Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations

Abstract

Cinderella’s story has been retold thousands of times. Although some elements remain stable across versions, the many differences reveal a story in constant flux. For example, Cinderella is traditionally rewarded for enduring familial abuse with marriage to a prince, thereby trading one subservient role for another. However, recent iterations of the character have escaped through different means: the protagonist of Rebecca Solnit’s picture book Cinderella Liberator (2019) opens a bakery; Sophia, the Black lesbian heroine of Kalynn Bayron’s Young Adult novel Cinderella Is Dead (2020) rebels against heterosexist oppression. This points to the fairy tale’s thematic flexibility: though its motifs (abusive families, identifying shoes, and helpful guardians) remain stable, the trials Cinderella faces and the texture of her happy ending depend on the cultural and historical contexts of a given retelling.This argument is advanced by Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations (2020). Edited by Nicola Darwood and Alexis Weedon, this book grew out of a 2017 conference at the University of Bedfordshire occasioned by Janet Stowe’s 2012 donation of a large collection of “Cinderella”-related texts and ephemera to the University. Retelling Cinderella’s intervention in Cinderella studies complements recent work in the field, which has moved away from the morphological and folkloric approaches of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first monograph devoted to the fairy tale, Marian Rolfe Cox’s Cinderella (1893), categorizes the structural elements of the Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella referred to in its subtitle. In The Cinderella Cycle (1951), Anna Birgitta Rooth extends Cox’s work, nearly doubling the number of variants under consideration and narrowing the definition of the plot points that comprise “Cinderella.” Alan Dundes’ edited collection, Cinderella: A Casebook (1982) diverges from Cox and Rooth; this book is folkloric in scope, including three English translations of “Cinderella” stories by Giambattista Basile (1634–1636), Charles Perrault (1697), and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812), which contextualize about a century’s worth of scholarship on the fairy tale. The essays in Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2016), edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil De la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monica Wozniak, reject folklore studies’ preoccupation with cataloguing variants of “authoritative” texts, instead reading “Cinderella” through translation studies’ dictum that translated and adapted stories are not variations but rather “versions,” that is, discrete texts in their own right.Retelling Cinderella likewise surveys a broad range of Cinderella stories. It brings together ten essays and two creative works that grapple with what Darwood and Weedon call the story’s “continuing duality” (xviii): Cinderella’s triumph over adversity is both inspirational and thematically adaptable; however, the parameters of her happy ending are still too often defined by capitalist, heteropatriarchal ideals. This holds true, Retelling Cinderella demonstrates, in multiple historical and cultural contexts.This cultural and historical eclecticism mirrors the nature of the Cinderella Collection itself (its contents are itemized in an appendix). In Chapter 1, Weedon explains that the items therein range from an edition of George Cruikshank’s 1814 chapbook, which extolls the virtues of teetotalling, to newspaper clippings comparing government ministers to Cinderella’s fairy godmother. According to Weedon, this heterogeneity evinces both the fairy tale’s adaptability and its enduring popularity.Chapters 2 and 3 analyze social media Cinderellas. In Chapter 2, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed and César Mora-Moreo dissect a parodic Colombian meme, Cenicienta costenña (Cinderella of the coast). Circulated online, the meme format creates humor via the juxtaposition of stills from Disney’s 1950 animated film—sometimes with accessories like hats and beer cans added—with Spanish slang specific to the city of Baranquilla. The format’s popularity illustrates, the authors argue, both the pervasiveness of American cultural products and the process of cultural transduction, that is, the transformation of audiovisual products as they cross geographic and cultural barriers. In Chapter 3, Marta Cola and Elena Caoduro examine the rise of the term “Tinderella”—a portmanteau of “Cinderella” and “Tinder,” the name of a popular mobile dating app—in news media, advertisements, dating memoirs, and photography. The moniker, according to the authors, is almost universally used in postfeminist contexts: Tinderellas are most often cisgendered, heterosexual women “empowered” by their adherence to patriarchal beauty norms and resultant ability to attract men, proof that not all twenty-first-century Cinderella stories are progressive.Chapter 4 is also rooted in the twenty-first century, but Nicky Didicher’s analysis centers on a literary text: Cinder (2012), the first volume in Marissa Meyer’s Young Adult Lunar Chronicles series, which blends fairy tales and science fiction. Didicher contends that though Meyers challenges the submissive femininity promoted by earlier versions of the fairy tale, she ultimately reifies their heteropatriarchal norms: though the heroine is a spunky cyborg determined to save her loved ones from an extraterrestrial threat, she ultimately needs rescuing by her male love interest; moreover, virtually all the novel’s characters are heterosexual.Chapters 5, 6, and 7 investigate shifts in the Cinderella story across time and genre. In Chapter 5, Eleanor Andrews compares the interweaving of rags-to-riches, Pygmalion, and Cinderella tropes in five twentieth-century films from a range of genres: Pygmalion (1938), My Fair Lady (1964), Educating Rita (1983), Pretty Woman (1990), and Nikita (1990). Focusing on transformations through education and wealth rather than magic, Andrews observes that though these film’s plots and settings are products of the times in which they were produced, their similarities speak to the enduring popularity of this particular mix of tropes. In Chapter 6, Sally King examines the thematic and cultural significance of clothing and footwear in the first English translations of two of the most influential versions of the fairy tale: Robert Samber’s 1792 translation of Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou le petit pantoufle de verre” (1697), and Edgar Taylor’s 1826 translation of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Aschenputtel” (1812). Analyzing how Samber and Taylor adapt their sources’ depictions of foreignness, entrapment, beauty, and smallness—as well as the Grimms’ efforts to make their Cinderella seem less French in later editions—King illuminates the extent to which iterations of this, and, indeed, any fairy tale are shaped by both their authors and translators. In Chapter 7, Darwood analyzes Nancy Spain’s 1950 detective novel Cinderella Goes to the Morgue: An Entertainment, a whodunnit centered on a pantomime. Darwood observes that Spain’s carnivalesque inversions borrow heavily from pantomime tropes and center—as the panto-within-the-novel does—the cross-dressing male actors who play Cinderella’s stepsisters, subverting readers’ expectations of what a Cinderella story entails.Chapter 8 also pursues a historicist reading, wherein Rebecca Morris considers the definitions of a “real” princess in two late nineteenth-century children’s texts: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s 1875 short story “Cinderella” and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1887 novel Sara Crewe: Or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (now better known as A Little Princess). Both texts, Morris argues, promote independence and resilience alongside kindness and charitability as traits worthy of a princess, a feminist development that Morris links to the historical agitation for women’s rights and the biography of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Louise.Chapters 9 and 10 are national in scope. In Chapter 9, Maia Fernández-Lamarque analyzes the representations of femininity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish Cinderellas. These representations are, she argues, inextricable from the country’s political history: for example, Antonio Robles’ Second Republic Cinderella (1936) rejects Francoist dress codes, instead attending the ball costumed as a harlequin; in the post-Franco era, the countercultural movement La Movida gave rise to at least two Cinderella pornographies (1979 and 2003) whose heroines seek pleasure rather than upwardly mobile marriage. In Chapter 10, Donna Gilligan examines Irish variants of Cinderella from the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin. Gilligan observes that Irish Cinderella stories replicate Irish culture’s blending of Christianity and paganism: in multiple variants, Cinderella goes to church instead of a ball, indicating a Catholic influence; hazel trees, which represent protection against evil in Celtic lore, are also common. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the influences of local cultures on fairy-tale adaptations.Two creative works conclude the collection. In Chapter 11, Vanessa Marr describes a 2014 set of seven fairy tales themed dusting cloths that has since expanded to a participatory art project. The cloths are hand-embroidered with domestic motifs and script critiquing fairy-tale romanticizations of domesticity, illustrating the ways in which women are both trapped by and might rebel against traditional gender roles. Chapter 12 comprises Lesley McKenna’s short story “Prom Night: Cinderella Gets a Gun” and a reflection. There is no fairy godmother or happy ending here: Ella and her girlfriend Faye murder Ella’s abusive stepbrothers and are then shot by the police. The editors may wish to include a content warning in future editions, as this story’s graphic discussion of sexual abuse and dramatization of a school shooting are unexpected in an academic collection.Retelling Cinderella would be enriched by more essays considering nonwhite and queer characters: it includes no Black or trans Cinderellas, which is surprising given its focus on representations of femininity and heteropatriarchal mores. Despite this shortcoming, however, Retelling Cinderella makes an important contribution to the field, extending its archive while illuminating how many Cinderellas are both liberated and constrained by their cultural and historical moments.