KidLit Forum

The title gives us a clue about what this fairy tale is about. Even without reading it we suppose it’s about Jack and the Beanstalk. I think the intertextuality is incorporated because it gives us an explicit reference to a fairy tale – Jack and the Beanstalk – right from the start. I think it’s also metafictional because it includes a discussion of the actual fairy tale retold from another perspective – the giant’s wife. Peter S. Beagle kept the beanstalk and the courageous Jack in the story but transformed the giant’s wife in a “monster” (she doesn’t agree with Jack telling her that Because you’re not people, ma’am, says he, not giving an inch. You’re a monster and you’ll crunch me up if I take my eyes off you for a solitary minute. Deny if you can, monster lady. I’m not either a monster! Says I, straight back in his face. I mean, that really hurt my feelings, him saying that, as I’m sure you’d have been hurt the same. I’m big, yes, and I’ve got dietary needs like you or anyone else. But that certainly does not make me any monster.

We can easily notice her monologue or her dialogue with the readers. She intervenes with her own opinions right in the middle of a discussion. Jack is as brave as in the old variant of the fairy tale because she has problems in catching him, and she even loses him. The wife wanted to show readers that giants are not that stupid as they think, but they are civilized You could stop for a cup of tea, I answered him straight out. That’s what civilized people do when they’ve killed somebody’s husband.
She lost her husband but she also gained something: she had a cup of tea with Jack and she managed to get a right funeral for her husband – as Jack agreed to bury Harvey with the help of all the villagers and say some good words about him - .

Up The Down Up The Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers makes us see the giants from another perspective. They don’t look like monsters to us –in the end because she doesn’t eat Jack even though she wanted to have him as an appetizer- , they are civilized as humans are, they know how to read and to embroider.