Forever Cursed: Stepmothers, “otherness,” and the re-inscription of myth in transnormative family narratives

The Step- in Stepmother derives from the Middle English steif, meaning bereaved, and was originally applied to orphaned children. A Stepmother, then is the mother of a bereaved child. Loss and grief are her milieu, her raison d'etre … she is a creature of the grief in which she moves, a shadow figure rising not ex nihilo, but out of wrenching loss. (Schectman 1993: xvi)