#EvilStepmother
Tales of Generational Reconciliation
Dedicated to S.C. and H.B.
I have with me a copy of Charles Perrault’s Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye (The Tales of Mother Goose), a collection of fairy tales written in 1695 during the reign of Louis XIV, when storytelling became a fashionable thing in French salons. I’ll assume my readers know the plot of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” thanks to Disney’s 1959 film adaptation. Major variations aside: a fair princess receives many blessings, but is cursed to sleep until she is woken by a prince, whom she marries. However, while the animated movie ends with a big “And they lived happily ever after” as the newlyweds dance off into the sky like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease, Perrault’s version has a darker second season.
Perrault’s second chapter to the story focus on the prince’s family; in particular, his mother who ―being of ogre descent― is set on eating Sleeping Beauty and her two children. Throughout the tale, her noble butler feeds her proxy meat in lieu of her three victims, until the ruse is uncovered and she prepares to chastise everyone by throwing them into a snake pit. Her son, the absent and rather oblivious prince, returns to the kingdom just in time to see this (“the hell, Mom?”), and his mother commits suicide in despair. The last line of the story ―at this point, not a surprise― underlines how much the prince still loved his mother, and how he eventually got over it.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: What could have possibly compelled the prince’s father to marry so poorly in the first place?
Perrault offers one sentence as an explanation: “The King was a good man […]. He had married her because of her many riches.” We are left, then, to conclude that this was a disgraced king with no money. In a rather confused act of virtue, he married this ogre queen to give his kingdom security, ironically putting his future family at the mercy of a cannibal spouse.
The Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), picks up most of Perrault’s stories over a century later, and presents their German ―and even darker― counterpart (imagine Lynch meets Haneke). Indeed, the Grimm brothers one-up Perrault at every turn with the recurrent use of the stepmother figure, which they consistently depict as the incarnation of pure, unadulterated evil.
Like Sleeping Beauty, the story of “Cinderella” and her evil stepmother appears both in Perrault and in Grimm. While the former takes the trouble to explain that her father “remarried the proudest, most vain woman ever” ―and leaves most of the antagonism to the heroine’s two stepsisters― the Grimm brothers offer no reason for why a caring father would marry into a family of three horribly abusive women.
Cinderella’s stepmother is possessive and manipulative throughout, coaxing her own daughters to saw off parts of their feet to deceive the prince into marrying them. And yet, her ruthlessness is paralleled by Cinderella’s “good” dead mother, who controls the story’s birds from the grave and has them peck out the eyes of the stepsisters in a fit of vengeance. However, the purest form of parental evil comes from the “loving father” who allows his own daughter to sleep in the fireplace ashes every night and to be bullied into being called “Cinderella” (a derisive nickname he uses himself) without batting an eye.
Finally, we have Yei Theodora Ozaki’s collection of Japanese Folktales (1903). “The Mirror of Matsuyama” has a similar setup as the previous stories: a good, albeit nondescript father has a loving daughter, and ends up marrying a horrible woman “by the advice of his relations”. The girl, still grieving her mother’s death, cherishes an object above all things: a mirror gifted by her in her deathbed which she ―in her innocence― confuses with a living picture of her.
The stepmother’s innate pettiness makes her hate the girl from the start and conspires to estrange her from her father. In the climax of the story, our heroine is accused of witchcraft, given the time she spends privately with the mirror which she conceals in her bedroom. Yet unlike the Western father figures, this one actually stands up for his daughter and explains to his (equally naïve) wife what a mirror is. The stepmother is aghast at having mistaken her stepdaughter’s grief with a personal dislike. But unlike Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella’s counterparts, she handles her shame with dignity and apologizes, promising to change her ways.
See how beautifully the story ends:
“From this day, I throw away my old wicked heart, and in its place I put a new one, clean and full of repentance. I shall think of you as a child that I have borne myself. I shall love and cherish you with all my heart, and thus try to make up for all the unhappiness I have caused you. Therefore, please throw into the water all that has gone before, and give me, I beg of you, some of the filial love that you have hitherto given your own lost mother.”
Thus did the unkind stepmother humble herself and ask forgiveness of the girl she had so wronged. […]
From this time on, the three lived together as happily as fish in water. No such trouble ever darkened the home again, and the young girl gradually forgot that year of unhappiness in the tender love and care that her stepmother now bestowed on her. Her patience and goodness were rewarded at last.
It takes Japan to give us an ending to the #EvilStepmother trope that does not end with suicide, murder or mutilation, showing us how the characters can truly live happily ever after.
Coming up next. Orpheus’ genealogy, to be followed by reflexions on katabasis and anabasis: what you take with you and what you leave behind.
And a fun fact. While the evil stepmother trope is predominant in Grimm, some key stories such as “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel” had the mother figure as an early antagonist, only to be modified in later editions of their book. Snow White’s mother is especially sinister after ordering a hit on her daughter and demanding her liver and lungs to feast on as proof of her death.