Thoughts on why step-mothers are often portrayed as being ‘wicked’ in folk and fairy tales.
This
started life as a paragraph in a previous post and then developed through a
Facebook conversation. I thought I’d develop it further in another post and
possibly use it in a future issue of Facts & Fiction storytelling magazine which I edit. Facts and Fiction web site
Why
are the ‘bad’ female characters in fairy/folk tales often described as
step-mothers? Why aren’t they real mothers? Or just a strange old lady met on
the road? Well they are sometimes. There are quite a few wicked mothers in both
songs and stories. For many years I have known, and occasionally sung, the
ballad of The Cruel Mother. She gave birth to two lovely little boys and
immediately took ‘a pen knife long and sharp’, and ‘pressed it through their
tender hearts’. No reason is given but we can surmise that either she shouldn’t
have been pregnant in the first place so was attempting to destroy the evidence
or she was suffering from extreme post-natal depression. Do either of those
make her ‘cruel’ or wicked’ or is she just desperate and a victim of
circumstance?
There
are also stories of old women— ‘witches’ - hunting for little boys to carry
off, perhaps to fatten up for food. Jack & the Buttermilk in my
Nottinghamshire Folk Tales book falls into this category as does the more
famous witch in the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel.
But
it is the term step-mother which has become the standard in
children’s fairy tales, films and pantomimes to describe a dangerous older
woman.
There
are probably good historical reasons for this. In the past a huge proportion of
children would have experienced step-mothers at first or second hand—either
they had a step-mother themselves or their natural mother was step-mother to
other children. Child birth was dangerous and many women died during or soon
after it. A rich man could then employ a nurse or nanny but a working man would
have had no option but to remarry as quickly as possible in order to have
someone to look after his children. (Sometimes it was older siblings who were
forced to take on the caring role.)
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| Cinderella |
In
my own family history research I’ve found several situations like this—a man
has two or three children, his wife dies, he immediately remarries and then has
several more children with the new wife. If life is hard and hand to mouth this
is a situation which could easily give rise to jealousies and favouritism,
either real or imagined. Most children have rages when they shout “I hate you!”
at their parents. They must feel that anger even more if it is not their ‘real’
parent. Another point of conflict could be the age of the new wife—sometimes
not much older than the oldest children… She might be very tempted to make life
difficult for her step-daughters just as a way of exerting her authority.
Insecurity.
It
was the cultural norm in the 18th/19th century for a mature, widowed man to
want a young, fertile wife able to give him more children and a girl’s parents
would be keen to find a ‘good match’ for their daughter, a man with wealth and
position, so an older widower would be ideal. (It probably didn’t do much
towards making a happy marriage in the way we expect to these days though, they
were definitely not equal partners.)
So
the ‘wickedness’ might be perception, or jealousy, or just grief, but there
obviously must have been (and still are) cases where a step parent does favour
their own children above the step children. This is very often the case in
novels—Dickens, Bronte, George Elliot etc—where they are treated like servants
or worse… which brings us back to fairy tales and Cinderella and so on.
I
guess that this situation was eased with advances in knowledge and medicine in
the early 20th century and even more so with the coming of the National Health
Service in 1947 which meant that all expectant mothers could have good care.
Infant mortality and that of new mothers dropped drastically. As divorce was
difficult and socially unacceptable step-mothers were much rarer through the
mid 20th century. Now, though, they are once again becoming the norm as many
couples divorce and remarry, perhaps several times!
A
century or two ago family life was altogether more complicated—the nuclear
family, as it was when we were growing up, was far more fragile and peoples’
status was less stable. A puzzle I had in my family history was a relation
three or four generations ago who was a successful farmer employing several
workers. His land and family grew from census to census but then he
disappeared. He had an unusual name so there was not likely to be more than one
person of that name in a neighbourhood but the only one I could find was a
single man employed as a farm labourer on a nearby property. It could only be
him but how had his circumstances changed so much in so short a time and where
were his wife and children? Through reading Hardy (Tess, I think) I came across
a form of inheritance where the lease on the land can be dependent on the wife.
It is hers and her husband’s during her lifetime, but if she dies he loses any
right to it. He loses his wife and his land in one go! In the case of my
ancestor the children were old enough to leave home but if they had been
younger and he had had to remarry what strains would that kind of situation
have put on the new mother—the step-mother! Even more, how would the existing
children have reacted? You can imagine them blaming their new stepmother for
their change of circumstances. They could easily see her as being ‘wicked’.
