A stepmother, stepmum or stepmom is a female non-biological parent married to one's preexisting parent. Children from her spouse's previous unions are known as her stepchildren. A stepmother-in-law is a stepmother of one's spouse.
A stepmother, stepmum or stepmom is a female non-biological parent married to one's preexisting parent. Children from her spouse's previous unions are known as her stepchildren. A stepmother-in-law is a stepmother of one's spouse.
Stepparents (mainly stepmothers) may also face some societal challenges due to the stigma surrounding the "evil stepmother" character. Morello notes that the introduction of the "evil stepmother" character in the past is problematic to stepparents today, as it has created a stigma towards stepmothers. [1] The presence of this stigma can have a negative impact on stepmothers' self-esteem. [2]
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In fiction, stepmothers are often portrayed as being wicked and evil. [3] The character of the wicked stepmother features heavily in fairy tales; the most famous examples are Cinderella , Snow White and Hansel and Gretel . Stepdaughters are her most common victim, and then stepdaughter/stepson pairs, but stepsons also are victims as in The Juniper Tree [4] —sometimes, as in East of the Sun and West of the Moon , because he refused to marry his stepsister as she wished, [5] or, indeed, they may make their stepdaughters-in-law their victims, as in The Boys with the Golden Stars . [6] In some fairy tales, such as Giambattista Basile's La Gatta Cennerentola or the Danish Green Knight , the stepmother wins the marriage by ingratiating herself with the stepdaughter, and once she obtains it, becomes cruel. [7]
In some fairy tales, the stepdaughter's escape by marrying does not free her from her stepmother. After the birth of the stepdaughter's first child, the stepmother may attempt to murder the new mother and replace her with her own daughter—thus making her the stepmother to the next generation. Such a replacement occurs in The Wonderful Birch , Brother and Sister , and The Three Little Men in the Wood ; only by foiling the stepmother's plot (and usually executing her), is the story brought to a happy ending. [8] In the Korean Folktale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon , the stepmother kills her own stepdaughters.
In many stories with evil stepmothers, the hostility between the stepmother and the stepchild is underscored by having the child succeed through aid from the dead mother. [9] This motif occurs from Norse mythology, where Svipdagr rouses his mother Gróa from the grave so as to learn from her how to accomplish a task his stepmother set, to fairy tales such as the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella , where Aschenputtel receives her clothing from a tree growing on her mother's grave, the Russian Vasilissa the Beautiful , where Vasilissa is aided by a doll her mother gave, and her mother's blessing, and the Malay Bawang Putih Bawang Merah , where the heroine's mother comes back as fish to protect her.
The notion of the word stepmother being descriptive of an intrinsically unkind parent is suggested by peculiar wording in John Gamble's "An Irish Wake" (1826). He writes of a woman soon to die, who instructs her successor to "be kind to my children." Gamble writes that the injunction was forgotten and that she "proved a very step-mother."
Fairy tales can have variants where one tale has an evil mother and the other an evil stepmother: in The Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm and also in The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen, the heroine is persecuted by her husband's mother and in another one by her stepmother, and in The Twelve Wild Ducks , by his stepmother. Sometimes this appears to be a deliberate switch: The Brothers Grimm, having put in their first editions versions of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel where the villain was the biological mother, altered it to a stepmother in later editions, perhaps to mitigate the story's violence. [10] Another reason for the change from a villainous mother to a villainous stepmother may have been the belief that mothers were sacred, as well as the belief that people would not believe that a mother could harbor such ill-will and animosity toward their child. [11] [12] The Icelandic fairy tale The Horse Gullfaxi and the Sword Gunnfoder features a good stepmother, who indeed aids the prince like a fairy godmother, but this figure is very rare in fairy tales.
The stepmother may be identified with other evils the characters meet. For instance, both the stepmother and the witch in Hansel and Gretel are deeply concerned with food, the stepmother to avoid hunger, the witch with her house built of food and her desire to eat the children, and when the children kill the witch and return home, their stepmother has mysteriously died. [13]
This hostility from the stepmother and tenderness from the true mother has been interpreted in varying ways. A psychological interpretation, by Bruno Bettelheim, describes it as "splitting" the actual mother in an ideal mother and a false mother that contains what the child dislikes in the actual mother. [14] However, historically, many women died in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources; the tales can be interpreted as factual conflicts from history. [15] In some fairy tales, such as The Juniper Tree, the stepmother's hostility is overtly the desire to secure the inheritance of her children. [4]
Stepmothers also make many appearances in Chinese tales of family. Wicked stepmothers are common. [16] In Classic of Filial Piety , Guo Jujing told the story of Min Ziqian, who had lost his mother at a young age. His stepmother had two more sons and saw to it that they were warmly dressed in winter but neglected her stepson. When her husband discovered this, he decided to divorce her. His son interceded, on the ground that she neglected only him, but when they had no mother, all three sons would be neglected. His father relented, and the stepmother henceforth took care of all three children. For this, he was held up as a model of filial piety.
Conversely, the exemplary stepmother prefers the stepson to her own child, in recognition that his seniority makes him superior. [17] The "righteous stepmother of Qi", faced with her son and stepson having been found by a murdered man, and both having confessed to shield the other, argues for her son's execution because her husband had ordered her to look after her stepson, and her son is the junior brother; the king pardoned them both for her devotion to duty. [17]
The ubiquity of the wicked stepmother has made it a frequent theme of revisionist fairy tale fantasy. This can range from Tanith Lee's Red as Blood, where the stepmother queen is desperately trying to protect the land from her evil stepdaughter's magic, to Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle , where, although it is known that stepmothers are evil, the actual stepmother is guilty of nothing more than some carelessness, to Erma Bombeck's retelling where Cinderella is lazy and a liar. More subtly, Piers Anthony depicted the Princess Threnody as being cursed by her stepmother in Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn : if she ever entered Castle Roogna, it would fall down. But Threnody explains that her presence at the castle caused her father to dote on her and neglect his duties to the destruction of the kingdom; her stepmother had merely made her destructive potential literal, and forced her to confront what she was doing.[ citation needed ]
The character of the evil stepmother can also be found in the genre of young adult fiction or young adult social problem novels. In Lisa Heathfield's Paper Butterflies. the protagonist June suffers horrific abuse at the hands of her stepmother, a fact that she conceals from her father.
Despite many examples of evil or cruel stepmothers, loving stepmothers also exist in fiction. In Kevin and Kell, Kell is portrayed as loving her stepdaughter Lindesfarne, whom her husband Kevin had adopted during his previous marriage. Likewise, Lindesfarne considers Kell her mother, and has a considerably more favorable view of her than Angelique, Kevin's ex-wife and her adoptive mother, due to feeling neglected by Angelique during her childhood. The Disney film Enchanted also makes references to the "evil stepmother" belief, as the villainess is a stepmother, but her wickedness comes from her selfishness and power hungriness rather than the simple fact she is a stepmother. When a little girl tells the heroine Giselle that all stepmothers are evil, Giselle reminds her that she personally knows some wonderful women who were good stepmothers, and the fact a woman is a stepmother does not suddenly change her personality. This is shown later on when Giselle marries that girl's father, who had her from a previous marriage, thus becoming a stepmother herself. As Giselle is a sweet and caring woman, she makes a good wife and stepmother. However, it is notable that during much of that film, Giselle was more of an older sister figure than a maternal figure to that little girl.
In the movie Nanny McPhee a group of children worry that their father will remarry, believing from their fairy tales that all stepmothers are an "evil breed." Although they help their father marry again to help keep the family together, their soon-to-be stepmother is very cruel, as they suspected. When the wedding to her is called off, the father decides to marry the much kinder scullery maid, causing one child to comment that the evil stepmother personification does not apply to her.
Stepmother relationships are often examined in soap operas. An example of this is the long-running rivalry between Victoria Lord Banks and stepmother Dorian Lord on the American soap opera One Life to Live .
In contrast to many other Disney-related media, the animated series Phineas and Ferb features a stepfamily in which both parents get along well with their three children (avoiding the normal tropes of evil stepparents). [18]
438 BCE: The dying biological mother requests that her husband not remarry, for fear of her children being mistreated by a stepmother.
428 BCE: The stepmother commits suicide to prevent herself from following through on her lust for her stepson and leaves a note falsely claiming that the stepson had raped her.
Stepmothers fulfill the role of antagonist in the following fairy tales:
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale with 69 variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances who is suddenly blessed by remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
"Snow White" is a German fairy tale, first written down in the early 19th century. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms' Fairy Tales, numbered as Tale 53. The original German title was Sneewittchen; the modern spelling is Schneewittchen. The Grimms completed their final revision of the story in 1854, which can be found in the 1857 version of Grimms' Fairy Tales.
A stepfamily is a family where at least one parent has children who are not biologically related to their spouse. Either parent, or both, may have children from previous relationships or marriages. Two known classifications for stepfamilies include "simple" stepfamilies, where only one member of the family's couple has a prior child or children and the couple does not have any children together, and "complex" or "blended" families, where both members of the couple have at least one child from another relationship.
"Hansel and Gretel" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 as part of Grimms' Fairy Tales.
The Evil Queen, also called the Wicked Queen or simply the Queen, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of "Snow White", a German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm. The most popular adaptation of the Evil Queen is from Disney's Snow White. The character has also become an archetype that has inspired unrelated works.
Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, also known as Grimm Masterpiece Theater in the original version and The Grimm's Fairy Tales, is a Japanese anime anthology series by Nippon Animation based on the Grimms' Fairy Tales.
A stepfather or stepdad is a biologically unrelated male parent married to one's preexisting parent.
"Brother and Sister" is a European fairy tale which was, among others, written down by the Brothers Grimm. It is a tale of Aarne–Thompson Type 450. In Russia the story was more commonly known as "Sister Alionushka, Brother Ivanushka", and collected by Alexander Afanasyev in his Narodnye russkie skazki.
Anastasia and Drizella are characters in the fairy tale and pantomime, Cinderella. They are the daughters of Cinderella's wicked stepmother, who treat her poorly. Anastasia and Drizella have been in variations of the story from as early as researchers have been able to determine.
Hansel and Gretel is a 2002 American fantasy comedy film based on the fairy tale of the same name by Brothers Grimm. The film is directed by Gary J. Tunnicliffe and produced by Steve Austin and Jonathan Bogner. Jacob Smith and Taylor Momsen portray the eponymous characters, alongside Howie Mandel, Alana Austin, Delta Burke, Lynn Redgrave, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Sinbad. The film follows siblings Hansel and Gretel as they try to escape from the Magic Forest and a witch's gingerbread house with the help of the Sandman and the Wood Fairy. The film received negative reviews from critics.
"The Juniper Tree" is a German fairy tale published in Low German by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812. The story contains themes of child abuse, murder, cannibalism and biblical symbolism and is one of the Brothers Grimm's darker and more mature fairy tales.
The Wonderful Birch is a Finnish/Russian fairy tale. A variant on Cinderella, it is Aarne–Thompson folktale type 510A, the persecuted heroine. It makes use of shapeshifting motifs. Andrew Lang included it in The Red Fairy Book.
"Ye Xian" is a Chinese fairy tale that is similar to the European Cinderella story, the Malay-Indonesian Bawang Putih Bawang Merah tale, and stories from other ethnic groups including the Tibetans and the Zhuang. It is one of the oldest known variants of Cinderella, first published in the Tang dynasty compilation Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang written around 850 by Duan Chengshi. Chinese compilations attest several versions from oral sources.
"The True Bride" or "The True Sweetheart" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales as tale 186.
The Juniper Tree is an opera co-composed by Philip Glass and Robert Moran in 1985 to a libretto by Arthur Yorinks based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
Märchen is the seventh story CD, released by the fantasy symphonic rock band Sound Horizon on December 15, 2010, through King Records. The normal edition debuted No. 3 and peaked No. 2 on the Oricon weekly albums chart. A limited edition sold over 40,000 copies in its first two days, 24,816 copies on the first day and 15,833 copies on the next.
Grimmtastic Girls is a series of children's books written by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams and published between 2014 and 2016 with Scholastic Inc. The characters are based on those from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, including Grimm's Fairytales. Each book is told from the perspective of a different character, including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Goldilocks. The series takes place at the boarding school Grimm Academy, located in the country of Grimmlandia, where certain girls are chosen by magic charms and must deal with middle school while thwarting the E.V.I.L. Society's plans.
The Candy House is a 1934 short animated film by Walter Lantz Productions featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The film is an adaptation of the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm and is one of the few Oswald shorts in which he plays a different character.
"Snow White" is a German fairy tale known across much of the world. There has been debate over possible origins of the tale and whether it could be an amalgam of other stories, have mythical roots, or be inspired by a real person. It falls within the classification of Type 709 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index.
Gretel & Hansel is a 2020 dark fantasy horror film directed by Osgood Perkins and written by Rob Hayes, based on the German fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel" by the Brothers Grimm. Sophia Lillis and Sam Leakey portray the titular characters, with Alice Krige and Jessica De Gouw also starring. The film follows the siblings Gretel and Hansel as they become lost in the forest and then stumble upon the home of a witch.