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Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella,” the particular version of the story adapted by Walt Disney, is another fairy-tale-as-morality-lesson. Disney ditches The Brothers Grimm when he makes “Cinderella;” even more strangely the credits cite Perrault’s story as the “original,” when in fact the rags-to-riches trope is an ancient and global motif. Even ignoring that the Brothers’ Grimm version predates Perrault’s.
The reason I’m so fixated on the issue of adaptation is because I found Perrault’s “Cinderella” odious. The main moral (which cannot be mistaken; the end of the story is followed by an explanatory poem titled “Moral”) is that it doesn’t really matter how beautiful a woman is (though heroines always are anyway), what matters is that she has grace.
Grace is a most laudable virtue. But there is a difference between bearing suffering with dignity and being a doormat, and in my mind Perrault’s Cinderella is the cautionary tale for this difference. It’s bad enough in Disney’s version, where Cinderella accepts her lot with nary a complaint to anyone who isn’t an animal (can’t she petition the king over her mistreatment? Her parents were landed gentry, after all, she should be in a nobility bloodline book somewhere). Perrault’s Cinderella, however, is downright cheerful in the face of her forced servitude, even volunteering for additional work.
Her virtues are constantly extolled, and they include her beauty, her diligence, her excellent fashion sense (she constructs elaborate head dressings for her stepsisters, giving me hilarious visions of them wearing boats in giant wigs), and of course, the grace she maintains under every circumstance. Even after her family makes her sleep on a straw mattress in a sooty corner and do all of their literal dirty work, she immediately forgives them upon finding her prince. She invites her stepsisters to live in the palace with her and promptly finds them good husbands.
Because that’s what an ideal woman does: she puts up with anything anyone does to her without complaint, and in reward she’ll find a rich man. Sadly the Disney version doesn’t really change this moral. At least Cinderella seems more discontent with her lot, pasting on smiles when she can but clearly just covering up her sorrow. Of course, the reason she can handle it is because her dream of marrying a prince gets her through the day, but at least it’s an improvement on Perrault (which is a commentary in itself for Perrault’s abhorrent version).
What makes Disney’s “Cinderella” more bearable is that most of the movie doesn’t really focus on Cinderella’s circumstances, or really on her at all. A chunk of the film follows the hijinks of Cinderella’s friendly mice and the family’s cat Lucifer. It’s stunningly like an extended “Tom & Jerry” sequence; in fact I wonder if that wasn’t intentional. “Tom & Jerry” had existed for a decade before “Cinderella” came out, and maybe for the first proper post-war feature length (I’m not counting the several short cartoons cobbled into 90-minute films the studio released right around World War II) Disney wanted to play it safe and give the public something he knew was popular.
Perhaps I’d pick on Disney more for being so obviously derivative, but I’m just so glad I didn’t have to put up with more than an hour of Cinderella letting everyone walk all over her that I don’t even care. Everyone may love a Cinderella story, of hearing about a poor girl freed from adversity, but I have to say I don’t care for the most famous versions of the tale.
Related Articles:
Does Every Girl Want to be a Princess?
Examining the Cinderella Effect
Princess Sofia the First: Let’s Hope She’s the Last
*(This image by OiMax is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
