The Cinderella story

The Cinderella story has a reputation for being quite archaic. The typical criticism is that it's a tale about a girl whose complacency and humility in the face of abuse is rewarded by a fairy godmother who gives her to a guy. It tells the tale of a girl who, without supernatural assistance, is unable to even get to a party.

Cinderella doesn't, however, genuinely have an innate moral code or value system, like other fairy tales do. It's an accommodating narrative that has been told and retold so much that it no longer really has a consistent moral. It can instead have any moral.

Due to her intelligence and good fortune, Cinderella frequently achieved success in mediaeval Europe. The brothers Grimm, who wrote the version of the tale that Americans are most inclined to consider canonical, focused Cinderella's triumph on her goodness and beauty in the 19th century. Cinderella alternated between being an active author of her own fate and a passive, mute doll as the tale was told and repeated.

Cinderella has been repackaged as a feminist icon numerous times over the past few decades. Cinderella Liberator is a children's picture book written by feminist author Rebecca Solnit, who also popularised the term "mansplaining." In the end, Cinderella establishes her own bakery and makes a platonic friendship with the prince, who renounces his throne to take up farming.

Although Cinderella's morals may have changed over the ages, the main story is as follows: Every Cinderella story features a daughter as the main character who is betrayed and mistreated by her mother or stepmother but ultimately overcomes due to her inherent goodness. Depending on who is telling the narrative, a different virtue is being discussed.

This is due to the fact that Cinderella's power does not come from its morals. It has to do with how the narrative views families.

Cinderella analyses key problems about family. How can two families be combined? And how can families remain intact as children grow older?

The early Cinderellas were con artists.

According to Jack Zipes, one of the finest experts on fairy tales in the world and professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, early Cinderellas frequently took the form of cunning trickster figures who plotted their way to the top.

Although Giambattista Basile is credited with writing one of the oldest versions of Cinderella in Europe, Zipes links the tale's origins to ancient Egypt and China. Because his Cinderella was as smart as a cat, Basile dubbed his 1634 rendition "The Cat Cinderella" ("Cenerentola" in Italian; Cat Cinderella in English).

After growing weary of the abuse, Cat Cinderella kills her first evil stepmother. She then repeatedly pricks her father with a pin until he decides to wed her governess as the next step in their relationship.

The governess ultimately reveals herself to be just as evil as the first stepmother, and the rest of the narrative follows the expected course. However, Cinderella triumphs thanks to her cunning ability to trick her evil stepsisters into taking her to the ball and her good fortune in having fairy allies. Basile acknowledges the significance of fate in his novel with his last conclusion, "You must be mad to resist the stars."

But the main problem in this story is the same as the one we know and recognise in contemporary Cinderella stories: Her father has wed a new wife, and Cat Cinderella's mother has passed away. (Actually, two newlyweds.) What will now happen to their family?

Finette Cendron, written by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy in 1697, features our heroine as the wittiest of the three daughters. The Cinderella character is known as Fine-Oreille (Shrewd Listener) and is also known by the nickname Finette, or Little Clever Girl. Her sisters are Fleur d'Amour (Flower of Love) and Belle-de-Nuit (Beauty of the Night).

When Finette finally defeats her evil mother, her evil sisters, and the horde of ogres that want to eat her, it is because to her amazing cunning. Finette's adventures unfold in a tale that reads like a Cinderella/Hansel and Gretel hybrid.

Finette is also incredibly kind, but the narrator of "Finette Cendron" is quick to reassure us that virtue in and of itself does not distinguish Finette from other people. Instead, Finette's generosity is crucial since being polite to horrible people makes them laughably enraged.

In the rhyming moral lesson, the narrator counsels the reader to "do favours for the undeserving until they weep." Each advantage causes a profound pain that cuts to the core of the arrogant bosom. In other words, Finette was the first troll in the world before the internet.

The tale of Finette is somewhat different from the Cinderella that is currently most popular. Her lovely sisters are her biological sisters, and her wicked mother is her biological mother. The mother is pursuing all three girls because she feels the family doesn't have enough food to sustain both parents and kids.

However, the fundamentals of the battle between them are ones that appear often throughout fairy tales, including the Cinderella we are most familiar with today: When a girl approaches puberty, what happens? How should a mother respond to her daughter if she poses a sexual threat?

The virtues that enable Cinderella to triumph aren't universal, despite the fact that the conflict in these early Cinderella stories is well-known and ubiquitous. Cinderella may or may not be nice in these tales, and she is typically attractive enough to look well in a ball gown, but it is not the reason she triumphs in the end.

She triumphs as a result of her intelligence and luck. The morality of these tales is one of chaos and serendipity, where the wisest course of action is to form strong allies and use all of your cunning.

The version of "Cinderella" by Charles Perrault from 1697, which was the first to make Cinderella's fateful shoe a glass slipper, appears to have had the most influence on the Grimms' adaptation.

Cinderella is a little more passive in Perrault's version than Cat Cinderella or Finette were (she never kills anyone or pricks them with a pin), but she actively works with her fairy godmother to come up with her plan and she enjoys tricking her evil stepsisters. The narrator tells us that Cinderella triumphs in the end due of her kindness and beauty as well as her bravery, common sense, and good fortune in having a fairy godmother.

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their version of Cinderella in the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812, there were many other literary versions of the story already existing, as well as several folklore variations that were being passed down orally. They later edited their stories before republishing them in 1819. After that, they revised the text once more and once more, publishing 17 editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales by 1864.

The voice of the elderly trickster Cinderella diminishes over time.

On the precise reason why the Grimms continued changing their stories, scholars can't agree. There is agreement that the Grimms frequently transformed evil mothers into evil stepmothers, as they did for "Snow White" and "Hansel and Gretel" throughout time: It appears to be a tactful endeavour to maintain the biological mothers as role models of morality in their narratives. According to Zipes, mothers were supposed to be "lovely" for the Grimms. (However, the Grimms consistently refer to Cinderella's evil stepmother as a stepmother, and there aren't many structural changes from one edition to the next.)

However, the Grimms kept changing their stories as they were published again, and some of the reasons for those modifications have generated debate.

Zipes makes a compelling case that the majority of the alterations the Grimms made as they edited their tales were done so in an effort to be more accurate to the oral tradition and that they were only editing as they discovered more Cinderella variants floating around folklore. A folklorist at Stony Brook University in New York, Ruth Bottigheimer, has a different viewpoint.

According to Bottigheimer, when the Grimms recorded the fairy tales they had gathered, they were inevitably impacted by their status as bourgeois Germans of the 19th century, and whether intentionally or unintentionally, they modified the tales to reflect their own moral principles. In her book Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys from 1997, she poses the question, "Who narrates the tales?" Whose voice, specifically, do we actually hear?

In Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys, Bottigheimer examines the speech in all of the Grimms' Cinderella editions, examining which characters get to speak directly to the reader and which characters have their sentences paraphrased in place of direct speech (indirect speech).

It turns out that there is a recurring pattern: "Direct speaking has tended to be moved from women to men, and from good to bad girls and women," the author adds. In other words, Cinderella and her deceased mother start speaking less and less as the Grimms continue to edit the tale. The "bad" ladies and the men start conversing more.

Cinderella, her stepmother, and the prince each have four lines of spoken speech in the Grimms' 1812 adaptation of the tale. However, Cinderella only had six lines of spoken dialogue by 1857. When she complained about her stepmother's behaviour in 1812, she obeyed without question in 1864, but in 1864, she kept quiet. While the prince only uses 11 lines of direct speech in 1864, her stepmother now uses 12 lines.

According to Bottigheimer, the Grimms saw quiet as both gendered and moral: Good women display their virtue by their meekness and stillness. Talking is unwomanly and hence wicked, and it is how terrible women demonstrate their badness. Men should speak at will since they are powerful and active.

It's possible that the Grimms removed Cinderella's direct words in an effort to make her more submissive, but it does appear to have disappeared over time. And as the Grimms' version of the tale became popularity, the cunning Cinderella from 200 years earlier completely disappeared. Cinderella now triumphs due to her moral virtue, and one of the ways we can tell she is virtue is by her silence.

The Grimms may have changed Cinderella throughout time, but they didn't fundamentally alter her family issues, which are the same issues that appear in the Disney version as well. Cinderella's mother has passed away, and her father's new wife wants to harm her. How can the family remain intact?