beautiful, the lassie is desired by the Prince, so perhaps she wants to consume the lassie's beauty. In Snow White the apple is eatable, but deadly for the innocent or good character, while for the lassie the apple serves as the price to pay for a moment with the Prince who she needs to save.

Because of the previous magical events in the story, for example the fact that the Prince is magically transformed into a bear during the day and can only be in his true form during the night when no one can see how handsome and noble he looks like. It can be determined that all the magic in the story is used to manipulate the Prince's marriageable fate. Will he end up with the good or the evil woman?
Apparently the Prince cannot tell that the drink that has been making him sleepy is different from any other drink, as it does not seem to raise any suspicion. This makes it difficult to save him. Until the Christians (people who live next to his room) explain to him about the girl that comes to his room every night. His unawareness of the sleepy transformation is changed when they explain that even though the girl “called and shook him, and wept, and prayed” he would not wake up. It is because of the Christians he suspects that he is being forced asleep every night, making it possible for him to hinder the transformation.

The drink must be palatable in order for him to drink it in the way he would with a normal drink. There is no focus on the culinary art of bewitching the drink, but there is still a process of serving it. It is given to him by the Princess at the same time each day before nightfall, so that when the lassie steps into the bedroom the Prince is fast asleep. Descriptions of the drink is not given, which means that it is not especially

tempting but rather a normal habit, sort of like a glass of milk in the morning. When it is so normal that it seems like a habit it becomes more frightful. Perhaps it is because it relates to reality in a way that you might start to think someone is messing with your food or drinks.

Like most fairy tales this one has a happy ending for the lassie and the Prince. At last he figures out how to not become sleepy by refusing to drink. They defeat the Princess and her followers and live happily ever after away from the spells of the Castle that lay Østenfor for Sola og Vestenfor for Månen.

- The End -