Evil stepmothers have been present in fairy tales almost since the beginning. And they’ve been problematic almost as long. Many scholars point out that stepmothers weren’t uncommon, any more than they are today, in the ages before fairy tales and when fairy tales were rising in popularity. This is due to the fact that many women died in childbirth, and fathers were expected to remarry to give their children a caretaker.
So why is the stepmother always considered evil? And isn’t it about time that that view was replaced, or at least critically reviewed?
That’s a bit of what I’m doing today. Let’s take a look at the evil stepmother. Is she really just an evil witch? Or a victim?
Stepmothers are prevalent in all kinds of fairy tales from all cultures. Almost any version of Rapunzel will feature an evil stepmother figure, the witch or ogress who steals a baby girl from a family because of some stolen greens. Cinderella, likewise, will often feature an evil stepmother who is constantly trying to push Cinderella into obscurity and elevate her own daughters.
But I think you’ll be surprised. It wasn’t just stepmothers who were doing evil things. Not always. In some versions…it was the birth mother.
The Grimm Brothers Changed Evil Mothers to Evil Stepmothers
In the original Snow White, written down in the Grimm brothers’ 1812 collection (which was for scholars and colleagues, not children), the evil queen was actually Snow White’s own mother. Though she longed for a child who was white as snow, black as ebony, and red as blood, she soon grew jealous of her own daughter and plotted to kill her.
Likewise in earlier versions of “Hansel and Gretel,” it is the mother, not a stepmother, who suggests abandoning the children in the woods because they can’t feed them. And because we often associate the witch in the gingerbread house as an extension of that later stepmother character, you can assume that the same applies to the mother. So not only does the mother want to leave her own children to die so she can eat what little they have left, you can also read it as she lures them into the woods so she can eat them.
Pretty disturbing, right? Especially when you pin that kind of image against the natural mother of a child.
When the Grimm Brothers were editing and fixing these tales for children, the evil mother figure was set aside for an evil stepmother. Snow White’s version was changed in 1819, and Hansel and Gretel’s mother was replaced in an 1840 edition. We don’t know for certain, but a lot of us suspect that these changes were made to preserve the sanctity and purity of the image of mother and motherhood.
It’s not an uncommon view. Patriotic motherhood, the purity of Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, the hardworking, kind, gentle, and tender mother of literature (think Mrs. March from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women)…there are many examples where motherhood is this wholesome idea. Taint that, and you taint all that motherhood touches — specifically children.
It’s likely the Grimm Brothers, editing their books for children, didn’t want them to walk away with this idea that mothers could be evil, cruel, and untrustworthy. So they replaced them with figures that were already mistrusted, strangers to the household, new and unknown…the Stepmother.
Which, as we already said, is unfair. Stepmothers have and always will be around, and making them out to be evil as a default is damaging to women in general.
Patriarch’s Problem with Female Agency
The biggest pervasive force maintaining this image of the stepmother as an evil “other” is the structure of the patriarchy. Please note that I’m not pointing fingers at specific people or people groups, but the structure of a typically patriarchal system, a system which puts men in all leadership positions and grants them more agency, freedom, and power than women.
By its very nature it opposes the idea of women in power or women with agency. A woman with agency doesn’t need a male figure in a position of authority. She’s already in a position of authority. So it’s unsurprising that a patriarchal system would view a woman who is taking matters into her own hands as something evil. Let’s look at the actions of some of these popular Grimm tales.
The evil queen crafts the items to kill Snow White and delivers them herself. The witch in the woods lures children into her gingerbread home and tries to eat them. The new stepmother distracts her stepdaughter with impossible chores so she can elevate her own daughters’ status in society. The sorceress trades stolen greens for a baby and then casts her out when she’s been “tainted” by a visiting prince.
These are the evil acts placed on these women. If they weren’t evil, some of these actions could be considered talents. The evil queen shows diligence, artistry, and even generosity, giving Snow White tools that a mother might give a daughter such as combs and ribbons. She doesn’t send a man to deliver or create these things. The witch lives comfortably and well-sustained in a rich home made of food, where the food never seems to run out. She also doesn’t have a man involved. The stepmother takes strides to move up in society while the husband, who isn’t dead, seems to just exist ambivalently in the background. And the sorceress defends her garden from a thieving man, and also raises a child completely on her own, existing without the aid of a husband.
If their stories were flipped, we’d applaud these women for their hard work, diligence, wisdom, and willingness to fight back when they are wronged. But in a patriarchal system, this level of agency is viewed as dangerous.
The heroines in these four tales had less and sometimes no agency. Snow White did nothing to fight back, and was all too often tricked by her stepmother (or mother) into accepting the cursed and poisoned objects that attempted to kill her. Rapunzel was content to live with her adopted mother until the prince came, and after the sorceress cast her out into the wilderness she stayed and lived there until the prince, now blind, stumbled across her. Cinderella may have called on the forces of nature to help her with her chores and dress her in gold and silver to attend the balls, evading the prince when he pursued her, but it was her father who called her to try on the golden shoe. She didn’t come down herself or try to win the prince. As for Gretel, she got the chance to save herself by shoving the witch into her own oven, but in doing so destroyed another woman with agency.
The evil stepmothers of Cinderella and Snow White were vanquished by the aid of men (princes), and the stepmother of Hansel and Gretel mysteriously died the same time as the witch in the woods. Interestingly the sorceress in Rapunzel isn’t defeated…but neither is she mentioned again.
I just think it’s curious that we keep destroying women with the power and ability to get things done by placing them in an evil framework and then placing that into the replaceable model of stepmother. Isn’t about time these women were viewed as something other than simply evil? When their actions are often the result of trying to act in a patriarchal world that will always label them as bad?
It’s still a complicated thing to think about, and it’s made even worse when you realize that these women aren’t fighting the patriarchy. They’re fighting each other.
Women as Enemies
Another unfortunate side effect of the evil stepmother is that it continues to pit women against women. While history and literature give us numerous examples of women working to oust competition against them and their children, it doesn’t mean it’s the norm. But unfortunately, fairy tales have a nasty habit of creating more women enemies than women allies.
Not all evil stepmothers prey on stepdaughters. In “The Juniper Tree” the evil stepmother kills her stepson, for instance. But for the most part, if we see a woman villain, she will almost always cross blades (figuratively of course) with another woman.
And, sadly, the only reason they are at war with each other is for reasons embedded in the patriarchal system. The favor of a man, for instance (Cinderella’s stepmother has her daughters cut off parts of her feet in order to marry the prince), or comparisons of beauty that arise from a patriarchal view of beauty (Snow White and her stepmother). The patriarchal system inevitably pits women against women in a competition for the male gaze, while also slandering stepmothers for being imposters in the patriarchal family unit, where Mother is a saintly moral guide to the household.
Acceptable power, in this system, comes from attaching yourself to powerful men, because female power gained by an individual woman alone is considered too dangerous. Is it surprising, then, that it forces women to compete with one another? And is it not a thing to be pitied that women who try to gain agency are torn down as witches and sorceress? Even more pitiable is that it all results in a reader having to choose sides between two women trying to grasp power in a patriarchal system.
It isn’t always like this in fairy tales. There are a multitude of tales where women do function as allies toward one another. For instance in Bluebeard tales where women save one another, or arguably the Twelve Dancing Princess tales where the twelve sisters escape the world around them for a time. There are also many stories that exist outside of the Grimm brothers’ collection where women have a better time and find allies and friends in fellow women. But unfortunately for the role of stepmother, it will always be a case of a woman competing with or battling another woman.
Powerful Stepmothers vs Powerless Stepmothers
In fairy tales, evil stepmothers always have power. They have the power to change whatever they perceive is wrong with their world or situation. The evil queen tries to kill Snow White, Cinderella’s stepmother forces her to do chores and punishes her, the sorceress kidnaps a baby girl to raise as her own and then punishes her for a single sin, and so on. They have power until that power is taken from them.
But in the real world, in today’s society, many stepmothers are often faced with a sort of psychological powerlessness. Powerlessness to be “as good as or better than” a child’s real mother, powerlessness to fight back against this idea of the evil stepmother, powerlessness to even talk about their fears when it comes to raising another woman’s child.
In Elizabeth Church’s study, “The Poisoned Apple,” she interviewed 104 women with the specific question of how they deal with the image of the evil stepmother.
The stepmothers were more likely to feel jealous than envious and this occurred when they felt second best, like outsiders, or were drawn into competitive relationships. Their jealousy seemed to be a response to feeling, and being, powerless and disregarded within relationships. Although their experience of jealousy differed markedly from the way stepmothers are portrayed in fairy tales, many felt silenced by the image of the wicked stepmother, and some saw themselves as wicked, particularly if they were jealous of their stepchildren.
Excerpt from the abstract of the study
Leslie Jamison explains this sort of powerless situation and the struggle beautifully in her article, In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale: On Becoming a Stepmother, and also talks about the study. For her, becoming a stepmother, especially since she had no kids of her own, was an experience in flying blind. With only the stereotypes of the evil stepmother, ever pervasive in fairy tale literature and even in other genres, to guide her experiences, she struggled with the same sense of guilt, frustration, fear, and anxiety that many new stepmothers face today.
It’s a hard image to crack or alter. Fairy tales continually use this image of the stepmother as an evil-only figure and continue to damage today’s views of stepmothers, and stepmothers’ views of themselves. Good stepmothers are seen as the exception, and they have to be distinguished out from the masses of stepmothers who must assuredly be evil or cruel in some way.
Altogether it paints a dismal picture for stepmothers of today. Stepmothers in fairy tales become scapegoats, saddled with all the evil traits of a woman in power, set apart from the virtues of a true mother, and then punished for their agency and their attempts to navigate a masculine world as a powerful woman. I find I agree with the emerging sentiment on this topic — that fairy tale stepmothers ought to be, if not pitied, viewed as complex, three-dimensional characters worthy of the same attention we give heros and heroines.
Hand-in-hand with that is the idea that, as we analyze and critically view these stepmothers in fairy tale literature, we think of those stepmothers who struggle to compete with the stereotype, and extend more grace to them. Parenting is hard, and there will always be someone criticizing you for your parenting tactics and mistakes. Stepmothers no doubt heap twice as much upon themselves thanks to this prevailing view of stepmothers as “imposter mothers” or “fake mothers.”
Stepmother, like any other societal role, is complicated and complex, good and bad and ugly and redeemable and all sorts of things. Though fairy tales aren’t so kind to them, moving forward, perhaps we as scholars can at the very least extend the courtesy of a thorough, unbiased examination of stepmothers, granting them the same attention as favored characters and character types. And to the real stepmothers of today, to those trying their best and loving their stepchildren, we can try to support them as they go on their journeys, changing the views of stepmothers one day at a time.
Further Reading
Wicked Women: The Stepmother as a Figure of Evil in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Anahit Behrooz.
Pity the Stepmother by Marina Warner
In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale: On Becoming a Stepmother by Leslie Jamison