Household Tales · Chapter
Clever Elsie explained
Clever Elsie, a girl considered wise by her parents, is courted by Hans who demands she be truly clever.
What happens
Clever Elsie, a girl considered wise by her parents, is courted by Hans who demands she be truly clever. During a trip to the cellar to fetch beer, she imagines a future child being killed by a pickaxe left above the barrel, and begins to weep. One by one, the maid, a boy, her mother, and her father join her in lamenting this hypothetical tragedy. Hans, impressed by her elaborate worry, marries her anyway. Later, when sent to cut corn, Elsie eats and falls asleep instead. Hans surrounds her with a fowler's net with bells while she sleeps. Upon waking, the bells confuse her about her own identity, and when she goes home and Hans says Elsie is inside, she believes she is not herself and flees the village, never to be seen again.
Themes in this chapter
Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished
Elsie's excessive and impractical cleverness is punished by her eventual confusion and exile, while Hans's practical trickery is rewarded with a wife.
Social Class and Marriage
The marriage arrangement is based on the perceived value of Elsie's cleverness, highlighting how practical skills were evaluated in rural matchmaking.
Characters to notice
- Clever Elsie
The protagonist, whose exaggerated cleverness leads to absurd worries and ultimately her disappearance.
- Clever Hans
Elsie's suitor and later husband, who tests her cleverness and ultimately tricks her into doubting her own identity.
- Unknown
Elsie's father, mother, the maid, and the boy, who all join in her lamentation over the imagined accident.
Key passages
“Oh, she can see the wind coming up the street, and hear the flies coughing.”
She is so perceptive that she notices even the slightest movements and sounds.
The mother exaggerates Elsie's cleverness to convince Hans of her worth.
“If I get Hans, and we have a child, and he grows big, and we send him into the cellar here to draw beer, then the pickaxe will fall on his head and kill him.”
Elsie worries that a future son might be killed by a falling pickaxe while fetching beer.
This hypothetical scenario triggers the chain of weeping that draws in the entire household.
“Is it I, or is it not I?”
Elsie becomes uncertain of her own identity after waking to the sound of bells.
Hans's trick causes Elsie to doubt herself, leading to her flight from the village.