In short, the wicked stepmother, one of the most notorious antagonists in the history of human stories, was the result of an edit.
Out of sensitivity, perhaps, or just a more comprehensible character arc, the Grimms altered the beginning of the story between their editions, and what we most commonly encounter now is the version they published in 1857, in which the innocent mother dies after giving birth, the king remarries, and neither Snow White nor the reader must contend with the disturbing notion that a mother would murder her own little girl simply because of her looks. It does not take more than a single page before the queen, once the most beautiful woman in the world and now surpassed by her own daughter, plots to kill the child she so desired. Instead she lives, and in the course of raising her daughter is revealed to be vain and envious.
Consider “Snow White”: That same stately queen who desires a child as red as blood and as white as snow does not die at all in the version of the tale that the Grimms originally set down in 1812. I’ve mentioned before that the Grimms collected many fairy tales in which it is the mother, not a stepmother, who is the villain. Just like couples who long for offspring, wicked stepmothers in the world of fairy tales are legion, and they need no introduction here as the very figureheads of abuse, jealousy, and murderous rage. Almost immediately, the wicked stepmother takes her place. And so we arrive at what may be at the root of my own lack of full-fledged enthusiasm for parenthood: In fairy tales, the only good mother is a dead one. My favorite fairy tale “The Juniper Tree” begins much like “Snow White,” with a woman cutting her finger and, upon seeing the drops of blood on the snow, wishing for “a child as red as blood and as white as snow!” In this tale, that child is a little boy, and when the new mother sees her baby son for the first time, she is “so delighted” that she instantly dies. Image via New York Public Library Digital Collections But what most inevitably comes to pass is that once the wish is granted, tragedy occurs, and the woman who so wished to be made a mother does not live long enough to see her child grow older than a day. In fairy tales, once a couple wishes for a child, what follows is sometimes a miracle, sometimes a bargain. Many of us want children because we don’t want to be childless. But babies bring joy, and we don’t want to grow old without a family-what a lonely thought! Sometimes I can’t help but bristle at the announcements of newly expectant cousins, as though each new member of the extended family casts a shade of pity on my husband and me-a shade I wouldn’t mind shrugging off. I want to be able to write and work I don’t want a child to have to watch the world succumb to climate change and overpopulation. Babies were needy things that only became children, and other children were loud and cruel.Įven now, in my thirties and hearing the tick of my own internal clock, starting a family is an abstract concept to me, and my feelings on it change on an almost daily basis. When I was younger, reading fairy tales in bed while my own parents watched late night news downstairs, I found this wish silly and incomprehensible. It’s so common a beginning that it would seem to capture something universal: After a happily ever after, the next step is fervently desired parenthood. “Oh, if only we had a child!” So many tales begin with this singularly human wish, uttered by poor couples and royal ones, whispered over blood-tinged snow by lonely queens or wept in garden patches by desperate husbands.
This is Tales for Willful Readers, a monthly column by Cate Fricke on the lasting power of folk and fairy tales, how they have influenced us individually and collectively, and the lessons they offer for modern life.
0 kommentar(er)
