This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes). Monday we looked at the cautionary tale of the Wendigo.

Today: Once Upon a California Cheeseburger – Cannibalism in Fairy Tales

It’s no secret that the blank-stared march of supposed social progress hasn’t been kind to fairy tales. Declawing. Sanitizing. Neutering. Whatever wince-evoking action verb you prefer, the children stories of yesterday have been pain-stakingly redacted to excise the rape, bloodshed and murder that were what made the concise narratives sufficiently cautionary in the first place. Along with all the forced, violent sex and baby murders, a requisite amount of cannibalism used to be a dependable bedtime story trope.

Before getting into the really gruesome stuff, I want to briefly respond to the gross number of people who cite “Hansel and Gretel” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” as examples of stories that retain cannibalistic overtones. I’m not including these stories because their respective threats – a blood-sniffing giant and feeder fetish witch – clearly exist external to the boundaries of human society. The giant obviously isn’t human. The witch is inhuman based on her narrative function as a spell-casting monstrous figure whose desire to eat porky little Hansel is, in itself, used to underscore her inhumanity. It’s kind of like how in Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” they specify that the zombies aren’t cannibals because they don’t each other. This witch ain’t ever gonna eat other witches.

Okay then.

In early variants of “Little Red Riding Hood,” before disrobing and going eat crazy on Red, the wolf tricks her into drinking a cup of her grandmother’s blood (a story point that was only removed when illustrators repeatedly refused to depict it). This theme of inadvertent cannibalism via sinister subterfuge can also be found in the Grimms’ telling of “The Juniper Tree,” in which a jealous step-mother turns her step-son into pudding and feeds it to her husband. Likewise, in an early version of “Sleeping Beauty,” soon after the titular sleepy-head is abandoned, she’s discovered by a traveling King, who hangs out for a while, repeatedly rapes her and then goes on his way. Upon learning of his infidelity, and two resultant bastard kids Beauty birthed mid-snooze, the King’s wife demands Sleeping Beauty’s children be kidnapped and cooked into a stew to be eaten by the King.

Mitochondrial versions of “Snow White” feature the vain step-mother demanding receipt of Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box so that she could eat the organ and inherent White’s youthful beauty. The Robber Bridegroom, which is also featured in the Grimms’ compilation, centers on a roving band of cannibalistic thieves who kidnap beautiful young women solely to butcher and eat them.

Obviously, in all of these examples, cannibalism is used as a thematic device to demonstrate the complexities of human (especially familial) relationships, and the ways in which we all emotionally chew each other down to the bone. I’m not saying the stories don’t work without all the people eating – I’m just saying they feel a bit anorexic.

(rimshot)

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