There was once a young girl, boy, and their father who lived in a small village south of Fénis, Italy. They were mourning the recent loss of the mother who had fallen ill a few years earlier. The father eventually remarried a woman who had a daughter of her own. This woman took on the role of the parrastra, or stepmother, in the family. Her daughter had only one eye due to an incident that occurred when she was a child.
The family lived together in peace and the stepmother would look after the children while their father was away working as a farmer in the hills of Fénis. What the rest of the family did not know was that she despised her husband’s children.
One day, she devised a plan to get rid of them. While her husband was away, she would send his two children with bread to give him. However, she planned to tell them the wrong direction so that they would get lost and never return.
The day that she sent them away was beautiful outside so the two children decided to stop at a creek to bask in the sun of the day. The young boy waded in the creek to cool down. To his surprise, he transformed into a calf with golden horns. In this moment, the children wanted to find their father more than ever.
Continuing into the hills, the young siblings came across a castle in the valley where a king and his son lived. When the prince saw how beautiful the young girl was, he immediately proposed and the two were married. Giving up hope for finding their father, this is where the young girl and her “calf” lived for the next several years.
One day, the father was wandering through the hills thinking about his lost children, and came across the castle in the valley. He had finally found his children! He was surprised to see that his son was no longer human but he was too happy to be reunited that he did not think twice. After catching up with them, he returned home to tell his wife the good news.
When she heard the news, she immediately began to plot how to get rid of the children once and for all. She brought her one-eyed daughter to visit the children, but when the parrastra was found her husband's daughter alone, she threw her from her window into the lake. She then left her own daughter in her place with the plan to tell the prince that she had fallen and injured her eye. The stepmother then returned home, thinking she had finally won.
The prince returned looking for his wife and when he found her to be replaced with the one-eyed daughter, he was furious. He went outside by the calf. He pleaded with the calf to help him find her and the calf yelled out to the sister. The prince looked to the body of water and saw his wife struggling to swim.
He sent his boatmen out to rescue her and in the meantime, he had his troops kill the blind daughter, and sent her remains to her mother. The father had many questions and when the parrastra came clean, he left her and went to live with his two children in the castle in the hills.
Author’s note:
This story that I have written this week is an adaption of the story Parrastra by Thomas Frederick Crane. Like with Cenerentola, I decided to use the Sicilian name of The Stepmother which translates to Parrastra because this story is originally Sicilian and helped keep my Italian theme throughout the Italian stories.
I wanted to keep my rendition of this story similar to the original story in order to keep the integrity of the story. However, I wanted to give the story a little bit more background. For this reason, I added some information about the late mother in the beginning of the story to give a sense of what happened prior to the story. I also decided to leave out some details to simplify the story. In the original story, it is known that the daughter has some mystical powers in the realm of water which is what makes her be able to warn her brother that he would turn into a calf if he went into the water. I decided to keep her mystical powers unknown in order to leave it to the imagination of the audience reading the story. The original version held many more twists and turns. For example, when the father finally found his children his daughter sent him home with gold to support the rest of the family. In addition to this, when the prince finds the one-eyed daughter, she tells him that the calf impaired her eye with his horn, and the orders the calf to be killed. However, when the calf heard of this he called to his sister who was out to sea, the prince heard, and this is how he realized the one-eyed daughter was a fraud. I wanted to keep the theme of my Italian storybook by setting the story near Fénis, Italy just as I did with Cenerentola. I hope you all enjoyed reading this rendition of The Stepmother. Let me know what you all think on my comment wall.