The Gingerbread House

by Nathan Gale

Robert Coover is supreme in his ability to confuse our perceptions of objects with what is in fact our conceptions of those objects. As well as we are baffled with the way the objects seem to move and constantly change within their relationship to space and time. In the short story The Gingerbread House the narrator, we guess Coover, with a focal point that is mysterious and vague, what even is their purpose is in traveling? If we try to use the Grimes fairytale Hansel and Gretel as a sort of blueprints to the story, we get lost in what our old concept of the fairytale was, and get lost in what it becomes. This seems to be his focus to scare us out of being lulled into any linear direction, this is exemplified in this quote: “Two children follow an old man, dropping breadcrumbs, singing nursery rhymes....Their song tells of God’s care for little ones.”

In the Gingerbread house we are never certain whether the old man is a creep or the father of the two children, are perception of character morphs between the two and is never quite defined. The children at one point seem sister and brother, then at the next instant they become sexualized as read in the story: “They sample the gingerbread wheatherboarding with its carmel coating, lick at the meringue on the windowsills, kiss each others sweetened lips.” While the witch with her foreboding presence seems reveal to the boy how fragile life may seem in the face of eternity and age, as she rips the hearts from passing doves. And shows just how age can desensitizes us from innocence and hope.

The story is set in a dense woods, the woods seem to emphasize this strange transition for the children from childhood into adolescent teenage behavior, and for the old man the perpetual state of middle-age to elder. A journey into the unknown, where once you start you can never truly return from. The scene changes and doubles back on itself at one moment the boy is obsessed with doves hearts, and then the next the odd sensation of desire upon discovering the Gingerbread house, all of which are strung together by the reappearing image of the red heart, both in the Gingerbread house door, and the “bloodstones”. The heart is the center of emotional growth and through our own growth it changes how we perceives things mentally, with the emotional connections we make with the world around us.

The doves are the Biblical symbol for hope, as is childhood an age of infinite forgiveness and hope the doves that follow them over head seem to give prevalence to. Their journey seems to mimic that childish hopefulness into adult hood, where hope becomes less and less prominent: “His way is marked, not by breadcrumbs, but by dead doves, ghostly white in the empty night.” His path is no longer marked by childish assumptions, but by his blossoming adulthood, the crossroads where child naivety becomes adult regret and sorrow. The girl in her pallid complexion takes on the whiteness or purity of the “white doves” and with this we see a transferal from what was for the two innocence into sexuality.

In the old mans journey, he is compromised by visions or dreams of nymph like fairies, who seem to show that the innocence of a fairy is dramatically modified by the presence of his adult desires. “Her gossamer wings flutter rapidly, and she floats, ruby tipped breasts downward, legs dangling and dimpled knees bent slightly, glowing buttocks arched up in defiance of the night.” His perception of a fairy is manipulated the adult conception of sexuality and desire. For Robert Coover is relaying to us that it is not how we perceive that fills in the world around us, it is how we conceptualize things from our own personal understanding of those objects and people. But through his adult sexuality, we see how his sensibility matures as instead of indulging in his desire he sees through them to state: “...the old man sighs and uses up a wish: he wishes his poor children well.”