Doing this site gives me waaaay too my plot bunnies. Yes, I thought that the fact that Jack is basically his own archetype is great fun!
This is so interesting! Thank you! In one of the Anne of Green Gables books, she has two china dog figurines with those names. She got the names from the Bible. Echoing the need to see all those Jack characters combined into one! Your email address will not be published. In some versions, Jack is an almost chivalric figure, overcoming adversity, slaying giants and surviving trials like any medieval knight; in others he is a cunning trickster figure a type recognisable from folktales all over the world, especially Africa who outwits the giant.
In the Jack the Giant Killer series of tales, set in Cornwall, the ogres are particularly obtuse and the heroic dragon-slayer figure of myth and epic - Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, St George and Beowolf - has become a comical adventurer with a taste for violence. Jack digs a huge pit for the giant to fall into and then hacks him to death with an pick-axe.
In another version, Jack wraps his stomach with cloths to make a huge pouch, which he fills with offal and then slits open, persuading the giant, Blunderbore, that this is a way of enjoying his dinner twice. When the giant slits his own stomach in imitation, "out dropt his Tripes and Trollybubs".
In the version of Jack and the Beanstalk current today, based largely on Joseph Jacobs's English Fairytales , Jack is a simpleton, constantly belittled by his sharp-tongued mother for being a lazy good-for-nothing.
He is sufficiently gullible to part with his mother's cow, Milky White, in exchange for a handful of beans from a butcher. In another variant, Jack and his Bargains, Jack is in conflict with his father, not his mother, and he swaps the cow for a magic stick rather than beans.
The stick beats his father to a pulp "up stick and at it" and Jack is established as head of the household. In The History of Mother Twaddle, Jack is sold the beans by a strange, dwarf-like man with a huge head and magic powers. In her most recent book, No Go the Bogeyman, Marina Warner links this man and the magic beans to the secret, pre-Christian Pythagorean cult.
All versions agree that when Jack returns to his anxious mother, she throws the beans out of the window in disgust and when she and Jack wake up the next day, they find that the beans have taken root: "The stalks were of an immense thickness, and had so entwined that they formed a ladder nearly like a chain in appearance. A ladder reaching to the heavens is a beautifully resonant image which brings to mind Jacob's ladder in the Old Testament; the iconography of medieval paintings in which the celestial realm is depicted as an upper storey of a building; and the Norse cycle of cosmological tales, the Edda, in which the world tree, Yggdrassil, stretches up to Heaven, while its roots reach down to Hell.
The ascent to the upper world by means of a tree is one of the many universal folktale motifs in Jack and the Beanstalk which ensure its enduring appeal and announce that we have entered a realm of enchantment and wonder: the seemingly foolish bargain which provides something enchanted, the quest-journey of the hero towards independence, the concealment of the hero by the giant's wife, the series of three thefts - of the goose that lays golden eggs, of the sack filled with gold and the harp - the magical speaking object.
The psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote extensively about the symbolic function of fairytales as psychological paradigms, reads Jack and the Beanstalk as a depiction of the struggle to reach social and sexual maturity - specifically, to assert adult masculine sexuality.
He emphasises the obvious phallic symbolism of the beanstalk growing in the night, and links this to childish anxiety about masturbation. In this somewhat reductive interpretation, all is safely resolved within the confines of the story: "In cutting down the beanstalk, Jack. As the story ends, Jack is ready to give up phallic and oedipal fantasies and instead try to live in reality.
Late 19th-century versions attempted to sanitise the story to ensure the moral protection of children by introducing the character of a fairy who meets Jack in the upper world and tells him that the giant had killed Jack's father long ago: desire for retribution then becomes Jack's justification for stealing from the giant.
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