The concrete folktales ‘Groom with his throat cut on wedding night and
falsely accused bride’ are stories which described a stepmother's desire, which
is deviant out of the order given by the society, leads a family to dissolution.
This concrete folktales draws attention in the point that the crisis of patriarchy
was risen to the surface by the death of the former wife's son which was
connected to the discontinuity of family, different from other concrete
stepmother folktales. Stepmother's murder of the former wife's son was caused
by the desire to hand over succession to her child, which desire can never
allowed, since that threatens the existing social order. At this point,
stepmother's desire is defined as an ‘evil’, which will be inevitably eliminated
to maintain social order.
In the concrete folktales, the punishment act is extended to the stepmother's
son, not only stepmother, for the death of the former wife's son. Stepmother's
son is a man who has the right as a successor of the family and he has no
ethical suspicion on the death of the former wife's son, nevertheless, he is
eliminated by patriarchy, this is the result that reflects the view which identifies the absence of the former wife's son with the discontinuity of family. The
former wife is the subject of the view that acknowledges only ‘the former
wife's’ son as the successor, when we extend it to the outside of the text,
the whole women who are not in the position of stepmother become the
subjects. They transform the existence of stepmother to be more evil to resolve
the anxiety about the threat that might be inflicted on their children when
they are absent, to repeatedly remind how dangerous stepmother's desire is
by drawing a stepmother as a threatening existence in the order of social
system through the transmission of stepmother folktales.
Castigation of the stepmother who murdered the former wife's son, is a
result that the former wife's desire wins in the conflict between the former
wife and the second wife for family succession. When the desire of the
stepmother and the former wife conflicts, which cannot coexists, the object
that led the former wife's desire to the victory was the existence of woman
who live in the order of patriarchy. Women tried to protect their right from
stepmothers' desire under the justification of ‘the principle of the eldest son's
succession’, so that the women's insistence that tried to define stepmothers'
desire, who were in the minority, as the ‘evil’, in the aspect that the order
of system must be protected to maintain the society, could build an agreement
with patriarchy. Stepmother folktales functions as a strategy to entirely
maintain the existing order, which attempts to keep a distance from the
minority stepmothers and the majority's voice that declares ‘difference’.