The evil (step)mother
It is very common in fairy tales have an evil character in the story, and several times that character is the stepmother. Besides that, the fathers in the family seem to have less power in decision making and to be very easy influenceable by their new wife. “Hensel and Gretel”, “Cinderella”, and “Juniper Tree” are examples of stories that the stepmother (or mother) acts against the children.
First, I want to unwrap “Hensel and Gretel”. This story originally has the mother as the evil character and in later versions it was changed to stepmother, probably because it is even more disturbing to see the biological mother abandoning her children. In the story, the father loved his children, but with fear of standing up to his wife, he let his wife convince him into taking the children into the forest and leaving them there. The father hesitated at first, but he was convinced since they didn’t have any food and the wife wanted them to be gone. The children were missing for days, but when they finally came back, the mother was gone and the father welcomed the kids back home.
“Hensel and Gretel” had different contemporary retellings, but I want to focus on the latest one that came out, which is also called “Hensel and Gretel” and it was released in 2020. The movie is considered horror genre and it is not targeted towards children. The film follows the original story very well, but has some variances, such as staying their first night in a kind woodsman house, and the witch’s house wasn’t made of food, but they still had a feast waiting for them on the table.
After reading and watching more about the story, I noticed that when Hensel and Gretel go back home their mother is gone, in some versions it is told us that she is dead. The fact that when they come back, after having killed the witch, makes me wonder if the mother (or stepmother in the older versions) is the witch that was trying to kill them, but got killed instead.
Nowadays, stepmothers still have the connotation of being evil and many times disliked by their stepchildren, and we can see that on non-fairy tale movies as well. In “The Parent Trap” we see a clear example of stepchildren disliking the father’s new woman. Throughout the movie, the twins who were separated after birth are reunited and they design a plan to make their parents fall in love again. When the father announces that he is planning on marrying his new girlfriend, the two girls were devastated and still acting against it. When the father realizes she wasn’t the right woman for him, he breaks up the engagement and get back to his children’s mother. Although this story is a lot less dark and the stepmother never tried to abandon the kids or eat them, we still see the dislike and refusal of the children towards their stepmother. Another similarity is that the children were trying to tell the father that she wasn’t the woman for him, but he was so influenced by the new woman that he wouldn’t listen to the kids. Though, unlike many fairy tales, he changed his mind and separated from the stepmother.
