Abstract: Stepmothers and wicked mothers play important roles in orally transmitted tales. But sometimes a child becomes a matricide. This superlative cruelty is at the heart of La Mère traîtresse or Le Ruban qui rend fort, a tale with nineteen versions in the catalogue of French tales. We analyze the figure of the “bad guy” in this corpus, to which we add, for comparison and cross-cultural exploration, eight Algerian versions in Kabyle and Arabic.
