Fear old women in fairy tales. For as long as people have been telling stories, crones have been scaring the wits out of children. But why does the face of evil so often belong to an old woman?
Typecasting is one explanation. “What do we have? Nags, witches, evil stepmothers, cannibals, ogres. It’s quite dreadful,” says Maria Tatar, who teaches a course on folklore and mythology at Harvard. Still, Tatar is quick to point out that old women are also powerful — they’re often the ones who can work magic.
“I always look to the Disney film Snow White and that charismatic, wicked queen who is down in the cellar with her chemistry set. There’s a sequence in which she turns from a beautiful, charismatic, wicked queen into an old hag,” Tatar says. “I think that’s a scene that is probably more frightening for adults than children because it compresses the aging process into about 20 seconds.”Sponsor Message
The queen poisons Snow White so she’ll sleep forever, and other characters are just as wretched. The old lady in Hansel and Gretel wants to roast children in her oven and the witch in The Little Mermaid cuts out Ariel’s tongue.
Tatar says old women villains are especially scary because, historically, the most powerful person in a child’s life was the mother. “Children do have a way of splitting the mother figure into … the evil mother — who’s always making rules and regulations, policing your behavior, getting angry at you — and then the benevolent nurturer — the one who is giving and protects you, makes sure that you survive.”
Veronique Tadjo, a writer who grew up in the Ivory Coast, thinks there’s a fear of female power in general. She says a common figure in African folk tales is the old witch who destroys people’s souls. As Tadjo explains, “She’s usually a solitary woman. She’s already marginal. She’s angry at something — at life, or whatever — and she will ‘eat’ — that’s the expression — people’s souls, in the sense that she’s going to possess people and then they die a terrible death. And everybody knows it’s the witch; it’s the old woman.”
Still, they’re not all bitter and malicious hags. Old Mother Hubbard might not be the brightest bulb, but she does try very hard to please her dog. Elderly women in folk tales often use their knowledge and experience of the world to guide the troubled protagonist. Tadjo points to the Kenyan story “Marwe In The Underworld” about a girl who commits suicide by drowning herself because she feels she has failed her parents. Marwe enters the Land of the Dead where she meets an old woman.
