The Fairy Tale And Disney Adaptation Of Cinderella

Disney’s Cinderella demonstrates that, whatever the intention of its makers, modern day fairy tales function in our society as hidden instructions for morals and behaviors that we give children. On the surface, it seems to be a simple story about a young woman whose wishes come true. However, the story also reflects cultural expectations of women’s behaviors and goals and defines expectations of “goodness” for women. Power belongs to men in “Cinderella”, and it is depicted as a female ambition and goal. The storyline describes the rise of the submissive haracter to becoming a Princess; she is portrayed as a passive character who waits for the Prince to come for her. While waiting for her Prince Charming she also bears the mistreatment from her stepmother and stepsisters. While masculine power is taken for granted in the figure of the Prince, becoming his wife is the only way women have to share this power. The

Cinderella has changed so little over time that it seems we’re still in the 1700’s listening to Charles Perrault. And yet it remains of the most popular fairy tales read to children. The role of women continue to be either the cruel, evil one or the good, docile one while the prince continues to be the saving grace of the helpless girl. The skeleton hasn’t changed much as well. A damsel in distress, saved by a knight in shining armor, who falls in love with her and they live happily ever after. Does this sound familiar? This sentence might as well be a fairy tale. We’ve seen this over and over in Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

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.

Throughout the story, the characterization is heavily influenced by gender roles and sexist stereotypes. The role of the stepmother and stepsisters is to solely use their power as a source of evil in order to bring down Cinderella, while Cinderella is depicted to be beautiful yet weak and

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.

The Grimm Brothers version of Cinderella is a written down oral story that people passed down from generation to generation, meant to teach a lesson about piety and good behavior. Before the Grimm Brothers ever wrote it down, the story had been told several times by memory. It is thus not surprising that the descriptions of certain events in the story, such as the way Cinderella went to the Ball, are lacking in details. It is obvious that these parts of the story are unimportant to the overall message of the story. Instead, it focuses on the piety of Cinderella and the wickedness of the step-sisters. Through the events of the story, it becomes obvious that the goodness of Cinderella is justly rewarded, and that

However, her true beauty lies within her skin, as Perrault’s interprets Cinderella as “a hundred times more handsome than her sisters”. He aims to focus more on female recognition and self-fulfillment, rather than provide a base for all readers to understand fully (Hühn). At an elementary level, this may not influence children to an extent, but other stories that reproduce this same structure of plot elements could possibly influence children in the future. For instance, she was not the hero of the story. The Prince isn’t the hero until he discovers her lost possession, a glass slipper, and searched for the person that fits. As told by Perrault, “he had done nothing but look at her all the time, and that most certainly he was very much in love with the beautiful owner of the glass slipper.” This enforces the fact that her beauty prevails over her actual personality but not behavior, and the appearance and mannerisms surely impressed the Prince.

When I started analyzing Cinderella I noticed some gender roles/stereotypes that are brought to light. One of them being how women are the ones who stay home and perform household chores. They are “housewives” who depend on a man. The father is briefly in the beginning and afterwards we do not hear of him, initiating that he is off working, or on a business trip while the mom and daughters are home. We also see through Cinderella (who is forced to do all the chores) how their are consequences if she (or women) don’t complete or do the chores that are expected of them (like not being able to go to a ball in Cinderella's case). Another theme that is consistent in Cinderella as it is in other princess stories is the value of being beautiful. We see this when the fairy godmother shows up and makes Cinderella beautiful. She transforms her house clothes into a gown and so forth showing us that beauty is in the way you look or your appearance. If we pursue this theme further we see that the prince falls in love with Cinderella based on how she looks (love at first

The story of Cinderella has become a classic fairy tale, known around the world, and past down from generation to generation. Yet, over the years, the story has been rewritten to better relate to different cultures. While some things never change, authors still manage to convey different messages by making the story their own. This can be clearly seen when the Grimm brothers version of Cinderella is compared to Charles Perrault’s version of Cinderella. While the core of the story does not change, the moral, tone, and “magical” aspects of the two stories are clearly shaped by the different cultures in which they were written in.

Fairy tales have always been focused towards children ever since Walt Disney took over the industry of remaking these stories. He took out all of the gore and some of the violence to make it more acceptable for children. With Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella, she brings back the gore and violence to its full capacity just like with the original Brothers Grimm story. Sexton's poetic version of Cinderella gives a humorous and eye-opened twist to this classic fairy tale. What brings all of these stories together is the way they all socialize women to make them naive. With this in mind, fairy tales do humiliate and objectify women to get them to accept violence within society.

The men in “Cinderella” also value women for their beauty. The prince has a ball for all the maidens in the land to find his future wife, which “amounts to a beauty contest” (Lieberman 386) for a new trophy wife. While some argue that Cinderella’s rebellion of going against her stepmother’s instructions of staying home shows that the story has feminist qualities, the prince weakens her achievement when he chooses her only because of her beauty as “girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all” (Lieberman 385). Her need for independence is transformed into the prince’s need for a pretty wife, making her again an object in her family. Once integrated into the prince’s family, Cinderella goes from the maid of her family to the smiling porcelain doll next to the prince as the “first job of a fairy tale princess is to be beautiful” (Röhrich 110). This gives the impression that the only way

In fairy tales, female characters are objects, and their value centers around their attractiveness to men. Since fairy tales rely on cultural values and societal norms to teach morals or lessons, it is evident that fairy tales define a woman’s value in a superficial way. Fairy tales teach that, typically, beauty equates to being valuable to men because of their fertility and purity; whereas, ugliness equates to being worthless and evil, including being ruined because of their lack of virginity. Descriptions readers see from fairy tales like “Rapunzel,” and “Little Snow-White” revolve around the women’s, or girl’s, physical appearance, and both stories play out to where the women remain in a state of objectification. In addition, they are damsels

Cinderella is a fairytale for children that displayed love, loss and miracles; however, when it is further analyzed, it has a deeper meaning. Cinderella is a story about a young girl who became a servant in her own home after her father remarried a malicious woman with two spoiled daughters. She was humiliated and abused yet she remained gentle and kind. She received help from her fairy godmother to go to the prince’s ball after her stepmother rejected her proposal. Cinderella and the Prince fell madly in love but she had to leave at twelve o’clock and forgot to tell him her name but she left her glass slipper behind. He sent his servants to find her and Cinderella was the only maiden in the kingdom to fit into the shoes. She

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.

Despite gender, living conditions or cultural backgrounds most people grow up reading or hearing stories of heroism and damsel in distress scenarios. Anne Sexton turns stereotypes on their head in her satirical poems of classic fairy tales, including Snow White and The Seven Dwarves and Cinderella. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves tells the tale of a young princess with hair as black as coal and skin as pale as snow, whose life is thrown into turmoil at the hands of her overbearing stepmother. Cinderella tells the story of a young girl who she spends her life is yearning for the prince’s ball, and similar to Snow White, Cinderella’s stepmother is influencing her life, however she is a positive character throughout the story. This sheds light on the stepmother in Snow White’s piece as despite the fact that Snow White’s stepmother clearly does inherently evil things, a re-reading demands a re-examination of why. It is throughout these tales’ where stepmothers are only trying to protect their children from the world around them, however in Snow White an outside motive, the beauty provided by the mirror and the pride manifested by poison, creates a barrier between the queen and her stepdaughter, thus giving her the title “Evil”.