The Truth About Cinderella: Part V

The final note in my series. You might want to read previous entries Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

The last thing I would like to point out about this book that I did indeed find very interesting, and which Wednesday Martin expounds upon in her admirable work Stepmonster, is bookended at the front and back of this book:

"The cross-cultural ubiquity of Cinderella stories is revealing, for they would not persist where their themes had no resonance." (p. 5)

and

"Why are wicked stepmothers so much more numerous in folklore than wicked stepfathers?" (p. 61)

The authors propose two reasons, both of which I find compelling. 

"A partial answer may be that stepmothers were not always so rare. Until this century, stepfamilies in Europe and America were more likely to be formed in the aftermath of death than a divorce, and the mothers of young children incurred substantial mortality in childbirth and from other causes. Widowers often, though by no means always, kept the children and tried to import a replacement for their mother.

Another possible reason why Cinderella and Snow White were beset by stepmothers rather than stepfathers has to do with the social purposes of story-tellers. If a tale is to persist through the ages, it must appeal not only to its audience but also to its performers. So who were the story-tellers who found these tales to be worthy of the telling, and who were their listeners? 

If the primary audiences were small children, as they surely were for Cinderella and Snow White, the primary story-tellers were probably their mothers And it is easy to imagine why mothers might prefer stories whose subtext is 'remember, my dears, that the worst thing imaginable would be for me to disappear and for your father to replace me'.......over those that instead whispered 'should your father ever die or leave us, it would be a terrible thing for you if I were to remarry' " ..... (p. 61-62). 

Indeed.