Bettelheim:  In dreams as well as in fantasies and the children's imagination, a house as well as a place in which we dwell, can symbolize the body, usually the mother's.  A gingerbread house, which one can "eat up," is a symbol of the mother, who infarct nurses the infant from her body. Thus the house at which Hansel and Gretel are eating away blissfully without care stands in the unconscious for the good mother, who offers her body as source of nourishment (Uses 161).