THE TRUE STORY OF HANSEL AND GRETEL: THROUGH THE LENSES OF NEW HISTORICISM
THE TRUE STORY OF HANSEL AND GRETEL: THROUGH THE LENSES OF NEW HISTORICISM

Summary/Abstract: The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (2003) by Louise Murphy, a renarrativization of a quintessential classic fairy tale, is a remarkable novel for its having a distinctive narration technique within Holocaust Literature. By transforming Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale entitled Hansel and Gretel into a haunting survival story, Murphy brings back the genocide history, a story thoroughly reminiscent of Poland under the Nazis during the World War II. In the novel, the story of two Jewish children, a girl of eleven and her seven-year old brother, who are left to wander the woods after their father and step mother are forced to abandon them, is not paradoxical in giving credible explanations for a systematic mass murder. Yet, the children are confronted with complete pandemonium such as disguising their own identities, and instead reciting themselves as Hansel and Gretel. Murphy reframes original fairy tale within Holocaust literature for situating the identities of Jews, Poles, Russians, Germans, Gypsies and the Nazi Other’s in a wider historical context ideologically. The mesmerizing story of the novel lies in the fact that the reconfiguring Grimm’s story as an intertextual reference from a monologic or didactic one into a dialogic folktale enables Murphy to present gritty realism of history. Thus, this paper firstly identifies holocaust literature and ideology and then a wide variety of narratives in the novel are analysed in terms of New Historical Criticism. This paper attempts to lift the veil of secrecy particularly in both overt and covert ideological narratives by referring identity, trauma, collective memory and transference.

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