"The New Mother" is a short story written by Lucy Clifford and first published in her collection of children's stories, The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise in 1882. The story has been reprinted in anthologies, including The Dark Descent, and was rewritten for the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.
Summary
The story concerns two well-behaved sisters, Blue-Eyes and Turkey, living with their mother and their baby sibling in the forest while their father is far away at sea. One day, the children meet a strange girl, who tells them that she has a tiny man and woman in a compartment on her guitar, and will only show them to naughty children. The children return home, and do their best to be naughty despite their love for their mother. The mother, despondent, tells the children that if they don't behave she will have to go away with the baby, and be replaced by a "new mother" with "glass eyes and a wooden tail". When the children next meet the girl, she tells them they haven't been nearly naughty enough, and suggests ways for them to be more naughty. This cycle repeats three times, at the end of which the girl tells the children that they will never be naughty enough to see the little people and that their mother and baby have gone away to be with the father and that they will never return and that the new mother is coming and disappears. At this point, the children's mother and the baby have also left. The children do not believe the girl and clean upthe house and await their mother's return. The new mother shows up but the children try not to let her in. They see that she has glass eyes and a wooden tail. The children flee into the woods and live on berries. Their real mother never returns and the new mother lives at the house instead.
Adaptations and legacy
The story was rewritten by Alvin Schwartz as "The Drum" for More Scary Stories to Tellin the Dark in 1984, the second installment of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In Schwartz's version, the sisters attempt to obtain a drum that contains a dancing mechanical man and woman from a gypsy girl. Schwartz misattributed the original story as an anonymous folktale entitled "The Pear Drum". In his 1997 collection More Short & Shivery, Robert D. San Souci rewrote the tale, retaining the basic plot structure but revising the ending. The girl and her guitar are changed to an old beggar woman at the market with a music box, where the figures of a boy and a girl come out and dance. The two sisters misbehave to come into possession of the box, only for the new mother with the glass eyes and wooden tail to be revealed as the beggar woman, who was in disguise. The children are swallowed by the woman's purse that grows to a large size when she arrives at their house. The story ends sometime later with two brothers approaching the woman in the market, who opens the box to reveal the dancing figures of two girls, one with blue eyes and one with red skirts. "The New Mother" was adapted into the 2008 short film "Music Box", where the sisters are lured into misbehaving by a homeless woman to claim her music box. Unlike the original story, the eponymous new mother is not featured and the sisters' mother simply leaves them at the end. The short film was written and directed by Brian Lange and starred Abi McKenzie and Shelby Howe as the sisters, Dana DeLorenzo as the homeless woman, and Danielle Brothers as the girls' mother. Neil Gaiman has acknowledged "The New Mother" as one of two major influences on his 2002 novella Coraline.
