Jack, our hero, can be talked into anything, so he trades the family cow for five beans. Were this to happen in real life, Jack would immediately trade the beans for a shiny rock and wind up washing windshields at the town stoplight for the rest of his life, but somehow he makes it all the way home with the beans, which now represent everything his family owns. When his mother sees what he’s done, she screams at him and throws the beans out the window, which suggests where Jack’s economic survival skills came from, and where they’ll lead.
The next day, however, a magical beanstalk has grown, as a lesson to Jack that he should never again be skeptical of anything said by a shadowy figure lurking outside the marketplace with designs on the family cow.
Jack climbs the beanstalk and enters a magical land, and…well, what exactly happens next? I’ve been looking for a good version of this story, and it’s hard to find. This here website offers three different versions:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0328jack.html
…but each of the three versions is horrible in a radically different way, as you’ll see:
Jack and His Bi-Polar Mother and the Beanstalk, as told by Joseph Jacobs
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0328jack.html#jacobs
In this version, Jack’s mother decides to sell the cow because it wouldn’t give any more milk, but then she smacks Jack when he trades the cow for the beans because the cow was “the best milker in the parish”.
The first thing we know is that this has nothing to do with the cow.
The second thing we may deduce is that the family’s unfortunate relationship with money is related to the mother’s unfortunate relationship with medication. From the above typical exchange, we may also surmise what happened to Jack’s father and even, perhaps, the milk.
Jack and the People’s Beanstalk, as told by Andrew Lang
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0328jack.html#lang
In this version, Jack climbs the beanstalk into a magical land, except it turns out that it’s actually a hidden corner of the same land he just came from; the tale might have been shortened to “Jack and the Footpath”. Already, Andrew Lang has decided that fanciful details have no place in fairy tales.
Jack meets a fairy woman who explains that everything the giant owns in the castle actually belongs to Jack, since the giant stole it from Jack’s parents long ago. Henceforth “Jack”, standing in for “The People”, seeks to initiate his own Bolshevik revolution. Predictably, the giant’s wife takes Jack as a slave and hides him from the giant so he won’t be eaten. In a longer version of the story, Jack would be fed propaganda until he came to sympathize with his captors, a transformation herein described as “The BeanStockholm Syndrome”.
After Jack escapes with the hen that lays golden eggs, he decides to climb the beanstalk again, so he dyes his hair and disguises himself. This suggests that the golden eggs represent not money, but the fabulous new look adopted by our hero. “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fashion! Where’s a guy who needs a lashin’?!?” the giant might say. Surely, groovy times are in store for whoever owns that chicken.
Again, Jack steals everything in sight, guided by the story he heard once that everything in the castle belonged to him. Has Jack never heard of third-party mediation?
Jack and the Beanstalk of Codependency, by Edwin Sidney Hartland
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0328jack.html#hartland
In this version, Jack’s inability to get a real job is blamed on the mother’s gratification of Jack’s every whim: “His follies were not owing to a bad disposition, but to his mother never having chided him.” By the time our story begins, however, she’s brutally lambasting him for dragging the family into ruin, which would at least suggest that she’s recovered from her own indulgent habits. When it’s time to sell the cow, it’s Jack who convinces his mother to let him sell it, and she finally agrees.
So, let’s tally: Jack’s mother blames Jack for their poverty, which you'd think would be the parent's responsibility; she blames Jack for the bad habits he learned from her; she criticizes his awkward first steps into self-motivated entrepreneurship, and she blames Jack that she hasn’t blamed Jack enough.
Jack climbs the beanstalk and again meets a fairy woman with a tendency to overexplain. This time, she tells him not only that he will benefit from her protection if he confronts the giant and avenges the giant's misdeeds, but also that Jack will suffer a terrible punishment if he does not confront the giant and avenge the giant's misdeeds. Sounds like something his mother would say, doesn’t it? How is Jack ever going to learn to make his own decisions with all these micromanaging women around?
Eager to find at least one appealing female character before the story ends, Jack meets the giant’s wife, who feeds him breakfast and confesses to being trapped in an abusive marriage; yet Jack thinks nothing of enraging her husband and fleeing the scene. Finally, when Jack has stolen all the goodies and killed the giant, he becomes - a mature, self-responsible adult who's learned from his family's mistakes? No, he becomes a “dutiful and obedient son”, arrested in development at the bottom of the fallen beanstalk, destined to someday be yet another wormlike man in his forties who can’t navigate adult relationships, get a job or handle money.
And he and his mother lived miserably ever after.
Copyright 2003 Betsy Shebang