DEAD MOTHERS AND WICKED STEPMOTHERS: THE

You know them well: on one side, the scheming, jealous stepmother, obsessed with her fading youth. On the other, her husband’s virginal, naive, and beautiful daughter – whose own mother is usually dead. The conflict between them is so familiar that it feels inevitable. Where, though, did these nearly universal figures come from? Why are they so ingrained in the imaginations of people around the world and across the millennia? In this course, we’ll explore the roots of the maternal in folk and fairy tales. We’ll analyze a variety of stories and films to investigate the “absent mother,” “virginal daughter,” and “wicked stepmother” from different critical perspectives, paying special attention to analytical psychology and feminist psychoanalytic theories, to try to figure out why these figures are so compelling, so ubiquitous, and so hard to shake.