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corywood
Unregistered User
(2/1/01 11:22:05 am)
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Stepmothers???
Why are there so many evil stepmothers? What do they symbolize?
| Midori
Unregistered User
(2/1/01 2:51:17 pm)
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stepmothers--much maligned
Corywood,
First let me recommend a useful book (in case your question maybe related to something you need for class) "From the Beast to the Blonde" by Marina Warner. In her book Warner takes a look at the difficult position in society of older women--and specifically how they are represented in fairy tales as witches, hags, evil stepmothers. Her argument is in part that these women have a very vulnerable place in society--not young and virginal, not old or venerable. Their ambiguous status worries the patriarchial social order that doesn't know how to handle independent thinking adult women. So they are often cast in stories as villians.
Part of what they do in fairy tales, their nastiness usually toward the heroine, has to do with the storyteller creating a crisis, or a dangerous situation for the heroine at home that forces her to go out into the world and find her own way. The negative actions of the stepmother propels the heroine on the first leg of her own journey to find herself as an adult. Not all stepmothers are human--sometimes they are fantastic mothers, witches with significant power and that is also the way in which the fantastic world inserts itself in the human order to force the young heroine to embark on her journey by having to leave home.
On the other hand, there are stepmothers and surrogate mothers who are helpful to the heroine--Cinderella's own fairy godmother is a mother figure and makes a nice constrast to the human stepmother (it also suggests the special nature of Cinderella--that she can call upon the positive forces of the fantastic world to assist her). There are animal mothers, who help our heroine when she is lost in the woods, there are even ogre mothers and cannibal mothers, who contrary to their natures help the heroine.
hope this helps.
| Terri
Unregistered User
(2/2/01 6:48:00 am)
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evil stepmothers
Also, keep in mind that in earlier versions of familiar fairy tales, the characters who are now "step-mothers" were actually mothers. The Brothers Grimm in Germany, for instance, changed the mothers in Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, and others into step-mothers because it offended their sense of propriety that natural mothers could be so evil. We know that they did this because the change was made between the early manuscript versions of their collected German folktales and the later published editions.
So then the question becomes: "Why so many evil mothers?" Actually, you'll find that in the older tales there are plenty of evil characters of all ages and both genders: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, men, women, kings, peasants. These weren't considered "children's stories," and they address the hard reality of life, which is that one kind find evil and cruelty anywhere, even in ones family. But, conversely, one also finds guides, fairy godmothers, magic, compassion, and grace in unlikely places too.
I also want to second Midori's recommendation of Marina Warner's wonderful book "From the Beast to the Blonde" if you want to gain a deeper understanding of the history of fairy tales.
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allysonrosen
Registered User
(2/6/01 2:39:15 pm)
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Re: evil stepmothers
Here's my own theory to add to the pot:
Considering that women were the major transmitters of these stories, and that there was a high rate of death during child-labor, it wouldn't surprise me if the "Evil Stepmother" archetype also rose from the fear women had of someone else raising their children. Also, there is the historical double standard of men taking mistresses (future stepmothers?) while their wives were expected to be faithful and chaste. Telling stories of "evil stepmothers" could also be a cheated wife's revenge upon circumstances that she cannot control.
But I also agree with all the above theories as well.
Allyson
| english
Unregistered User
(2/6/01 3:21:52 pm)
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from what i have read and studied
though by no means should this be read as expert opinion...
Remember when you were young and your parents loved you dearly and gave you everything your little heart could possibly want? As all young children probably are, you were spoiled. Then you started growing up and changing? As such, you were expected to take on "responsibility," like cleaning and dishes. Those mothers, symbolically, could not have been your real mothers--not the ones that loved you and coddled you so! They are the ones who changed, certainly not you! Therefore, they must be "evil" or "step"parents....
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Terri
Registered User
(2/7/01 6:25:32 am)
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Re: from what i have read and studied
English, you've made a good point. But don't forget that there are a lot of children out there for whom an evil parent or step-parent is not a stretch of the imagination. Just take a look at the child abuse statistics. As a child with a background that was part of those statistics, fairy tales were potent for me precisely because they told the truth: that horror could be found within ones own home. And that one could survive it with the "magic" tools of courage, compassion, clear vision, and determination.
| english
Unregistered User
(2/7/01 10:25:31 am)
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agreed...
(and thanks for thinking i made a good point)
but from my understanding, Fairy Tales were not originally meant for young children--the images of darkness and death certainly support this. These stories were told to almost-teenagers. Yes, abuse is certainly as much an issue now it is was then--and these stories were perhaps a way of dealing with such horrors--but these stories are also typically about growing up and that difficult (and painful) transition from childhood to adulthood.
| Midori
Unregistered User
(2/7/01 12:43:11 pm)
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across the board
I know more about performance of African tales but they are certainly told to all audiences, the same tales sometimes to age mixed audiences, gender mixed audiences, and as equally, among peers (teens to each other, elderly women to each other, men to men) and instructionally in the seclusion of the rites of passage periods for teens. The substance of the tales (along with the violence, and often bawdy scatology) is pretty constant. A storyteller may lighten the tone if there are only small children, though they can get pretty raunchy and scatological--especially when the kids take a turn telling the stories. And the same story teller may expand and nuance a well known tale into a more sophisticated version for an audience of adult peers. I've read trasncriptions of the same narrative told in three or four different settings and it's interesting how little they vary (some are richer--but they are all pretty graphic). Context is everything--a tale told in the day will keep its violence on the surface because it's day. A tale told in the initiation huts is emotional and derives intense meaning by the context of the rite which may not have for a girl before she enters the huts.
In the west we had to reach back to the original tales and learn over again that the tales were intended to be shared adult audiences as well--but I think traditionally, children were not as "protected" from the content of the tales as we might imagine.
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Terri
Registered User
(2/8/01 6:49:36 am)
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Re: across the board
English, I agree completely. I'd be the very last person to try to argue that fairy tales were meant only for children. <g>
Edited by: Terri at: 2/8/01
6:50:19 am
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Gregor9
Registered User
(2/8/01 7:47:26 am)
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Children as Children
Midori wrote: "I think traditionally, children were not as 'protected' from the content..."
Absolutely. Historically, if I remember my research correctly, the notion of "children" as a separate stage of development really didn't exist as we think of it or develop until the latter part of the 18th century. Prior to that, infancy/childhood lasted until maybe 6-8 years of age, after which you were a productive member of the family and expected to work as such.
In light of that, I wonder if children listened to fairy tales as part of the family--not excluded from adult things--until the notion of a longer childhood running into the teens developed, and the idea of stories for children vs. stories for adults occurred in parallel evolution.
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Terri
Registered User
(2/8/01 9:29:41 am)
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Re: Children as Children
Greg, I agree with you. In England, fiction aimed exclusively at children (as opposed educational works of moral instruction) did not become widely popular until the late 18th century, and more particularly in the 19th. Here's some relevant text from an article I wrote recently about fairy tales in Victorian England: (There's probably something a little tacky about quoting oneself, but I'm in a rush this morning and it's easier to cut-and-past than to write this info. out all over again. My apologies!)
"...one of the major shifts we see in magical literature from the19th century onward is that more and more of it was published in books intended for children. There are two major reasons why this shift occurred, despite the fact that adult fascination with fantasy and fairies had rarely been so high. First, the Victorians romanticized the very idea of 'childhood' to a degree it had never seen before; earlier, childhood had not been viewed as something quite so separate from adult life. Children, according to this earlier view, came into the world in sin and had to be quickly, strictly civilized into God-fearing members of society. By Victorian times, this belief was changing to one in which children were inherently innocent, rather than inherently sinful -- and childhood was thus a special Golden Age before the burdens of adulthood. (Our modern notion of childhood as a sheltered time for play and exploration is rooted in these Victorians ideals, although in the 19th century they held true only for the upper classes. Most Victorian children still labored long hours in fields and factories -- as Charles Dickens portrayed in his fiction, and experienced as a child himself.) This romanticized view of childhood was paired with a romanticized view of rural life, in which country people were considered primitive and childlike themselves. Just as the "innocence" of the countryside was vanishing due to the Industrial Revolution, the golden innocence of childhood was doomed to vanish as a child matured. This is a theme that runs through many great works of Victorian fantasy, in which magic is accessible only to children and lost on the threshold of adulthood. From Lewis Carroll's Alice books to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Victorian writers grieved that their young, wise heroes would one day grow up. (There is a darker side to this ideal, however, and some prominent Victorians were a little *too* interested in children. Lewis Carroll may or may not have been a closet paedophile, but he certainly had an uncomfortable interest in photographing scantily clad little girls; while John Ruskin fell in love with an eight-year-old, and constantly pestered his artist friend Kate Greenaway to send him drawings of unclothed little 'girlies'. Kate declined.)
"The second reason that Victorian publishers produced so many new volumes for children was due to the growth of a middle class that was both literate and wealthy. There was money to be made by exploiting the Victorian love affair with childhood; publishers had found a market, and they needed product with which to fill it. Children's fiction in the previous century had been diabolically dreary - consisting primarily of pious, tedious books full of moral instruction. By the 19th century, some educators were still decrying the evils of "immoral" fairy stories (using arguments that are much the same as the anti-Harry-Potter arguments made today), but once the Grimms and Andersen collections [first published in English translation in 1823 and 1846] proved to be so popular, London publishers jumped on the fairy tale band wagon in increasing numbers. Cheap story material was available to them by plundering the fairy tales of other lands, simplifying them for young readers, then further revising the stories to conform to Victorian gender roles and moral standards. A lot of these fairy tale volumes, marred by heavy-handed alterations, make abysmal reading today -- but some retained enough of the magic of their source material to have stood the test of time, such as the famous series edited by Andrew Lang in partnership with his (unaccredited) wife: The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, etc.."
[The full article is on the Endicott Studio site.]
| karen
Unregistered User
(2/8/01 3:10:07 pm)
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Victorian childhoods
Terri,
I'm wondering if the Victorians really did conceive of childhood as a romanticised, Edenic state, given the proliferation of very heavy handed didactic literature for children during the period- in which children who do not tow the line are allotted the most severre punishments- even death, on occasion! Rather, this seems to indicate the continuation of the earlier concern you write of above- training them up early and forcefully in order to transform them into God-fearing citizens ASAP! I don't think the Victorians can ever be taken at face value- as the revision of Foucault and other theorists has shown, the Victorian preoccupation with finding "scientific euphenisms" for sex can serve as a polite "cover" for discussing the subject endlessly. So too, a perpetual ennunciation of a romantic, childhood ideal implicitly evokes its opposite- an "alternate", disruptive childhood which adult society saw as a very real threat- and allows adult society to assuage that threat with "polite" talk.
While I certainly agree that Carroll evokes that fading ideal childhood in the Alice books (especially in the poem which precedes Through the Looking-glass), much of *Alice*, for me, seems to lampoon the conventions of polite, adult society- the (il)logic of the Victorian drawing room- I think this is especially evident in the scenes involving food.
Karen
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Gregor9
Registered User
(2/9/01 11:25:39 am)
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Complexity of Childhood
I think the matter of the shift in views toward children is probably a far broader topic than can be covered within the confines of our site here. Up until life expectancy improved, which wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century, really, adult attitudes toward children were pretty alien from our perspective.
In the first half of the 19th century, you have consolation literature as its own genre, and most of that was of children--either promising that they would be waiting on the other side, or else describing their beautiful deaths. One book that details these attitudes is Death In America, edited by David Stannard. And Philippe Aries has written a number of very fine books on the topic of how our view of and relationship to death has changed over time--again, I think this sort of social examination has to be a part of the analysis of fairy tales, too, since death is at the core of so many, and the stories' revisions were occurring at the same time as western society was trying to push death further and further away.
Children were constantly reminded that they should expect to die soon--and something like half of them would by the age of 10. Parents didn't name babies for a time after the birth, to make it easier to dispose of the corpse if the child didn't live. Fathers tended to remain distant from the children even later (perhaps making it easier to objectify them). Mothers were singularly blamed when their newborns died, by the Catholic church in particular. All of these forces (and others) helped fuel the spiritualist movement, which was very much a feminist rebellion against church rules and restrictions.
And this is only a single sketchy aspect of the massive change and upheaval going on. It doesn't even address the mad Calvinist "sinners in the hands of an angry God" motif that made all children corrupt before they could talk (Cotton Mather actually insisted that Satan visited them in their cribs, thus perverting them for evil before their parents could intervene--how convenient for the church that this be so).
The motivations behind a lot of what the Victorians did were, I think, denied even unto themselves. I'd bet Ruskin would never have admitted to pederasty. And Dickens adamantly denied any romantic or sexual motivation when he "treated" one female friend with hypnosis for her hysteria-- which included his locking himself in a room with her for hours on end. His wife suspected otherwise. So much denial on so fundamental a level was sure to warp everything around it. But I do think it's interesting that those adult Victorians of the later 19th century were the children who had been schooled in the constancy of death in the earlier part.
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Terri
Registered User
(2/11/01 5:19:02 am)
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Re: Complexity of Childhood
Karen, I agree with you when you say (so eloquently): "So too, a perpetual ennunciation of a romantic, childhood ideal implicitly evokes its opposite-an 'alternate', disruptive childhood which adult society saw as very real threat- and allows adult society to assuage that threat with 'polite' talk." One of the things that interests me about Victorian society is that it was filled with these kinds of oppositions. Scratch the surface of any subject and you find its opposite--often its extreme opposite--right underneath.
Greg, I haven't read Phillipe Aries. Can you recommend a place to start?
Please forgive such a short response to your thought-provoking posts, Karen & Greg. I'm at the tail end of my work on "Year's Best" and in a bit of a rush. But this thread is fascinating!
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Gregor9
Registered User
(2/12/01 12:55:09 pm)
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Aries
Terri,
I'd recommend you start with "The Hour of Our Death." He's written numerous smaller books on, or around the subject, but that one is in many ways definitive in observing how western society has moved closer or farther from death. By the time you get to the Victorians, the embrace of death has become nearly pathological.
It's a good, interesting history, and regrettably out of print--strictly used book store material.
Greg
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