I realize that this thread is a few months old, but I just wanted to echo that Maguire's books are all stand alone except for the two sequels to Wicked. Also, in addition to Confessions of an Ugly Step-sister, he also has Mirror Mirror A Novel a retelling of Snow White. (He also has others but they aren't relevant here.)

Also, Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" is really wonderful (well...), and told from the step-mother's point of view. It's in Smoke and Mirrors Short Fictions and Illusions.

Looking quickly in my Icelandic Folktales book there are a few stepmother stories. I haven't read them yet though. The titles are "Surtla of the Bluelands Isles" and "The Tale of Hildur, the Good Stepmother". In the notes it mentions that Red "was often the villain's name in 'stepmother' stories of this kind. There is some evidence of a belief that red hair was a sign of a trecherous nature." Both stories have a character named Red. (And I must be trecherous since I have red hair...)

eta: Also, in the Terry Pratchett book I'm reading currently (Witches Abroad) one of the characters is Emberella instead of Cinderella. It's more with the fairy godmother though, but I thought I'd stil. mention it.

Well and I've watched a bitch (in the literal meaning of female dog) wean puppies, and she has to turn on them and snap and growl, or they just keep following her around weheeping. So I totally thought of that when you said the mother and the stepmother are the two sides of the same mother.

Also of course within the same person you can love your kids one minute and be incredibly frustrated with their foolishness another. So in that way too, it makes sense to me that it can be a splitting of aspects of the same person instead of two different people.

Yeah, its a cool idea, isn't it? I like it too. I do think that the father no longer being all powerful aspect of it smacks of a little Freudian to me, but the rest is good.

Stepmothers might be evil, but they might also get a bit of a bad rap. Some of these maidens will take a good deal of crazy punishment before they voluntarily seek other a world outside of the familiar.

Wow Kelly that's really interesting. The stepmother is the force that pushes the child out of the nest. Oh I like that!

I'm sort of randomly ducking into this conversation, and its been really interesting to read so far!, because I have read some interesting things about evil stepmothers lately, particularly in that book I keep recommending, Spinning Straw into Gold.

The idea is advanced that the stepmother is the Good Mother in disguise, but she acts as we could never conceive the Good Mother would. But the Evil Mother is necessary, is the interesting part of the statement. Were it not for her, the young girl would never leave home, and would never advance from maiden to mother, wouldn't keep the cycle going. Her father's house would always be safe for her. The stepmother almost always pushes the maiden out of her place in her father's house before she was ready- hence how many of these maidens "go to sleep," because they are not ready to transfer yet. ie, refuse to believe that Mother could be doing this to them, refuse to deal with sexual maturity and what that means for her. So she's just the idea of cruel change and in that sense, the "stepmother," can be someone other than that exact familial figure. She's also the destruction of the father. I liked that idea, too- the idea that the father can no longer be seen as all powerful, all knowing, able to do everything- he must come down in the daughter's eyes for her to realize that she must take care of herself. For example in Beauty and the Beast when the merchant father loses his entire fortune (comedown), maybe gets it back (girl is able to hang on and hope this happens), but he finds out that he's lost even more- but gets waylaid in the storm at the Beast's castle, ends up picking a rose from the garden for Beauty, and the Beast gets pissed and wants him to be prisoner. He mentions his daughters, the Beast says that one of them must come back to be prisoner- Beauty volunteers. Her father's house doesn't feel safe for her anymore- the mention of this rich, powerful Beast is her catalyst for change and leaving-one of the cases where she thinks she's ready for change and at least doesn't fall asleep.

I don't know if I'm explaining all that as clearly as I should, but..anyway, I just thought I'd chime in.

Well, isn't she also a witch? I mean, the stepmother in Cinderella is pretty bad, but only in the stepmother kind of way. The stepmother in Snow White is bad, both as a stepmother and an enchantress, no?

HAH! Yeah she really is an evil stepmother. There's sort of a vampire, Elizabeth Bathory vibe there for sure.

And what's with Snow White's stepmother? I'd been reading mostly Cinderella stories, so hadn't really taken in that she not only raises this child from an infant (in the traditional version I read) but is prepared to kill her simply because she's more beautiful, and also by the way wants to cut out her HEART and eat it!

That makes a lot of sense. The stepmother takes away the mother's birthright, the jewels, which are part of Cinderella's coming of age. In that story, a Victorian retelling, Cinderella had also been doing her father's accounts and generally acting as the woman of the house before the stepmother took all of her tasks over under the pretext of letting her be a child again.

Ohhh nasty stepmother indeed!

So I had a long rambling ponder while I was weeding the garlic mustard out of the perennial beds and I was thinking about stepmothers and fairy godmothers - who often seem to be both present and in opposition to one another. I was thinking that while in some of the tales the stepmother is clearly all about giving preference to her own children over the children of a previous marriage, there is another stepmother aspect too.

I think sometimes stepmother stories are coming of age stories, in which some women in the story (stepmothers) oppose the young woman coming of age, and others (fairy godmothers) try to assist her.

That stepmothers can be about not being willing to give way to the next generation, or actively hampering the next generation from moving forward - actually putting them in comas or trying to kill them - because you don't want to let go of your own place at the center of the story. Snow White would probably be the best known example of that, clearly the stepmother doesn't want Snow White to grow up and become "the fairest."

So it can be about resisting or assisting the cycle - not wanting the maiden to become the mother because if the maiden becomes the mother then the mother has to become the crone.

The most unpleasant stepmother I've come across so far has been in Anne Isabella Ritchie's short story, 'Cinderella', published in Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. She's self-centred and manipulative, and not even a particularly nice mother to her own two daughters.
The day she moves in, she raids Ella's bedroom for what was probably her dead mother's jewellery:

'"Dear me," said Mrs Ashford, "is it not a pity to leave such temptation in the way of the servants? Little careless thing - had I not better keep them for her, Henry? they are very beautiful." And Mrs Ashford softly collected Ella's treasures in her long white hands.'

Heh, you're right. The magical and the mundane, side by side. I have a gorgeous picture of Kate and her sheep-headed sister in a book of mine; Anne shedding a little sheepish tear at her fate.
These two have always seemed a bit Shakespearean to me, like Beatrice and her more conventional, pretty friend in Much Ado.

Thanks Danielle. One of the things I enjoy a lot about folk tales is when they go utterly matter of fact about bizarre occurances like that - of course the step sister's head fell off into the pot and was replaced with a sheep head, what else did you expect? Nobody blinks. Or if they do blink its not considered worth preserving in the tale. Somehow that makes me laugh.

There's one exception that I know of, and that's Kate Crackernuts, where a King and Queen each have a daughter by blood, step-sisters, and they are both 'good' despite the Queen being a 'bad' character who repeatedly tries to mar her step-daughter's beauty in order to advance her own daughter.

There's a retelling here:
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/twelv...

Maybe that's why I always loved this story as a kid; the loving bond between the two step-sisters is a nice change, and I loved the feisty, quick-witted Kate.

I'm just reading Bound at the moment, and something that has been consistant in the modern retellings I've been reading has been the motivation of the stepmother; she is acquisitive and status-conscious, so desperate to keep (or improve) her and her daughters' place in society, that she becomes cruel. Often it seems she's either going through or has been through tough times and has an adult perception of how bad life can get that the main character doesn't yet share. She is so fixated on wealth and financial security that she has little time for emotional wellbeing.

Danielle, That's a good observation also. All step-parents and their offspring are portrayed as bad in every story I've been thinking about. Does anyone know of exceptions to this?

And why would that be? The mortality rates were so high, that second/third/fourth marriages were not unheard of. That makes for a ton of step-relatives. Inheritance is the only thing I think makes sense, but even that seems a weak explanation.

Something I've been noticing in some of the older tales I've been reading is that good children have good birth parents, whereas the (bad) stepmothers, when they bring children of their own into the story, invariably have bad children. Maybe a belief that blood will out? Cinderella is good, kind, patient, industrious etc because she has a good mother and father. Wicked stepmothers have selfish, rude and ugly children, in comparison.

Hmmm now I'm making a connection that hadn't occured to me before. Maybe step parents fear that without the blood tie children won't take care of them when they are old. So they are motivated by that fear to privilege their blood children. So they aren't (figuratively) left on an ice floe in their senior years.

I've done some reading on crime around the turn of the century in France and England, and violence against stepchildren (by both stepmothers and fathers) appears to have been pretty common, especially withholding of food.

Not to mention that in European inheritance structures its likely that although the stepdaughters will hopefully marry and leave, the oldest of the stepsons are going to inherit. Which means they will have control of the resources you are going to need access to if you survive your spouse.

One of my ancestors was a woman who, in the late 1700's married a man who already had ten children the two oldest boys were older than she was. In a time when women quite frequently died in or worn out by childbirth, I would imagine those kind of second marriages were not uncommon. But how do you manage yourself in a family in which some of your stepchildren are closer to you in age than your husband?

Yes, I've read that theory, Miriam. I tend to gravitate toward these anthropological explanations for folklore. Like the idea that the legend of centaurs originally came from tales told by tribes who had not domesticated the horse, when first they encountered riders on horseback. Or the idea that the fairy-folk of western European (particularly Celtic) lore come from the meeting of Iron Age peoples and those they replaced. Hence the fact that iron, or sometimes all metals, are anathema to these "others." There are many examples...

Re: bunwat and kelly jo's mention of climactic change et al environmental factors -- A fairly standard sociological explanation for the changeling stories in Ireland and elsewhere is that it allowed parents of children with physical or mental problems who were a drain on very limited resources to get rid of the children while telling themselves it wasn't their child. Note that fairy changelings are always "bad" children who eat too much and have tantrums and won't work.

wow.

wow

I found this, from a Kennedy Center production a few years ago. It reminded me of another kind of Stepmother story;

U.S. PREMIERE!
Yukio Ninagawa's Shintoku-Maru featuring Tatsuya Fujiwara

Renowned for his innovative interpretations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, King Lear, and other classics, award-winning director Yukio Ninagawa has been called "one of the great image-makers of modern theater" (London's The Guardian).

For the festival, Ninagawa brings his tragic fable of love, lust, and revenge based on an ancient Japanese noh play written by Shuji Terayama and adapted by Rio Kishida. Blending drama, music, and spectacle, the production stars Tatsuya Fujiwara, one of Japan's hottest young actors known for movie roles ranging from Death Note to Battle Royale. Reprising his acclaimed, star-making performance from the London staging of Shintoku-Maru, Fujiwara portrays a young man haunted by the memory of his departed mother and strangely drawn to his new stepmother, portrayed by the magnetic Kayoko Shiraishi.

Performed in Japanese. English synopsis in the program and in pre-recorded narration by Alan Rickman before the performance. No intermission.

PLEASE NOTE: This performance contains nudity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shintoku-Maru
SYNOPSIS
(the following note will also be included in the programs)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a crowded thoroughfare, Shintoku-Maru searches for memories of his late mother, whose picture he carries in his pocket. His father, bereft without a wife, decides to purchase a new mother for his family.

From a group of travelling players who have fallen on hard times, he chooses Nadeshiko. Shintoku is immediately attracted to her. With her own son, Sensaku, they all make a home together. However, Shintoku rejects his step-mother and the aging father refuses to treat her as his wife. Nadeshiko realizes she has been married only to provide domestic stability.

The family play a game of cards, in which he who collects a complete family (father, mother and children) is the winner. Thinking he is being deliberately ignored, Shintoku surrepititiously withholds the ‘mother' cards and leaves with them.

Nadeshiko goes to look for him and finds him playing with a long-horned beetle (in Japanese superstition, long-horn beetles were supposed to cut off women's hair). When she tries to comfort him in a motherly way, he rejects her and the pent-up anger between them explodes.

Shintoku meets a mask seller, who tells him that although he does not have a mask of his mother, he will lend him some magic: a black hole through which he can travel anywhere.

Shintoku travels to the underworld in search of his mother. There he finds many mothers looking for their children. Ships come and go with cargos of the dead, and the mothers grieve for the untimely deaths of their children. Shintoku longs to see his mother again, who, he reveals, died saving him from their burning home when he was a small boy. Suddenly his step-mother Nadeshiko appears and this seeming heaven turns into hell. Shintoku summons his long-horned beetle and the nightmare ends.

Two years pass. Nadeshiko is cleaning the house. She polishes the picture of Shintoku's mother with such vigor that the image vanishes. This enrages Shintoku, and in a fury he hits his step-mother. In an attempt to maintain the stability of the family, Shintoku's father orders him to obey, but he refuses.

Nadeshiko reappears with an effigy of Shintoku, on which she begins to place a curse because of his dislike for her--he will not even look at her. In the darkness, Shintoku mistakes her for his real mother and embraces her, telling her of his hatred for his step-mother. He realizes too late that it is Nadeshiko in his arms. In despair, Nadeshiko concludes her curse and Shintoku is blinded.

Over the next year Nadeshiko starts to lose her mind. Shintoku returns, disguised as Nadeshiko, and savagely assaults his step-brother. In a nightmarish sequence, the family home is symbolically destroyed and the father's health is broken. The strolling players return: their song is of the father and all he represented. (The players are wearing masks depicting seals which to the Japanese signify their rights as householders).

Nadeshiko finds Shintoku playing the family card game alone, wearing her kimono. They finally acknowledge their love for each other and he pleads with her to consummate this love, so that she may give birth to him, and hence become his real mother.

Together they disappear into the crowd, their destination unknown.

Another example of a story of fatal attraction between a son and stepmother would be the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus.

BunWat wrote: "Was watching a documentary about the little ice age (13th to 19th century) last night. As an aside the narrator mentioned that during the starving times due ..."

That's an interesting observation, Bun! I had not thought about the relationship between natural-historical events and stories. When we consider history, many times it is never presented with a climate context.

Emma Donoghue's short story, The Tale of the Shoe (in Kissing the Witch; Old Tales in New Skins), is interesting in that Cinderella doesn't actually have a stepmother; what she has are a bunch of internalised critical voices that seem to have cropped up since her mother died:

'Nobody made me do the things I did, nobody scolded me, nobody punished me but me. The shrill voices were all inside. Do this, do that, you lazy heap of dirt. Some days they asked why I was still alive. I listened out for my mother, but I couldn't hear her among their clamor.'

On the subject of gender issues, another study that's worth checking out is an anthology edited by Nina Auerbach called Forbidden Journeys Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. But this is more addressing the subversive role of fairy tales in the 19th century rather than in their periods of origination.

I've been reading a Cinderella variation on SurLaLune, 'Finette Cindron', which features once-wealthy royal parents trying to ditch their three daughters as they can no longer afford to keep them in the style to which they're accustomed...

Was watching a documentary about the little ice age (13th to 19th century) last night. As an aside the narrator mentioned that during the starving times due to the little ice age it sometimes became necessary for peasant families to abandon some children in order to be able to feed the rest through the winter, especially in the more northern parts of Europe. Claim was made that folk tales like Hansel and Gretel are a remembrance of this time.

That's interesting Aldawen, the tale about the good stepmother. I'm trying to think of other examples and there's something tickling at the back of my brain but I'm not getting it. I can think of a lot of tales where the godmother is the good opponent of the wicked stepmother, but few in which the stepmother is good.

Aldawen: if you can run down your source for that Icelandic tale, I'd appreciate it! Was it in a collection? Did you read it in German? I've studied Old Icelandic, and the country and culture interest me greatly (as well as the topic under discussion, of course!)

Miriam: thanks for that! Warner is a scholar I've read (parts of From the Beast to the Blonde), but have always wanted to explore further...

I know her From the Beast to the Blonde has already been mentioned, but more germane to this thread would be Marina Warner's No Go The Bogeyman Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, which focuses heavily on parent/child relationships in mythology and folklore, including the mutual fear of being eaten (literally or figuratively).

Abigail, I think they're standalones. This is the first time I've read anything by him, and I'm really enjoying it. There's lots of sensory detail, and the time period and setting are interesting. What he's done with the characters of the stepmother and Cinderella, particularly, is intriguing. Nobody's particularly 'nice', but you get the feeling that being nice in a modern sense would be a bit of a luxury given the living conditions; spreading plague, the risks of a livelihood based on sea trade, just generally being a woman and having to depend on relationships with men to survive. Not that the men in the book have it particularly easy, but the stresses are different and this is first and foremost a tale about women.

Bunwat, cheers for the tale. It rings some bells with me, somehow - the mother who provides food even after death sounds familiar from somewhere else. I loved the detail of the nose ring! It's interesting - both modern retellings I've read have been careful to introduce the prince to Cinderella earlier than the ball, maybe because modern audiences like something a bit more satisfying than he 'was so fascinated by her pretty face and nice manner that he married her'.

Bunny: thanks for supplying that tale! It reminds me of the Russian fairy-tale The White Duck, in which a jealous witch turns a princess into a duck, and takes her place. The duck-mother also struggles to protect her children from their step-mother.

Chandra: I too have often been aware of a disparity in the treatment meted out to neglectful fathers, as opposed to mothers. I'll have to dig around for specific examples, but I know I've read quite a few tales in which the father does something egregious, only to be forgiven at the end, when reunited with his child(ren). I can't think of a single example in which this happens with a neglectful or abusive mother-figure.

Perhaps this reflects the fact that women were far more vital, in earlier times, to the actual care of children? Not that paternal abandonment wasn't an issue, but that it doesn't strike quite so directly at the child's chances of survival...?

Danielle, I've never read any Maguire. Do you have to read Wicked first? I definitely agree that many of these tales set up a dynamic of female competition, and not just the ones featuring step-families.

As you say, fairy tales like Cinderella really allow authors to explore female rivalry. In Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister there is an obvious tension between the daughter of the house and her new stepmother, as they vie for control of the only sphere they are really allowed any influence within (this is set in 1600s Holland); the house. This is made even worse by the fact that the Cinderella-character, Clara, seems to be agoraphobic - I'm not finished reading it yet and suspect there will be some reveal coming about how this came about, but she's determined not to leave the house, which sets up even greater conflict with her stepmother.

As for Clara's father, he's moved from his first marriage, where he is described as henpecked, to his second marriage, with the very controlling stepmother figure, and the book plays on those tensions between men's and women's realms; he is a business man, and really wants nothing to do with any problems in the household - this is women's business. He becomes increasingly absent as a figure, even while physically present, especially after financial set-backs render him practically catatonic.

In some ways, you can't easily study the stepmother without also looking at where the father's at, what he's doing in all of this, you're right.

Here is a Kashmiri folk tale on the theme of the stepmother

One day a Brahman adjured his wife not to eat anything without him lest she should become a she goat. In reply the Brahman's wife begged him not to eat anything without her, lest he should be changed into a tiger. A long time passed by and neither of them broke their word, until one day the Brahman's wife, while giving food to her children, herself took a little to taste; and her husband was not present. That very moment she was changed into a goat.

When the Brahman came home and saw the she goat running about the house he was intensely grieved, because he knew that it was none other than his own beloved wife. He kept the goat tied up in the yard of his house, and tended it very carefully.

In a few years he married again, but this wife was not kind to the children. She at once took a dislike to them, and treated them unkindly and gave them little food. Their mother, the she goat, heard their complainings, and noticed that they were getting thin, and therefore called one of them to her secretly, and bade the child tell the others to strike her horns with a stick whenever they were very hungry, and some food would fall down for them. They did so, and instead of getting weaker and thinner, as their stepmother had expected, they became stronger and stronger. She was surprised to see them getting so fat and strong while she was giving them so little food.

In course of time a one-eyed daughter was born to this wicked woman. She loved the girl with all her heart, and grudged not any expense or attention that she thought the child required. One day, when the girl had grown quite big and could walk and talk well, her mother sent her to play with the other children, and ordered her to notice how and whence they obtained anything to eat. The girl promised to do so, and most rigidly stayed by them the whole day, and saw all that happened.

On hearing that the goat supplied her stepchildren with food the woman got very angry, and determined to kill the beast as soon as possible. She pretended to be very ill, and sending for the hakim, bribed him to prescribe some goat's flesh for her. The Brahman was very anxious about his wife's state, and although he grieved to have to slay the goat (for he was obliged to kill the goat, not having money to purchase another), yet he did not mind if his wife really recovered. But the little children wept when they heard this, and went to their mother, the she goat, in great distress, and told her everything.

"Do not weep, my darlings," she said. "It is much better for me to die than to live such a life as this. Do not weep. I have no fear concerning you. Food will be provided for you, if you will attend to my instructions. Be sure to gather my bones, and bury them all together in some secret place, and whenever you are very hungry go to that place and ask for food. Food will then be given you."

The poor she goat gave this advice only just in time. Scarcely had it finished these words and the children had departed than the butcher came with a knife and slew it. Its body was cut into pieces and cooked, and the stepmother had the meat, but the stepchildren got the bones. They did with them as they had been directed, and thus got food regularly and in abundance.

Some time after the death of the she goat one morning one of the stepdaughters was washing her face in the stream that ran by the house, when her nose ring unfastened and fell into the water. A fish happened to see it and swallowed it, and this fish was caught by a man and sold to the king's cook for his majesty's dinner. Great was the surprise of the cook when, on opening the fish to clean it, he found the nose ring. He took it to the king, who was so interested in it that he issued a proclamation and set it to every town and village in his dominions, that whosoever had missed a nose ring should apply to him.

Within a few days the brother of the girl reported to the king that the nose ring belonged to his sister, who had lost it one day while bathing her face in the river. The king ordered the girl to appear before him, and was so fascinated by her pretty face and nice manner that he married her, and provided amply for the support of her family.

From J. Hinton Knowles, Folk-Tales of Kashmir

All very interesting perspectives. I am particularly drawn to the idea of 'blood ties' and how this, in some ways, explains a step-mother's misdeeds. Which then leads us to the fathers....

In Cinderella and Snow White he's typically dead/absent right? Which pretty much exonerates him. But what's always so troubling about Hansel and Gretel for me is that the father so easily allows himself to be manipulated. It's interesting to see how different retellings approach this. Some make no excuses for him - he's just weak. Some show him being deluded into thinking the children actually have a chance in the woods. Others just don't explain it at all. But in every version I've read he's very contrite at the end and is reunited with his children. It's one of my favorite fairy tales, but I'm never quite satisfied with the treatment of the father. It's almost as if, for me, his action is WORSE because he is the blood relative.

Another thing that's interesting to note is how fairy tales often seem to highlight rivalries between women - often it is in the form of the step-mother/daughter relationship, but there are of course the step-sisters in Cinderella and in The Goose Girl she is betrayed by her maid.

Wow, Danielle! That sounds like a LOT of reading! I'm interested in novelized fair-tale retellings, and everything you mention is on my to-do list, but I don't think I'll get to even a fraction of that this month! Luckily, we can keep the thread around, and revisit it! Like Bunny said, keep the ideas rolling - there's more than enough material here to give everyone an idea, I think.

What about the rest of you? Anyone else planning to read something this month?

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is interesting, so far - the switch in focus from Cinderella to Iris, her stepsister, lets you view the stepmother as a mother, too. I guess the flipside of being such an unpleasant stepmother in some of the traditional tales is that she is motivated in part by trying to be a good mother to her own daughters, and advance them, albeit at Cinderella's expense.
In this book, she's quite a complex woman who has seen some hard times, and is definitely trying to do well (if not kindly) by her daughters. Also, in this story, the Cinderella-figure's birth mother is around for a good third of the book, so you get to see some of the inadvertant damage she does to her daughter's psyche, too. Possibly easier/more acceptable for modern authors to criticise a mother than, say, the Grimms, who found it preferable to make the monster a stepmother?

Thanks Danielle! Those are interesting contributions, keep those ideas coming!

I have to admit, I got a bit over-excited about the idea of a folklore reading group, and have started doing a bit of reading already :)
I read a couple of online overviews about stepmothers in folklore, and those two schools of thought came out again and again; demonising stepmothers as a more acceptable way of criticising a maternal figure than having a go at the actual mother, versus the simple social reality that so many women died in childbirth that stepmothers were a common fact of life, and might also be keen to safeguard their birth children's access to limited resources (rather than their stepchildren's).
Sounds like Marina Warner has written about the latter idea in her book From the Beast to the Blonde On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, which our library doesn't hold, unfortunately!

As for a reading list, I'm starting off with some (mostly YA) fiction based on Cinderella - I found a good starter list of retellings in an online essay by
Terri Windling - Cinderella: Ashes, Blood and the Slipper of Glass.

So far, I've read Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, and am currently reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire. I also found a neat picture book, Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal A Worldwide Cinderella, which combines aspects of Cinderella variants from all over the world into one narrative, and a nasty but interesting short story by Tanith Lee, 'Red As Blood', based on Snow White.

Other books on my reading list include Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, based on the Chinese Cinderella, and short stories by Joanne Harris ('The Ugly Sister'), Peter Straub ('Ashputtle'), George Cruikshank ('Cinderella and the Glass Slipper'), Emma Donoghue ('The Tale of the Shoe') and Anne Isabella Ritchie ('Cinderella').

Sorry it's such a long post, but it is an interesting and inspiring topic! And modern authors have chosen to rewrite the 'wicked' stepmother in an intriguing variety of ways. Don't want to make this too long so will post the links to the online overviews I found in another post, if anyone's interested!

Well I think what I read on the subject depends on what the library can come up with really.

That's an interesting idea, Bun - that somehow the stepmother is a safer figure, particularly when it comes to looking at the older/younger woman theme. I'd always assumed that the wicked stepmother motif had more to do with older notions of blood-ties, and what they meant. It occurs to me now that the mother figure is such a powerful one, so central to our sense of self, that examining maternal cruelty and misdeeds must be very difficult, and having the mother be a step-mother might indeed be useful.

Were you planning on reading anything specific on this, or just going with what you already know?

ETA: hadn't seen the second half of your post, when writing the above. I guess, in other ways, the stepmother is less safe? I love folklore - it can go any which way, no?

Hmmm, well I think that one of the things that interests me is that it seems to me folktales use the figure of the stepmother in order to say things about rivalries and mother/daughter relationships and relationships between older and younger women which are unacceptable when said about actual mothers.

In fact it seems like wicked stepmothers and fairy godmothers are used in lots of tales to explore the good/bad aspects of the maternal relationship. Whereas actual mothers are often killed off early in the story so they can be left on a pedestal.

There are other aspects too, that was just the first one that occurred to me off the top of my head.

Oh - I remember, another thing that interested me about the topic was that I read a study somewhere recently; research that there really is a small but measurable tendency to be more forgiving of children to whom you are genetically related, and that tendency has to be overcome by education with parents dealing with fostered or adopted children.

So I was thinking about the higher incidence of deaths in childbirth in the past, and this study I was reading and put them together in my head and started to think hmmm maybe wicked stepmothers were a more real hazard in the past than I had previously considered.

Also, as the person who suggested this topic, Bunny, I'm wondering if you'd like to give a little summary of what particularly interests you, and what you'd most like to explore? Thanks!

Well, May is just around the corner, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to get this thread going a few days early, to share ideas about reading material. There are any number of folk and fairy tales featuring stepmothers, among them Cinderella, Snow White, and Vasilisa the Beautiful. I know that Hansel and Gretel sometimes features a step-mother, and sometimes just a mother. Perhaps we can start compiling a list of tales, as we go along?

Critical works addressing this topic include Jacqueline Schechtman's The Stepmother in Fairy Tales: Bereavement and the Feminine Shadow. Sibylle Birkhauser-Oeri's The Mother: Archetypal Image in Fairytales, has a chapter on the step-mother. There is also an essay about the "wicked stepmother," written by Fern Kupfer, and contained in the anthology Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales.

I myself am planning on re-reading all the variants of Cinderella and Snow White in my library, as well as the Kupfer essay. What about all of you? What (if anything) do you plan to read for this month's topic?