“Not all stepmothers are evil,” I said, more for my benefit than for hers. Even as I said the words, I realized that in the show we were about to see, a woodcutter’s children are sent off into the forest alone by their evil stepmother who hopes they’ll be eaten alive by wild animals. I had conveniently forgotten about the evil stepmother element when I bought our tickets. The curtain rose, and my daughter and I braced ourselves for a face-to-face with the characters we feared most.
To my shock, this version of the show had no stepmother. The opening scene gave us four puppets: the woodcutter, Hansel, Gretel, and their ordinary, un-evil, actual birth mother. Instead of banishment to the woods by the nefarious wife of their father, Hansel and Gretel choose to traipse off on their own counsel. The unseen grown-ups manipulating Hansel and Gretel gave us the story line:
“Mommy and Daddy are so poor, but they love us so much that they plan to sell our only cow at the market tomorrow so they can buy us food. But we love them so much that we’re going to sneak out tonight and search for food in the forest to surprise them so they don’t have to sell the cow.”
Well. No evil stepmother! I was delighted. Somebody out there was sensitized to the high divorce rates and concomitant millions of stepfamilies who made up potential audience members. If my boyfriend’s daughter saw this show, she wouldn’t have to worry that the equivalent of me would banish her into the woods. I relaxed, and focused on wicked witch management, helping her laugh at the silly witch instead of cry. We both left the show feeling relieved.
I married my boyfriend the following year. As the months passed and we moved ever deeper into stepfamily life, my daughter’s fear of witches abated, but the memory of that sanitized, politically correct Hansel and Gretel continued to haunt me—and made me angrier and angrier. Why, exactly, was the specter of the evil stepmother so dire that the show felt the need to eliminate her, while the witch was allowed to stay? Was it indeed helpful to children of blended families to negate the stepmother’s very existence? In American popular culture, despite millions of stepfamilies, we still cling to the Madonna/Whore model of stepmother typecasting: we’re either Carol Brady-perfect or we’re Snow White-Cinderella-Hansel-Gretel-evil witches. And you know how many of us are Carol Brady. So what do I then prefer? To grapple with being portrayed as Evil, or to grapple with not being portrayed at all?
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