“The Boy with the Bread”: Consuming Hansel and Gretel in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, “Hansel and Gretel” reflected the abandonment of children in the wake of European wars. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy provides unmistakable parallels. Collins’s version of “Hansel and Gretel” evokes understandings of contemporary wars that suggest that these conflicts—often fought in places where adults and children starve—feed the economies of the strong, wealthy, and well-fed. This chapter argues that it is war and its consumption of youth that are at the heart of this twenty-first-century incarnation of the classic fairy tale. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the fates of Katniss and Peeta offer inversions of, and insights into, societies that sacrifice the children of one group to sustain the consumption of another.