How do Hansel and Gretel get the better of the Wicked Witch? They are in an absolutely desperate situation, yet still they manage to wriggle free.
Whilst Hansel languishes in his cage, the Witch compels Gretel to help her prepare the stove that will cook him. Gretel must be beside herself, almost paralyzed with shock and fear. The Witch tells Gretel to go get into the stove to check on the strength of the fire, thinking perhaps that she’d have an hors d’oeurve before the main course of roast boy. Anyway its fun to tell people what to do and push them around.
Gretel sees the slimmest chance and does the one thing sure to get the witch’s blind reaction. She plays dumb. ‘I, er, don’t know how to…” The witch can’t help herself exploding, ”Oh you helpless idiot! Must I do everything? Get out of the way, let me show you how…” and in she goes head first.. Gretel shoves her from behind, slams the door….
and so the witch’s goose is cooked instead.
Gretel turns things around in three ways..
Firstly she refuses to give up hope…
‘If you have a why, you can endure almost any how.” Victor Frankl
What keeps her going is love, even though she has been so terrorized that the Witch no longer considers her a threat and even gives her kitchen duties instead of sharing Hansel’s cage. Throughout the story the abandoned waifs comfort and look out for one another.
Secondly, because she hasn’t given up hope, she can think on her feet which the WW never expects. Tyranny always thinks everyone else is stupid. It is often the downfall of tyranny to underestimate the calibre of it’s detractors. The tyrant’s use of others to project vulnerability onto, and insistence on their inferiority, means that the possibility of a intelligent and crafty response is completely overlooked. Feelings of superiority can only be maintained by the perennial assumption that folk are dumb, so Tyranny gets over confident and takes it’s eye off the ball.
The third thing she does is to overcome her own susceptibility to authority. We are hard wired to do as we are told, way more than we realise. Add the policy of divide and rule and the Witch is liable to come out on top. Making one child a meal and elevating the other to a kind of kitchen co-conspiritor might well have estranged the children from each other.
A series of psychological tests called ‘the Millgram Experiments’ demonstrated how easily a figure of authority in a white coat can persuade a seemingly ordinary person (randomly picked but told they are specially selected) to administer electric shocks as punishment to a person supposedly wired up next door. Many were quite happy to deliver potentially lethal shocks to the invisible actors. Some continued even after the actors fell silent…..
Similarly the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’, which attempted to investigate the power struggles between prisoners and their guards yielded some unexpected findings.. Professor Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University used college students randomly assigned to either role and sat back to see what happened. The experiment had to be abandoned after six days when two ‘prisoners’ escaped..
The results showed that the students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting prisoners to psychological torture, while many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers’ request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it.
Our instincts for survival impel us to follow the direction of authority because we assume with the weight of millenial learning that it is within our best interests to do so and yet to concede to authority at the expense of one’s own destiny is at the root of much human misery.
Eventually the child must rebel and take action. In the process she must face her own shadow, her own capacity for aggression and murderous intent. She has to realise her own capacity for destruction and the responsibility this entails. She has to have the courage of her convictions, she has to understand that some decisions don’t have do-overs and that any security gained from tying oneself to powerful others has to be relinquished.
This means letting yourself be scared and not rushing in to make it better with platitudes or ‘positive thinking’, not sheltering beneath the wing of someone who seems to have the mantle of Protector, Mentor or Supposedly-in-Charge.
I recall being furious with my neighbour for calling in the Planners about a shed I’d built at the bottom of my garden. Weeks went by and I was still mad. Then I realised that her petty behaviour meant I could no longer project ‘Wise Old Woman’ onto her, which meant I was saddled with myself and the difficulty of finding such a wise figure in my own inner landscape rather than conveniently next door.
