XX Factor: the blog

The Orphan Fantasy

The other day, the Guardian published a list of its favorite literary stepmothers, scouring children's classics for the few that aren't just pure, unredeemable evil. Here at DoubleX, we asked: Why are stepmothers always pure, unredeemable evil? And why do characters' biological parents so frequently have to die?

Meredith Simons: Just last week, my mom asked me, "Why doesn't Disney make a movie about a wicked stepchild?" I'm biased, but my impression of blended family situations is that often stepparents enter a marriage with genuinely good intentions and affection for their stepkids. The kids, meanwhile, feel an almost innate desire to sabotage, undermine, and generally make the stepparent miserable. Yet this doesn't seem to be reflected in our literary (or at least fairy tale) canon. There's only one put-upon stepmother on the Guardian's list.

Rachael Larimore: Can anyone think of ANY Disney movie with two parents? It's a common trope among the old fairy tales, like Snow White and Cinderella . But even the more modern movies almost all have single parents.

Hillary Busis: Mulan had both her parents, but other than that, the only two-parent families I can think of come from much older Disney movies: Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians .

Jenny Rogers: Sleeping Beauty . But I suppose she's torn from her parents.

Hillary Busis: Mulan and the kids in Peter Pan also spend most of the movie away from their parents.

Noreen Malone: Isn't that just the classic kid fantasy? In nearly every single game I played as a kid, we pretended we were orphans. No authority figures that way.

Dana Stevens: It's an age-old trope in children's lit—all the big Grimm's Fairy Tales have dead or absent mothers, replaced by mean stepmothers or bad moms who die in the course of the story, like Hansel and Gretel's. Even more modern kids' fiction, like The Secret Garden , A Little Princess , and my old fave Ballet Shoes , dispense with parents, especially female ones, early and unsentimentally.

Hanna Rosin: In all great children's books, kids used to be orphaned (and in some cases still are, like in Harry Potter and the The Mysterious Benedict Society ). Now at least they get one parent.

Claire Gordon: I think it's a Freudian thing. In James and the Giant Peach , the wonderful parents die, then James runs away from his abusive aunts and then travels the sea in a giant womb. Rereading the scene where he climbs up the sticky peach hole: awkward.

Dahlia Lithwick: Michael Chabon has a nice riff on this in his fatherhood book. That kids can't grow unless they are ditched. He says his kids would have to be frogmarched into the wardrobe at knifepoint to meet the lion.

Jessica Lambertson: Do you think the stories cause kids to fantasize about being orphaned or in some way abandoned? Is it just natural to imagine being alone to have adventures? My sister and I always imagined ourselves as parents in the new frontier (Laura Ingalls Wilder style). We turned the couch into a horse-drawn buggy and used our American Girl dolls as our babies, but we always had husbands, imagined though they were.

Dana Stevens: I think it's the opposite—the fantasies give rise to the stories, or rather, the stories that best speak to children's fantasies are the ones that survive for generations.

Jenny Rogers: In my childhood games, I was always an orphan and usually a maid. I blame Cinderella for these strange fantasies.

Comments

In the new Frog Princess

By: emily.lehnen | Mon, 02/08/2010 - 14:55

In the new Frog Princess movie, Tiania has her mom, but not her dad. But still, there are never two parents. In fact, I know many people who don't let their kids watch princess movies because they don't contain "A Proper Nuclear Family".

Mothers and stepmothers

By: dsteinsaltz | Mon, 02/08/2010 - 03:47

I thought it was well known that many of the original tales collected by the Grimm brothers had mothers, not stepmothers. The change seems to have been made to spare the feelings of mothers and/or children, as the gruesome folktales were domesticated. Of course, that explains how the stepmothers got into some of our best-known tales, but their persistence suggests that they're still serving the same purpose, of pretending that the evil one couldn't possibly be a "real" mother.

(The Grimms' version of Cinderella, one which always had a stepmother, brings this contrast out. Cinderella's ball clothes come, not from a "fairy godmother", but from a tree that she's planted on her mother's grave.)

Digital edition of the first edition of Grimm is available at http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Grimm,+Jacob+und+Wilhelm/Märchen/Kinder-+und+Hausmärchen+(1812-15)/Erster+Band

Orphans are "free"

By: Sisi | Sat, 02/06/2010 - 20:50

Orphaned children are often the heroes and heroines of stories for a very simple reason. Orphans are free to engage in adventures far from home, to take risks, and to battle the great unknown. Children with a warm and cozy home, complete with a loving mother would worry that mother to no end when they are out having their adventure.
Orphaning children is a literary device that has long been used to give children the position of adults, and it is these emancipated children who can go forth and seek their fortune, encounter magic or find themselves a new home to be a child in yet again. With parents there would be no Frodo, Harry, Anne, or Tom.

Historical artifact

By: Kit-Kat | Sat, 02/06/2010 - 16:27

I think the orphan/evil stepmother trope in fairy tales is a byproduct of the fact that for centuries, the odds that a child's mother would die, most likely in childbirth or shortly thereafter from puerperal fever, were very high. I mean, it was an uphill slog in the nineteenth century to convince doctors to wash their hands before attending a birth. Having babies was really dangerous, and if your birth didn't kill your mother, the next baby's birth had a good shot at doing so. Many kids came into the world motherless or lost their mothers at a young age.

Especially if the father had not yet had a son, he might remarry. The stepmother might be a lovely person, but she might also be eager to have her own children to establish her value and resent caring for someone else's children, and she would be concerned about what portion of an inheritance her own children would get. Marriage simply had different stakes for women back then.

That said, the orphan trope has other literary value, as others have discussed, but I think it clearly arose out of the fact that lifespans were shorter (for men and women) and childbirth more dangerous. Being an orphan or a half-orphan was just something that more people were likely to be able to relate to.

evil stepmoms & missing parents

By: jasingerman | Sat, 02/06/2010 - 12:05

I think the missing parent does make it easier for the writer to create drama and to allow changes in the child and family that make for a more satisfying narrative arc. But the missing parent/orphan/evil step-mother also tie together developmentally: a young child doesn't know that her anger won't really hurt her parent, and that when she's angry with her mother, her mother isn't necessarily angry with her. And young children get angry a lot, because they get told "No" a lot.

If you can't be angry with your parents, then what if . . . they're not your real parents! You're adopted and your real parents would never treat you this way. Or your mother-who-says-no is a step-mother, and your real mother is beautiful and good.

http://www.freeplaytherapy.wordpress.com

Characters without parents

By: a caldwell | Fri, 02/05/2010 - 20:45

Pretty much everybody who was everybody in Nineteenth Century literature was an orphan or had only one parent or a seriously absent parent: Anne Eliot, Jane Eyre, Heathcliff and Cathy, Emma Woodhouse, Julien Sorel, the March Sisters, etc., etc. Frankenstein's monster is a remarkable case. Not to mention various major figures of earlier literature, such as Moses, Candide, and Charlotte in the Sorrows of Young Werther.

I always assumed it was to

By: falk | Fri, 02/05/2010 - 20:11

I always assumed it was to add tension to the story. Otherwise, the whole thing would be "Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived happily ever after. The end."