Cinderella Was Not Invented by Disney!

Century-long narratives from numerous cultures are woven together to create the real Cinderella.

 

You're familiar with Cinderella. You do, of course. She is a character we learn about through osmosis because she is a part of the cultural ether.

Princess that she is. She is decked out in a lovely dress, glass shoes, long white gloves, and a shiny headband. To meet and dance with a very handsome prince and get home before the clock strikes midnight and her carriage turns back into a pumpkin, she overcomes the hardship of her evil stepmother and stepsisters, who treat her like their maid. 

However, that isn't the true Cinderella. That is the Cinderella from the 1950 animated film and the recent remake that is currently playing in theatres.

Not everyone can agree on who the real Cinderella is. She is a figure who connects the majority of human cultures and centuries of storytelling.

And occasionally, her lost slipper isn't even made of glass.

Greeks were the first Cinderellas.

There are two sides to Cinderella: the European folktale that gave rise to the modern-day tale of a girl wearing a large blue ball gown, and the centuries-old story that has been passed down through the ages from one culture to the next.

The story of overcoming oppression and marrying into a different social class to escape a dysfunctional family is incredibly powerful and cannot be contained by the well-known narrative. A persecuted heroine who overcomes her social station through marriage is the central theme of most Cinderella stories (whether they use that name for their protagonist or not).

Greek literature from the sixth century BCE contains the earliest known tale with a character who resembles Cinderella. In that old tale, an eagle steals a shoe from a Greek courtesan named Rhodopis and flies it across the Mediterranean before dropping it in the lap of an Egyptian king.

The king sets out on a mission to find the owner of the shoe after interpreting the shoe's accidental fall as a literal and metaphorical sign from the heavens. Rhodopis is raised to the throne when he marries her after discovering her.

Ye Xian, a Chinese fairy tale from the ninth century, is another one of the earliest known Cinderella tales. In this tale, a young girl named Ye Xian is granted one wish by some magical fishbones, which she uses to make a gown in the hopes of finding a husband.

Similar to Rhodopis' story, a monarch acquires the shoe (this time, the shoes are decorated with gold fish scales) and sets out to find the woman whose tiny feet will fit it. The cruel stepmother is killed by stones in Ye Xian's cave home after the king is persuaded to wed her by her beauty.

The story's European adaptation dates back to the 17th century.

The Cinderella we are most familiar with originates from Europe, where more than 500 variations of the tale of Cinderella have been discovered (France, specifically).

When a tale called Cenerentola was included in a book of Italian short stories in the 17th century, it became the first Cinderella that is remarkably similar to the most well-known version. The evil stepmother and stepsisters, the magic, and the missing slipper are all present in Cenerentola, but it is darker and slightly more magical.

In the tale, Zezolla, a woman the king desires to wed, flees him at two separate celebrations before he finally catches her at the third celebration and forbids her from leaving. Cenerentola is not a tale of true love, but one of forced marriage and six heinous stepsisters.

The story we know today originated as an Italian fable that was given a French twist sixty years later. The character of Cinderella was portrayed in Cendrillon by Charles Perrault, the French author who is credited with creating the fairy tale. He described the fairy godmother, the pumpkin, and the glass slipper. This is the version that Disney later turned into a beloved animated film.

The Brothers Grimm's version of the story was, shall we say, grimmer.

The story was also included in The Brothers Grimm's renowned collection of fairy tales. Aschenputtel, or Cinderella in English translations, is the name of the tale that first appeared more than a century after Perrault's rendition in the 19th century.

The story of Aschenputtel is much grimmer. Cinderella's wishes come from a tree that is growing on her mother's grave, not from a fairy godmother. In contrast to Perrault's story, her father is willfully ignorant of his daughter's suffering.

When the Prince comes to measure the stepsisters' feet in the Grimm version, the heroine's slippers are made of gold (not glass), and one of them cuts off her own toes to try to make the shoe fit. Ultimately, Cinderella marries the prince; her stepsisters assist her in her nuptials; and doves pluck their eyes out. It goes without saying that it is a lovely story for kids.

Did Cinderella create the trope of the wicked stepmother?

Simply put, no.

In numerous fairy tales with roots in the 17th century, such as Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, the protagonists' stepmothers are evil and out to ruin their lives. In each of these tales, the stepdaughter, a living, breathing reminder of her father's first marriage, serves as the stepmother's main adversary.

However, plots don't appear out of nowhere. Most are inspired by real-life events, or at the very least, real-life emotions. Stepmothers are frequently singled out for very poor treatment by stepchildren who pick up on their mother's anger and resentment and become her proxy in their father's household, according to Dr. Wednesday Martin, author of the book StepMonster, in an article for Psychology Today.

And this issue is not brand-new. In the past, stepmothers were very prevalent—not because of divorce and remarriage, but rather because so many women died giving birth. This put the new wife (and her kids) squarely in the first wife's child's crosshairs, not just for love but also for the inheritance that would determine their place in society upon the husband's passing. As a result, the concept started to sound cliché.

This also illustrates the true theme of Cinderella, which is money.
 

Cinderella is a tale about interclass conflict.

Cinderella is fundamentally about how women used to be dependent on men to determine their place in society.

Cinderella is introduced in the narrative as the affluent man's daughter. She is a girl from the upper middle class with good prospects who might get married into a family from the upper class with even better prospects. However, after her mother passes away and her father remarries, her status in the family changes and her marriage is no longer the family's main concern.

This occurs frequently in numerous other tales that make use of the same theory. Think about the movies Pretty in Pink, My Fair Lady, Pride and Prejudice, or the television show Pretty Woman, to name a few, where a man's attractiveness is greatly increased by his wealth. Sometimes a working-class boy and an upper-class woman fall in love. Consider Aladdin or the Titanic.

Because its true moral is that a woman can improve her life by being kind and beautiful, the original Cinderella, written by Perrault, is even more overtly about social class. As a result, Cinderella, as Disney retold the story in 1950, represents what people in that era believed women could achieve the American Dream through marriage rather than through employment.

As opposed to Aschenputtel, Disney decided to adapt Cinderella. When compared to Aschenputtel, the former had a lot more freedom but required assistance for everything she did. In other words, Cinderella needs to be at home by midnight. Aschenputtel makes the decision to leave right 

Source: Get Pocket