Folklore and Fairy Tales: Cinderella
Vivian:
“I just want to know who it works out for. You give me one example of somebody that we know that it happened with.”
Kit:
“Name someone? You want me to name someone?”
Vivian:
“Yes. I’d like a name.”
Kit:
“Oh god, the pressure of a name…”
(Sigh)
“…Cinde-fucking-rella.”
(Laughs)
~ The movie Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall, and, most importantly, written by J.F. Lawton
Cinderella stories are usually rags-to-riches tales, known as “rise” stories in folklore, stories where a character rises beyond their position in life, a pauper who becomes a prince, a peasant girl who becomes a queen, or a peasant boy who becomes a king, basically, if you take away the royal titles, the American dream.
In all of them, the shoe, or some other item like a ring, for example, fits them just right.
The classic version is not Pretty Woman, but the French writer Charles Perrault’s tale of “Cinderella” which he wrote down during the 1690s.
It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, that classic start to a fairy tale, there was a man whose wife died. For his second wife, he chooses to marry one of the most arrogant, meanest women in the world. The haughty lady also has two daughters who are just as wicked as their mother.
The man has a daughter from his first marriage, who is kind and good just like her mother had been. Her stepmother and the awful stepsisters treat the girl horribly: They take the nicest rooms in the house, forcing the girl to sleep on a straw mattress in the garret.
Her stepmother forces her to work in the kitchen. When her work is done, she would sit exhausted among the ashes and cinders of the fireplace. Her stepsisters wickedly call her “Cindertail” and “Cinderella.” Now, one thing I want to mention is that this reflects very poorly on her father who allowed this to happen under his roof. He had a responsibility to protect and look after his daughter. Weak men make for unhappy families.
One day, the prince invites the ladies to a ball. The stepsisters mock Cinderella, because they will be going, but her stepmother tells her that she must stay to finish her work. When her sisters leave, Cinderella cries.
Hearing her cry, Cinderella’s godmother shows up. In fairy tales, Fairy Godmothers are often implied to be the deceased mother of the heroine. Her godmother tells her that she will help her to go to the ball if Cinderella will bring her a pumpkin, which she turns into a gilded coach.
Then she turns six mice into horses to draw the coach, a rat into a coachman to steer it, and six lizards into footmen, who are basically servants to open doors for Cinderella, or act as valets, and who hang onto the back of the coach. Finally, the godmother transforms Cinderella’s rags into a beautiful dress. Before she leaves, the godmother warns Cinderella to make sure that she is home before midnight.
At the ball, the prince is smitten with her. He gives her his hand and leads her into the ballroom, where he dances with her all night. At a quarter to midnight, she excused herself and rushes back home. Her sisters come back and tell her that there was a beautiful princess at the ball.
The next day, there is another ball, because clearly the prince liked to party. The godmother helps her again and Cinderella dances all night with the prince, she is the belle of the ball. She enjoys it so much that she forgets to keep an eye on the time. As the clock strikes midnight she runs away to get home and loses one of her glass slippers. In the Russian version of this story, the shoe is made of fur.
Some think the Perrault invented the glass slipper, since it is impractical to dance in such shoes, even for the upper-class in France during that time, which were notorious for wearing impractical clothes to show off that they did not have to bother with menial tasks or physical exertion. Others say it might have been a bad translation, since the French word for glass, verre, sounds a lot like the word for squirrel fur, which is “vair,” so some scholars think she actually wore shoes lined with squirrel hair. In other stories the shoe is not a shoe at all, but a ring or some other object that the girl must fit into, and that can be used to identify her.
The next day, in a fit of passion, the prince proclaims that he will marry whomever’s foot fits in the shoe. He comes to the stepsisters’ house, and each woman tries on the shoe, but, alas, it does not fit. In some versions of this story, the stepmother, forgetting her marriage to Cinderella’s father, tries the shoe on too, and she and the stepsisters, cut off their toes or heels to try and squeeze their foot inside it.
Finally, it is Cinderella’s turn. Her stepsisters laugh at her, but then, to their amazement, surprise, and shock, her foot fits perfectly in the glass slipper. To hammer it home, she takes out the matching shoe and slips it on her other foot.
At that moment, the girl’s godmother arrives; she taps her wand, and transforms Cinderella’s clothes into a more beautiful gown than the two she wore to the balls.
In this story, her stepsisters throw themselves at Cinderella’s feet and beg her forgiveness for the horrible way that they treated her. Like a good Christian, she forgives them. She even hooks her two sisters up with two great noblemen at the court, and, lo and behold, on the day that Cinderella marries her prince, her stepsisters get married too, ending the tale on a triple marriage.
In the German version, which is much darker, birds come and peck out the stepsisters’ eyes.
The French version is the classic, more child-friendly, version, but there are many other similar tales. In Italy in the 1620s, Giambatista Basile wrote in The Tale of Tales, a collection of stories, this account:
“The Cat Cinderella”
Once upon a time, which, just for interest’s sake, is not the only way to start a fairy tale (the stories collected by the brothers, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, two Germans who collected folktales more than fifty years before Germany was unified as a state by Otto von Bismarck, often began: “In olden times, when it was of use to wish for something”), there was a prince and a princess, who had a baby that they named Zezolla. Zezolla’s mother loves her, but shortly after Zezolla is old enough to remember her mother’s face, her mother, sadly, dies.
Zezolla and her dad are devastated. To make her feel better, the prince buys her dresses and employs a seamstress, named Carmosina, to teach Zezolla how to sew.
Soon Zezolla’s father, the prince, and since a prince usually does not find it hard to find a wife, marries another woman. However, she is a bad woman, a “fiery, witch of a woman.” I find it fascinating that the men in these stories always marry such dreadful dames. Especially since they married a good woman the first time around. Perhaps good woman are just hard to find. Either way, this woman gives Zezolla nasty looks, while Carmosina gives the prince other kinds of looks, because she has a wicked plan to get rid of the woman and bed her man.
Carmosina must have been a sexy lady, because soon her plan works, and the prince marries her. At the wedding, a bird lands next to Zezolla and says that if she needs any help, “you have only to ask for the dove of the Queen of the Fairies of Sardinia, and she will bring you help.” Then it flies away.
For six days, all goes well, but on the seventh day (perhaps God rested), the family sits down to eat their supper, when they hear a knock at the door. Carmosina opens the door, and in walks her six other daughters: Calamita, Columbina, Diamante, Imperia, Shiorella, and Pascarella. I wonder if the prince knew about them or whether he got a nasty surprise.
The sixth and youngest daughter, Pascarella, pushes Zezolla out of her own chair, sits down in her place, and begins to eat the food out of Zezolla’s plate. Soon, her new stepmother sends Zezolla down into the kitchens. Her new family begins to call her “the Cat.” They feed her scraps. Anyone who has ever helped someone, only for them to turn on you and betray you, knows that it is one of the worst feelings you can experience, a mixture of shame, regret, sadness and loss. Again, this, for me, reflects very poorly on her father who allows this to happen. Parents should try hard to treat all their children the same.
This abuse goes on for some time. One day, the weak prince needs to travel to Sardinia on business. He asks his six stepdaughters what they want him to bring for them. They ask for ribbons, rouge, and dresses. Finally, cruelly, only as an afterthought, he asks Zezolla: “What do you want?”
She says:
“Oh, only that you would send a message by the dove to the Queen of the Fairies of Sardinia, that whatever she wants to give me, I will take, but beware, do not forget. If you forget to ask, you will not be able to move forward or backward.”
The prince goes off and buys the rouge, dresses, and ribbons, but when he steps on the ship to sail home, he finds that he cannot move forward or backwards. The ship’s captain falls asleep, and the fairy queen of the island of Sardinia comes to him in a dream. She tells him to inform the prince that he must come see her. When he wakes up, the ship’s captain does as she told him and the prince remembers his duty to his daughter.
The prince goes into a grotto, because as everyone knows, that is where the fairies of Sardinia live and that is where he finds the fairy queen. The fairy queen is beautiful, but fierce. She gives him a small date tree, a golden pail, a little golden hoe, and a silken cloth. When he comes home, he gives all the gifts to his daughters, and finally he throws the date tree to Zezolla. Clearly he is a terrible father.
Zezolla takes the tree, she waters it with the golden pail, she takes out the weed with the little hoe, and every morning she cleans the dew off of the leaves with the silken cloth. Over the next days, the date tree quickly grows to the size of a woman, and lo and behold, on the fourth day, a woman steps out of the tree.
Zezolla recognizes the woman’s smile, as someone who loved her, long, long ago, the smile of her mother. Zezolla tells the spirit of her mother that she wants to come and go out of the house without her sisters knowing. The spirit tells her that if she wants to leave, she can simply say:
Little date tree, little date tree
I have watered you with my golden pail
I have weeded you with my golden hoe
I have dried you with my silken cloth
Now strip yourself and dress me.
If she does this, the date tree will give her a disguise, and she can leave. When she comes back, all she has to say is:
Little date tree, little date tree,
I have watered you with my golden pail
I have weeded you with my golden hoe
I have dried you with my silken cloth
Now strip me and dress yourself.
The date tree will then take its gifts back and return the girl to how she was. Then the woman goes back into the tree. The next day, the prince’s family receives an invitation from a king in a neighboring kingdom to come visit him.
Zezolla says the magic words to the tree. At once, a beautiful dress and a horse come out of it. Zezolla puts on the dress, rides off, charms the king, and dances with him. At the end of the evening, she sneaks off. Intrigued by her, the king sends a page, which is a fancy word for an errand boy, after her, but Zezolla throws coins behind her to distract him. It works and she shakes him off, making it home without being seen, where she transforms back at the date tree.
The next week there is another ball and she does the same. At the end of a third ball, she runs away as usual, but this time she loses one of her cork overshoes, called a chinello, which Italian ladies put over their nice ballgown shoes to protect them from dirt and grime.
This time the page has something to bring back to the king. The king searches for the woman whose foot will fit the cork shoe. He comes to Zezolla’s house, and as soon as the shoe gets near her foot, it flies out of the page’s hand and clings to her foot like iron clings to a magnet.
The king marries Zezolla, and she becomes the queen. Her six step-sisters and the treacherous Carmosina, now have to bow to her. Zezolla and her king live happily ever after.
This story was written during the Romantic era, a time when people embraced nature and the natural world, and the stories from that time often contained ghost, phantoms, fairies and forest spirits which help the heroes or heroines. That might explain why Zezolla’s magical helper in this story is a fairy spirit in a tree. Many people believed that there is a strange and mysterious connection between humans and nature. In the fifteenth century a Swiss physician and alchemist, a dabbler in the occult who tried to change base metals like lead and copper into gold and silver, but also to transform human nature itself, and who looked for ways to extend human life, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, classified elemental beings by associating elements with them, and we still use his categories in storytelling to this very day.
For example, he associated gnomes with the earth, sylphs with the air, salamanders with fire, and undines with water. In the Disney movie Cinderella, she talks with mice and birds and rabbits and other animals and it is perhaps from the Romantic idea that humans can have an uncanny connection with nature that the filmmakers got the idea.
Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, and pioneering cultural critic, said that fairy tales are the first tutors of mankind.
These powerful stories teach us morals, but sometimes they do not teach the morals that we expect. In Cinderella’s story, diligence is rewarded. The awful stepmother and stepsisters are also forced to swallow their pride and bow down to the girl who surpasses them. No doubt, her success will lead to feelings of envy, jealousy, and perhaps even hate, but at least we, the readers, can rejoice with her and secretly hope that we too can turn our lives around and have a fairy tale ending, just like Vivian in Pretty Woman.
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Bibliography
Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Rabkin, E.S. (2007) Masterpieces of the imaginative mind. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.