Folklore with Witches: The Juniper Tree - Essay Example

Short Story Analyses The Juniper Tree In “The Juniper Tree”, a short story by the Brothers Grimm, a small boy born to a man’s first wife is killed by his second wife as a means of securing her husband’s fortune for her daughter. To get rid of the evidence, the woman contrives to have her young daughter accept responsibility for the death and chops up the boy’s body to feed to the husband. The daughter, knowing the stew’s ingredients, gathers the discarded bones and returns them to the juniper tree where the boy becomes a bird who enacts revenge before transforming back into himself. This story utilizes a great deal of symbolism to tell the story of divine justice and retribution. Much of the action takes place under the Juniper Tree, which was typically associated in folklore with witches and the unnatural things they could do with their magic. This is reinforced by the blood sacrifice, however accidental, of the first wife and her surety of having a child as well as by her foreknowledge of her own death. Other instances of witchcraft occurring under the tree include the young daughter’s placement of the bones under the tree and the transformation of the bones into the beautiful bird that is then able to act on his own. It also uses the Biblical symbolisms of the Evil One, who continuously influences the second wife to do evil to the young son and the form of the apple. The second wife uses the apple to tempt the young son to the trunk with the sharp lock on it that functions to behead him and an apple is used to entice the daughter to strike her brother, causing her to feel his death is her fault. Although it is a story of retribution, the husband and the daughter suffer no ill effects because their participation in the boy’s murder were unintentional, unlike the second wife’s deliberate entrapment and murder. The husband was not aware that the boy’s body had been cut into the stew he ate and the daughter realistically played no part in the murder yet suffered a great deal of grief over his loss. Therefore, the husband received a golden necklace, to remind him to always be mindful of what he swallows while the daughter received a pair of apple red shoes to remind her to always watch her steps. The Black Cat Like the Grimm’s Brothers “Juniper Tree”, Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Black Cat” deals with the concept of retribution or justice. In this story, the main character has a fondness for a cat that gradually turns to hatred as the man is overtaken by alcoholism. He first cuts out an eye of the cat and then hangs him. Despite this, a fire at the house seems to have spared the man simply because of the intervention of a cat-shaped creature that stayed the flames from his head. His discussions into the concept of perverseness hint at a tendency for the man to seek punishment for behavior that he realizes is wrong, seeming to understand that his soul deserves to be in hell for the atrocities it had committed even before the hanging. Because he misses the company of the cat, though, he adopts another cat that looks very similar to the one he killed. This is where the story takes on the note of retribution. The cat that is adopted is the same size and color, except for a mark of white that gradually grows to resemble the image of the gallows, which infers that this cat is the same one that had been hanged now returned from the dead to seek justice. Nothing is done to the man at first, as if the cat is simply remaining in place to ensure the man has learned his lesson. He indicates the cat’s growing affection for him as his own rage continues to grow within him, another indication that the cat has returned as a warning to the man to keep himself to better behavior. When he eventually takes a swing at the cat when his rage is finally too much for him to contain, his wife’s interference drives him to yet more violence as he kills her instead. Yet this action is too much to allow him to get away with. The cat becomes entombed within the wall in which he buries his wife. By keeping silent until the police have arrived, inspected the cellar and determined to leave, the cat ensures that it is the man’s own cleverness, his own perverseness, that eventually gets him caught as he raps on the recently bricked wall with his cane and the cat lets out inhuman yowls that immediately gain the departing policemen’s attention. A Boring Story Anton Chekhov’s “A Boring Story”, on the other hand, offers few solutions, little justice and even less hope for its characters. Rather than focusing on a series of events such as the stories of the Brothers Grimm or Edgar Allen Poe, Chekhov decides to focus on a series of thoughts experienced by one man. These thoughts continue to grow more and more bleak as he approaches what he is certain is his death, although he has no actual medical diagnosis to confirm this. He also lives much further beyond the few months he had thought he had remaining and mentions a tendency to hypochondria, suggesting he is perhaps not in as poor physical health as he imagines. The story really focuses upon a loss of hope in the human race. Whether he is physically ill or not, Nikolai’s thoughts become ever more dreary and negative as he begins to lose hope in the world around him and the future of mankind. While he wishes he could live for at least ten more years to see where science goes, he finds that this desire is not as strong as he had imagined. This general hopelessness is echoed in the feelings of his young ward, Katya, as she struggles to find a purpose for her life and finds none. Although she dedicates herself to seeing to his welfare as much as she is able, Katya recognizes Nikolai’s melancholia as a symptom of finally opening his eyes to the truth of the world. She had long ago learned that the theater, for which she had once held a deep and abiding passion, has been destroyed by charlatans, drunkards and pretenders, herself included. This lack of meaning, it is suggested throughout the story, is not necessarily a lack of meaning in the eyes of the public, as Nikolai was highly accredited and well-respected, but rather in the eyes of the one looking out. Nikolai no longer placed value on his scientific contributions because he felt there was no one left to carry on his work once he was gone. Similarly, Katya felt there was no value to anything she undertook and, so, was unable to undertake anything. A Painful Case James Joyce’s tale included in the Dubliners entitled “A Painful Case” is also about human suffering, but in this case it’s a suffering created and experienced by the same person. In this story, Duffy is a man of habit, making a circular route between his home as far from the activity of Dublin as he can and his job at a bank in the city itself. His life is full of routine and neat and uncluttered orderliness, which is exactly how he likes it. The attention Joyce gives to the description of his house, devoid of color, imagination and comfort is a reflection of Duffy’s soul, full of information like the shelves for his books, but not often allowed freedom to feel and certainly not to imagine. When he meets Emily Sinico, a married woman, he finally learns what it is like to allow someone into his heart a little, but the experience frightens him and he breaks off the relationship. He justifies this decision based upon her married status, but the fact that he returns to his emotionless life and even cuts out the few entertainments he had enjoyed before hint at the fact that he’s hiding from feeling. Upon her mysterious death before a train, but not apparently from the injuries sustained in her fall, Duffy is forced again to feel something. While he first feels disgust that he could ever have cared so much for someone who would sink so low as to begin drinking and who would die in such an undignified way, he eventually realizes that she probably died of a broken heart brought on by her extreme loneliness. Making it worse, he realizes this loneliness was his own fault as he brought it not only upon her by making her realize what she’d been missing, but he also had been forcing it upon himself for as long as he could remember. As he looks upon two lovers in the park, he realizes that he has always been lonely and will always be lonely. He doesn’t make any attempt to change the way he lives his life, illustrating one of the many ways in which people can live their lives as if dead. Death and the Compass It could be argued that too much involvement lead to the tragedy in Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Death and the Compass,” but the more interesting facet of this story is the way in which it differs from the common detective story. The plotline of this story follows the piecing together of a series of murders that have taken place in Paris. Where most detective stories work to show how murder A is connected to murder B and murder C, Borges’ story changes the pattern and allows his detective to take a more ‘intuitive’ approach to solving crime. This can be seen in Detective Lonnrot’s response to the police description of the first murder when he tells them their theory is “Possible, but not interesting. … You’ll reply that reality hasn’t the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis that you propose, chance intervenes copiously. Here we have a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.” In this statement, Borges twists the detective device of always looking at all of the evidence to deduce a motive rather than the most obvious one into a means of trapping the brilliant detective in a room full of mirrors just before his own death as proof that he managed to solve the puzzle. The criminal here has already deduced the character of the detective likely to follow him and has set a series of events in place specifically to lure this individual into a vulnerable position. As is suggested in Lonnrot’s comment to the police, nothing in the story is left to chance. Each step has been plotted out and analyzed with careful consideration given to the character’s mind and personality at work, yet this unique approach to the detective story allows Borges to twist the plot twice without warning or possibility of prediction. The Beggar Maid Alice Munro’s book The Beggar Maid is something like a cross between a series of short stories and a new form of novel with interrelated but not necessarily fully connected chapters. Throughout the series, she tells about the complex relationship that exists between Flo and her step-daughter Rose. However, the main character that emerges to capture the imagination is Rose. By following her story, it can be determined that most of the story is set in pre-war Canada in a town that has been so beset by hard times that they are a natural part of life. However, the real element being explored is the concept that the human soul can survive even in these soul-killing circumstances to achieve a level of success and escape once thought impossible. It is also interesting to note the sorts of entrapments that are set for the mind to slip into this life of despair and neglect. These include such things as the comfort of habit, disconnectedness and insulation. This disconnectedness is highlighted quite well in the title story when Rose finds herself merely the physical object attached to an idea Patrick holds of an obedient woman that had little to nothing to do with herself. However, insulation occurs when Rose marries Patrick anyway as a way of avoiding the need to make plans for herself or to face the wider world. Yet even as she tries to settle down to the habit of being married and acting the part Patrick expects of her, Rose finds her spirit is unable to accept such fetters. She continuously discovers herself to be unhappy and unsettled despite all appearances to the contrary. Even though her life after Patrick is not full of such comforts and stability as she had experienced with him, her spirit and her actions are more in keeping with each other. While she eventually ends up right back where she started from, Munro shows the success of her actions as a new way of being able to look at the world, knowing that she succeeded in exploring the limits of her abilities regardless of the outcome. Read More