At the end of the tale of Vasilisa and the skull, the skull goes home with the girl and burns her stepmother and stepsister to ash. Nobody in the story is sorry. Varvara Dobrovolskaya, an associate professor at the Institute of Slavic Culture of the Kosygin Russian State University, points out that readers tend to forget this ending. What they remember is Vasilisa, who got away, "the nice little girl."
On NauchDok, Dobrovolskaya was asked whether such tales reflect real daily life, and her reply was short. It was a brief aside, not a thesis, but it explains why the stepmother is so often the villain. Russian tales are full of relatives behaving badly. In her phrase, they play "one nasty trick after another." The stepmother is the best-known case, and Dobrovolskaya reads her through marriage rules.
Start with where the wife comes from. If a man marries a woman from his own village, from his own kin, his child is already hers. The girl is a sister's child, or an aunt's, or a relative of her mother. Nobody has to be persuaded to love her.
Now send for a wife from far away. What is the man's child to her? Why would she love a girl she has never seen? And suppose the new wife has a daughter of her own. Then the two girls are heading for the same market, the marriage of a bride who must be chosen over another.
Yes, if she has a daughter of her own, it's nothing but competition, right, so it has to be eliminated, she mustn't be the most beautiful bride, right, the most skilled with her hands, the most capable housekeeper, no need.
Да если у неё ещё своя девочка есть, это же конкуренция сплошная, да, значит, надо это устранить, она не должна быть самой красивой невестой, да, самой рукодельной, самой хозяйственной, не надо
— Varvara Dobrovolskaya, NauchDok, 48:31
The tale's famous chores fit this reading. Heap enough work on the girl and she has no time to become the most skilled in the village. The cruelty has a purpose, and the purpose is her own daughter's wedding. Dobrovolskaya says the questions of marrying inside the kin or outside it are all there in the stepmother.
So when a stepmother appears in a tale, you can read her as the sign of a marriage that brought a woman in from elsewhere.
Other tellers have found other motives. A study in Psychiatry Investigation in 2019, by Geon Ho Bahn, counted what drove stepmothers in folktales. Jealousy lay behind the abuse in 12 of 15 cases in the Grimms' tales. In the Korean collection, greed led in 12 of 14.
The real world is less tidy than the tale. A study in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2021, by Ryan Schacht, looked at more than 400,000 people in Utah between 1847 and 1940. Children whose widowed parent remarried did not die more often than other children who had lost a parent. Within a single family, stepchildren even survived better than their half-siblings. That is Utah, not a Russian village, and it measures deaths, not weddings. A tale may be about something quieter than survival: who gets to be the best bride.
The skull, at least, picked a side.
