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So Cheryl, some years ago I was asked to submit an essay on fairy tales, something I knew

absolutely nothing about.

And in the course of that, I did a bunch of research.

And one of the things that I uncovered that I just hadn't thought about at all was

kind of the unique history of how step mothers are portrayed.

There's a long tradition, as we know, in fairy tales of the wicked stepmother.

It's just an archetype.

And that arises actually from very particular economic and familial dynamics in the Middle

Ages.

Basically, if there was a stepmother who came into a family, she was suddenly competing

with the children economically for the inheritance with the children of the husband.

And really what was so interesting in thinking about it is, okay, but that's medieval times.

Why is it that this archetype of the wicked stepmother somehow still exists in our culture?

And it's partly because we keep recycling these fairy tales.

But it's also, I think, because the idealization of the mother figure is one of the persistent

myths that we've been unable to cleave ourselves from.

And it's the only become more extreme in a sense, because as we've discussed and here

in so many letters, mothers of all sorts hold themselves to an impossible standard.

I feel like that modern myth is colliding with that longer standing traditional myth of

the stepmother as an inherently suspect, morally suspect figure.

And today that's what we're going to talk about, step monsters.

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