THREE VERSIONS OF OORY
I THE MUTILATED GIRLS
But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle are it oilated sisters -- indeed, it would be easy to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, some sort of circumcision-like ritual chop, heless, the story always begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtles mother, as though it is really always the story of her mother even if, at the beginning of the story, the mother herself is just about to exit the narrative because she is at deaths door: "A rich mans wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside."
he absence of the husband/father. Although the woman is defined by her relation to him ("a rich mans wife") the daughter is unambiguously hers, as if hers alone, and the entire drama s only women, takes place almost exclusively among women, is a fight between two groups of women -- in the right-hand er, Ashputtle and her mother; in the left-hand er, the stepmother and her daughters, of whom the father is unaowledged but all the same is predicated by both textual and biologiecessity.
In the drama between two female families in opposition to one another because of their rivalry over men (husband/father, husband/son), the men seem no more than passive victims of their fancy, yet their significe is absolute because it is ("a rich man", "a kings son") eic.
Ashputtles father, the old man, is the first object of their desire and their dissension; the stepmother snatches him from the dead mother before her corpse is cold, as soon as her grip loosens. Then there is the young man, the potential bridegroom, the hypothetical son-in-law, for whose possessiohers fight, using their daughters as instruments of war or as surrogates in the business of mating.
If the men, and the bank balances for which they stand, are the passive victims of the two grown women, then the girls, all three, are animated solely by the wills of their mothers, Even if Ashputtles mother dies at the beginning of the story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position more authoritative. The mhost domihe narrative and is, in a real sehe motive tre, the event that makes all the other events happen.
On her death bed, the mother assures the daughter: "I shall always look after you and always be with you." The story tells you how she does it.
At this point, when her mother makes her promise, Ashputtle is nameless. She is her mothers daughter. That is all we know. It is the stepmother who names her Ashputtle, as a joke, and, in doing so, wipes out her real name, whatever that is, banishes her from the family, exiles her from the shared table to the lonely hearth among the ders, removes her ti but honourable status as daughter and gives her, instead, the ti but disreputable status of servant.
Her mother told Ashputtle she would always look after her, but then she died and the father married again and gave Ashputtle an imitation mother with daughters of her own whom she loves with the same fierce passion as Ashputtles mother did and still, posthumously, does, as we shall find out.
With the searriage es the vexed question: who shall be the daughters of the house? Mine! declares the stepmother ahe freshly named, non-daughter Ashputtle to sweep and scrub and sleep on the hearth while her daughters lie between sheets in Ashputtles bed. Ashputtle, no lon