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 husbands 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 storys 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. 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. The stepmother may be identified with other evils the characters meet.
In the series The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, one episode featured a princess who was the heir to the throne of her country and feared that her stepmother wanted to have her assassinated as her own son was next in line after her stepdaughter. The episode concludes the revelation that her stepmother actually wanted her stepdaughter to inherit the throne and had attempted to thwart actual assassins who did not want a woman to rule their country. In Sofia the First, Sofias mother Miranda became stepmother to Prince James and Princess Amber, she acknowledged there werent many tales featuring loving and kind stepmothers. This is another example of a well-blended family. Classical Literature
Greek
Alcestis (play)
438 BCE: The dying biological mother requests that her husband not remarry, for fear of her children being mistreated by a stepmother. Hippolytus
428 BCE: The stepmother commits suicide to prevent herself from following through on her lust for her stepson and leaves a note falsely claiming that the stepson had raped her. == References ==