Which Cinderella You Want Your Daughter To Be?

Abstract

Modern age has provided great opportunities in all domains of people's lives, but it has also generated unexpected obstacles; one of which is a negative change in the concept of beauty in society. The new emerging tendency of people to appear like a supermodel in social media and to draw the interest of others by adding beauty filters not only sends an ambiguous message about beauty, but also produces a false claim of appearance where teenagers like to 'fake it.' Beauty has always been the contentious subject in most fictional works and specially in fairy tales. Classic fairy tales portray their heroine as a beautiful being, a picture-perfect substance. They are celebrated not for their confidence or bravery, but for their outward appearance, clothing and jewels. Thus, every girl child has a fantasy of finding a Fairy God Mother who can turn her into a stunning, attractive princess and only then, they can meet their prince charming and happily ever after. But things are not the same, they don’t have God Mother or they don’t want to remain as a beautiful angel, rather, they want to be ordinary with full of courage and confidence to fight back to any evil. They don’t need any prince charming to fight for her rather they want to fight for their own. This paper will study the contrast between the classical and modern story of Cinderella in Children Literature and also explore how the concept of beauty is changing in the modern books and fairy tales.