Good mothers vs.

Bad mothers

Good mothers, in fairy tales, are usually presented like natural mothers. In my opinion, the
reason is simple. We supposed that a flesh-and-blood mother, like Maria Tatar is calling he
natural mothers in her book, is always supporting her child, because she loves him. For us,
this is the normality. A mother is always suffering when her child does, good mothers
sacrifice themselves for their child well-being. A good mother, in fairy tales, is a woman
who wants with all her heart to give birth and sacrifice her own life to have a baby. Such a
mother we met in tales like Juniper Tree or Snow White. In both stories, the future
mothers are dreaming to have a beautiful child and they are paying with blood their wishes.
In Brother Grimms tales, the good mothers are always dead, absent or transformed into
some entities such as a bird, a cow or a tree (usually a symbol of nature).
Mothers, in general, have a central role in fairy tales compiled by the Grimms, in part
because Wilhelm Grimm could rarely resist the temptation to act as censor by turning the
monstrously unnatural cannibals and enchantresses of this tales into stepmothers, cooks,
witches, or mothers-in-law. As the audience for the tales changed, the need to shift the burden
of evil form a mother to a stepmother became ever more urgent. The threaten is that, in our
times, the biggest audience for the fairy tales are children and, how Ludwig Bechsteis said,
there is nothing that children would rather read than fairy tales. Among the thousands of
children who every year get their hands on books of fairy tales, there must be many so-called
stepchildren. When such a child, after reading many a fairy tale in witch stepmothers appear
(the stepmothers are all uniformly evil), feels that it has been somehow injured or insulted
by its own stepmother, then that his guardian. This aversion can that it disturbs the peace and
happiness of an entire family. Imagine if all that stepmothers, mothers-in-law, cooks or
witches were flesh-and-blood mothers. All the children will be terrified by their mothers. In
this case, the tales will be compromised. Nobody will allow anymore that his little boy or girl
read such a story.
If the good mother are often dead, the father is usually not. One of the reasons is that,
without the father, it will be no stepmother to replace the real one. Always the fathers
remarriage is the reason of social persecution of a child. But while the fathers responsibility
for creating turmoil by choosing a monstrous marriage partner recedes into the background or
is entirely suppressed as a motif even as the father himself is virtually eliminated as a
character, the foul deeds of his wife come to occupy centre stage. A good example is
Cinderella. She lives just with her stepmother and her stepmothers daughter, and about his
father we know just that he is gone. There are, also, fairy tales like Juniper Tree, where the
father is present in the story, but he does not know anything about the murder of his little boy.
He even eats him and, without his knowledge, he is committing cannibalism. We can say that,
even his body is there, he is totally absent. But even they violate basic codes of morality and
decency, like Maria Tatar said, fathers remain noble figures who rarely commit premeditated
acts of evil. Some heroines make a point of returning home to their fathers and sharing the
new-found wealth with him and with him alone, like in Hansel and Gretel. In one version
of Snow White, recorded by the Grimms, it is the father and not the prince who discovers

his daughters coffin on his way through the wood and who mobilizes medical help to
reanimate her. But on the whole, fathers in the Grimms tales either absent themselves from
hone or are so passive as to be super fluous. This is the reason why we not seem to invest
father figure in the tales with much emotion or attachment at all.
Bad mothers, like I said, are always presented like stepmothers, cooks, witches or mothersin-law.
A very good example of mother-in-law is presented in Nursery and Household Tales. In
this story there are three types of ogres. The first comprises beasts and monsters; these
include wolves and bears, but also the man-eating giants who threaten to devour the hero as
he makes his way through the world. The second group consists of social deviants; among
them are robbers and highway-men who waylay innocent young women, murder them, chop
up their corpses, and cook the pieces in a stew. The third (and this group easily outnumber the
members of both other categories) is composed by women. They are various cooks,
stepmothers, witches, and mothers-in-law with voracious appetites for human fare,
sometimes even for the flesh and blood or for the liver and heart of their own relatives. Snow
Whites stepmother, the witch in Hansel and Gretel and the cook in Fledgling belong to
this class of cannibalistic fiends. As we can see, the last type is presented like the worst
(worst that the others two at the same time). In all this stories, a bad mother is more evil
than the beasts in the forest. We know that in Snow White, after the stepmother order Snow
Whites murder, the little princess is running into the forest, but the beasts do not hurt her.
Despite the bad image that this evil mothers have in fairy tales, their role is an important one,
much more important than that of a good mother, because they are always the reason why
the children are leaving their commodity space and become adults. It is true that almost all
the time they need help to pass all over the challenges, but in the end, they are prepared to
handle the situation by themselves. For this reason, I agree the version that a bad mother
must not be a stepmother, it can also be a flesh-and-blood mother. It must not be even bad.
All this malice can be just in the children had. He must be upset because his mother is forcing
him to grow up and for this reason he is seeing her like a bad mother. My opinion is
enforced by Marias Tatar comments about Snow Whites stepmother. She says that Snow
Whites stepmother is perhaps the most infamous stepmother of them all. But is she really a
stepmother? In the first version of the Nursery and Household Tales, Snow Whites mother
never dies; her vanity and pride turn her into an ogre who orders her daughter murdered; she
then devours what she believe to be the girls lungs and liver.
This is teaching children to always listen to the grownups, to never trust strangers and to
always be good and humble. They also learn how to appreciate what they have: a beautiful
family with parents that love and cherish them.