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Jack and the Beanstalk is an English fairy tale, closely associated with the tale of Jack the Giant Killer. It is known under a number of versions. Benjamin Tabart recorded the oldest known one in 1807, but Joseph Jacobs popularized it in English Fairy Tales (1890)^[1]. Jacobs's version is most commonly reprinted today and is believed to more closely adhere to the oral versions than Tabart's, because it lacks the moralizing of that version.^[2] The story was made into a play by Charles Ludlam.

Plot synopsis

Jack was a very poor boy whose lack of common sense often drove his widowed mother to despair. One day she sent him to the market to sell their last and only possession, a cow. But along the way, Jack met a stranger who offered to trade it for five "magic beans." Thrilled at the prospect of owning magic beans, Jack made the deal without hesitation. Alas, his mother turned out to be less than thrilled when he arrived back home. She threw the beans straight out of the window and sent Jack to bed without dinner. Overnight however, the seeds grew into a gigantic beanstalk. It reached so far into the heavens, the top went completely out of sight. Eager as the young boy was, Jack immediately decided to climb the plant and arrived in a land high up in the clouds, the home of the giant. When he broke into the giant's castle, the giant quickly sensed a human was near:

Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Be he 'live, or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

However, Jack was saved by the giant's wife and as he escaped from the palace, he took some gold coins with him. Back home, the boy and his mother celebrated their newfound fortune. But their luck did not last, and Jack climbed the beanstalk once more. This time he stole a hen which laid golden eggs. Again he was saved by the giant's wife. He went down the ladder and showed the hen to his mother, and the two lived happily on the proceedings from the hen's eggs.

Eventually, Jack grew bored and resolved to climb the beanstalk a third time. This time, he stole a magical harp that played by itself. The instrument did not appreciate being stolen and called out to the giant for help. The giant chased Jack down the beanstalk, but luckily the boy got to the ground before the giant did. Jack immediately chopped it down with an axe. The giant fell to earth, hitting the ground so hard that it split, pulling the beanstalk down with him.

The origin of Jack and the Beanstalk is unknown, although the author was almost certainly British or German. The earliest printed edition which has survived is the 1807 book The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, printed by Benjamin Tabart, although the story was already in existence sometime before this, as a burlesque of the story entitled The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean was included in the 1734 second edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire.

In the usual version of the tale, the giant is unnamed, but many plays based on the story name him as Blunderbore; a giant of that name also appears in Jack the Giant-Killer.

The beanstalk is reminiscent of the ancient Saxon belief in a World tree connecting earth to heaven.

The giant's "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!" was included in William Shakespeare's King Lear.^[3]

Variants

Other tales of this type include the Italian Thirteenth and the Greek How the Dragon was Tricked.

The Brothers Grimm drew analogies between this tale and the German The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs, where the devil's mother or grandmother acted much like the wife in this tale: a female figure protecting the child from the evil male figure.^[4]

The tale is unusual in that the hero, although grown, does not marry at the end of it but returns to his mother; this is found in few other tales, although some, such as some variants of Vasilissa the Beautiful, do feature it.^[5]

One of the many retellings of the tale appears in A Book of Giants and A Choice of Magic by Ruth Manning-Sanders.

Controversies

The story portrays a hero unscrupulously hiding in a man's house, playing on his wife's sympathies in order to rob and finally murder the owner of the house. In Tabart's version, a fairy woman explains to Jack that the giant had robbed and killed his father, thus transforming the acts into justice.^[6]

Jacobs dropped the justification on the grounds that it had not been in the version he had heard as a child, and because children knew that robbery and murder were wrong without being told so by a fairy tale.^[7]

Many modern interpretations have followed Tabart and painted the giant as a villain, terrorizing smaller folk and often stealing items of value, so that Jack becomes a legitimate protagonist. For example, the 1952 film starring Abbott and Costello blames the giant for Jack's ill fortunes and impoverishment, as he has been stealing food and wealth from the smaller folk of the lands below his home, including the hen that lays golden eggs, which in this version originally belonged to Jack's family. In other versions it is implied that the giant had stolen the hen and the harp from Jack's father. And since Jack's father neither appears in the story nor is he mentioned, it is often speculated that the giant murdered him. And thus, Jack's killing the giant is not only self-defense, but also an act of divine vengeance.

Psychoanalytical interpretation

In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim contends that the story of Jack and the beanstalk symbolizes an adolescent male's "giving up relying on oral satisfaction. . . and replacing them with phallic satisfaction," declaring that Jack's climbing of the beanstalk "symbolizes not only the 'magic' power of the phallus to rise, but also a boy's feelings connected to masturbation" because it shows how the boy "fears that his desire to become sexually active amounts to stealing parental powers and prerogatives."

Film adaptations

Walt Disney made a short of the same name in 1922, and a separate version entitled Mickey and the Beanstalk in 1947 as part of Fun and Fancy Free. This adaptation of the story put Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy in the role of Jack. Mickey, Donald and Goofy live in a place called "Happy Valley" which is plagued by a severe drought, and they have nothing to eat except one loaf of bread. Mickey trades in the cow (which Donald was going to kill for food) for the magic beans. Donald throws the beans out the window in a fit of rage, and the beanstalk sprouts. In the magical kingdom, Mickey, Donald and Goofy help themselves to a sumptuous feast. This rouses the ire of the giant (named "Willy" in this version), who captures Donald and Goofy and locks them in a box with a singing golden harp, and it's up to Mickey to find the keys to unlock the box and rescue them. The story villainizes the giant by blaming Happy Valley's hard times on Willy's theft of the magic harp, whose song kept the land prosperous; unlike the harp of the original tale, this magic harp wants to be rescued from the giant, and the hapless heroes return her to her rightful place and Happy Valley to its former glory. This version of the fairy tale was narrated by Edgar Bergen.

Warner Bros. adapted the story into three Merrie Melodies cartoons. Friz Freleng directed Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk (1943), Chuck Jones directed Beanstalk Bunny (1955), and Freleng directed Tweety and the Beanstalk (1957).

Gisaburo Sugii directed a feature-length Japanese anime telling of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in 1974, titled Jack to Mame no Ki. The film, a musical, was produced by Group TAC and released by Nippon Herald. The writers introduced a few new characters, including Jack's comic-relief dog, Crosby, and Margaret, a beautiful princess engaged to be married to the giant (named "Tulip" in this version) due to a spell being cast over her by the giant's mother (an evil witch). Jack, however, develops a crush on Margaret, and one of his aims in returning to the magic kingdom is to rescue her. The film was dubbed into English, with legendary voice talent Billie Lou Watt voicing Jack, and received a very limited run in U.S. theaters in 1976. It was later released on VHS (now out of print) and aired several times on HBO in the 1980s. However, it is now available on DVD with both English and Japanese dialogue.

Books

Crazy Jack by Donna Jo Napoli
Jack of Kinrowan by Charles de Lint
Jack and the Beanstalk by E. Nesbit, illustrated by Matt Tavares

Other Media

In Edward Eager's book Knight's Castle, through the use of magic a modern boy named Jack is able to enter a toy castle with his sister and cousins. When he encounters the inhabitants (his toy knight figurine and the girls' dolls who have come to life), upon learning his name they draw back in terror and ask "Not the Giant Killer?"

The story is the basis of the similarly titled traditional British Pantomime, wherein the Giant is certainly a villain, Jack's mother the Dame and Jack the Principle Boy.

Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk is the protagonist of the comic book Jack of Fables, a spin-off of Fables which also features other elements from the story such as giant beanstalks and giants living in the clouds.

DI Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division from the book The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde feels a strange impulse to climb the giant beanstalk that was grown in his mother's yard after she threw out the magic beans he had traded for her Stubbs painting of a cow. He is also thought to be a giant killer though out of the four only one was technically a giant, the others were just very tall. All the killings were in self-defense.

Roald Dahl rewrote the story in a more modern and gruesome way in his book Revolting Rhymes (1982). The story of Jack and the Beanstalk is also featured in Dahl's The BFG, in which the evil giants are all afraid of the "giant-killer" Jack, who is said to kill giants with his fearsome beanstalk.

In the Crash Tag Team Racing game, a track is named " Track and the Beanstalk ".

Peter Combe rewrote the story in an upbeat song ('80s '90s?)

An episode of the BBC television series The Big Knights retold the story with the show's human protagonists as the "giants" to a race of tiny people living in their garden.

An episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, titled "Mario and the Beanstalk", does a retelling with Bowser as the giant (no explanation as to how he becomes a giant).

Garfield and Friends parodied the story with a U.S. Acres segment titled "Jack II: The Rest of the Story". After Orson reads the original story to them, Booker, Sheldon, Roy, and Wade write up a satirical sequel patching up plot holes they noticed.

In the Magic School Bus episode "Gets Planted", the class put on a school production of Jack and the Beanstalk, Phoebe starring as the beanstalk after Ms. Frizzle turned her into a bean plant.

An episode of The Goodies, entitled "The Goodies and the Beanstalk" is a retelling of the tale, containing a spoof of the game show It's a Knockout and Tim, Graeme and Bill's own rendition of the song "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" There are also geese and hens that lay gold eggs and even gold bars, and the giant turns out to be only the same size as the Goodies!

Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods features Jack along with several other fairy-tale characters. In the second half of the musical, the Giant's Wife climbs down the stock to exact revenge for her husband's death, furious at Jack's betrayal of her hospitality. She is eventually killed as well.

References

External links

• Pantomime based on the fairytale of "Jack And The Beanstalk"
• "Jack and the Beanstalk" at SurLaLune Fairy Tales — Annotated version of the fairy tale.
• "Jack and the Beanstalk" variants
• Adult Pantomime based on the fairytale of "Jack and the Beanstalk"
• Jack tales in Appalachia — including "Jack and the Bean Tree"
• Children's audio story of Jack and the Beanstalk at Storynory
• Kamishibai (Japanese storycard) version — in English, with downloadable Japanese translation
• The Disney version of Jack and the Beanstalk at The Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Shorts