Where Have All the Mothers Gone?

It's impossible to read fairy tales without realizing one very glaring absence in the lives of nearly every hero or heroine. They have no mothers. They have stepmothers out the wazoo, perfectly ready to throw their innocent stepchildren under the closest available bus, but no mothers. They have fathers, who are either malicious favorite-players or ineffectual weaklings bullied by their second wives. But no mothers. Fairytale Land should put out an APB for all its missing moms.

The Death of Rachel, Giambettino Cignaroli

The lack of maternal influence has painfully obvious results. Scads of motherless heroines fall effortlessly into the clutches of their evil stepmothers. And that's not even the worst of it. Take the story of Joseph and his brothers. Granted, those kids had four mothers to share around, but the death of the beloved Rachel leaves a huge hole in the structure of Jacob's family. Zilpah and Bilhah are never allowed much say in the raising of their sons, and Leah is either incapable of or uninterested in keeping twelve rowdy boys in line. In effect, if not in fact, Jacob's sons are motherless. They live in a world of ruthless male competition. And Jacob himself, as consolation for the loss of his love, makes no bones about the fact that Rachel's son Joseph is his favorite. With no mother to teach morality and a father who's hardly modeling good behavior, it's no wonder that resentment and hatred fester among the brothers, leading ultimately to the other eleven selling Joseph into slavery to get rid of their rival. It's difficult to say what would have happened with Rachel as an active presence in their lives, but it's pretty clear that Jacob wouldn't have favored Joseph so flagrantly if he hadn't been mourning the boy's mother.

Snow White illustration, Franz Juttner

The plot thickens when you go back to the Grimm stories and realize that those clever German boys weren't just cataloging folktales. They were deliberately shaping the moral compasses of the next generation. Mothers, real mothers, could never be allowed to do the horrific things to their children that they do in those well-loved stories: poison them with apples, abandon them in the woods, etc. It was much easier to kill the mothers before they had a chance to become evil. That way, the stories preserved a saintly image of a mother who often dies in giving her child life, side by side with the villainous hag who usurps her place. Better to put the kids at risk from a world without a mother than to admit that mothers are, in fact, capable of the same horrors as other human beings.

Kate Crackernuts, Trina Schart Hyman

But that line of thinking leaves us singularly ill-equipped to handle, say, the heroine's mother in Kate Crackernuts. Bold, quick-thinking princess Kate is clearly the story's protagonist, but her half-sister Anne is the beauty of the family. Kate's mother (who is Anne's stepmother) resents her biological daughter being overshadowed, so out of love for Kate, she magics a sheep's head onto Anne's shoulders. What on earth should our reaction be? Should we be glad that at least one fairytale mother cares about her daughter's future? Should we be outraged that the queen could do such a thing to her trusting stepdaughter? Should we renounce the queen's actions utterly (as Kate herself does), or should we allow that her motive was love and concern? After all, the queen's just doing exactly what fairytale convention demands of her: being cruel and manipulative toward her stepdaughter. It's her bad luck that her story involves one of the few sets of siblings who actually like each other, creating an instant gray area where the evil stepmother's biological child is our hero.

So, having no mother is bad. Having a vindictive mother is bad. Having a caring mother is bad. Is there any kind of good mother who's not also dead?

Demeter and Persephone, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

Well, there's always Demeter.

Right from the start, she's got the loving and nurturing aspect of motherhood covered; she's goddess of the harvest, so we already know she'll take awesome care of her daughter. And going by the brief glimpse we get of young carefree Persephone before Hades abducts her, it seems fair to say that Demeter knocked it out of the park. Once Persephone goes missing, Demeter essentially shuts down the earth, holding life itself hostage until her daughter is returned. Her determined crusade to find Persephone is the sole reason Zeus gets off his arse and sends Hermes to bring Persephone back. And even though Hades tricks Persephone into spending three months of the year with him, the remaining nine are divinely judged to be the purview of the mother-daughter team of spring and harvest, which creates lovely weather and plentiful harvests and ensures that even the mortals want Persephone to stay with her mom.

Isis & Horus, Judith Page

And look over there! It's Isis, who brought her dead husband back to life just so she could get pregnant. She spends decades incognito, using her powerful magic to protect Horus from his murderous uncle who's got teams canvassing Egypt looking for him. When Set gets past her vigilance and nearly kills Horus via scorpions, Isis calls in favors from the gods in order to save her son. She devotes every waking minute to teaching Horus exactly how to survive the inevitable battle with Set. Unlike with Demeter and Persephone, we get to see Isis's efforts fulfilled: Horus trounces Set (albeit with some interesting methods), avenges his father, and becomes king of Egypt (and ultimately a god). Well done, Isis.

And now the Virgin Mary is knocking at the door. Gotta count her, too. Betrothed-but-not-married knocked-up-by-God virgin mom sounds like the premise of a VH1 show. But Mary makes it work. She convinces a very skeptical Joseph that she didn't actually cheat on him (at least not by choice - we can talk

Madonna and Child, Il Sassoferrato

about God's consent issues later), goes with him to Bethlehem ready to drop at any second, gives birth alone in a freaking stable, and maintains a strong and loving relationship with her son for his entire life, which sadly ends before hers. Statistically, she should have been screwed. Every card was stacked against her. But out of the jaws of defeat, Mary snatches an enormous parental victory. Very few women can successfully raise a Savior.

So yes, there are positive models of motherhood who play active and crucial roles in their children's stories. But there's a catch. They're all goddesses. (You can quibble about Mary's divine status, but she ascends to Heaven at the moment of her death, and has more icons and fan-worship than any sanctified Christian who's not Jesus. The woman's a goddess.) Fairytale mothers are mortals with only mortal strength. Is it fair to ask human mothers to live up to the astonishing lengths that goddesses go to in protecting and raising their children?

Brave, Disney/Pixar

It might actually be fine. Because what the ranks of good living mothers sorely need to oppose the army of evil mothers is power. The evil mother's menace comes from the fact that she has all the power and her child-victim has none. To declare her disgust for her mother's methods, Kate Crackernuts has to go into self-imposed exile. Even the sainted dead moms have power; Cinderella's dresses her up for the ball, assisting her in her only avenue of escape from her powerful stepmother's dominance. So the good mothers need the power that goddesses of life and love can provide: the strength to endure, the courage to nurture, the will to make things better. The goddess-mothers aren't providing an unreachable ideal. They exist to brace up mortal mothers, to show them what qualities will serve them best, and to remind them that - divine or not - every good mother has what it takes.

Siblings Have Feelings Too

Fairy tales are very clear on sibling relations. The trick of it is hate, hate, and more hate, with a sprinkling of contempt from older to younger. Gender is immaterial; brothers murder each other for brides just as easily as sisters pitch each other into rivers. If the relationship isn't one of hatred, normally the siblings are just there so that Our Hero can be the youngest of three. The point is that a real Hero or Heroine can and must succeed on his/her own. Help earned through individual virtue is acceptable; the support of a loving family just gets in the way.

The problem is, I like my siblings. My sisters never tried to backstab me or steal my prince; my brothers would fight for my honor in a minute. Luckily, there are fairy tales where siblings get along. Not many, of course, but some of the most interesting, particularly in terms of what they say about sibling relationships.

Kate Crackernuts, Derek Collard

My personal favorite, from the day I first read it, is Kate Crackernuts. Kate and Anne are princesses and half-sisters. Anne is prettier; Kate's mother jealously magics a sheep head onto Anne's shoulders; hence drama, right? Wrong. Kate chooses this moment to remember that the story's got her name in the title and takes off with Anne, willingly abandoning crown, place, and her (albeit somewhat psychotic) mother's love to travel the world and find a cure for her sister. Her stepsister, which in any other story would be the excuse for her to send the poor girl to drudge among the ashes. Since she has the resourcefulness that often eludes the "fairest of them all" types, Kate manages to save a prince (with a handy brother for Anne) at the same time, and presumably winds up co-ruling two kingdoms.

This might be the best sibling relationship in any fairy tale ever. Devotion on both sides, complete commitment to happiness together, renouncement of anything that doesn't benefit them both - it's almost like Kate and Anne care about each other! The kiss-of-death word "stepsister" is maybe mentioned once in any version; it's immaterial. Anne puts her fate in Kate's hands without question, and Kate more than requites that trust. These girls are sisters, by blood and in their hearts, and woe to anyone who messes with that.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Ruth Sanderson

The Twelve Dancing Princesses hang together in the same way. It's less moving, because the Princesses are never differentiated as individual characters (at least, not in the traditional versions), but they show the same camaraderie. They never crack and spill the secret to an outsider, but among themselves they share it freely. Granted, their united front dooms unnumbered men to death; it's far easier to see Kate and Anne, who never hurt anyone, as paragons of sisterhood. But despite the darkness to their relationship, the Twelve Princesses present the most famous portrait of sisterly devotion in the fairy tale canon.

Hansel and Gretel, Greg (CreatureBox)

The most famous, period, obviously goes to Hansel and Gretel. Those adorable cherubs, armed only with their wits and their mutual affection, battle domestic and supernatural evil and even manage to rescue each other. Their dynamic is clear from the beginning: they're a team, and they will put themselves on the line for each other at the drop of a hat. In terms of familial support, they don't even need their appallingly cavalier father. They back each other up far more effectively than he ever does. The feminist in me finds it very appealing that although Hansel is the leader, the idea man, and the muscle all in one while Gretel sits down and cries, she more than steps up to the plate when it's her turn. More than any other fairy tale siblings, these two grow into themselves and their comradeship. In one sense, it's easy for them to stick together so completely: they're children, and the adult concerns that drive fairy tale siblings apart have yet to enter their lives. But they face truly adult dangers - abandonment, imprisonment, slavery, death, loss of love - and come out on top purely through the strength of their bond.

Sets of brothers present a different conundrum in fairy tales. Princes and poor boys alike are expected to seek their fortunes, while sisters generally have to compete for whatever single fortune comes their way. Sisters resort to lies, backstabbing, and occasionally murder, while brothers have the option of ignoring each other on their individual quests. Of course, if some upstart youngest brother has the gall to come back home with a magic wife and untold treasure, his older brothers jump instantly to the murder option.

The Four Clever Brothers, Arthur Rackham

Or alternatively, they could help each other out. The Four Brothers each set out to seek their fortunes, making a promise to come back after four years and catch up. You'd think this would be instant danger for the most successful brother, but lo and behold, after four years they've each achieved great success in their chosen (and different) professions: one's a master thief, one's a great astronomer, one's a crack shot, and one's a tailor who can sew anything. When the inevitable princess gets inevitably kidnapped, they band together to rescue her, and each one proves indispensable to the quest. Of course, they can't all marry her, but she's a MacGuffin anyway; the brothers are all quite content with each getting a quarter of a kingdom to rule. The only time they quarrel is when they can't decide who should marry the princess. In dire straits, they all jump to each other's rescue without thinking twice about it, unlike the numerous jealous brothers who stage fake deaths as easily as they breathe.

Personally, I love that none of them really care that much about the princess. They're on this adventure for the sake of having a grand lark with each other. As rare as sibling devotion is in fairy tales, it's even rarer to see siblings actually having fun together. So often someone's got to be rescued, like Anne, or a debt owed, like Gretel saving Hansel, or control established, like the Eldest Dancing Princess laying the law down to her sisters. One way or another, one sibling usually has the upper hand, even in friendly relationships. The Four Brothers are complete equals, and nothing makes that clearer than the fact that none of them squeaks by the others to marry the princess.

The Cruel Sister, John Faed

What I don't love is how few of these stories there actually are. They're so outnumbered by stories of jealous brothers, sisters, and stepsisters that that's become the fairy tale norm, when in fact affection of this sort is a lot more interesting than blind hatred. The more popular stories are weirdly gendered, too: blood ties make no difference to brotherly hate, while stepsisters tend to perpetrate the worst crimes on each other. (The exception that proves the rule, of course, being the sisters of The Bonny Swans.) Only the brother-sister team of Hansel and Gretel is allowed to like each other without comment. What does that mean? Are men more prone to irrational jealousy than women? Are women afraid of being supplanted? What, precisely, is family worth in a fairy tale? Is it what you're born to, or what you make (or refuse to make) for yourself? If the point of fairy tales is individual success, how should we treat these siblings whose fate hinges on cooperation, friendship, and love, and who are made more than they are by the help and affection of their family?

I don't know the answers. I don't know if there are any universal answers, given the wide range of problems fairy tales address. But I am glad that there are many kinds of family represented in fairy tales, even if scantily.