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The text explores three areas in which the stepfamily is likely to seem an incomplete institution, with ambiguous norms
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A perfect family structure is considered to have a married couple with one or two children. When the family is broken up, sometimes a stepparent comes in and tries to replace what has been “broken”. This usually concludes with disaster or even death. The Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales show a pattern of this same damaged family problem, like in Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. Stepmothers in the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales are seen as wicked and want power over the family: they usually try and get this by hurting or showing hate towards the children. Everyone knows the fairy tale story of Snow White, but do they know the Grimm Brothers’ version? In Disney’s Snow White fairy tale, the evil queen poisons an apple and gives it to Snow White and she falls and dies from the poisoning. While in the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale the queen tries multiple times to kill snow white and all of them more gruesome than the last. In the Brothers’ story it is clear that the queen will stop at nothing to kill Snow White. Throughout the story, the queen goes up to her secret mirror and asks, who is the fairest of them all. Expecting the answer to be her, she is surprised when the mirror says that the princess is, in fact, the …show more content…
Reading each fairy tale, one can infer that stepmother characters in fairy tales will stop at nothing to hurt the child and get what they want. In the Brothers’ fairy tales, stepmothers are often seen as selfish and unrighteous to gain strength and authority in the family home. Doing this usually involves harming the children. This wicked archetype fortunately remain only in fairy tales, stepmothers in the world today are believed to be loving and caring to their new family. Which raises the question, why have the characteristics from these well known fairy tales changed over the years to what we know and think of stepmothers
Step Mother (second wife of fathers and mother to the youngest children) was only a young girl when her parents were killed. After a series of unfortunate events she was bought from a village clan and sold to become someone’s “companion”. None of this was her choice. “She was taken to a mission house, then taken away again, reclaimed by the village clan, and eventually sold into fathers canton merchant family” (13). Objectified and forced to be what someone else wants, stepmother is told to be exactly how the father wants her. She is forced to be submissive, and acts as a mother to the children, a wife to the husband, and a servant to the grandmother, or Poh-Poh. Throughout the novel her life is not hers to live, and her children are taught to treat her differently because of it. She is father’s second wife and not his first and because of this the children-even those who are biological- are expected to call her stepmother: “Poh-oh insisted we simplify our kinship terms in Canada, so my mother became “step mother.”… What the sons called my mother, my mother became… Father did not protest. Nor did the slim, pretty woman that was my mother seem to protest, though she must have cast a glance at the old one and decided to buy her time” (15). Stepmother is forced to be a third party in the raising of her children. She is only able to step out of
They have no power to choose for themselves and are considered to have a lack of ability to be independant, forcing the need to rely on men in their lives like fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. As a representing character, Stepmother did not control her life. Bandits killed most of her family when she was young, but she survived by hiding between two trunks of clothes. Then she was taken away from a Mission House and “reclaimed by the village clan, eventually being sold to her Father’s Canton merchant family” (Choy 6). So clearly, Stepmother has no right to choose for herself like an individual; she is just an article that belongs to others and a good that can be sold. In addition, in this family, Stepmother has a very low position even though she gave birth to two kids. Stepmother is Jook Liang and Sek Lung’s birth mother, but she can only be called “Stepmother”. Third Uncle explained, “Stepmother” was a ranking much more respectable than a “family servant,” more honourable than “concubine,” but never equal in honour or respect to the title of First Wife or Mother, Stepmother remained silent (Choy 147). This illustrates Old Chinese Seniority Rules; no matter what a female dedicates to the family, if she is not the first wife, she will never get the respect that she deserves to have. Normally, in Old China, women cannot get fair treatments. They must follow the rules without any doubt, even if they are unequal. Also, Stepmother
Both concrete similarities between the characters of the stepmother and Meroe and metaphors in the story of the stepmother that are meant to represent the magical elements in the story of the witch connect the two stories. Initially, there are several concrete similarities between the stepmother and Meroe. The first likeness the stepmother bears to the witch is her position of power. After she decides to kill her stepson, she enlists “the aid of a villainous slave, part of her dowry” (174). The fact that she has resources of her own makes her powerful and all the more dangerous. Her possession of a slave and her ability to procure poison, though also metaphors of the deadly spells Meroe casts upon Socrates, are most prominently concrete representations of her status of power. A second similarity is that the stepmother and Meroe are both notably older than the younger men they prey upon. This detail helps to accentuate the i...
In “Cinderella” by the Grimm Brothers, the moral is that one should never lie or be wicked to others. In the story, Cinderella’s mother passed away and a year later her father gets remarried to an evil woman who has two daughters. The wife and daughters torment Cinderella, making her complete tedious chores. Eventually, Cinderella attends a ball for the Prince and they fall in love. However, she runs away every night and he cannot find her. The Prince finally takes one of her slippers and sets out to find the love of his life. He then goes to her household and asks all the sisters to try the slipper on. The stepsisters try to deceive the Prince but “the blood was streaming from” their feet and they are eventually caught. When Cinderella tries on the shoe it fits perfectly and the two get married. At the reception, two birds peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “with blindness as long as they lived.” The archetypes in the story are Cinderella who is the damsel in distress, the Prince who saves her and the evil stepsisters and mother who are the villains. A convention is that true love always...
There have been many critics of the Grimms' work over the years. Maria Tatar, author of The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, holds an extremely critical view of the tales told, and the content in them. She states, "Even those who know that Snow White's stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella's stepsisters, that Briar Rose'...
In the article, “Fairy Tales and a Dose of Reality,” Catherine Orenstein attempts to show the contrast between the modern romanticism of marriage and the classic fairy tale’s presentation of them (285). She looks at the aristocratic motivations for marriage and the way these motivations are prominent in Cinderella. She then looks at the 20th century to highlight the innate difference of our mentalities, showing a much more optimistic and glorified relationship. In the article, “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” Elisabeth Panttaja claims that Cinderella’s success can be attributed to her craftiness (288). She shows her and her mother as an equal to the stepfamily, analyzing each family’s goals and values. She attempts to show their similarities,
Snow white and the seven dwarfs is a classic fairy tale, however most people only know the Disney version of the story, but before Disney’s version there were many others. One of the first versions was written by the Grimm brothers.
The stepmother symbolizes selfishness, which eventually leads to the loss of Hansel and Grethel’s innocence, because the children follow their parents’ lead. When the children passed by “the house built of bread,and roofed with cakes; the window of transparent sugar..” (Grimm 89), they were selfish and greedy while “they went on eating never disturbing themselves.”(Grimm 89). This shows how the children’s innocence was lost because they ate the house that was made of luxurious items,which belonged to someone else, for their own benefits. Previously, they saw how their stepmother was greedy and only thought of herself; they used her method of surviving with her husband, to survive and fend for themselves. When discussing how her and her husband were to survive, she devised a plan of “leav[ing] them alone;..never finding their way home.. and being quit of them.”(Grimm 85), in order to
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them is as important as the grandmother. Through her narration, the reader gets all the information needed to understand the story. Indeed, by telling her own story she provides the reader the familial context in which the story is set with her granddaughter and her daughter but even more important, she provides details on her own life which should teach and therefore protect her grand-daughter from men, and then save her to endure or experience her past griefs. This unnamed grand-mother is telling her life under a fairy tale form which exemplify two major properties of fairy tale, as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [through the moral] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience”. As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales work on different levels of moral which are directed to categories of people, for instance in “Little Red Riding Hood” the moral ...
Cinderella is one of those fairytales where I can only associate it with live-action adaptations. In addition, I don’t know much about the details in the written versions, however, I knew about the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet and losing their eyes. When I think about it, I have no idea why I know that. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the Brothers Grimm's’ version and how the introduction described the other versions with violence. As I read the adaptations, I noticed groundless violence; I called it groundless violence because of how extreme it is. However, the morbid acts didn’t deter me from being interested in looking deeper into the acts themselves. When reading the introduction, I saw that in the Grimm’s adaptation, doves picked out the stepsisters’ eyes.
Fairytales, the short stories that most children heard as they went to bed, are actually folktales from previous decades. The fairytales today are primarily adaptations of older versions recreated by Disney— the pioneers of this generation. With that said, the modern versions consistently display good triumphing over evil, a prince charming that constantly came to the rescue, and a happily ever after ending. However, the original folktale version didn’t always come with fortunate events, but often were more violent and gruesome. With the fairytale Cinderella, Disney maintains a similar theme as its Grimm version; however, the conflicts, events, and characters that support this idea are rather different.
It is more obvious in this tale than others, but some of these aspects are the nickname of Cinderella, the evil stepfamily, the three balls, and the beautiful slipper. However, Perrault and the brothers Grimm made some parts of the story very different. In the Grimm’s version, Cinderella’s mother was very important to her and she was very important to her father, while in Perrault’s her mother is not even mentioned and her father is more attached to his new wife than he is to his daughter. Perrault described the stepsister’s as less beautiful than Cinderella, while the brothers Grimm described them as just as beautiful but with bad personalities. Another major difference was Cinderella’s magic helper. In Perrault’s story Cinderella had a fairy godmother that gave her horses, a carriage, footmen to escort her, and new beautiful clothes, and in Grimm’s story her magic helper was birds that only provided clothes. A main difference that a lot of people would notice is the fact that in the Grimm’s tale Cinderella’s slipper was made of gold, and in Perrault’s it was glass which is what most people are familiar with. The endings of the stories also differed. The Grimm’s version ended in a much darker way. Both stepsisters got their eyes pecked out and were doomed to live a life of blindness, which was clearly not a very child friendly way to end a story. In
These ideas are molded into society and there are very few stories to tell children where the stepmother is not the villain. Most fairytales express the ideas of an evil stepmother and the main character must seek help from someone outside of the family, never do you hear of the stepmother being the one to help the character through her conflict rather than being the main source of it. Characters such as fairy godmothers or animals are created to assist the “Cinderella” character and help them escape from the issues of their family lives and find their happily ever
Cinderella’s stepmother Eleanor has the ability to conduct decisions because Cinderella’s father left Eleanor in charge of his daughter and his estate. Furthermore, Eleanor received the as much power as any other man depicted in the film. In addition, Eleanor is the only female with power. Unfortunately, Eleanor is the only person in the movie to abuse their power. Throughout the film, Eleanor abuses Cinderella and treats her no better than an animal. Eleanor expects Cinderella to complete unbelievably strenuous tasks with no compensation. This depiction of a woman abusing her power socializes children to believe women are not capable of having any power. Disney’s depiction of a woman with power is sexist because she is inferior to the men
In the Grimm’s Brothers 1812 version, it was very apparent that gender roles played a big part in stories and in life back then. In 19th century Germany, if you were a girl, you had almost no rights. Women were inferior to men and young women were extremely inferior to their elders. This part of German culture is seen in Grimm’s version of Cinderella when they explain how hard Cinderella had to work for her stepmother in order to go to the ball and even when she was done with everything, it still was not good enough. It is also shown when the stepmother forces her daughters (Cinderella’s stepsisters) to disfigure their feet so that they were able to fit into Cinderella’s missing shoe for the Prince’s love. It later goes on to tell how the stepsister’s are punished at Cinderella's wedding for being cruel to her by getting their eyes poked out by birds. It shows how different gender roles were back in the 1800’s compared to modern day beliefs not only in Germany, but in other countries too. The Chinese Cinderella story written by Adeline Yen Mah in 2010 shows how Cinderella has evolved to fit other countries modern, unique cultures. Adeline (the Cinderella figure) is bad luck to her family because her mother died giving birth to her. Since Adeline’s family considers her bad luck, they are very bad at showing her love and affection and