Who's Wicked Now?: The Stepmother As Fairy Tale Heroine
Who's Wicked Now?: The Stepmother As Fairy Tale Heroine
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Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2010), pp. 255-271. Copyr
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Stepmother breaks her daughter out of prison, and the two of them flee to th
woods. Stepmother hides her daughter and, once the daughter is recaptured
tries various schemes to prevent, or at least to delay, the planned execution. She
tries appealing to the Reaper, her arch enemy and the authority in the woods,
with magic, sex, and reason, but she fails. Her daughter is executed, and Step
mother seeks vengeance. The execution of her daughter and Stepmother's sub
sequent revenge is not a new plot to Stepmother, as she repeats it over and
again with each of her daughters, the many heroines of fairy-tale tradition:
holes drilled in them and rolled into the river. Their going always
sickens me and the deep self-righteous laughter of their executioners
causes the bile to rise, and for a time thereafter I unleash a storm of
hell, or at least what's in my meager power to raise, and so do my
beautiful wild daughters, it's a kind of violent mourning, and so they
come down on us again and more daughters are caught up in what
the Reaper calls the noble toils of justice and thus we keep the cycle
going, rolling along through this timeless time like those tumbling
nail-studded barrels. (1-2)
Stepmother explains that there is nothing new in what we are about to read;
she has experienced it all before and will experience it all again. But she still
has to try to save her daughter, and as readers we are left with the impression
that she will keep trying with each new daughter's appearance.
The impetus of the novel is summed up in its second sentence, narrated by
Stepmother: "my poor desperate daughter, her head is locked on one thing and
one thing only: how to escape her inescapable fate" (1). Throughout the novel,
Stepmother and other characters struggle against their predetermined fairy-tale
functions. Despite recognizing the "inescapability" of their fates, they still try to
change the cycle of events they know will unfold by manipulating fairy-tale pat-
terns to their advantage. Stepmother, too, is engaged "in what the Reaper calls
the noble toils of justice"; as an adversary, she challenges the Reaper and his val-
ues. Unlike the Reaper, Stepmother is not motivated by a larger cause but works
to save lives, one daughter at a time. And yet her focused actions have a wider
impact in that by trying to save the lives of her daughters, she begins to undo
the master narratives that make her daughters victims. In attempting to change
the rules, she shows that they are not "natural." There is no evidence in the text
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By using well-known figures and motifs, and not inventing wholly new ones
Coover forces a comparison between his Stepmother and her cruel foremoth-
ers. Coover collapses and dismantles a variety of tales, tale types, motifs, and
functions in Stepmother, challenging not only the popular conception of fairy
tales in Western culture but also the structuralist base of fairy-tale and folklore
studies. He does not change the actions of stepmothers who have been previ-
ously identified as villains (by Vladimir Propp) or as cruel (by Stith Thompson)
Instead, he shifts the focalization and the motivations for these actions, thus
recontextualizing specific acts by cruel stepmothers to allow for meaning that
is not possible in Propp's rigid and gendered functions or Thompson's limitin
motifs. For example, when Stepmother sends the "kind" stepdaughter on an
impossible task in an embedded recounting of tale type ATU 480, The Kind
and the Unkind Girls (a tale indentified under the cruel stepmother motif,
S31), she does so as an act of protection. The "kind" stepdaughter is annoying
and sanctimonious, and Stepmother is afraid she is going to hurt the step-
daughter. To avoid this, Stepmother devises ways "to get her out from under
foot" (23). The girl returns home "coughing up gold pieces," a curse courtesy
of Stepmother's rivals (23). When the "unkind" daughter duplicates the task
she does so without Stepmother's blessing and in order to stand up for her
mother. From Stepmother's point of view, she is protecting her "kind" step-
daughter by removing her from the house, not seeking to harm her. And
though the "unkind" daughter is cursed to spit toads, it is not a punishment
for her and Stepmother's greed (as it is often explained), but it is in reaction t
her actively defending her mother. The actions of Stepmother remain consis-
tent with those identified in the tale type, but in changing the context of those
actions Coover challenges the traditional classifications and understandings of
the fairy tale.
This generic self-consciousness relies on the reader's familiarity with the
genre for any critique to work. Merja Makinen, in "Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fic-
tion, Reading Jeanette Winterson," asserts that "[t]he fairy tale, as a well-known
culturally familiar body of texts with an almost canonical status ... is a ripe sit
for both reduplication and rewriting, for pastiche and for parody, within a
broadening of the concept of literary historical metafiction" (148). And in
Cathy Lynn Preston's article "Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender:
Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale," Preston argues that "[i]n postmodernity the
'stuff' of fairy tales exists as fragments (princess, frog, slipper, commodity rela
tions in a marriage market) in the nebulous realm that we might most simply
identify as cultural knowledge" (210). I would also add "wicked stepmother" to
Preston's list of examples. Coover's rewriting of the stepmother figure depend
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on the reader's familiarity with the popularized stepmother character and the
associated narrative conventions.1 Preston's concept of "fragment" is particu-
larly useful for analyzing Stepmother because Coover does not work solely from
the "cruel stepmother" motif (S31), but instead combines a variety of other
stepmother motifs, stereotypes, and assumptions.2 Motifs are the smallest rec-
ognizable units of meaning in the tales cataloged by folklorists, but fragments
take their meaning from a wider cultural context. The term "fragment" is more
flexible than "motif" because it is not tied to specific academic designations.
Using "fragment," then, redirects the unit's meaning by breaking up the motifs
into smaller parts or placing them in different contexts, thereby destabilizing
motifs and opening the unit (stepmother) to multiple possible meanings. As a
fairy-tale fragment, whose reach is wider than the folklore designation of "cruel
stepmother," the wicked stepmother exists outside of any specific tale. She is a
stock character who is evil and always has been. This cultural knowledge of the
character creates the ground on which Coover's rewriting stands.
Of course, the villains we know and love as wicked stepmothers were not
always stepmothers. As both Maria Tatar and Marina Warner, among others,
have pointed out, the Brothers Grimm made editorial changes to various sto-
ries from one edition of their collection to the next. These editorial changes led
to the absent mother and the wicked stepmother becoming staples of the fairy-
tale genre (Tatar 36-37; Warner 210-13). The mothers of Snow White and
Hansel and Gretei had been the first villains in their stories, siding with the fa-
ther over the children and attempting to kill the children they viewed as
threats. As the Grimms increased the violence in their tales in order to make
them more didactic, they changed these wicked mothers into stepmothers, ef-
fectively killing off the good mothers to make room for the villains. In The
Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Tatar states, "Wilhelm Grimm recog-
nized that most children (along with those who read to them) find the idea of
wicked stepmothers easier to tolerate than that of cruel mothers" (37). While
Tatar's explanation of the appearance of the stepmother focuses on the text and
editorial choices, where one wicked person is substituted for another, Bruno
Bettelheim's Freudian interpretation in Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales provides a psychological reason for Wilhelm Grimm's
editorial choices. Bettelheim is fixated on the psychic and emotional develop-
ment of a child who splits the mother into two people. Bettelheim suggests
that "[t]he fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good
mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one's angry thoughts
and wishes about her - a guilt which would seriously interfere with the good
relation to Mother" (69). The figure of the mother is split into two roles in fairy
tales, says Bettelheim, as a way to provide children with a means of handling
the troubling emotion of anger toward a beloved parent.
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In this case the psychoanalytic approach neglects both the editorial and the
historical origins of the stepmother. Both Tatar and Warner point out that a
straightforward psychoanalytic reading of the wicked stepmother figure is in-
complete, as, in addition to the Grimms' editorial practices, it neglects sociohis-
torical cultural context (Tatar 49-50; Warner 212-14). Both scholars refer to
the high rates of mortality for mothers during childbirth before medical inter-
vention was commonly practiced: the stepmother was a common figure in his-
tory. Arguing that Bettelheim's approach "leeches history out of the fairy tale"
(213), Warner suggests that the cruelty of stepmothers found in fairy tales has a
historical origin in addition to the editorial one. With remarriage the second
wife could easily find herself competing with her stepchildren for the very re-
sources for which she married (Warner 213). Thus, cruelty to her new hus-
band's biological children would be a way to ensure survival for her own bio-
logical children. Warner also suggests that the villainy of the stepmother figure
is partially possible due to "psychoanalytical and historical interpreters of fairy
260
tales usually enter [ing] stories like 'Cinderella,' 'Snow White,' or 'Beauty and the
Beast' from the point of the view of the protagonist" (214). As Warner points
out, popular fairy tales rarely involve first-person narration (215).
Coover's use of first-person narration, with the stepmother telling her own ex-
perience of events, encourages reader identification with Stepmother. In refer-
ring to Coover's rewriting of fairy tales in his collection Pricksongs & Descants,
Jackson I. Cope states, "Coover in these stories accepts and preserves the in-
tegrity of the narrative history presented him in his folk sources. The signifi-
cant difference is in the place of the narrator" (19). Coover employs the same
technique in Stepmother ; he shifts the narrator out of extradiegetic narration
and into multiple narrative positions for the stories being told. Stepmother
narrates four out of fourteen sections (including the first and last sections),
and the extradiegetic narration is focalized through other characters and an ex-
ternal narrator. In Postmodern Fairy Tales : Gender and Narrative Strategies ,
Cristina Bacchilega explains that "an external or impersonal narrator whose
straightforward statements carry no explicit mark of human perspective -
gender, class, or individuality . . . presentís] the narrator's vision as the only
possible one" (34). Statements such as '"there was,' 'there are,' [and] 'she
was,'" when made by an extradiegetic narrator, present information as objec-
tive knowledge or "fact" (Bacchilega 34). In this way, extradiegetic narration
discourages questioning of the narrative voice, and "naturalizes" the "social
conventions" presented by that voice (Bacchilega 34, 35). First-person narra-
tion, on the other hand, acknowledges the subjectivity of the narrative posi-
tion. Rather than presenting a single external narrator that functions as the
moral authority for the tale, moral judgment shifts between Stepmother and
the external narrator.
Stephen Benson, in "The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover," describes the
voices of Stepmother - Stepmother herself and the extradiegetic narrator - as
"dense, elaborately loaded and knowing," voices that are "freighted with
knowledge and tradition" (123). The narrating voices are fully entrenched in
fairy-tale tradition and so carry with them the authority of that tradition.
Coover provides Stepmother with not only a voice, but with a voice recogniz-
able as authoritative in fairy-tale tradition. Thus the reader is able to both iden-
tify with Stepmother because of her first-person account, which diminishes
the distance between character and reader in the popular tales, and recognize
that voice as imbued with the authority expected of a traditional extradiegetic
narrator.
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262
263
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264
If the stepmother is no longer simply "wicked" and no longer the villain of the
story, who is the villain? In the case of the novel Stepmother ; none of the char-
acters snuggly fits into the role of "villain." What is left, then, is the plot and its
relationship to pattern. The wicked elements of the story are the popularized,
conventional fairy-tale patterns that have been reproduced and naturalized as
authoritative in Western popular culture and fix the characters of Stepmother
into well-defined roles and plots. Coover unmakes these patterns in three pri-
mary ways: (1) he reveals that the patterns have a stranglehold on which con-
ventions are recognized as making up the genre in popular culture; (2) he
challenges the authority of those patterns to have that hold by showing that
they can be contested and are not inevitable; and (3) he offers a way to contest
those patterns by staging these conflicts from within the stories.
Coover's deconstruction of fairy-tale narratives relies on his impeding of
those narratives. His use of nontraditional fairy-tale qualities, such as first-person
narration, complex and self-aware characters, and metanarrative critiques, breaks
genre boundaries and expands the possibilities for fairy tales as a genre in
265
stable and as natural as they purport to be. Coover deconstructs the popular-
ized, conventional patterns of the Western fairy-tale genre to reveal them as
patterns without the authority that we as authors, readers, and popularizers
give them. The authority of the convention comes not from the tales or even
their authors, but from the people who assume them to be authoritative.
As such, it is only fitting that the protagonists greatest enemy is the
Reaper, the character who thrives on patterns and is intent on reproducing
them: "[The Reaper] does not disturb the way things are and is angered by
those who do; thus his unending conflicts with Stepmother, who would hang
the lot and burn the forest down if she could, and all the world beyond it"
(13). By maintaining order the Reaper preserves his authority in Reaper's
Woods, named after him for his constant presence. He is the authority because
the other characters recognize him as the authority. In the final pages of the
novel, the conflict between Stepmother and the Reaper comes to a head, and
they discuss the inescapability of plot and Stepmother's desire to change it:
266
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a girl not to enter a forbidden room, much like in "Bluebeard" (ATU 312), and
then punishes the girl when she does so by banishing her from heaven, removing
her ability to speak, and later stealing her children so that the girl is accused of
cannibalism and is to be burned at the stake until she confesses her sins. Like the
268
mother is never able to truly break free from the plot set in motion in the firs
lines of the novel. She makes a lot of noise and shatters a few of her enemie
but the cycle in which she spins remains unbroken. She is doomed to repea
the scenario again, watching her daughters be executed to the delight of th
folk and seek her revenge for their deaths in a "kind of violent mourning
again and again, "keep[ing] the cycle going" (Coover 2). Writers of fairy tale
today who are dissatisfied with the roles of women projected by the seeming
endless reproduction of a small canon of popular tales are struggling, like
Stepmother, with the narrative patterns that came before them. How does on
rewrite a fairy tale to remove and critique the ideological values associated
with the genre and still be writing a fairy tale?
The future of postmodern feminist fairy tales lies in stories that can
rewrite the genre without totally unmaking it. Jack Zipes, in Relentless Progres
The Reconfiguration of Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling, explai
that contemporary writing of fairy tales by women does not seek to constru
a new, feminist fairy-tale canon: "Instead of focusing directly on gender issu
and radicalizing the canon, women writers nowadays tend to depict baffled
and distressed women and men caught in a maize [sic] of absurd situations. In
doing this, they are endeavoring to unravel the causes of their predicamen
and use narrative strategies that both reflect the degeneration of communic
tion and are somewhat degenerative themselves" (130). This, I believe, is tru
of Coover's work as well. Coover's novel does not reveal liberated women and
strong heroines in opposition to the popular tales that are the fodder for his
novel; however, by using narrative strategies that show how carefully scripted
gender roles are unsatisfying and detrimental in and beyond the world of nar-
ration, Coover's novel does feminist work, even though his critique of misogyny
is part of his larger critique of the authority of authors and genre.
Coover's construction of Stepmother exhibits how similar the most popular
fairy tales in Western culture are by how seemingly effortlessly they are collapsed
into their roles. In making the characters aware of their ultimate fates, Coover
gives his characters, well, character. The princes, for example, though repug-
nant, are more complex than their popular predecessors - they have motive for
the rapes and murder they commit and are nevertheless clever in their manipu-
lation. The stories never reach a level of realism, as Coover of course is not at-
tempting realism, but they are more interesting as characters because they are
provided with motivation and agency. The plots remain stable, but the details
and distortions that Coover supplies enrich the fairy-tale genre he is parodying.
The possibility of evolution here lies not with the characters in Coover's novel,
but with the reader. The characters are bound by their roles, and as they struggle
to change their predicaments, they are only further embittered by the trappings
of the fairy tale. The reader, however, is free to understand the characters in a
269
new light - traditional heroes are rendered less gallant, victims are availed of
agency, and villains are humanized. As Brian Evenson argues in Understanding
Robert Coover, "By clearing a space for his readers, [Coover] allows them to move
into the freedom that they always have but which they sometimes are unable to
perceive" (22). The characters are trapped by the plot, but the reader is shown
how complex fairy tales can be and is led to question the authority of the popu
larized conventions. The reader is provided with a way to reimagine the genre
Though Stepmother is clearly a postmodern novel, it also is a fairy tale. It
contains all the recognizable traits of the fairy-tale genre and then plays with
them. The novel does not abandon fairy-tale patterns in remaking the genre,
but instead shows possibilities for those patterns. Coover's work reminds us
that fairy tales are not static monoliths. Though the patterns may appear to b
stable, there is room for play. Near the end of the novel, when confronted with
Stepmother's plot to save her daughter from execution by preventing the
Reaper, a fixture at all executions, from attending the event, the Reaper says,
"Not all legends are true" (89). When the Reaper tells this to Stepmother, he is
explaining that though the pattern is for him to be at all executions, it is not
causal relationship nor does it hold some essential truth about how executions
happen. Therein lies the future of the genre; fairy tales as they have been can-
onized are not "true." Just because a narrative pattern is pervasive does not
mean it is essential to the genre of fairy tales. Patterns can be broken, and the
plot can continue. Writers can rewrite the popular fairy tale and still write fairy
tales, and their heroines need not walk the same paths as their foremothers in
order to reach the story's happy ending.
Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2008 Popular Culture Asso-
ciation Conference. Many thanks to Cristina Bacchilega and Jennifer Orme for
their guidance in revising.
1 . Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk- Literature identifies several motifs associated
with stepmothers, and although most of the motifs are worded to suggest the
stepmother acts in opposition to the desires of the hero(ine), clearly aligning her
with Propp's villain , only one is identified as "cruel" (S31). However, "Cruel step-
mother" is a large entry with sixteen tale types associated with it.
2. While Coover certainly tackles Propp's functions and Thompson's motifs in his
novel, he is also working with the popularized conception of the stepmother fig-
ure as wicked, and it is this popular understanding of the character that I exam-
ine in this article. I refer to the stepmother figure throughout as "wicked," rather
than "cruel," to avoid confusing the popularized wicked stepmother with the
more diverse cruel stepmother that is specific to folklore studies.
3. For an analysis of Briar Rose, see Sünje Redies, "Return with New Complexities:
Robert Coover's Briar Rose and Jaroslav Kusnír, "Subversion of Myths: High and
Low Cultures in Donald Barthelme's Snow White and Robert Coover's Briar Rose."
270
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadel-
phia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.
Preston, Cathy Lynn. "Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodern
and the Fairy Tale." Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Ed. Donald Haas
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 197-212.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. Ed. Louis A. Wag
2nd ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 2001.
Redies, Sünje. "Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover's Briar Rose." Marvels
Tales 18.1 (2004): 9-27.
Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 19
Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature : A Classification of Narrative Element
Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books
and Local Legends. Rev. and enlarged ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1975.
Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliograph
vols. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New Yo
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994.
Zipes, Jack. "Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm." The Complete Fairy T
of the Brothers Grimm. Trans, and ed. Jack Zipes. Expanded ed. New York: Banta
1992. xvii-xxxi.
271