“And then Jack chopped down what was the world’s last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant’s children didn’t have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done…which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.”
One major difference between variants of practically any iconic fairy tale is the particular motivation given for the protagonist’s actions.
Early published versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk” gave Jack little motivation–other than greed–for robbing the Giant. For example, see the 1804 “Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery” at Tabart's collection of popular stories for the nursery : from the French, Italian, and old English writers : Godwin, William, 1756-1836 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Later versions amped up Jack’s justification for robbing and/or killing the Giant by making the Giant a killer (of boys or of livestock, usually). Sometimes the Giant is said to have killed Jack’s father, giving Jack a “righteous” motive to take revenge against the Giant.
Check “Aarne-Thompson 328, The Boy Steals the Giant’s Treasures” for many variations on the theme.
Perhaps those storytellers from antiquity had all the boys snatched up because they were cause for the most concern. Good young lasses stayed home and tended the hearth; cooking and cleaning and whatnot for the family. Mischievous boys got up to no good, which could cause mayhem and harm to entities like giants. Maybe?
Were they Catholic?
Might it just be a matter of the audience? If you’re telling a story to a little boy, you’ll want to make him identify with the protagonist and fear for him, so he sees the villain as a personal threat. So, a story told to a boy will have the villain specifically targeting boys (and especially boys who meet his own personal description, for oral traditions where the stories can be customized). So maybe it’s just that the Jack story, or stories about giants in general, are for some reason the sort of story that’s more likely to be told to boys. Girls would be told other stories, personalized to them in other ways.
Going way out on a limb here:
Boys are adventurers who must survive a rite of passage into manhood.
Girls are princesses who must protect their virtue until they find the suitable mate.
I don’t make the rules, all I know is that I didn’t slay that dragon just to come back and marry the town pump (I keed I keed!)
I never understood that bit. Was the cartoon making some now-forgotten popculture reference?
I think they were just playing on it being an uncommon and funny-sounding name to Americans at the time the cartoon was made. Still, really. I have never met anyone with Hansel as a given name. To the best of my recognition, though I have seen it in print as a family name, I’ve never met anybody with that, either.
Isn’t it just a diminutive form of “Han” or “Hans”?
According to a HS German teacher I know, it is a diminutive variant of “Hans.”
The older cartoons, along with Old Time Radio and early TV, borrowed/copied/stole pretty heavily from vaudeville. One of the least funny, but most copied, vaudeville comedy traditions was that foreign accents and names are just intrinsically funny. Reading more into it gives what was always a pretty lame attempt at humor more attention than it deserves.
a different diminutive than Hänschen klein?
Maybe it is a way of explaining the higher rate of infant and childhood mortality among males.
I’m trying to figure out the culpability of the guy who traded Jack the magic beans for a cow… why did he have those beans anyway? Was he the original procurer for the giant and he just got tired of climbing the damn stalk?
The wife is new to me. The version I always heard was the giant just caught Englishmen and ground their bones to make his bread.
It was fiction, so who cares?
You mean ooey gooey gopher guts and chopped up monkey meat…
That’s what boys are made of.
He’s so hot right now!
Seeing as every portrayal I’d seen of him has him be an unsavory character, I’d always assumed he was just a basic con man who had no idea that there was anything special about the beans.
Though, I guess on thinking about it, he could just be a guy who would find boys for the giant’s supper. I don’t see any reason why he’d need to be doing anything other than his job. Why would he ever need to climb the stalk himself? Perhaps he has a young boy made a deal with the giant. He wouldn’t get eaten, as long as he would procure other boys for him.
And, if you want to make him a better guy, maybe he saw something in Jack and picked him to finally try to get rid of the giant, in order to make up for his past crimes of helping the giant. He’s often old, so maybe he’s dying, and this is his last gesture. He does get Jack up there when the Giant isn’t ready for him, or so it seems.
Girls do have a higher percentage of body fat; perhaps he’s on a diet?
