A week or two ago, a friend of mine made some comment on her Facebook page about Maleficent, or the idea of the "Bad Fairy/Wicked Witch" rehabilitation that's kind of the thing in fantasy right now, or something similar. I responded about an idea I had had just that morning on the edge of sleep, kind of a half dream, in which this friend had been Maleficent, I had been Aurora's mother, the queen, and we were best friends. In the idea, baby Aurora was "cursed" not out of spite, but to protect her from the fate of the original Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, which was pretty grim. (I'm including it behind a cut because it's kind of disturbing.)
Sun, Moon, and Talia
In the oldest version of the Sleeping Beauty story, the princess (Talia) doesn't fall into the enchanted sleep from pricking her finger, but rather when a poisoned or cursed splinter of flax gets stuck in her finger. Overcome with grief, her parents leave her where she is, shut the castle, and leave, taking everyone else with them.
Some time passes and another king who is out hunting comes across the castle. Discovering this beautiful, but presumably-dead, woman he proceededs to rape her. Nine months later, Talia gives birth to twins, while still in her enchanted sleep. The spell is broken and she wakes when one of the babies sucks the flax splinter out of her finger. She names the children Sun and Moon.
At some point after this, the second king returns - and finding not a dead woman, but a very much alive woman with his two children, he returns home with them. But he is already married and has to hide them from his wife, with whom he has not been able to have children. When his wife finds out, she orders first the children, than Talia, killed and cooked, to be served to herself and the king. Fortunately, the cook hides the children and their mother instead, substituting goat and deer meat.
The king eventually discovers both that his lover and her children are hidden at the cook's house, and his wife's plot. He has his wife thrown into the oven instead and is left free to marry Talia and recognize the children as his.
In some of the early versions, the king's wife if part ogre or part giant, I guess to explain why she wants to eat the princess and her children. In some versions, the half-orgress queen is the king's mother rather than his wife, I guess because it's "better" if the prince isn't married when he sleeps with a seemingly-dead body.
I'm also currently reading Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik, which is kind of a deconstruction of the idea of marrying the king as a reward for completing an impossible task. In the story, two of the three main female characters end up married to powerful men who would kill them as soon as they are no longer useful, or as soon as they set a toe out of line. (That's not how the story ends - it's the impetus for the two of them to work together to resolve their situations.)
Why is this a thing? Why is it a reward, something to aspire to, to be married to an unstable despot, or to a man who finds a seemingly-dead woman in the woods and his immediate response is to kiss her (or more), or a man who can't even remember what you look like but knows that gosh darn you had some fantastic shoes?
And then there's also the new show coming out on Hulu, The Great (about Catherine the Great, played by Elle Fanning, who I would watch do pretty much anything). As much as I love Russian history, I actually don't know as much about Tsarina Yekaterina II as I should. I do know that she was a German princess, married to the Russian Tsar who was, depending on what source you're looking at, either insane, mentally deficient, or just your common garden-variety megalomaniac ruler. The show (based on the previews) is portraying her as a smart young woman who wants to help her new people, wants to be an equal partner in this reign, but who is "trapped in a marriage with a madman." And for what it's worth, she was historically one of the best and longest-reigning Russian rulers (once she got ride of that madman, of course.)
And of course I think of Henry VIII and all his ill-fated wives...
I found myself thinking, "Is this the fate of queens? To be a beautiful trophy, a brood mare, an expendable model to be replaced if she doesn't do what you want?" Why would anyone want that? Why is this the "dream," the fairy tale we have been sold for centuries, the tale we are still, to a certain extent, selling today?
I actually have a couple "wicked fairy/evil stepmother" rehabilitation stories in my head right now. One of them being the idea mentioned at the beginning of this post, the other being the idea that Snow White's step-mother - again, someone with a prior relationship with the princess's mother - recognizes that Snow White is not a natural child, but a vampire or dhampir.