Transcript of the Audio:
I’ve serialized my entire book, The Fairy Tale Heroine’s Journey here on Substack over the last several months. Now I’m beginning a series of podcasts with different takes on the feminine fairy tales and what they might mean. This week, I’m launching an audio podcast for ease of production, but I’m planning to post videos and interviews as well.
Meet the Mothers on the Heroine’s Journey
As a lifelong storyteller, I discovered the stages of the heroine’s journey found in the pre-literate, oral traditions. The age-old, foundational fairy tales, folktales, and myths of the feminine quest had survived by word of mouth over millennia, often from matriarchal cultures. These are similar, but very different sources than those in Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, popularized in his book, Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Modern storytellers, like me, found heroine’s tales in versions collected from the “folk,” mostly throughout Europe and the Middle East, transcribed, published, translated centuries ago. So, the heroine’s journey has always existed and perhaps predated the patriarchal hero’s quest. Now, as women seek equal status in society, we are urged to rediscover the feminine heroic and its meaning in our own lives.
In this first podcast, we will meet the “Three Mothers” in two stories, one ancient, one personal.
The heroine’s tales typically include mothers, a group of three, distinct mothers; I’m sure you already know them: the good, nurturing, loving mother who predictably dies; the evil, critical, competitive stepmother who seeks to destroy the heroine; and the godmother, spiritual mother, or supernatural crone who aids the heroine in her escape, yet challenges and empowers her.
Since these characters appear in folk and fairy tales, the “mothers” are symbolic of certain forces and pressures in a woman’s life. As you listen to this Germanic folktale from Old Europe, consider who those three characters are in the tale and in your life. Determine what the challenges are for the heroine in this story and how she succeeds in her quest.
Folktale: “Mother Holle”
In some traditions, Mother Holle or Frau Holle is known as the feminine spirit of the woods; winter feasts are still held in her honor in Germanic cultures. Yet we’ve been taught to think of folktales like hers as entertainment for children, not as remnants of matriarchal culture and its beliefs in the power of women and the feminine.
This version of the folktale is based on the 1812 Grimm Brothers’ collection, Household Tales:
There was once a widow who had two daughters—one was her stepdaughter, sweet and industrious, while the other was her own daughter, sour and lazy. The stepdaughter did all the work in the house: Every day the poor maid had to sit by a well and spin and spin with a hand shuttle till her fingers bled. She often thought of her own sweet mother and their peaceful home before her beloved mother became ill and died.
Now it happened one day that the shuttle became stained with her blood, so she dipped it in the well to wash the blood off and…dropped it and it fell to the bottom. She began to weep, and ran to her stepmother.
The stepmother showed no mercy, “Since you have let the shuttle fall in, you must fetch it out again.”
So the girl went back to the well, and did not know what to do; in the sorrow of her heart she jumped into the well to get the shuttle. She fell and fell and when she came to herself again, she was in a lovely meadow where the sun was shining on many flowers.
Along this meadow she went, and soon came to a baker’s oven full of bread, and the bread cried out, “Oh, take me out! take me out! or I shall burn; I have been baked a long time!” So she went up to it, and took out all the loaves one after another with the bread-shovel.
After that she went on till she came to a tree covered with apples, which called out to her, “Oh, shake me! shake me! my apples are all ripe!” So she shook the tree till the apples fell like rain, and went on shaking till they were all down, and when she had gathered them into a heap, she went on her way.
At last she came to a little stone cottage, out of which an old woman peeped; but she had such large teeth that the girl was frightened, and was about to run away.
But the old woman called out to her, “What are you afraid of, dear child? Stay with me; if you will do all the work in the house properly, you shall be the better for it. Only you must take care to make my bed well, and to shake it thoroughly till the feathers fly—for then there is snow on the earth. I am Mother Holle.”
As the old woman spoke so kindly to her, the girl took courage and agreed to enter her service. She attended to everything for her mistress, and always shook her bed so vigorously that the feathers flew about like snow-flakes. So she had a pleasant life with her; never an angry word; and good meals every day.
She stayed some time with Mother Holle, and then became sad and homesick. At last she said to the old woman, “I have a longing for home; however well off I am down here, I must go up again to my own people.”
Mother Holle said, “I am pleased that you long for your home again. As you have served me so truly, I myself will take you up again.”
Thereupon she took her by the hand, and led her to a large door. The door was opened, and just as the maiden was standing beneath the doorway, a heavy shower of golden rain fell, and all the gold remained sticking to her, so that she was completely covered with gold coins.
“You shall have that because you are so industrious,” said Mother Holle; and at the same time she gave her back the shuttle which she had let fall into the well. Thereupon the door closed, and the maiden found herself up above upon the earth, not far from her stepmother’s house.
The maid told all that had happened to her. As soon as the stepmother heard how she had come by so much wealth, she was anxious to obtain the same good luck for her lazy daughter.
I’ll end the tale here, but I’m certain you can predict the outcome for the lazy daughter.
Reflections:
Consider how the heroine in this folktale succeeds, with what qualities?
Are you able to identify the three mothers and their roles in her quest?
Can you identify mother figures like these in your own life?
My Personal Story: Three Mothers, 1959
My personal, true story has three important mother figures—when I left home for college in 1959.
When I was seventeen, I left my new home in California for a women’s college near Chicago. The night before, my thoughtless mother had already given my small bedroom to my younger brother and I’d slept on a hard mat on the floor in my parents’ room. I took the Silver Zephyr express by coach from San Francisco to Chicago, with a stopover in Kewanee, Illinois, since the train ran right through my dad's hometown.
My grandmother greeted me at the train station in Kewanee with hugs and kisses. I was transported to her cottage home on Main St., a comfy, sweet place with a vegetable garden in the back. Grandmother was a charmer who loved me with a deep-hearted devotion, her only granddaughter. Days later, I left the only stable home of my childhood, with grandmother’s confidence in me, the wind at my back.
On the short train ride to Chicago, I thought of the letter I’d received from my great aunt, Sister Georgina, on my mother's side, just before high school graduation, encouraging me to apply to Rosary College, a respected liberal arts college for women run by Dominican nuns. My great aunt was part of their motherhouse based in Wisconsin. Sponsored by her, I’d applied and was quickly accepted as a freshman in a stunning turnaround of good fortune. But I was to live off campus as a day student and be a maid of all work, a mother’s helper to a wealthy family in Oak Park to pay for my room and board.
One fall Sunday, I planned to take the train to Milwaukee to visit Sister Georgina where she was a math teacher at a downtown girls’ high school. Anxiously, I waited for the Lake St. elevated to take me to Chicago’s Union Station. At last, an L arrived just in time for me to sprint down the stairs from the platform and run to catch the train for Milwaukee.
But when I’d raced down the steep stairs, I grabbed the railings with my white gloves. After I caught my breath inside the train, making it to a seat with minutes to spare, I noticed that the inside of both my gloves was stained with dark soot, the filth of Chicago. It was 1959, when young ladies were expected to wear white gloves, certainly to church or a convent. Ashamed, I clenched my hands into fists.
The nuns at the convent where my great aunt lived welcomed me and brought me to an inner parlor, treating my aunt with deep respect, an elderly nun. She wore the full habit of a Dominican, a black veil and starched wimple with a full-length, white robe, and sat at the head of a dining table. I sat to her left, politely waiting for her to speak.
As we were served a light lunch, she quizzed me about my studies and the campus, my work in the family home.
With a twinkle in her blue eyes, she asked, “Why are you hiding your white gloves in your lap?”
Shamefully, I showed her the stain of soot in each glove’s palm and told her of my race to the train.
“Never be ashamed of something you can’t help,” she said. “You were running and needed to hold on. I’m proud you ran to visit me.”
Later, as I stood to leave the parlor, she called out, “Wear your white gloves!”
I put them on as a badge of honor and wore them all the way back to Oak Park. I understood what my religious, demanding great aunt was telling me: to wear with grace all the times when things didn’t go right, when I made mistakes, because my heart was in it.
Reflections:
Do you recognize the three mother figures in this story: the nurturing one, the competitive, the spiritual?
Reflect on the different stages of your life: When did any of these three mother figures play a key role?
What is your story of the three mothers?
Share this post