Retelling The Juniper Tree & Humanizing The Villain

The Juniper Tree (1990) directed by Nietzchka Keene tells the story of two witch sisters who flee from their home after their mother is stoned and killed by neighbors for witch-craft. Their quest for safety is to find the oldest sister a husband and find solace in a new family. Once the older sister finds a husband and marries, he brings the two girls into his home where he is raising a son from his first marriage; his wife, who passed from childbirth, is buried near his home. Now embodying the role of a stepmother, the older sister actively tries to find peace in her new home- expressing love and effort towards her new husband and his son, Jonas. Jonas, from the beginning despises his stepmother and does not trust her- yelling at both his father and her in frustration often, and causing turbulence within his new family unit. His actions cause his father to be rough physically and verbally with his new wife, and she becomes frustrated with her step son’s inability to let her live in peace. While Jonas revisits his mother’s grave often throughout the story, Margot, the younger sister, sees the ghost of her mother often. Margot pleads with Jonas to give her older sister a break, and although he is kind to his new sister, he refuses to accept the replacement of his late mother. As ample time passes and Jonas receives a feather he believes to be from his mother, he tells his stepmother that it will protect him from everything bad, including her. Unable to form any connection with the boy and her husband, Clara responds frustrated “if you really believe that then jump off of this cliff.” It’s clear that she was trying to prove to the little boy that his rejection of his new mother, and illusion of his biological mothers’ presence was not beneficial to him- she did not want him to jump and die- which he does not. The boy instead loses balance and falls. The stepmother dumps his body in the river, sews his mouth shut with one of his fingers in it, and puts another one of his fingers in a stew. Time passes and when the father comes to the realization, thanks to aloof Margot, that his wife is the reason for the death of his lost son, she runs away on horseback. Time passes and we see Margot and the father miss the older sister; the husband realizes she did not intentionally kill the son. The younger sister found Jonas’s finger in the stew, and buries it within his mother’s grave- a juniper tree sprouts in its place and among it lives a bird who Margot knows is Jonas; his father does not realize this. The film ends with the older sister’s husband leaving Margot and the bird to go find his wife, unaware that his son was still with him.

The Original telling of the story, The Juniper Tree (1812) by the Brothers Grimm, is a shorter tale that begins with a father and his son. The boy’s mother died of happiness after his birth, and afterwards his father remarries a woman who brings along her daughter into the home. The stepmother resents the boy, beating and battering him in the house. She ends up murdering the son by slamming his neck in a chest, ripping his head off. She then ties the boys head back onto his body and sits him in a chair, tells her daughter to wake him, and convinces her daughter, Marlene, that she has killed her new brother. The stepmother cooks the boy into a stew, and Marlene saves the bones of her half-brother, and brings them to a Juniper Tree. The bones vanish before her and a bird emerges from flames in the middle of the tree. The bird, who is the boy, sings throughout the town and gathers gifts from the townspeople for his voice: a gold chain, a pair of red slippers, and a mill stone. He then returns home with the three gifts, dropping the chain onto his father’s neck, the shoes to his new sister, and the mill stone on top of his stepmother. The stepmother perishes into flames, and in her place returns the boy- the story ends with his father and sister embracing him, and the three of them live in happiness and love free of the evil woman.

A key difference I took away from the film is the way it rejects this notion of the father’s second wife being innately evil towards the boy. Instead, it is the boy who seems to push himself to his demise as a result of his stubbornness and initial choice to not give the woman a chance. She tries and tries to make their new living situation a pleasant one and he will not have it unless he gets his way, and she leaves. The audience sympathizes with the woman because we know she has nowhere to go and can’t return home because she will be killed for being the daughter of a witch- she is also the victim of physical abuse by her husband- and the plot frames this abuse as a result of the boy’s inability to accept his new mother-figure. Even in the time of his death I did not view the woman as the stressor regardless of her sadistic disposal of Jonas’s body.

Keene’s retelling of the story elicits empathy towards the stepmother from the viewers, rewriting the character of the Grimm’s evil stepmother in the original story. The retelling’s shift in the stepmother and boy’s relationship dynamic leading to his death inverts the black and white villain vs. heroine plot in the original telling, and opens up the story for a “less flat” multifaceted audience perception of all characters in the film, rewriting the fairy tale trope of “stepmother and witch” as a character who arguably faces more adversity than the boy, but struggles to overcome it due to variables out of her control.

Links:

https://elon.kanopy.com/product/juniper-tree

https://www.nme.com/news/music/bjorks-dreamy-1990-film-debut-juniper-tree-re-released-2396590

https://scalisto.blogspot.com/2018/10/nietzchka-keene-juniper-tree-1990.html

https://www.amazon.com/Juniper-Tree-Other-Tales-Grimm/dp/0374339716