In fiction, stepmothers are often portrayed as being wicked and
evil. The character of the wicked stepmother features heavily in
fairy tales; the most famous examples are
Cinderella,
Snow White, and
Hansel and Gretel. Stepdaughters are her most common victim, and then stepdaughter/stepson pairs, but stepsons also are victims as in
The Juniper Tree—sometimes, as in
East of the Sun and West of the Moon, because he refused to marry his stepsister as she wished, or, indeed, they may make their stepdaughters-in-law their victims, as in
The Boys with the Golden Stars. In some fairy tales, such as
Giambattista Basile's
La Gatta Cennerentola or the Danish
Green Knight, the stepmother wins the marriage by ingratiating herself with the stepdaughter, and once she obtains it, becomes cruel. In some fairy tales, the stepdaughter's escape by marrying does not free her from her stepmother. After the birth of the stepdaughter's first child, the stepmother may attempt to murder the new mother and replace her with her own daughter—thus making her the stepmother to the next generation. Such a replacement occurs in
The Wonderful Birch,
Brother and Sister, and
The Three Little Men in the Wood; only by foiling the stepmother's plot (and usually executing her), is the story brought to a happy ending. In the Korean Folktale
Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, the stepmother kills her own stepdaughters. , a son at his mother's grave seeking aid against his stepmother In many stories with evil stepmothers, the hostility between the stepmother and the stepchild is underscored by having the child succeed through aid from the dead mother. This motif occurs from
Norse mythology, where
Svipdagr rouses his mother
Gróa from the grave so as to learn from her how to accomplish a task his stepmother set, to fairy tales such as the
Brothers Grimm version of
Cinderella, where Aschenputtel receives her clothing from a tree growing on her mother's grave, the Russian
Vasilissa the Beautiful, where Vasilissa is aided by a doll her mother gave, and her mother's blessing, and the Malay
Bawang Putih Bawang Merah, where the heroine's mother comes back as fish to protect her. )'' by
Franz Jüttner: the
evil stepmother realizes her stepdaughter Snow White has escaped her magic. The notion of the word
stepmother being descriptive of an intrinsically unkind parent is suggested by peculiar wording in John Gamble's "An Irish Wake" (1826). He writes of a woman soon to die, who instructs her successor to "be kind to my children." Gamble writes that the injunction was forgotten and that she "proved a very step-mother." The Icelandic fairy tale
The Horse Gullfaxi and the Sword Gunnfoder features a good stepmother, who indeed aids the prince like a
fairy godmother, but this figure is very rare in fairy tales. Fairy tales can have variants where one tale has an evil mother and the other an evil stepmother: in
The Six Swans by the
Brothers Grimm and also in
The Wild Swans by
Hans Christian Andersen, the heroine is persecuted by her husband's mother and in another one by her stepmother, and in
The Twelve Wild Ducks, by his stepmother. Sometimes this appears to be a deliberate switch: The
Brothers Grimm, having put in their first editions versions of
Snow White and
Hansel and Gretel where the villain was the biological mother, altered it to a stepmother in later editions, perhaps to mitigate the story's violence. Another reason for the change from a villainous mother to a villainous stepmother may have been the belief that mothers were sacred, as well as the belief that people would not believe that a mother could harbor such ill-will and animosity toward their child. Tales featuring evil fathers seldom alter it so that it is an evil stepfather, even when, as in
Allerleirauh,
The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter, or
Donkeyskin, the father tries to force the heroine to marry him. This does, however, appear in the variant
The Princess That Wore a Rabbit-skin Dress. The stepmother may be identified with other evils the characters meet. For instance, both the stepmother and the witch in
Hansel and Gretel are deeply concerned with food, the stepmother to avoid hunger, the witch with her house built of food and her desire to eat the children, and when the children kill the witch and return home, their stepmother has mysteriously died. This hostility from the stepmother and tenderness from the true mother has been interpreted in varying ways. A psychological interpretation, by
Bruno Bettelheim, describes it as "splitting" the actual mother in an ideal mother and a false mother that contains what the child dislikes in the actual mother. However, historically, many women died in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources; the tales can be interpreted as factual conflicts from history. In some fairy tales, such as
The Juniper Tree, the stepmother's hostility is overtly the desire to secure the inheritance of her children. In
Classic of Filial Piety,
Guo Jujing told the story of
Min Ziqian, who had lost his mother at a young age. His stepmother had two more sons and saw to it that they were warmly dressed in winter but neglected her stepson. When her husband discovered this, he decided to divorce her. His son interceded, on the ground that she neglected only him, but when they had no mother, all three sons would be neglected. His father relented, and the stepmother henceforth took care of all three children. For this, he was held up as a model of
filial piety. Conversely, the exemplary stepmother prefers the stepson to her own child, in recognition that his seniority makes him superior. The "righteous stepmother of Qi", faced with her son and stepson having been found by a murdered man, and both having confessed to shield the other, argues for her son's execution because her husband had ordered her to look after her stepson, and her son is the junior brother; the king pardoned them both for her devotion to duty. ==Classical literature==