Allusions In The Farmer's Children

Families “Crumbling” Down: Allusions to a Classic Fairytale

Families are fragile and without the proper stability, they can easily fall apart. Two flawed families are portrayed in “The Farmer’s Children” and “Hansel and Gretel”. Hansel and Gretel have a wicked stepmother, and a father who obeys her selfish orders. Similarly, Emerson and Cato have a careless stepmother, and a clueless father. In both tales, this leads to families falling apart. These connections are shown through allusions, or references to other works. Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Farmer’s Children” portrays the theme of how neglect and isolation can break down families by alluding to “Hansel and Gretel.”

In “Hansel and Gretel,” there is a mother figure who neglects her children.

The poor children “went on all night and the next day from the morning until the evening, but they could not find the way out of the wood, and they were very hungry for they had nothing to eat but the few berries they could pick up. And when they were so tired that they could no longer drag themselves along, they lay down under a tree and fell asleep” (Grimm 89). This indicates that they were a long distance from the home. It is also evident that Hansel and Gretel cannot take care of themselves, showing a clear consequence of being isolated. In “The Farmer’s Children,” as a result of the stepmother’s neglect, Cato and Emerson are forced to be isolated from their warm home. It is evident that Emerson is exasperated by the distance between the home and the barn when he says “‘Where is that damned old barn?’ Emerson asked, and spat again. It was a relief to get to it… He turned to Emerson and called his name, but Emerson only moaned in his sleep. So he fitted his knees into the hollows at the back of his brother’s and hugged him tightly around the waist. At noon the next day their father found them in this position” (Bishop 294). The family was torn apart when Emerson and Cato were forced out of the house and into the unforgiving cold. The freezing weather killed them, which is a damage to their family that can never be

Many children associate a trail of breadcrumbs with the age-old tale, and are familiar with how Hansel attempts to use his breadcrumbs as a trail. But to his and Gretel’s dismay, the birds eat the breadcrumbs. The Brothers Grimm portray this by saying that “when the moon rose they got up, but they could find no crumbs of bread, for the birds of the woods and of the fields had come and picked them up. Hansel thought they might find the way all the same, but they could not” (Grimm 89). With Hansel and Gretel, the trail is demolished by birds eating the crumbs, which isolates them because they are all alone and unable to get back home. In Cato and Emerson’s case, Cato creates a trail, but the breadcrumbs are never used to get home. His plan seemed useless to him, though, because “he couldn’t seem to think it through-- whether his plan was good for anything or not,” but later, he remembers this by thinking with “pleasure of the trail of crumbs he had left all the way from the house to here. ‘And there aren’t any birds,’ he thought almost gleefully” (Bishop 291-294). A clear reference to “Hansel and Gretel” is the mention of the birds, because any reader familiar with the fairytale knows that the birds led to Hansel and Gretel’s demise. A reader would also know that the breadcrumbs show isolation because they depict the desperation Cato and Emerson feel after being