MY REVIEW OF "THE WICKED STEPMOTHER" AND THE WITCH SUBGENRE

Ah, witches. My first encounter with a witch was from the viewing of the ever popular movie The Wizard of Oz, which is where I'm sure a lot of folks get their ideas about witches from. But did you know that Witchery (sometimes called Wicca) is a following? They exist today as gatherings of proclaimed witches and warlocks (male versions as most term them to be), and their belief seem to be mostly based on Animilism, similar to whats seen in Japanese Shinto religion as talked about in my last post.

In the short story, "The Wicked Stepmother", my first initiation was that the wicked stepmother was the true witch, as her ill treatment of the poor stepchildren could be seen by anyone as the formal treatment by a common wicked witch. But from reading this, I myself gather instead that the true witch was not the stepmother, but the true mother of the children, who had been turned into a female goat at the beginning of the story, after her and her husband (the father of the children) had somehow cursed each other and prevented one another from eating without the company of the other. From the reading, I could not find anything very witchlike in the stepmother (at least in the traditional sense), the only thing being that she gave birth to a one-eyed daughter, who was just as wicked as she was.

The huge but terrible sacrifice that the true mother of the children made when she was slaughtered by a butcher at the direction of the wicked stepmother makes me thingk that the author of this story may be trying to assure readers that not all witches may be evil, or that our initial ideas of what a witch is may be inaccurate. From this story, I have gathered that we as writers (myseklf included) may not be taking as far enough advantage of the witch genre of literature as we should, since from this short story alone I was surprised at the end of it that the real witch of the story was really a protagonist, when almost always it is the other way around.