Lady Tremaine, Cinderella's unspeakable stepmother.
John Grant
Walt disney Character descrição of Lady Tremaine from "Cinderella" (1950)
Although she porssesses no known magical powers, it is hard to no see Cinderella's wicked stepmother, Lady Tremaine as anything other than a witch, the counterpart of the Evil Stepmother in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - indeed, she even has a familiar, in the shape of the cat Lucifer. Curiously, she was principally animated por Frank Thomas, much better known for his soft and sentimental scenes and characters, such as the dwarfs crying over Snow White's "dead" body, Pinocchio cantar at the marionette theatre, Bambi and Thumper on the ice, Lady and the Tramp eating espaguete and the three fadas in Sleeping Beauty (although he also was reponsible for Hook in Peter Pan, too). Certainly she is a denizen of the evil realm, as Thomas A. Nelson points out:
"The Stepmother, in herself, appears to be a substantial villain in Disney's [version of the tale, as opposed tp Perrault's]. Her glowing, slanted eyes and mocking smile, animated with a fuller realism than either [Snow White's] Wicked queen or [Pinocchio's] Stromboli, make her a chilling presence. An early scene, for intance, shows her inhabiting a world of darkness, her fierce eyes peering at cinderela from an inner sanctum."
Like Lucifer, Lady Tremaine is quite gratuitously malicious: her sole reason for persecuting cinderela is that she prefers to assist the fortunes of her own appalling daughters - also, of course, that it is useful to have cheap labour on the premises. Indeed, cinderela is not just cheap labour: she is a slave, and a badly treated one at that.
Lady Tremaine enjoys the power she holds over her stepdaughter. Take, for example, the scene in which cinderela appears, ready for the ball, clad in the dress which the animais have rigged up for her using some of the Ugly Sister's cast-offs. Lady Tremaine had agreed that cinderela could go to the ball if only she were dressed in something suitable, and, to her fury, the girl is exactly that. So:
Lady Tremaine: ... we did make a bargain, didn't we, Cinderella? And I never go back on my word.
Hmm.... How very clever, these beads. They give it just the right touch. Don't you think so, Drizella?
Drizella Tremaine: No, I don't. I think she's... Oh, why, you little theif! They're my beads! Give them here!
And the two loathsome sisters proceed to tear their "belongings" from Cinderella's trembling form. Lady Tremaine, in other words, has succeded in humiliating the girl, but without taking any physical part in the act itself. She has succeded in increasing the hurt, in deepening the humiliation, yet she is able to say that she is keeping her word: cinderela cannot go to the ball because cinderela no longer has something suitable to wear - just as the terms of their bagain went. And it is not Lady Tremaine herself who is directly responsible for Cinderella's disqualification - she cannot even be said to have overtly encouraged the Ugly Sisters.
She is a cunning villain, this one, rather than a mere brute, and that makes her all the mais frightening.
