It is important is to recognize Tennant’s influence for Ever After comes from Charles Perrault and not the Brothers Grimm. In the opening scene of Ever After, the Grand Dame has invited Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm over to set the record straight about Danielle de Barbarac whose “romance had been reduced to a simple fairy tale” (Tennant). With this scene, Tennant sets the audience up to be told a story that differs from the Grimm’s version. It could be inferred that Tennant chooses to adapt his Cinderella from Perrault’s because Cinderella: Or the Little Glass Slipper was written in the same time and place as Ever After’s setting and this exaggerates the contrast between the two stories even more.
Tennant creates a character that goes against the ideals of Perrault’s society by putting an emphasis on Danielle’s intellect,
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Perrault creates a character that is passive, weak, and communicates discriminatory ideals about women. Cinderella’s gentleness, passivity, and steadfast patience denote the gender roles that would be expected in French salons. Perrault discusses these charming qualities with his readers by stating “without [them], one can achieve nothing; with [them], everything” (Perrault 78). His moral proposes because Cinderella peacefully endures years of abuse from her family, she is rewarded with the prince and a happy life. However, it is important to note that the prince fell in love with Cinderella not because of her kind and gentle nature, but because of her beauty. Perrault’s ideals suggest that women exist for the benefit of men and that women’s value of live is related to meeting society’s expectations. Tennant transforms Perrault’s Cinderella into a young woman who takes pride in her intellect and is capable of thinking for herself. Tennant presents the foundation of Danielle’s knowledge through Thomas More’s Utopia; the last book Danielle’s father gives her before he died. Danielle adopts More’s ideas about “the
“Going up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella’” is a scholarly article written by Elisabeth Panttaja that analyzes the roles of the mothers and the importance of class within these times. Panttaja focuses her article on the Grimm version, which is most famously critiqued and discussed. The article analyzes the importance of the mothers, which leads to the overall concept that the natural mother’s role seems irrelevant, yet Cinderella’s entire destiny is based upon her. The mother’s also show similar goals: get their daughter(s) married into power. Cinderella wins this battle, however, for she is the “true bride.”
Cinderella by Grimm and its Disney version has the same plot and same main characters. Minor details are changed in the written fairy tale and its popular adaption but these changes can help to judge about the tendencies of the contemporary pop culture.
In “Conte” by Marilyn Hacker, Cinderella shows the reader a glimpse of her life after the childhood tale ends, a less happier ending than the original story implies. She feels trapped in a constant state of misery and boredom in the royal palace. Without life experience guiding her, Cinderella is in a dilemma caused by her ignorance of the potential consequences of her actions. With the use of irony, structure, and diction, “Conte” shows how innocence and naïveté result in regrettable mistakes that create life experience.
A lot of the fairy tale stories that we have seen as young adults and even as adults are original folk tale stories that have been modified and rewritten to accommodate our new cultures. Cinderella happens to be one of these stories that have been changed over the years. There are many different versions of Cinderella, an African Cinderella, a Hungarian Cinderella and even a Chinese version. All of the Cinderella’s are similar in plot, but the author dictates the story’s theme based on the people whom he is writing for which completely changes the story’s tone, mood and other elements. While Perrault's version stresses the values and materialistic worries of his middle-class audience, Grimm’s' focus is on the harsh realities of life
Cinderella’s story is undoubtedly the most popular fairy tale all over the world. Her fairy tale is one of the best read and emotion filled story that we all enjoyed as young and adults. In Elizabeth Pantajja’s analysis, Cinderella’s story still continues to evoke emotions but not as a love story but a contradiction of what we some of us believe. Pantajja chose Cinderella’s story to enlighten the readers that being good and piety are not the reason for Cinderella’s envious fairy tale. The author’s criticism and forthright analysis through her use of pathos, ethos, and logos made the readers doubt Cinderella’s character and question the real reason behind her marrying the prince. Pantajja claims that
Charles Perrault’s Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper was published in 1697. It is considered to be one the most prevalent reinterpretations of the classic story. Perrault’s version was “addressed largely to an adult and highly sophisticated audience” (Cullen 57). For this reason, Perrault seldom emphasizes the details of Cinderella’s mistreatment and instead shifts the stories’ focus on the moral and materialistic concerns related to his audience in order to “to please [his] aristocratic audience” (Tatar 189). Accordingly, Perrault portrayed Cinderella to be dependent, self-sacrificing, and “exhibits
When most people think of the movie, "Cinderella';, they think of the animated Disney version with the little mice and the happy ending where Cinderella marries the prince and they live happily ever after. While the movie "Ever After'; is based on "Cinderella';, it is not animated, but still has many of the same characteristics as the Disney version. Of course it is not exactly the same, and since it is not animated there are many differences.
In her article, “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” Elisabeth Panttaja illustrates the important role of parents in a childhood. She talks about the importance the mother plays in all versions of Cinderella as well as evidence showing what lack of parenthood does to children. Panttaja claims by way of the Grimms Brothers version of Cinderella and how each mother wants to guarantee a bright and happy future for their daughters by marrying them off to the prince. The similarities between the wanting of Cinderella and the stepsisters married- and doing anything to get it- contradicts the idea that Cinderella and her mother were morally superior, or different at all, from the stepmother and sisters.
Women who had no claim to wealth or beauty received the harshest of realities in America’s Victorian era. Author Charlotte Bronte – from America’s Victorian era – examines and follows the life of a girl born into these conditions in her gothic novel Jane Eyre (of which the main character’s name
In Perrault’s take on the fairytale it is the fairy godmother’s magic that provides Cinderella with the means to attend the ball and win the prince’s heart. In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version of “Cinderella” her benefactors appear in the form of a tree and a white bird that aid her. Pip seems not to mind waiting complacently in his belief that his benefactor will reveal himself or herself on his or her own time. When visiting Miss Havisham, assumes that she is his benefactress, reflecting that, “She, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were bestowing the finishing gift” (134). This language conveys how passive and dependant he is, rather than active and resourceful – he grasps his situation as a fairy tale, and is thus far from discovering the reality of the situation, that she is not responsible for his “great
Adults realize that despite Cinderella’s charismatic traits, Cinderella’s behaviour in Perrault’s tale is not acceptable for today’s modern western woman.
Have you ever had a dark and gloomy day? Imagine having that feeling every single day. The Grimm’s Cinderella was written in 1812. 1812 was one of the harshest years for America. An event that formed it was the war against Great Britain and the United States. Not only was there a war, but there was also a series of disastrous harvests. Taxes got higher, and more than twenty people who were involved with a Luddite Act were hung. In 1812, there was also the only assassination of a prime minister, who was shot dead in the House of Commons. The Grimm Brothers have put the dark times of 1812 into their stories. Some of their stories contain violence, child abuse, and wicked mothers. They came up with these types of stories after their father died, and when they struggled out of school. That gave them enough time to research and put together a collection of folk tales. Now you can see why the Grimm’s Cinderella was dark and gloomy. Although the plot stayed the same, over the years, the story did get lighter. Disney’s Cinderella came out in 1950. In 1950, learning information was not by fear, but by engaging happiness. Disney’s Cinderella transforms the Grimm’s Cinderella into a happier atmosphere. While some similarities between Disney’s Cinderella and Grimm’s Cinderella are noticeable, the differences are pronounced, especially when referring to the slippers, her father, and the ball.
She is very kind to all creatures, whether it be animals or humans. Cinderella takes it upon herself to robe, feed, and befriend the animals of the house. She takes care of her evil stepmother and stepsisters because she is good at heart, and she will put up with their torture to help them. She could choose not to help them, or just to leave, but she knows that she won’t have anything left, and they need her. It is because of this pure, perfect attitude that the prince falls in love with her instantly, and not with the other girls that just want to be with the prince for superficial reasons. Her effervescent kind-heartedness that prevails through her hardships is an example of the humanistic perspective. The humanistic perspective views behavior as controlled by the decisions that people make about their lives based on their perceptions of the world. It’s a view in which personality is seen as developing through an actualizing tendency which unfolds in accordance with each person’s unique perceptions of the world.
In my short analysis of “Cindarella”, understanding the basic concepts of the story was not as easy as I had once predicted. The author Elisabeth Panttaja explains in her essay different views and ideas in the sense that Cinderella is successful because of the magical powers created by her dead mother. The author tells that “It is not suprising . . . that modern criticism of (Cinderella) . . . has been so strangely indifferent to the roles that Cinderella’s mother plays in the story.” This to my knowledge is giving me a different view on how people thought Cinderella acted to the situations that occurred.
When someone mentions the name “Cinderella”, the first thing that usually comes to our minds is the fairytale in which the fair maiden who works so hard yet it treated so poorly gains her “fairytale ending” with a wave of a magic wand. However, the fairytale of Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has multiple differences in plot from the fairytale we all usually think of. The plot of the Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers, written in 1812, is that a young female’s mother passes away early in the story, departing with the message to Cinderella to remain “pious and good”. Cinderella remained true to this message given to her by her mother, and she showed this in her work ethic. Because Cinderella had remained pious and good, her mother, in return, watched over her in the form of the birds above her grave that gave Cinderella help and material things that she needed. In the end, Cinderella has her “happily ever after”, for when the prince held a festival to find a new bride, she was chosen due to her insurmountable beauty. The feminist lens critiques how females are commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient these representations are as a categorizing device. These representations of women often include them being passive and emotional—staying back while the men do the work. Cinderella relates to the feminist lens because she fits into the typical representations of women created by men. Feminist criticism is important to recognize because women are often falsely represented as helpless, thus needing a man to come to their rescue. It is common in literature to see helpless women, crying and begging for help instead of being able to work out their own problems and hardships. Others, however, may believe that it is still important to uphold the fundamentals of the feminist lens because it keeps the man in power, which they say is important in keeping the man the head of the household. Cinderella thoroughly represents the feminist lens because it shows how women in literature uphold the representations of passive and emotional, created by the man.