“Jack and the Beanstalk” is a strange tale of gardening gone wrong and get-rich-quick schemes gone right. Or maybe it’s about parent/child relationships. Or the struggle of the poorest classes in medieval times. Going into this article I’d hoped to call it something like “The Original Heist: Jack and the Beanstalk,” but (as with many fairy tales) you reap what you sow when you dig down to the roots, if I may mix my metaphors, and it turns out there’s much more to this story than just a fun, vegetable-themed caper.
The seeds of these stories often seems to fall into familial grounds, as young Jacks (and Jills) wrestle with their parental relationships, try to understand their mothers and gigantic father-figures, and heal generational trauma. It’s a lot to put on a little seed, but as you’ll see, it can grow into something fascinating, indeed.
In case you aren’t familiar with the tale, here’s my down-in-the-dirt take:
Young Jack and his mother live in near poverty, with only a cow to help supplement their meager diet. Eventually, the cow stops giving milk, so Jack’s mother asks him to take the cow to market to sell, and then bring her back the money or at least a lot of food. On the way to the market, Jack meets an old man who offers him magic beans in exchange for the cow. For one reason or another, depending on the telling, Jack thinks this is a great idea and makes the swap.
His mother is far less pleased when he returns home; upset, she throws the beans out the window and they go to bed without supper. In the morning they wake to discover a gigantic beanstalk has grown in the garden, stretching up into the sky as high as they can see.
Jack climbs the massive beanstalk, which takes him hours or days, depending on who you ask. At the top he finds a verdant and magical land, and ventures across lush fields until he comes to the home of a giant. The giant’s wife (or mother, sometimes) immediately becomes fond of Jack, feeds him, and lets him rest his weary feet, right up until the giant returns. Suddenly she’s like, oh dang you have to hide, my giant dude hates Englishmen and wants to eat you.
Jack hides, and the giant indeed smells the blood of an Englishman, and oh yes, you know how it goes:
Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
But the mother or wife convinces him he’s only imagining the scent of British musk. The giant’s evening entertainment consists of counting his gold while prodding his goose to lay golden eggs and being serenaded by a golden harp that magically plays itself.
After eating an enormous (if disappointingly Englishman-free) dinner, the giant falls asleep. Jack takes the moment to escape, but not without stealing some treasure: all those golden things. This is accomplished all in one trip, or sometimes three separate trips on the beanstalk bridge to the sky, depending on how sleepy your children are when you start telling the story.
But just before Jack is about to get away with his ill-gotten gains, the giant wakes and chases after Jack and his treasure. Jack shimmies down the beanpole and quickly cuts the stalk before the giant can reach the ground. The giant falls to earth and dies.
Jack, now in possession of treasure, the ability to make more treasure (thanks to the goose), and a magical harp, is set for life. In some versions of the story he marries the harp, which is sentient and has the appearance of a woman. He builds his mother a beautiful house called Beanland, and they live happily ever after.
Except… maybe it’s not such a simple caper, after all. While I do enjoy the idea of the big bad giants hoarding all the gold being cut down by the little people, these retellings of “Jack and the Beanstalk” offer other perspectives, pointing out that things are never so simple once you’ve heard more than one side of the story, that our parents’ actions and choices continue to affect us, and that our own actions will affect our descendants, in turn.
Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hale, illustrated by Nathan Hale
Jack was Rapunzel’s sidekick in Rapunzel’s Revenge, the previous volume by husband and wife authors Shannon and Dean Hale and illustrator (and no relation) Nathan Hale. The follow-up story provides just enough background to remind us of how we previously met Jack, while still being a complete, standalone story on its own in case readers missed the earlier volume. Nathan Hale’s illustrations are glorious throughout. Playing fast and loose with the original story and set in the Weird West, the Hales’ retelling brings humor and fleshes out the main character, introducing us to a Jack who wasn’t always quite as respectable as the man Punzy meets in her own tale.
Crazy Jack by Donna Jo Napoli
The basic plot of this retelling sticks pretty closely to the original, filled in with Napoli’s charming prose and a surprising and satisfying romantic storyline. Jack, in this tale, is haunted by the loss of his father, who vanished into the clouds long ago. When Jack gets an opportunity to follow and find his father, or at least discover what happened to him, he jumps—or climbs—at the chance. Although the ending isn’t exactly a surprise, Jack’s purposefulness provides a nice contrast to the typical telling’s feckless lad, and Napoli weaves enough suspense into the narrative to keep the beans garden-fresh.
“Giants in the Sky” by Max Gladstone (from The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
This futuristic retelling flings us into a world where some of humanity has rotated to a new dimension, through a combination of space elevator and digital upload. These higher beings occasionally take a peek at the war-torn and ravaged groundlings who have survived violence and fallout over the centuries since the giant avatars ascended. Told from the point of view of an operative who makes it her business to monitor the groundlings, she’s disturbed to find that one of the other giants has left some “magic beans” lying around for anyone to find, with no care for the possibly deadly consequences to the young woman who finds them and who learns to use them to reopen the space elevator. Dark but fun, Gladstone breaks the original story apart and puts it back together with just a hint of mythological fire stealing to give humanity a boost on this next round of existence.
Jim Henson’s Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story
Among the more obscure features to come out of Henson Company’s workshop is this delightful made-for-TV movie from 2001, directed and co-written by Brian Henson. A hidden gem, featuring the Henson’s Creature Shop’s expertise with visual effects and some very fun cameos (Daryl Hannah! Jon Voight! Richard Attenborough!), it also follows what Henson considered a more humanist approach to the story, balancing different POVs from the various characters.
As Jack approaches his 40th birthday, everyone around him expresses concern—for generation after generation, all the men in his family have died at age 40. When an intriguing woman, Ondine, approaches him and questions him about his family history, he begins to search for answers about his family and their strangely close ties to the legend of Jack and the Beanstalk. When he gets his own chance to climb into the sky, though, he finds that the fairy tale was heavily biased in favor of his ancestors, who conveniently made themselves into the heroes…
While a rich white man realizing what life is all about and making a commitment to addressing the wrongs of the past may feel as much like a fairy tale as the original version, perhaps it’s the kind of story we need more than ever. The idea that we need to be aware of the ways in which we benefit from the past—along with the recognition that those benefits and privileges often came at a horrible cost to others, and (most importantly) the understanding that these injustices must be rectified—is a message that feels incredibly timely even two decades later.
“Jill and the Beanroot,” from Feminist Fairy Tales by Barbara G. Walker
Our protagonist is gender-flipped in this retelling, and the story itself is inverted as Jill travels down a beanroot ladder to a land of dwarven artificers who are growing/raising/creating a new race of silicone-based crystal creatures. Jill is awed by the beauty of the crystals but finds them to be a bit snotty as well, wishing they were as wise and kind as mother earth. When they begin to mock her, she snatches one of the biggest ones and makes for the surface, dwarves hot on her heels. Back in her garden, she and her mother chop down their magic bean plant, closing the hole that leads to the dwarven tunnels. Once on the surface, the tourmaline Jill stole no longer speaks, but it does listen.
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“Jack and the Beanstalk” is a tale of adventure, theft, and now that we’ve revisited it so many times, consequences. Which are your favorite versions, and what aspects of the story do they highlight?
Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes cabaret shows, daydreams, and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science which comes in handy at odd hours, and she shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.
