Via London Review of Books, Leslie Wilson considers the figure of the Witch as the Bad Mother:
“The crudest form of this belief is still held by present-day Tories: she is a single parent and breeds monsters.
Originally, all the bad stepmothers were mothers, and [Wilson’s] own 1907 Gothic-script version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ forgets to call her the stepmother as the story gains momentum. The mother refuses to feed the children and sends them out to die. They meet the witch, who feeds them only in order to eat them. When Hansel and Gretel come home after Gretel has burned the witch in her own womblike oven, they find the bad mother dead, and can live well on the witch’s treasure on their own with the father.
It is the mother who has been assassinated: it could only be done by turning her into a witch. This is not merely society’s judgment on undutiful mothers, but an expression of the thwarted child’s unpermitted rage, inevitable in any culture where women are delegated to tend and slap children.”