A fairy tale
or fairy story is a fictional story that may feature folkloric
characters (such as fairies,
talking animals)
and enchantments,
often involving a far-fetched sequence of events. In modern-day parlance, the
term is also used to describe something blessed with princesses, as in
"fairy tale ending" (a happy ending)
or "fairy tale romance", though not all fairy tales end happily.
Colloquially, a "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can
also mean any far-fetched story. Fairytales mostly attract young children since
they easily understand the archetypical characters in the story.
In cultures in which
figures such as witches are perceived as real, and the teller and hearer of a
tale see it as having historical actuality, fairy tales may merge into legendary narratives.
However, unlike legends
and epics,
they usually do not contain more than scholarly references to religion
and actual places, persons, and events; they take place and when you are having
a bad day you write a story "once upon a time"
rather than in actual times.
The history of the
fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace, because only the literary forms
can survive. Still, folklorists have found these forms from every culture over
many centuries. Thus the oral fairy tale may have existed for at least that
long, although not perhaps recognized as a genre. The name
"fairy tale" was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy.
Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today.
The older fairy tales
were intended for an audience of adults as well as children, but they were
associated with children as early as the writings of the précieuses;
the Brothers Grimm
titled their collection Children's and Household Tales, and
the link with children has only grown stronger with time.
Fairy tales of the
past were disturbing by today’s standards and were in effect a way of teaching
children and adults alike things to watch out for in the way in which the world
works. For example, little red riding hood, in which the young girl strays from
the path to grandma's house and ends up in bed with the wolf who 'eats her up'
referring to a sexual act rather than just the act of physically eating her.
Today's version has been turned into a children's story, where the original was
quite gruesome. (See 'The Classic Fairy Tales' by Maria Tatar)
Folklorists have
classified fairy tales in various ways. Among the most notable are the Aarne-Thompson classification system
and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp.
Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance, but no school has
been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.
Although the fairy
tale is a clearly distinct genre, the definition that marks a work as a fairy
tale is a source of considerable dispute. Vladimir Propp,
in his Morphology of the Folktale, criticized the common distinction
between "fairy tales" and "animal tales" on the grounds
that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals.[4]
Nevertheless, to select works for his analysis, Propp used all Russian folktales
classified as a folk lore Aarne-Thompson 300-749—in a cataloguing system that made such
a distinction—to gain a clear set of tales.[5]
His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot
elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend
itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest, and furthermore,
the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works.
One universally
agreed-on factor is that the nature of a tale does not depend on whether
fairies appear in it. Obviously, many people, including Angela Carter
in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales, have noted that a
great many of so-called fairy tales do not feature fairies at all.[7]
This is partly because of the history of the English
term "fairy tale" which derives from the French
phrase conte de fées, and was first used in the collection of Madame
D'Aulnoy in 1697.
As Stith Thompson
and Carter herself point out, talking animals and the presence of magic
seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves.[9]
However, the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy
tale, especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face, as in fables.
In his essay "On Fairy-Stories",
J. R. R. Tolkien
agreed with the exclusion of "fairies" from the definition, defining
fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in Faërie,
the land of fairies, fairytale princesses, dwarves, elves, and not
only other magical species but many other marvels. However, the same essay excludes tales that are often
considered fairy tales, citing as an example The Monkey's Heart, which Andrew Lang
included in The Lilac Fairy Book. Other tales that
include no magic but are often classified as fairy tales include What Is the Fastest Thing in the
World? and Catskin.
Some folklorists
prefer to use the German term Märchen to refer to the
genre, a practice given weight by the definition of Thompson in his 1977
edition of The Folktale: "a tale of some length involving a
succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world
without definite locality or definite creatures and is filled with the
marvelous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries,
succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses." The characters and motifs of
fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons
and gallant princes; ogres, giants,
dragons,
and trolls;
wicked stepmothers
and false heroes;
fairy godmothers
and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or
foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of
prohibitions. Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of
"quickness" in literature, because of the economy and concision of
the tales.
Originally, stories
we would now call fairy tales were merely a kind of tale, not marked out as a
separate genre. The German term "Märchen" means, literally,
"tale" rather than any specific type. The genre itself was first
marked out by writers of the Renaissance, who began to define a genre of
tales, and became stabilized through the works of many writers, becoming an
unquestioned genre in the works of the Brothers Grimm.
In this evolution, the name was coined when the précieuses
took up writing literary stories; Madame d'Aulnoy
invented the term contes de fée, or fairy tale.
Prior to the
definition of the genre of fantasy, many works that would now be classified as fantasy
were termed "fairy tales", including Tolkien's The Hobbit,
George Orwell's
Animal Farm,
and L. Frank Baum's
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Indeed, Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" includes
discussions of world-building and is considered a vital part of fantasy
criticism. Although fantasy, particularly in the sub-genre fairytale fantasy,
draws heavily on fairy tale motifs, the genres are now regarded as distinct.
The
fairy tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale.
Many writers have written in the form of the fairy tale. These are the literary
fairy tales, or Kunstmärchen. The oldest forms, from Panchatantra
to the Pentamerone,
show considerable reworking from the oral form. The Brothers Grimm were among the first to try to preserve
the features of oral tales. Yet the stories printed under the Grimm name have
been considerably reworked to fit the written form.
Literary fairy tales
and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots, motifs, and elements with each
other and with the tales of foreign lands. Many 18th century folklorists attempted to recover the
"pure" folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions. Yet while oral
fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years prior to the literary forms,
there is no pure folktale. And each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions,
if only in parody. This makes it
impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale. Oral story-tellers
have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of
stories and treatments.
The oral tradition
of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were told or enacted
dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to
generation. Because of this, the history of their development is necessarily
obscure. The oldest known written fairy tales stem from ancient Egypt,
c. 1300 BC (ex. The Tale of Two Brothers), and fairy tales appear, now and again, in written
literature throughout literate cultures, as in The Golden Ass,
which includes Cupid and Psyche (Roman,
100–200 AD), or the Panchatantra
(India 200–300 AD), but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual
folk tales even of their own time. The stylistic evidence indicates that these,
and many later collections, reworked folk tales into literary forms. What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots,
older than the Arabian Nights
collection of magical tales (c. 1500 AD), such as the Vikram and the
Vampire, and Bel and the Dragon. Besides such
collections and individual tales, in China, Taoist philosophers
such as Liezi
and Zhuangzi
recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works. In the broader definition of the genre, the first Western
famous fairy tales are those of the Greek Aesop (6th century BC).
Allusions to fairy
tales appear plentifully in Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene, and the plays of William Shakespeare. King Lear
can be considered a literary variant of fairy tales such as Water and Salt
and Cap O' Rushes. The tale itself resurfaced in Western literature in the 16th and 17th
centuries, with The Facetious Nights of Straparola by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Italy, 1550
and 1553), which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales, and the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile (Naples, 1634–6), which are all fairy tales. Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Commedia dell'Arte scenarios, including among them one based on The Love For Three Oranges
(1761). Simultaneously, Pu Songling, in
The first collectors to attempt
to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also the style in
which they were preserved, were the
Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; ironically enough,
this meant although their first edition (1812 & 1815) remains a treasure for folklorists, they
rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured
their sales and the later popularity of their work.
Such literary forms
did not merely draw from the folktale, but also influenced folktales in turn.
The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told
orally to them by Germans, because the tales derived from Perrault, and they
concluded they were thereby French
and not German tales; an oral version of Bluebeard
was thus rejected, and the tale of Briar Rose, clearly related to
Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, was included only because
Jacob Grimm convinced his brother that the figure of Brynhild
proved that the sleeping princess was authentically German folklore.
This consideration of
whether to keep Sleeping Beauty reflected a belief common among
folklorists of the 19th century: that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales
in forms from pre-history except when "contaminated" by such literary
forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales. The rural, illiterate, and
uneducated peasants, if suitably isolated, were the folk and would tell
pure folk tales. Sometimes they regarded fairy tales as a form of
fossil, the remnants of a once-perfect tale. However, further research has
concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary
influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.
The work of the
Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect
tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a
country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of
cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev (first published in 1866),
the Norwegians
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe
( first published in 1845), the Romanian Petre Ispirescu
(first published in 1874), the English Joseph Jacobs (first published in 1890), and Jeremiah Curtin,
an American
who collected Irish
tales (first published in 1890). Ethnographers collected fairy tales over the
world, finding similar tales in Africa,
the Americas,
and Australia;
Andrew Lang
was able to draw on not only the written tales of Europe and Asia, but those
collected by ethnographers, to fill his "coloured" fairy books series.
They also encouraged other collectors of fairy tales, as when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, Japanese
Fairy Tales (1908), after encouragement from Lang. Simultaneously, writers such
as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald
continued the tradition of literary fairy tales. Andersen's work sometimes drew
on old folktales, but more often deployed fairytale motifs and plots in new
tales. MacDonald incorporated fairytale motifs both in new literary fairy
tales, such as The Light Princess, and in works of the
genre that would become fantasy, as in The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith.
Two theories of
origins have attempted to explain the common elements in fairy tales found
spread over continents. One is that a single point of origin generated any
given tale, which then spread over the centuries; the other is that such fairy
tales stem from common human experience and therefore can appear separately in
many different origins.
Fairy tales with very
similar plots, characters, and motifs are found spread across many different
cultures. Many researchers hold this to be caused by the spread of such tales,
as people repeat tales they have heard in foreign lands, although the oral
nature makes it impossible to trace the route except by inference. Folklorists
have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not
always be clear; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish
tale The Ridere of Riddles with the version
collected by the Brothers Grimm, The Riddle, noted that in The Ridere of
Riddles one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom,
but in The Riddle, the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity.
Folklorists of the "Finnish" (or historical-geographical) school
attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results.
Sometimes influence, especially within a limited area and time, is clearer, as
when considering the influence of Perrault's tales on those collected by the
Brothers Grimm. Little Briar-Rose appears to stem from Perrault's Sleeping Beauty,
as the Grimms' tale appears to be the only independent German variant.
Similarly, the close agreement between the opening of Grimms' version of Little Red Riding Hood and Perrault's tale
points to an influence—although Grimms' version adds a different ending
(perhaps derived from The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids).
Fairy tales also tend
to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style
in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color.
Originally, adults
were the audience of a fairy tale just as often as children. Literary fairy
tales appeared in works intended for adults, but in the 19th and 20th centuries
the fairy tale came to be associated with children's literature.
The précieuses, including Madame d'Aulnoy,
intended their works for adults, but regarded their source as the tales that
servants, or other women of lower class, would tell to children. Indeed, a novel of that time, depicting a countess's suitor
offering to tell such a tale, has the countess exclaim that she loves fairy
tales as if she were still a child. Among the late précieuses, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
redacted a version of Beauty and the Beast for children, and it
is her tale that is best known today. The Brothers Grimm titled their
collection Children's and Household Tales and rewrote their tales after
complaints that they were not suitable for children.
In the modern era,
fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children. The Brothers
Grimm concentrated mostly on eliminating sexual references; Rapunzel,
in the first edition, revealed the prince's visits by asking why her clothing
had grown tight, thus letting the witch deduce that she was pregnant, but in
subsequent editions carelessly revealed that it was easier to pull up the
prince than the witch. On the other hand, in many respects, violence –
particularly when punishing villains – was increased. Other, later, revisions
cut out violence; J. R. R. Tolkien noted that The Juniper Tree often had its cannibalistic
stew cut out in a version intended for children. The moralizing strain in the Victorian era
altered the classical tales to teach lessons, as when George Cruikshank
rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes. His acquaintance Charles Dickens,
protested "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of
grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."
Psychoanalysts
such as Bruno Bettelheim, who regarded the cruelty of
older fairy tales as indicative of psychological conflicts, strongly criticized
this expurgation, on the grounds that it weakened their usefulness to both
children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues.
The adaptation of
fairy tales for children continues. Walt Disney's
influential Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
was largely (although certainly not solely) intended for the children's market.
The anime Magical Princess Minky Momo draws on
the fairy tale Momotarō.
In Waldorf Schools,
fairy tales are used in the first grade as a central part of the curriculum.
Rudolf Steiner's work on human development shows that at age six to seven, the
mind of a child is best taught through storytelling.
The archetypes and magical nature of fairy tales appeals strongly to children
of these ages. The nature of fairy tales, following the oral tradition,
enhances the child's ability to visualize a spoken narrative, as well as to
remember the story as heard.
In contemporary literature, many authors have used
the form of fairy tales for various reasons, such as examining the human condition
from the simple framework a fairytale provides. Some authors seek to recreate a
sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse. Some writers use fairy tale forms for modern
issues; this can include using the psychological dramas implicit in the story,
as when Robin McKinley retold Donkeyskin
as the novel Deerskin,
with emphasis on the abusive treatment the father of the tale dealt to his
daughter. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are
retold with a twist simply for comic effect, such as The Stinky Cheese
Man by Jon Scieszka and The ASBO Fairy Tales by Chris Pilbeam.
A common comic motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the
characters are aware of their role in the story, such as in the film series Shrek.
Other authors may
have specific motives, such as multicultural
or feminist
reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric
masculine-dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives. The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly
attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting
this figure include The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch,
a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, and Angela Carter's
The Bloody Chamber, which retells a number of fairy tales from a female
point of view.
One interesting use
of the genre occurred in a military technology journal named Defense
AT&L, which published an article in the form of a fairytale titled Optimizing
Bi-Modal Signal/Noise Ratios. Written by Maj. Dan Ward (USAF), the story uses a fairy named Garble to
represent breakdowns in communication between operators and technology
developers. Ward's article was heavily influenced by George MacDonald.
Other notable figures
who have employed fairy tales include Oscar Wilde,
A. S. Byatt,
Jane Yolen,
Terri Windling,
Donald Barthelme,
Robert Coover,
Margaret Atwood,
Kate Bernheimer, Espido Freire,
Tanith Lee,
James Thurber,
Robin McKinley,
Kelly Link,
Bruce Holland Rogers, Donna Jo Napoli,
Cameron Dokey,
Robert Bly,
Gail Carson Levine, Annette Marie Hyder, Jasper Fforde
and many others.
It may be hard to lay
down the rule between fairy tales and fantasies
that use fairy tale motifs, or even whole plots, but the distinction is
commonly made, even within the works of a single author: George MacDonald's Lilith
and Phantastes
are regarded as fantasies, while his "The Light Princess", "The Golden Key",
and "The Wise Woman" are commonly called fairy tales. The most
notable distinction is that fairytale fantasies, like other fantasies, make use
of novelistic
writing conventions of prose, characterization, or setting.
Fairy tales have been
enacted dramatically; records exist of this in commedia dell'arte, and later in pantomime.
The advent of cinema
has meant that such stories could be presented in a more plausible manner, with
the use of special effects and animation;
the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
in 1937 was a ground-breaking film for fairy tales and, indeed, fantasy in
general. Disney's influence helped establish this genre as children's movies,
despite the fact that Snow White, as well as the company's other early feature-length films,
were originally intended for adults as well, and has been blamed for
simplification of fairy tales ending in situations where everything goes right,
as opposed to the pain and suffering — and sometimes unhappy endings — of many
folk fairy tales
Many filmed fairy
tales have been made primarily for children, from Disney's later works to
Aleksandr Rou's retelling of Vasilissa the Beautiful, the first Soviet film to use Russian folk tales in a
big-budget feature. Others have used the conventions of fairy tales to create
new stories with sentiments more relevant to contemporary life, as in Labyrinth
and the films of Michel Ocelot. Other works have retold familiar fairy tales in
a darker, more horrific or psychological variant aimed primarily at adults.
Notable examples are Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beastand The Company of Wolves, based on an Angela Carter's
retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Likewise, Princess Mononoke
and Pan's Labyrinth create new stories in this
genre from fairy tale and folklore motifs.
In comics and
animated TV series, The Sandman, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu,
Fables and MÄR all make use of
standard fairy tale elements to various extents but are more accurately categorised
as fairytale fantasy due to the definite locations
and characters which a longer narrative necessitates.
Beauty and the Beast, illustration by Warwick Goble
Any comparison of fairy tales
quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each
other. Two of the most influential classifications are those of Antti Aarne,
as revised by Stith Thompson into the Aarne-Thompson
classification system, and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale.
This system groups
fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common, identifying
features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much
therefore depends on what features are regarded as decisive.
For instance, tales
like Cinderella
– in which a persecuted heroine, with the help of the fairy godmother
or similar magical helper, attends an event (or three) in
which she wins the love of a prince and is identified as his true bride – are
classified as type 510, the persecuted heroine. Some such tales are The Wonderful Birch, Aschenputtel,
Katie Woodencloak, The Story of Tam and Cam, Ye Xian,
Cap O' Rushes,
Catskin,
Fair, Brown and Trembling, Finette Cendron,
Allerleirauh,
and Tattercoats.
Further analysis of
the tales shows that in Cinderella, The Wonderful Birch, The
Story of Tam and Cam, Ye Xian, and Aschenputtel, the heroine
is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or
other event, and in Fair, Brown and Trembling and Finette Cendron
by her sisters and other female figures, and these are grouped as 510A; while
in Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, and Allerleirauh, the heroine
is driven from home by her father's persecutions, and must take work in a
kitchen elsewhere, and these are grouped as 510B. But in Katie Woodencloak,
she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service
in a kitchen elsewhere, and in Tattercoats, she is refused permission to
go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types
of 510, Katie Woodencloak is classified as 510A because the villain is
the stepmother, and Tattercoats as 510B because the grandfather fills
the father's role.
This system has its
weaknesses in the difficulty of having no way to classify subportions of a tale
as motifs. Rapunzel
is type 310 (The Maiden in the Tower), but it opens with a child being demanded
in return for stolen food, as does Puddocky;
but Puddocky is not a Maiden in the Tower tale, while The Canary Prince,
which opens with a jealous stepmother, is.
It also lends itself
to emphasis on the common elements, to the extent that the folklorist describes
The Black Bull of Norroway as the same
story as Beauty and the Beast. This can be useful as
a shorthand but can also erase the coloring and details of a story.[84]
Vladimir Propp
specifically studied a collection of Russian fairy tales, but his analysis has
been found useful for the tales of other countries.
Father Frost
acts as a donor in the Russian fairy tale Father Frost, testing the heroine
before giving her riches.
Having criticized Aarne-Thompson
type analysis for ignoring what motifs did in stories, and because the
motifs used were not clearly distinct, he analyzed the tales for the function
each character and action fulfilled and concluded that a tale was composed of
thirty-one elements and eight character types. While the elements were not all
required for all tales, when they appeared they did so in an invariant order —
except that each individual element might be negated twice, so that it would
appear three times, as when, in Brother and Sister, the brother resists
drinking from enchanted streams twice, so that it is the third that enchants
him. One such element is the donor
who gives the hero magical assistance, often after testing him.[88]
In The Golden Bird, the talking fox tests the hero by
warning him against entering an inn and, after he succeeds, helps him find the
object of his quest; in The Boy Who Drew Cats, the priest advised
the hero to stay in small places at night, which protects him from an evil
spirit; in Cinderella, the fairy godmother gives Cinderella the
dresses she needs to attend the ball, as their mothers' spirits do in Bawang Putih Bawang Merah and The Wonderful Birch; in The Fox Sister,
a Buddhist
monk gives the brothers magical bottles to protect against the fox spirit. The
roles can be more complicated.[89]
In The Red Ettin,
the role is split into the mother – who offers the hero the whole of a journey
cake with her curse or half with her blessing – and when he takes the half, a
fairy who gives him advice; in Mr Simigdáli,
the sun, the moon, and the stars all give the heroine a magical gift.
Characters who are not always the donor can act like the donor. In Kallo and the Goblins, the villain goblins
also give the heroine gifts, because they are tricked; in Schippeitaro,
the evil cats
betray their secret to the hero, giving him the means to defeat them. Other
fairy tales, such as The Story of the
Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, do not feature the
donor.
Analogies have been
drawn between this and the analysis of myths into the Hero's journey.
This analysis has
been criticized for ignoring tone, mood, characters and, indeed, anything that
differentiates one fairy tale from another.
Many variants,
especially those intended for children, have had morals
attached. Perrault concluded his versions with one, although not always
completely moral: Cinderella concludes with the observation that her
beauty and character would have been useless without her godmother, reflecting
the importance of social connections.
Many fairy tales have
been interpreted for their (purported) significance. One mythological
interpretation claimed that many fairy tales, including Hansel and Gretel,
Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog King, all were solar myths;
this mode of interpretation is rather less popular now. Many have also been
subjected to Freudian, Jungian, and other psychological
analysis, but no mode of interpretation has ever established itself
definitively.
Specific analyses
have often been criticized for lending great importance to motifs that are not,
in fact, integral to the tale; this has often stemmed from treating one
instance of a fairy tale as the definitive text, where the tale has been told
and retold in many variations. In variants of Bluebeard,
the wife's curiosity is betrayed by a blood-stained
key, by an egg's breaking, or by the singing of a rose she wore,
without affecting the tale, but interpretations of specific variants have
claimed that the precise object is integral to the tale.
Other folklorists
have interpreted tales as historical documents. Many German folklorists,
believing the tales to have been preserved from ancient times, used Grimms'
tales to explain ancient customs. Other folklorists have explained the figure
of the wicked stepmother historically: many women did die in childbirth, their
husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the
first marriage for resources.
All these information is provided from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_tale