Cinderella and fairy tale traditions

Cinderella: Or, On the Virtues of Shutting Up and Sitting Down

There are many ways of critiquing folktales. However, they all agree on one central point: the tale is told to children so that they will behave. In less coercive terms, one might say the story is that so that the child will grow up to be a functional part of society. Either way, it boils down to the same thing. These stories are finely tuned propaganda pieces designed to inculcate into children the basic "virtues" needed to make them obey and keep to their place in the world. Among the many stories that for centuries now has been teaching children, especially the young girls at which it is aimed, to be meek and quiet beneath the command of their superiors and elders has been Cinderella.

One the face of it, this folktale may seem almost subversive. After all, Cinderella manages to go from being a servant in her own house to being a princess. What could be more revolutionary than that? After all, the narrative here clearly states that the grown-ups, those eternal enemies of childhood and children, are out to get our heroine. The parental figures are seen as either evil or ineffectual, and their pet children as terrors. One might say there has never been a fairy tale more on the child's side than this one, in which she not only has every right to condemn her parents, but also to gain the power to lord it over them. However, like Cinderella's dirtyness, the subversive nature of this fairytale is only skin deep. The subversion is only there for the sake of convincing the child that the narrator is really on her side, that this story was written for her, that it is not really grown-up propaganda, but a real and true story about her estate. A story about a good, well-behaved heroine in a perfect family will not inspire good behavior. It will probably inspire anger. In the words of grown-up and critic Bruno Bettelheim, "The child identifies with the good hero not because of his goodness, but because the hero's condition makes a deep positive appeal to him." (Bettelheim, 80) In the case of Cinderella, the child is given a chance to rationalize their natural, instinctive feelings of resentment against the parents and siblings who are trying to force them into society's mold by identifying them with the evil stepmother in Cinderella. They are given the chance to express their desire for self-expression and power by imagining that they, like Cinderella, will someday be a princess and capable of oppressing those who currently oppress them. However, at the same time, by being forced to identify this oppressive force with a "step" mother instead of a real mother, and "step" sisters instead of real sisters, they are being taught that no matter how bad their situation is, it is not of course really like Cinderella's, because no real mother or sister would be evil. Already there is a separation between the story-self and the real-self that is vital to teaching the child her moral lesson.

The child is allow to take their half-formed, unspoken feelings of rebellion and resentment and embody them in Cinderella's situation, not so that they can be realized and acted upon in the real world, but so that they can be exorcised by a fictional resolution brought about by "proper" and "moral" actions on the heroine's part. "The fate of these heroes convinces the child that, like them, he may feel outcast and abandoned in the world, groping in the dark, but, like them, in the course of his life he will be guided step-by-step, and given help when it is needed." (Bettelheim, 80) Certainly the child may say, as many have, "If I were Cinderella, I'd run away!" The story, however, allows the one telling it to step in and say, "Ah, but then you would never meet the fairy godmother or the handsome prince." The narrator, as the representative of society and the parental units, proves to the child that no matter how repressive grown-ups may be, one must take it patiently, because only grown-ups (in the form of princes and fairy godmothers) can step in and guide them, step-by-step, to happiness.

Cinderella always treats her evil parental figure with respect. She is obedient. She is meek. She waits patiently for something good to happen. She never stops to think that the evil stepmother and the fairy godmother might be one and the same. Obedience is praised over and over again. She is praised for obeying her stepmother, and the child is made to feel pity that she is still treated unfairly, but never to think that maybe she should have thrown down her broom, poured ink on her stepsisters dresses, and gone to the ball by herself. (Even when she does go, she is not disobeying -- she was told she could go, if she had time to get ready, and the godmother just speeds things up) She is punished for procrastinating about obeying her godmother by being made to walk home when she is a few minutes late in leaving, but nowhere is it suggested that she should have refused to leave the ball at all and stayed with the prince in the first place. She never rebels, and in return, she is finally given a position of power. This is an ending obviously made up by those in power: just be good long enough, and we'll share our authority, they promise. However, it is enacted not by Cinderella's will, but by a narrative trick, a deus ex-machina: a fairy godmother enters to save her and a prince on a horse carries her away. The child here is taught to be good and obedient and long-suffering, and someday if they are lucky a deity or a handsome lover will come and rescue them. So, through the trick of identifying with a repressed hero, children are taught to endure repression silently and peacefully. Thus the fairytale works to the advantage of society, assuring future complacent generations.