The true story
Wow. What a find. I’ve always thought that fairy tales reflect realities that illustrate what I want to say in my trilogy of books I’m translating into English—and look what I found today!
In the real Middle Ages, not in fairy tales, some mothers—who we would now say suffered from malignant narcissism—killed their most beautiful daughters for reasons of power, if we understand the dynamics of the noble classes. (I couldn’t help but think of the infanticide campaign that my mother subtly unleashed during my puberty and that virulently culminated in my adolescence. But that’s another story.)
3 replies on “Snow White”
Yes! In regards to mothers envious of their own daughters I remember seeing some of this growing up in high school. I remember going to these dances that were chaperoned by the mothers of the students and they would be wearing extremely provocative clothing. I thought it was odd then, but my seventeen year old self didn’t realize at the time that these older women still sought attention from men, even boys as I was not yet an adult. Attention is truly a powerful addiction for women. I see Instagram growth with the primary reason being women going there for attention and validation which they get from an army of weak emasculated men online. I see older women constantly giving younger women the horrible advice of not marrying until well into their 30’s like they did which sabotages many women from forming healthy families earlier in life.
This is the problem with true stories. I enjoyed watching it (I didn’t know this – though I knew folktales have often been lightened up) and certainly believe it as realistic. But then I thought how much trouble I have usually putting autobiographical truth to others. It shatters what they ‘know as true’ and challenges their preconceptions, and the result is often cynicism and dismissal, referring to a situation as contrived or unlikely, preferring themselves to live in fantasyland, perhaps to some degree for ease of their own conscience in having turned a blind eye to this sort of thing. It disenchants it, and ‘spoils the magic’ of ignorance.
I’ve noticed too in the past (and read in researchers) that it’s often easier to blame, say, an uncle or a stepmother in contrived retellings of atrocity, passing down into folk consciousness. Really, even if that were the case (it does happen too, to some degree, especially in cases of physical abuse), parents, as primary caregivers with the closest emotional bond for the child to experience, from birth – closer than that of a relative or unrelated adult – can still do the most damage, taking on board Colin Ross and John Bowlby in their writings on Attachment Theory, as much as the clinical home life evaluations of Theodore Lidz and Silvano Arieti.
Even in fairy tales of our century, such as Harry Potter’s misadventures with his uncle & aunt, there is a displacement of what actually happens: it is not the “uncle and aunt” but mom and dad who behave this way.