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Research Paragraph and What I've Learned

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Research Paragraph and What I've Learned

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A feminist review on Cinderella

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Cinderella's Representation of Gender and How its Changed

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Cinderella's Representation of Gender and How its Changed

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Article discussing Cinderella's representation of gender and how it has changed, this article mentions the role of gender starting all the way back from the Charles Perrault's version of cinderella from 1697 and 1950's film adaptation, along with referring to Disney's film "Frozen" which was released in 2013.

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Growing up, Cinderella was a classic. I can't tell you how frequently I watched the Disney movie as a child, because that number may not exist yet. As I've gotten older and wiser, the gender issues in this film have become more and more apparent. It is interesting to see these issues, and though they can be very aggravating, observing them show just how far we have come as a society. This article piggybacks off of Emily Lighezzolo's article Disney No Longer 'Frozen' in Antiquated Gender Stereotypes and provides emphasis specifically on Disney's Cinderella.

Model Behavior and Perpetuating Gender Stereotypes

When peeling back the layers of the film, Cinderella highlights key issues with gender roles and stereotypes. It is worth noting that Disney's adaptation is based on Charles Perrault's classic, written all the way back in 1697. Clearly, times were different, especially in terms of gender norms and stereotypes. Although the tale is centuries old, it is interesting to discover that a few ideas viewers see in the film were actually rather prevalent during the 1950s. For the purposes of this analysis, the Disney film will be analyzed looking through the lenses of the fifties.

One major common thread between 1950s gender issues and gender in Cinderella is the belief that marriage is the ultimate life goal. According to PBS, "In the 1950s, women felt tremendous societal pressure to focus their aspirations on a wedding ring" ("People & Events: Mrs. America: Women's Roles in the 1950s"). Marriage was viewed as a sense of security and escape from one's family. This idea can be seen when observing the film through a critical lens. Every eligible bachelorette wants to be married to the Prince, from Cinderella to her step-sisters. The whole existence of a grand ball that allows a slew of single females to mingle with the Prince-and hopefully solidify a marriage proposal-reiterates the idea that marriage is supremely important.

Another notion is that a woman's place is in the home. Edith Stern wrote an article entitled, "Women Are Household Slaves," in which she constructs a satire-esque advertisement calling for a domestic female to do "all cooking, cleaning, laundering, sewing, meal planning, shopping, [and so on]" (Stern 71). The whole article points to the fact that women in the 1950s were essentially confined to the role of housewife. Upon getting married, women were expected to stay at home and perform household chores. Some viewers are able to draw parallels within the film, as well; there is an expectation of Cinderella to constantly perform similar tasks, like sweeping and sewing. When she doesn't do these things, there are consequences, suggesting that it is in a woman's best interest to do the housework expected of them.

It is easier to notice the gender roles and stereotypes that have been brought to light in Cinderella especially when considering how progressive our nation has been in equalizing women and men. For instance, it is worth pointing out that the idea that a woman's value is determined based on how they look. This is seen in specific instances in the film, such as when Cinderella encounters her Fairy Godmother. Initially, Cinderella is dressed quite plainly in her house clothes. Her transformation into a glamorous and impeccably dressed young bachelorette reinforces the beauty ideal. If Cinderella were to attend the Prince's ball in her homely attire, her chances of making a good and lasting impression on the Prince would be slim to none.

Another instance where viewers observe the value of being beautiful is at the ball, when the Prince first sees Cinderella. Based on her physical appearance, he immediately falls in love with her, not even considering other elements, like her kind personality. Peggy Orenstein believes that the focus on beauty is damaging for young girls watching films like Cinderella. She argues that "young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs-who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty-are more likely to be depressed than others" (Orenstein). Moreover, young girls are beginning to feel that in order to be well-liked, they must "please everyone, be very thin and dress right" (Orenstein).

There is, additionally, the belief that love is superior to both independence and education. Today, being independent and educated are things that more and more women are focused on; they are more focused on getting a college degree and being self-sufficient than finding a husband as soon as possible. In Cinderella, independence takes a back seat to marriage. If she can marry the Prince, she will be taken care of and can depend on him to be the provider. Education is something that doesn't even come up in the film, which could suggest that women didn't want to waste their time learning, that they had more important goals to be fulfilling, like wrangling a husband. In our society, women work to become doctors, lawyers, and politicians. Cinderella, though...not so much; as Orenstein would say, "Cinderella doesn't really do anything" (Orenstein).

Breaking the Chains of Gender Stereotypes Today

While Cinderella may perpetuate numerous gender roles and stereotypes, it is also just a movie. Disney's own executive Andy Mooney has chimed in on the matter. According to him, children merely go through phases as they grow. He reasons that "[boys pass] through [and girls pass] through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be" (Orenstein). In this case, young children watching Cinderella could view it and remain unaffected by it; just because they watch the film doesn't mean they will grow up thinking that they need to be a princess.

Orenstein, too, agrees that "plenty of girls stray from the script," and rather than reenacting scenes from film, they may do other things, like "[play] basketball in their finery, or [cast] themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella." She also states that "there are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls' self-esteem or dampens other aspirations."

Perhaps the most telling about the progress we've made are the films that are being made today and how they stray away from these traditional gender roles. Lighezzolo brings up Frozen, which is certainly a great example of the undoing of these stereotypes, especially with the idea that Elsa gets her happily-ever-after without having a love interest. Brave is another film that doesn't depend heavily on a female character in need of saving. Merida is a rough-around-the-edges, self-sufficient, and determined young woman that relies more on her set of skills than waiting on a male to shoo in and do all the hard work.

The views on Cinderella undoubtedly are multi-faceted. While some see the film as a basic children's movie, others feel that it paints a particularly problematic picture of gender roles and stereotypes. Although neither side is one hundred percent right or wrong, it is still essential to examine the film closely because of the debates that it sparks, no matter what era we're living in.

Works Cited

Orenstein, Peggy. "What's Wrong With Cinderella?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2006. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24princess.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&>.

Stern, Edith M. " Women Are Household Slaves." The American Mercury (1949): 71-76. Print.

"People & Events: Mrs. America: Women's Roles in the 1950s." PBS. PBS, 2001. Web. 2 Feb. 2014. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/peopleevents/p_mrs.html>.

What do you think? .

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Cinderella's Representation of Gender and How its Changed

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Growing up, Cinderella was a classic. I can't tell you how frequently I watched the Disney movie as a child, because that number may not exist yet. As I've gotten older and wiser, the gender issues in this film have become more and more apparent.

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This 1950 Film version of Cinderella, I will be using it in comparison to other versions when discussing feminism representation and influence.

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This is "Cinderella" by Public Domain on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Some critics argue that "Have courage and be kind" is an anti-feminist mantra, reinforcing stereotypical beliefs about how females should act and behave, but Branagh insisted this was not the case in a recent interview in The New York Times. The director "likened it to the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi."

"I'm proud that a sophisticated, intelligent and passionate girl emerges out of a classical framework where her empowerment is not at the price of becoming like a man. I think it celebrates her specific femaleness in a way that encourages people to be who they are, not necessarily in competition with the opposite gender or with an attempt to be what other people appear to wish them to be," Branagh told the Times.

In other words, the you-ness of being you isn't tied to gendered traits, but rather a series of qualities to which you should remain true. "There are lots of different ways in life to be strong, but for her, it comes from within," James says. "She doesn't have to take lessons or use a sword, but she's able to get through life with this goodness and this courage that makes her so unique."

This newly empowered Ella would also require a multi-dimensional suitor. "In the animation you only see him in two or three scenes, and in this film you get to see him as a son, as a soldier, and as a friend, as well as a prince," Madden said on the red carpet at the L.A. premiere of the film. "I wanted to bring a sense of humility to him and see him not up in this palace, but as a man who has been at war. When you watch this film, you see Cinderella is such an amazing woman. My biggest thing was how do I create a man that is worthy of her?"

James echoed his sentiment. "We wanted it to feel like they were really right for each other, and that they were going to enrich each other's lives."

For all of the lovely sentiments being expressed about how progressive this Cinderella is, it's not without flaws. Ella is still confined to her corset and the expectation that she be thin, attractive, and blonde. Critics have accused Disney of further digitally slimming the already small-framed James to make her waist appear even tinier in her blue ball gown. Both the actress and Branagh have refuted this claim, but the body shape being portrayed still confines to a mainstream feminine ideal.

There's also the issue of Ella remaining in her home, even after her stepmother forces her to move to the cold, dark attic and wait on her family members hand and foot. Perhaps it can be written off as Stockholm syndrome, or her reticence to abandon a home that's been in her family for centuries or the creature friends she's made who also live there. Still, it's hard to understand this newly empowered Ella's reasons for remaining a servant in her own home, with no desire to move out, and only the belief that if she continues to have courage and be kind, her circumstances will change one day. There's only so many changes one can make to a classic tale before it becomes something completely different, we suppose.

And, of course, Ella still requires a fairy godmother to play the deus ex machina who transforms rags and mice into a fancy dress and carriage for the ball. In Branagh's Cinderella, however, this becomes more of a quid pro quo. Her fairy godmother only helps Ella after the latter takes pity on the former when she appears disguised as a beggar. Again, the message being conveyed is that Ella's kindness and ability to empathize are what inclines others to help her in return. She brings about the changes in her life through these steadfast character traits.

Is this new Cinderella the fully-realized feminist fairy tale we've been hoping for? No, because, as Lily James herself points out, Cinderella isn't real. Perhaps the best proof of this are the glass slippers that had to be CGI'd onto her feet because "they didn't fit any human foot." It wasn't that she was "the wrong Cinderella," James said, it's that Cinderella is a fairy tale construct that's an amalgamation of historical and present-day ideals. The 2015 Ella is certainly a CGI glass-slippered step in the right direction, though.

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Disney's New "Cinderella" Isn't A Perfect Feminist Fairy Tale, But It's A Start

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Some critics argue that "Have courage and be kind" is an anti-feminist mantra, reinforcing stereotypical beliefs about how females should act and behave, but Branagh insisted this was not the case in a recent interview in The New York Times. The director "likened it to the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi."

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Brother Grimm's 1697 Cinderella Fairytale

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Brother Grimm's 1697 Cinderella Fairytale

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One of the earlier and most significant written versions of Cinderella I will be referring to when discussing feminism's representation and influence.

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Charles Perrault

Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had, by a former husband, two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things. He had likewise, by another wife, a young daughter, but of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world.
No sooner were the ceremonies of the wedding over but the stepmother began to show herself in her true colors. She could not bear the good qualities of this pretty girl, and the less because they made her own daughters appear the more odious. She employed her in the meanest work of the house. She scoured the dishes, tables, etc., and cleaned madam's chamber, and those of misses, her daughters. She slept in a sorry garret, on a wretched straw bed, while her sisters slept in fine rooms, with floors all inlaid, on beds of the very newest fashion, and where they had looking glasses so large that they could see themselves at their full length from head to foot.

The poor girl bore it all patiently, and dared not tell her father, who would have scolded her; for his wife governed him entirely. When she had done her work, she used to go to the chimney corner, and sit down there in the cinders and ashes, which caused her to be called Cinderwench. Only the younger sister, who was not so rude and uncivil as the older one, called her Cinderella. However, Cinderella, notwithstanding her coarse apparel, was a hundred times more beautiful than her sisters, although they were always dressed very richly.

It happened that the king's son gave a ball, and invited all persons of fashion to it. Our young misses were also invited, for they cut a very grand figure among those of quality. They were mightily delighted at this invitation, and wonderfully busy in selecting the gowns, petticoats, and hair dressing that would best become them. This was a new difficulty for Cinderella; for it was she who ironed her sister's linen and pleated their ruffles. They talked all day long of nothing but how they should be dressed.

"For my part," said the eldest, "I will wear my red velvet suit with French trimming."

"And I," said the youngest, "shall have my usual petticoat; but then, to make amends for that, I will put on my gold-flowered cloak, and my diamond stomacher, which is far from being the most ordinary one in the world."

They sent for the best hairdresser they could get to make up their headpieces and adjust their hairdos, and they had their red brushes and patches from Mademoiselle de la Poche.

They also consulted Cinderella in all these matters, for she had excellent ideas, and her advice was always good. Indeed, she even offered her services to fix their hair, which they very willingly accepted. As she was doing this, they said to her, "Cinderella, would you not like to go to the ball?"

"Alas!" said she, "you only jeer me; it is not for such as I am to go to such a place."

"You are quite right," they replied. "It would make the people laugh to see a Cinderwench at a ball."

Anyone but Cinderella would have fixed their hair awry, but she was very good, and dressed them perfectly well. They were so excited that they hadn't eaten a thing for almost two days. Then they broke more than a dozen laces trying to have themselves laced up tightly enough to give them a fine slender shape. They were continually in front of their looking glass. At last the happy day came. They went to court, and Cinderella followed them with her eyes as long as she could. When she lost sight of them, she started to cry.

Her godmother, who saw her all in tears, asked her what was the matter.

"I wish I could. I wish I could." She was not able to speak the rest, being interrupted by her tears and sobbing.

This godmother of hers, who was a fairy, said to her, "You wish that you could go to the ball; is it not so?"

"Yes," cried Cinderella, with a great sigh.

"Well," said her godmother, "be but a good girl, and I will contrive that you shall go." Then she took her into her chamber, and said to her, "Run into the garden, and bring me a pumpkin."

Cinderella went immediately to gather the finest she could get, and brought it to her godmother, not being able to imagine how this pumpkin could help her go to the ball. Her godmother scooped out all the inside of it, leaving nothing but the rind. Having done this, she struck the pumpkin with her wand, and it was instantly turned into a fine coach, gilded all over with gold.

She then went to look into her mousetrap, where she found six mice, all alive, and ordered Cinderella to lift up a little the trapdoor. She gave each mouse, as it went out, a little tap with her wand, and the mouse was that moment turned into a fine horse, which altogether made a very fine set of six horses of a beautiful mouse colored dapple gray.

Being at a loss for a coachman, Cinderella said, "I will go and see if there is not a rat in the rat trap that we can turn into a coachman."

"You are right," replied her godmother, "Go and look."

Cinderella brought the trap to her, and in it there were three huge rats. The fairy chose the one which had the largest beard, touched him with her wand, and turned him into a fat, jolly coachman, who had the smartest whiskers that eyes ever beheld.

After that, she said to her, "Go again into the garden, and you will find six lizards behind the watering pot. Bring them to me."

She had no sooner done so but her godmother turned them into six footmen, who skipped up immediately behind the coach, with their liveries all bedaubed with gold and silver, and clung as close behind each other as if they had done nothing else their whole lives. The fairy then said to Cinderella, "Well, you see here an equipage fit to go to the ball with; are you not pleased with it?"

"Oh, yes," she cried; "but must I go in these nasty rags?"

Her godmother then touched her with her wand, and, at the same instant, her clothes turned into cloth of gold and silver, all beset with jewels. This done, she gave her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the whole world. Being thus decked out, she got up into her coach; but her godmother, above all things, commanded her not to stay past midnight, telling her, at the same time, that if she stayed one moment longer, the coach would be a pumpkin again, her horses mice, her coachman a rat, her footmen lizards, and that her clothes would become just as they were before.

She promised her godmother to leave the ball before midnight; and then drove away, scarcely able to contain herself for joy. The king's son, who was told that a great princess, whom nobody knew, had arrived, ran out to receive her. He gave her his hand as she alighted from the coach, and led her into the hall, among all the company. There was immediately a profound silence. Everyone stopped dancing, and the violins ceased to play, so entranced was everyone with the singular beauties of the unknown newcomer.

Nothing was then heard but a confused noise of, "How beautiful she is! How beautiful she is!"

The king himself, old as he was, could not help watching her, and telling the queen softly that it was a long time since he had seen so beautiful and lovely a creature.

All the ladies were busied in considering her clothes and headdress, hoping to have some made next day after the same pattern, provided they could find such fine materials and as able hands to make them.

The king's son led her to the most honorable seat, and afterwards took her out to dance with him. She danced so very gracefully that they all more and more admired her. A fine meal was served up, but the young prince ate not a morsel, so intently was he busied in gazing on her.

She went and sat down by her sisters, showing them a thousand civilities, giving them part of the oranges and citrons which the prince had presented her with, which very much surprised them, for they did not know her. While Cinderella was thus amusing her sisters, she heard the clock strike eleven and three-quarters, whereupon she immediately made a courtesy to the company and hurried away as fast as she could.

Arriving home, she ran to seek out her godmother, and, after having thanked her, she said she could not but heartily wish she might go to the ball the next day as well, because the king's son had invited her.

As she was eagerly telling her godmother everything that had happened at the ball, her two sisters knocked at the door, which Cinderella ran and opened.

"You stayed such a long time!" she cried, gaping, rubbing her eyes and stretching herself as if she had been sleeping; she had not, however, had any manner of inclination to sleep while they were away from home.

"If you had been at the ball," said one of her sisters, "you would not have been tired with it. The finest princess was there, the most beautiful that mortal eyes have ever seen. She showed us a thousand civilities, and gave us oranges and citrons."

Cinderella seemed very indifferent in the matter. Indeed, she asked them the name of that princess; but they told her they did not know it, and that the king's son was very uneasy on her account and would give all the world to know who she was. At this Cinderella, smiling, replied, "She must, then, be very beautiful indeed; how happy you have been! Could not I see her? Ah, dear Charlotte, do lend me your yellow dress which you wear every day."

"Yes, to be sure!" cried Charlotte; "lend my clothes to such a dirty Cinderwench as you are! I should be such a fool."

Cinderella, indeed, well expected such an answer, and was very glad of the refusal; for she would have been sadly put to it, if her sister had lent her what she asked for jestingly.

The next day the two sisters were at the ball, and so was Cinderella, but dressed even more magnificently than before. The king's son was always by her, and never ceased his compliments and kind speeches to her. All this was so far from being tiresome to her, and, indeed, she quite forgot what her godmother had told her. She thought that it was no later than eleven when she counted the clock striking twelve. She jumped up and fled, as nimble as a deer. The prince followed, but could not overtake her. She left behind one of her glass slippers, which the prince picked up most carefully. She reached home, but quite out of breath, and in her nasty old clothes, having nothing left of all her finery but one of the little slippers, the mate to the one that she had dropped.

The guards at the palace gate were asked if they had not seen a princess go out. They replied that they had seen nobody leave but a young girl, very shabbily dressed, and who had more the air of a poor country wench than a gentlewoman.

When the two sisters returned from the ball Cinderella asked them if they had been well entertained, and if the fine lady had been there.

They told her, yes, but that she hurried away immediately when it struck twelve, and with so much haste that she dropped one of her little glass slippers, the prettiest in the world, which the king's son had picked up; that he had done nothing but look at her all the time at the ball, and that most certainly he was very much in love with the beautiful person who owned the glass slipper.

What they said was very true; for a few days later, the king's son had it proclaimed, by sound of trumpet, that he would marry her whose foot this slipper would just fit. They began to try it on the princesses, then the duchesses and all the court, but in vain; it was brought to the two sisters, who did all they possibly could to force their foot into the slipper, but they did not succeed.

Cinderella, who saw all this, and knew that it was her slipper, said to them, laughing, "Let me see if it will not fit me."

Her sisters burst out laughing, and began to banter with her. The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very handsome, said that it was only just that she should try as well, and that he had orders to let everyone try.

He had Cinderella sit down, and, putting the slipper to her foot, he found that it went on very easily, fitting her as if it had been made of wax. Her two sisters were greatly astonished, but then even more so, when Cinderella pulled out of her pocket the other slipper, and put it on her other foot. Then in came her godmother and touched her wand to Cinderella's clothes, making them richer and more magnificent than any of those she had worn before.

And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, said that she forgave them with all her heart, and wanted them always to love her.

She was taken to the young prince, dressed as she was. He thought she was more charming than before, and, a few days after, married her. Cinderella, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the court.

Moral: Beauty in a woman is a rare treasure that will always be admired. Graciousness, however, is priceless and of even greater value. This is what Cinderella's godmother gave to her when she taught her to behave like a queen. Young women, in the winning of a heart, graciousness is more important than a beautiful hairdo. It is a true gift of the fairies. Without it nothing is possible; with it, one can do anything.

Another moral: Without doubt it is a great advantage to have intelligence, courage, good breeding, and common sense. These, and similar talents come only from heaven, and it is good to have them. However, even these may fail to bring you success, without the blessing of a godfather or a godmother.

Source: Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., ca. 1889), pp. 64-71.

Lang's source: Charles Perrault, "Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre," Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Paris, 1697).

Links to related sites

Cinderella, additional folktales of type 510A and related stories of persecuted heroines.

Charles Perrault's Mother Goose Tales. Information about Perrault and his famous collectionHistoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l'Oye.

Les contes de Perrault . A French-language site featuring Perrault's tales.

D. L. Ashliman's folktexts , a library of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.

Revised October 8, 2003.

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Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper

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Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had, by a former husband, two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things.

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"Woman gives birth to a gourd."

Our heroine is discovered by a prince, who finds the talking gourd and takes it home. If nothing else, perhaps it has a future in show business. At some point, she presumably emerges from it - the details offered in the book about this particular folk tale are limited - and she becomes a servant. The prince keeps her at the palace but mistreats her terribly, even beating her and kicking her to prevent her from attending his ball, but she gets there anyway without his knowing it's her (which is one reason it seems certain she's out of the squash by now). They meet and he gives her gifts and so on. Later, when she prepares his breakfast in the guise of his once-ensquashed servant, she slips into the breakfast the gifts he gave her at the ball when they danced. When he finds jewelry in his food, he realizes she is his beloved, and they get married. Ah, the classic "boy meets gourd."

What is the name of this young lady who was born inside a vegetable? Her name, of course, is Zucchettina. (It could be worse to our modern ears: One of the Cinderella variant entries is called "Little Saddleslut.")

This version is an obvious relative of Cinderella but not quite Cinderella; it's presented as one of the variants of Catskin, a related tale that also has a hard-working girl who meets a prince at a ball while in disguise and is then recognized and rescued.

That's not the strangest variant in the book, and it is certainly not the darkest. One begins with Cinderella, her two older sisters and their mother agreeing to a whimsical bet: First one to drop her spinning spool will be eaten by the others. When Mom proves clumsy, the sisters indeed eat her. (A deal's a deal?) Cinderella decides not to eat her mother, but to wait until the killing and eating is over, then bury her mother's bones. You know, out of respect. Fortunately, her mother's bones turn into coins and beautiful magic dresses. It's no fairy godmother, but you don't look your mother's gift bones in the ... mouth, I suppose.

There's a Vietnamese variant called Kajong And Haloek in which the evil foster mother of the Cinderella figure, Kajong, is tricked into eating the flesh of her own dead daughter (who boiled herself alive trying to be as beautiful as Kajong) - punishment for them both.

And here is a direct quote from Cox's book, summarizing a variant called Gold-dice: "King goes to war, leaving three daughters in mound with victuals for seven years. Father slain; princesses forgotten. Dog and cat eaten; elder sisters die. Heroine eats mouse; digs way out."

Kind of makes you think having your eyes pecked out is getting off easy, right?

As Disney releases another Cinderella adaptation - this one live-action, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Lily James as Cinderella and Cate Blanchett as her evil stepmother - we see again how perplexingly durable this story is, particularly for something so slight. The film that's coming out this weekend may be bent and polished, stripped of some of its themes and relieved of its bone-burying - and Cinderella may now be an established part of the Disney princess racket - but this is still recognizably a story of which 345 versions could already be found almost 125 years ago.
What Is Cinderella, Exactly?
To try to figure out what exactly that story is and why we still have it, we have to separate out the folk tale that is Cinderella, though, from the turn of phrase that is "Cinderella story." Americans will call almost anything a Cinderella story that involves a good thing happening to someone nice. We slap that title on movies and books, but also on basketball games won by tiny schools full of scrawny nerds, small businesses that thrive and even political ascendancies that upend established powers.

The actual Cinderella tale, while a nebulous thing that can be hard to pin down with precision, is more than that. There's very little that's common to every variant of the story, but in general, you have a mistreated young woman, forced to do menial work, either cast out or unloved by her family. She has an opportunity to marry well and escape her situation, but she gets that chance only after being mistaken for a higher-status person, so she has to get the man who may marry her to recognize her in her low-status form, which often happens either via a shoe that fits or some kind of food that she prepares.

It's partly a fantasy about simplifying the relationships between social standing and coupling - one that makes the most sense in a world in which class differences arean accepted barrier to a good man choosing to marry a woman. If the prince is a man who believes from the outset that love conquers all, the story doesn't really make any sense. It would be hard to set Cinderella on a properly functioning egalitarian collective.
Disney, Hilary Duff And Other Spins Are Spun
The Cinderella familiar to United States popular culture, though, is most easily traceable, and most commonly traced, to the one published in 1697 by the French writer Charles Perrault, whose version, called Cendrillon, brings together many of the elements popularized by the 1950 Disney cartoon: the fairy godmother, the transformed pumpkin, the glass slipper, the midnight spell.

In lots of other versions, there is no fairy godmother; there is simply Cinderella praying for help, often to her dead mother (as she does in the Brothers Grimm version, written more than 100 years after Perrault's, that resembles Cinderella's story in Stephen Sondheim's musical Into The Woods). There is often a shoe that proves her identity and her suitability for marriage, but it's not always a glass slipper. In fact, the Cinderella story is sometimes traced all the way back to the Egyptian tale of Rhodopis, a girl who winds up marrying a king after a bird steals her red shoe and dumps it in the king's lap, leaving him to search for her.

But once it's wormed its way into the culture, like any folk tale, Cinderella bends in delightful and vulgar ways to suit the purposes of the high and the low, the noble and the crass.

In 1957, CBS aired a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical - written for the TV broadcast rather than adapted from the stage - in which Cinderella continued the 1950 theme of limitless dreaming as a fundamental piece of the story. In the cartoon, she had sung "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes," and in the TV musical, she sings "In My Own Little Corner," which finds her happy only when she's alone and dreaming of adventure. While the story is still quite similar to Perrault's, her fantasy has evolved a little; rather than simply wanting out, she wants excitement. Whereas the cartoon Cinderella engaged in the rather circular wishing logic that her greatest wish was ... for her dreams to come true, the musical Cinderella started to fantasize about going on safaris and having her own squad of silkworms.

Julie Andrews, then just 21, seven years away from her feature film debut in Mary Poppins and appearing before a staggering reported audience of more than 100 million people, gave Cinderella more personality than she'd had as a cartoon and played up her status as a plucky dreamer. This Cinderella longed for connection ("on the wings of my fancy, I can fly anywhere / and the world will open its arms to me") rather than existing as simply a miserable, put-upon, featureless doormat - a vision that would eventually become a fundamental part of the pop-culture Cinderella as well as heroine princesses in general. In this one, the pumpkin carriage and the mice as horses are her idea, and she's the one who persuades her fairy godmother to do it. There were no bright colors and sumptuous visuals to carry it, either - most people saw it in black and white.

That production was followed by two more television versions, including a charming one from 1997, in which Brandy Norwood played Cinderella and Whitney Houston played her fairy godmother - one of only a few times the American pop-culture Cinderella has not been white, despite her global ubiquity. In some cases, that's continued to the stage: One incarnation of the show's recent Broadway production, with a new book, featured Keke Palmer as Cinderella. (In the category Trivia That May Or May Not Mean Anything, chew on this: Both Jon Cypher, who played the Prince in 1957, and Stuart Damon, who played the Prince in the 1965 version of the musical opposite Lesley Ann Warren, later became prominent soap opera actors.)

In 1998, Ever After: A Cinderella Story very specifically staged an assault on some of the story's gendered elements, casting Drew Barrymore as a more self-possessed heroine (actually named Danielle, but taunted with the nickname "Cinderella") whose prince came to admire her for her intelligence and independence, rather than simply dancing with her and marrying her because she fit into a shoe (much as the oldest Brady Buncher, Greg, was once hired to assume the identity of singer Johnny Bravo because he fit the suit).

In a sense, the classic tale often treated like our quintessential cultural romance had to be substantially adapted to allow for the existence of romantic love as we imagine it now, which does not occur in the complete absence of communication. If a pure fantasy of economic security and social uplift achieved by magic might have sufficed in the 1600s, romance by the 1990s required conversation and affection and the promise of a partnership, so the rhythms of the love story in Ever After don't come from centuries-old folk tales, but from 20th-century romantic comedy crossed with misty melodrama. (The musical had presaged some of this confusion with the eyebrow-raising song that literally asks, "Do I love you because you're beautiful / or are you beautiful because I love you?" In other words, "Me: Shallow or not?" Great question, that.)

Then there are the others. So many others.

On and on she goes: Even the new Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a Cinderella homage. All it takes is a girl and a dress and a shoe; people get it. There are countless versions. No matter how many I list here, other people would list others, on and on, forever. That's not a casual use of the word "countless."

Bare simplicity is both the story's strength and its weakness. One of the things that makes Perrault's Cinderella story an unlikely classic is that stripped to its basics - as it is in the 1950 cartoon, for instance - there's barely enough to it to sustain more than a paragraph. Sad girl gets magic dress, goes to dance, loses shoe, is found. The film is only an hour and 15 minutes long, and much of that is stuffed not with Cinderella's story, but with Tom and Jerry-style animal hooliganism involving the mice, the birds, the cat and the dog. Helper animals are common in the folk tale variants, though: That movie comes by those mice and birds honestly, from hundreds of years of history.

The reed-thin story is why usually things are added - all the things that tell you what kind of Cinderella this is and whom it's made for. Cinderella becomes a kind of cultural tofu that takes on the flavor of whatever you're mixing with it. In Ever After, what's added is an actual courtship between the prince and Danielle that's not reliant on a single dance. In A Cinderella Story, it's recycled high-school plotting lifted from other, better movies: the nerdy male BFF, the mean popular girls and an entire side investigation of the tragic ways teenagers had to try to flirt online 10 years ago, when texting the letter "S" meant hitting the "7" key on your flip phone four times.

And, not to find too much sociology in my Hilary Duff vehicles, but it's interesting that this one draws the stepsisters as awkward dorks and therefore has to invent another group of beautiful and popular girls to serve as Cinderella's more aggressive tormentors; it's as if Hilary Duff being presented as conventionally appealing in every way and in possession of a cute white convertible means that no dork could believably make her feel anything she didn't care to feel. Thus we get literal stepsisters who are goats from the beginning and figurative stepsisters - the ubiquitous "mean girls" - who represent an actual threat and can only be bested when the prince doesn't choose them. Tacky and awkward girls to emphasize that Cinderella is beautiful and pleasing; mean girls to show that she's good. (Just about the only justification we are given for Sam's pitifully low status at school, despite her seeming like the kind of girl who would do well socially in high school, is that she has a job, and is therefore scorned by her peers.)
You Should See The Other Guy
This poor girl, this Cinderella. Over and over, in century after century, she has to scrub the floors and slop the pigs and perhaps dig around in the fireplace for lentils. (A development I call: Yet Another Situation In Which We'd All Be Better Off Without Lentils.) Her entire life is defined by her dreams of a marriage that will improve her standing - making her not so different from her stepsisters and stepmother - and in some versions, she has no personality except a vague affinity for animals and perhaps the tiniest hint of impatience with cleaning. But you know who fares even worse? The prince.
The Stepmother And Stepsisters And The Treachery Of Women
There are a lot of variations on this story in which the central character - sometimes called Cinderella, sometimes not (she's sometimes called fun things like "Finette, The Swineherd") - plays a role herself in all this treachery. There is, as previously mentioned, that variant in which she ultimately schemes to trick her stepmother into consuming her own dead child's flesh. There are also some in which the prince does the dispatching with equal flair: one of Cox's summaries ends, "The prince sends for his two sisters-in-law, with his own hand, he hews them in pieces, and lives with his wife happily ever after." But the one we tend to get is one where Cinderella and the prince rise above: They live happily ever after even without cutting anybody up in little pieces. You cannot simply defeat your tormentors; you must do it kindly and gently. It is not enough to be victorious; you must also be good, even to those who are not good to you.

In Ever After, which spends most of its running time trying to complicate the way women operate in this story, they change things up so that there is one nasty stepsister and one kind one - the latter is played by the wonderful actress Melanie Lynskey, then only 20 or so, as a sweet girl treated only moderately better than Cinderella (and berated about her weight, an interesting little 20th-century touch on a story about girls made to feel bad about themselves). It makes for an interestingly different dynamic, where Danielle's courage benefits more than just herself, and the horrible behavior she confronts doesn't seem endemic to womanhood outside herself.

Of course, the Disney version (per the Perrault version) also adds the fairy godmother, a kind of stand-in for the mother Cinderella doesn't have - the figure her stepmother could have been. In a lot of Cinderella stories, you cannot have your dead mother, but you can have her magic bones - or in this case, her magic stand-in. The supernatural woman becomes effectively an answer to the shortcomings of all the flesh-and-blood women in her life. Ever After spends a little time with this idea that Danielle genuinely wishes her awful stepmother could have loved her, as well as with the suggestion that her stepmother - played by Anjelica Huston - truly loved Danielle's father and could perhaps have turned out differently had she not been stuck in grief.

Both of these things are more nuanced ways of thinking about that relationship than most versions of the story allow, and both notably take place in the absence of a fairy godmother who comes in to nurture and aid Danielle. Instead, she meets Leonardo da Vinci (really!), who's just passing through France and helps out with the dress and some good advice. The cheeky way the film literally replaces a magical character with one of the great men of science and invention is among its more charming, assertively modern touches, and one of the ones that most emphatically announces its mission to renounce magic pumpkins and tell a story about a girl who works hard, defends the less fortunate, protects her parents' memories, reads important literature, can hold her own in unexpected woodland battles with bands of gypsies, and thus gets to marry a prince who is lucky to have her.

What exactly motivates all the mistreatment of Cinderella shifts, though jealousy is a common theme, particularly in the ones we see in the United States. In lots of forms of the story, the stepsisters aren't ugly; in some, they're specified to be quite lovely - they're just really mean. But our versions tend to make them ugly and tacky, grasping social climbers who can't hope to compete with Cinderella's physical beauty, as if to better distinguish them as undeserving compared to their sister who, after all, wants largely the same thing they do: to meet a prince. In the Disney cartoon, they have protruding noses and funny expressions, contrasted with Cinderella's meticulously indistinct face - the face that would adorn a store-brand box labeled "Girl." Her stepmother's prominent nose and pointed chin, of course, are reminiscent of Disney witches across time.
Disney's Post-Frozen, Post-Tangled Cinderella
As for the new live-action Cinderella from Disney, it retains debts to the cartoon, and it keeps Cinderella on brand: blonde, wide-eyed, corseted to an unsettling degree. It keeps the magic: the pumpkin, the fairy godmother (played in a delightfully breezy performance by Helena Bonham Carter), and that pretty glass shoe (here a heel almost impossibly high).

But while this is still Disney's version of this story, and while it is and will remain a story of a girl saved by marriage from a team of mean harpies, there are signs that this is post- Frozen and post- T angled Disney storytelling, this time in live action. And there are, quite honestly, beats that seem awfully similar to the markedly feminist Ever After. Again, Blanchett's take on the stepmother, while not robbed of any of her wickedness, is informed by a couple of moments that suggest she does have feelings and is as much a scarred stepmother as an evil one.

Cinderella again meets the prince outside the palace before there is any ball. Tather than the sparky rom-com business of Ever After, this is a purer, simpler romantic swoon, and it's pretty effective for what it is. The film protects her from being after a change in status by ensuring that she doesn't know he's a prince when she goes to the ball hoping to see him. These are little touches, but they make her easier to relate to and less stuck in a world in which all she dreams of is brushing up against royalty.

The transformations of pumpkin and mice alike are great fun, and the ball is scrumptious to watch. Making a proper Cinderella ballgown - one that can still impress in an age in which that character has everything including a waffle iron branded with her likeness - is tough, but this one is such a liquid swirl that it's independently pretty to watch how it behaves in a dance.

It's a film that's exactly what it has to be. It's still Disney, it's still extremely safe, it's still about being rescued and married off to gain higher status, it's still another princess movie. Its updated elements are interesting but measured; it has white leads across the board, but Cinderella lives in an intriguingly diverse kingdom. But it's executed so well that in the end, it's probably as good as it was at all reasonable to expect it might be. Branagh knows his scenic lushscapes, and why would you have anyone else as the stepmother if you could get Cate Blanchett?

The frustrations are contained in the ways in which it's traditional, the things they didn't modernize. The frustrations grow from parts of the story that, while they could certainly be altered - there are 345 variants already, after all - have been around for hundreds of years.
In Conclusion: Is Captain America A Cinderella Story?
Drawing precise conclusions about who the cultural Cinderella is right now is so hard, because in a sense, everything has a taste of Cinderella. Despite the fact that My Fair Lady has specific origins in George Bernard Shaw and goes back to Ovid, Time recently pointed out that in one interview, Julie Andrews, who you'll remember had actually played Cinderella, called My Fair Lady "the best Cinderella story, really."

If it's just a rescue of a deserving underdog from an ordinary life and delivery to an extraordinary one, then The Little Mermaid is Cinderella, and Pretty Woman is Cinderella, and - to be honest? - Captain America is Cinderella. Lots of our current stories are. What is a fairy godmother, after all, that isn't also present in the idea of being bitten by a spider and gaining the ability to climb buildings? What is that pumpkin coach but ... the Batmobile? And not to return to the tone of cannibalism and murder, but what consideration of unloved pop-culture girls whose evil mothers won't let them to go dances is complete without Carrie?

Too far afield? Sure. But this is folklore, and it doesn't end, it just takes new forms. It isn't as if folklore goes up to 1900 and then stops, and everything after that is "pop culture." The production is different and the financing is different, but the appeal of stories that overlap and wind together, and the appeal of stories told and retold in different forms in different voices and variations, is not only a function of greed. It's also a function of instincts to tell and share and revisit stories you've heard before, not because they're new, but because they're not.

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A Girl, A Shoe, A Prince: The Endlessly Evolving Cinderella

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"Woman gives birth to a gourd." Our heroine is discovered by a prince, who finds the talking gourd and takes it home. If nothing else, perhaps it has a future in show business. At some point, she presumably emerges from it - the details offered in the book about this particular folk tale are limited - and she becomes a servant.

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Feminist View on 6 different versions of Cinderella Films and TV adaptations

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Feminist View on 6 different versions of Cinderella Films and TV adaptations

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This source compares 6 different versions of cinderella and feminism including "Cinderella", "Rodger's and Hammerstein's Cinderella", "Ever After", "Ella Enchanted" and "A Cinderella Story". As mentioned in my topic proposal,This source will be able to help when discussing the different versions of the story as well as how the role of feminism has changed and evolved.

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It's been a big week for Disney. The Little Mermaid turned 25 to the delight of nostalgic millennials everywhere (save for me, I hate Ariel), and today? The first trailer of Disney's live-action Cinderella debuted. The good news is that the costumes are fab, but that bad news is that it seems Cinderella isn't getting the modern feminist makeover she definitely needs.

We love discussing feminism in line with Disney Princesses, because many of us see those films as the building blocks of how we view the world. As time goes on, there's definitely been a spectrum of which stories are more or less damaging in shaping feminine values, and as a result of these discussions, there's even been a little bit of re-working to fix the more antiquated aspects of our fairytale friends. We nitpick at the good, and we condemn the bad, and we try to fix the problematic the best we can.

Case and point: Snow White, perhaps the least feminist princess, has recently been rebranded in several venues as a crafty fighter. And even Ariel, who is the dumbest (I have a sophisticated argument supporting that, as in: Belle rules and Ariel drools) manages to run away from home. So why is this so hard to do with dear old Cinderelly?

The problem with Cinderella has always been a lack of genuine motivation. At any point in the 10 or some-odd years that Cinderella works as a housemaid she could've just been like, "NOPE" and bailed, but she doesn't. She doesn't until literal magic intervenes and a rich guy she just met decides she's hot enough to marry.

Short version: somehow it's just REALLY hard to make that story into intelligent feminist discourse, and media has proved that time and time again. It doesn't seem like this version will change that, but hopefully someone else will break tradition? Maybe Anna Kendrick?

Until then, let's revisit six versions of Cinderella and weigh their feminist leanings (or, more likely, lack thereof) accordingly.

Cinderella

Perhaps the most famous version of Cinderella, yet as glorious as that fairytale dress transformation is, she's almost impressively bland. She's not even a bit self-sufficient, she has no backbone, and she relies on everyone from fairy godmothers to goddamn mice to solve her problems. The worst part? although I know watched this at my YiaYia's house constantly as a child, I couldn't tell you a single detail about the plot. I just tried remembering her songs and got them all mixed up with Snow White's. No bueno.

Feminist or Nah?: It's a Disney film from the 1950's. A resounding nah.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella

The wonderful Julie Andrews originated the role, and there's a 1998 version with Brandy worth checking out, but somehow the above 1965 television adaptation is the one I remember. Again, Cinderella is shown to be less than self-sufficient, and when the Prince sings "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" I die a little inside. It just sounds like a proto-One Directions song. However, "In My Own Little Corner" at least shows that she has adventurous ambitions, albeit ones she won't fight to pursue.

Feminist or Nah?: Nah, but at least there was a glimmer of imagination somewhere inside her.

Ever After

My brother had to compare this with the Disney version for a women's studies paper, and ultimately I ended up re-writing the entire essay because he completely missed all the important points. In short, this is not a perfect feminist re-write of the tale, but there's a LOT of good happening with Drew Barrymore's Danielle, the Cinderella character. She has a rebellious streak and totally calls the Prince out on his shit, so that's something.

Feminist or Nah?: Perhaps the closest we'll get to feminist.

Ella Enchanted

I mentioned just the other day that the movie is terrible, and I stand by it. Anne Hathaway's character is a quirky, clumsy rom-com cliche in a corset. Still, the book it's vaguely based on, which is in turn based on Cinderella, exemplifies a totally progressive protagonist. The Ella of that story is has strong values, an adventurous spirit, and is fluent in several different language (no big deal or anything). A "curse of obedience" explains why the Ella's in each story put up with their family's torment, and in the book it could be read as a metaphor for living with a kind of mental illness (although it's a YA novel, so probably not).

Feminist or Nah?: "Eh" to the movie, it's mired in so much stupidity all it's good points get drowned out. The book would be a definite yes.

A Cinderella Story

Welp. Hillary Duff's Sam is at least working as a means to an end, rather than being a slave for the sake of being a slave. She's saving up to go to Princeton, a dream shared by school hottie Chad Michael Murray. Still, I don't think tacking an Ivy League to the end of the film makes her Gloria Steinem.

Feminist or Nah?: Nah. While that sole ambition does notably separate her, and she masterminds her escape in the end (by deus ex machina, pretty much) she doesn't really inspire or empower the audience. Much like the Ella Enchanted adaptation, the film is too campy and mediocre the elevate the strengths of the Cinderella.

Once Upon a Time

This show, which turns Snow White into a badass champion in pelts and Little Red Riding Hood into a ferocious werewolf, manages to do the greatest injustice to Cinderella. In her featured episode back in season one, Cinderella pulls an Ariel and basically makes a deal with Rumplestiltskin to get that fabulous dress and carriage. BIG mistake. Huge. Then they decide to make her like, a sad pregnant teenager who's stuck doing laundry for 28 years. No joke. This episode debuted in 2011, what's their excuse for this?

Feminist of Nah?: I just... I so respect her struggling to make it on her own, which would have theoretically happened if Cinderella tried to run away from her stepfamily. But this just shows that even a show like Once Upon a Time, who even gives star moments to Princess Aurora, doesn't trust Cinderella to be-there's that word again-self-sufficient. Awful.
Image: Disney/YouTube

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The Evolution of Cinderella: Feminist or Nah?

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It's been a big week for Disney. The Little Mermaid turned 25 to the delight of nostalgic millennials everywhere (save for me, I hate Ariel), and today? The first trailer of Disney's live-action Cinderella debuted. The good news is that the costumes...

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This source discusses stereotypes and behaviour from a feminist presepective in the 1950's film adaptation and Brother Grimm's 1697 fairytale. It talks about how "marriage is the ultimate goal for women" and men will rescue women from difficult situations which is a stereotype, this presentation discusses how these stereotypes are shown in the 1950s Cinderella film.

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A negative review of feminism in Cinderella

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A negative review of feminism in Cinderella

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I finally came unhinged in the dentist's office - one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games - where I'd taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I'd held my tongue. I'd smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with "Hi, Princess"; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her "princess meal"; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, "I bet I know your favorite color" and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist's Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, "Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?" I lost it.

"Oh, for God's sake," I snapped. "Do you have a princess drill, too?"

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

"Come on!" I continued, my voice rising. "It's 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?"

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. "Why are you so mad, Mama?" she asked. "What's wrong with princesses?"

*

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a "trend" among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. "Princess," as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls' franchise on the planet.

Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own "world of girl" line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire's and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for "Princess Phones" covered in faux fur and attend "Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties." Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.

Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, has ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a "true princess," the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer-products division released a satin-gowned "Magic Hair Fairytale Dora," with hair that grows or shortens when her crown is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: "Vámonos! Let's go to fairy-tale land!" and "Will you brush my hair?"

As a feminist mother - not to mention a nostalgic product of the Garanimals era - I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they'd never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble "So This Is Love" or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they'd concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.

More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom - something I'm convinced she does largely to torture me - I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I've spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls' well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters' mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn't matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?

On the other hand, maybe I'm still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can "have it all." Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what's wrong with that?

*

The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What's more, Disney films like "A Bug's Life" in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities - what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?

It was about a month after Mooney's arrival that the magic struck. That's when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first "Disney on Ice" show. "Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses," he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. "They weren't even Disney products. They were generic princess products they'd appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, 'O.K., let's establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they're doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.' "

Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film's release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual "mythologies," the princesses never make eye contact when they're grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others' presence.

It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of "Princess" is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign didn't last. "We'd always debate over whether she was really a part of the Princess mythology," Mooney recalled. "She really wasn't." Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, though for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior's gear.)

The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. "We simply gave girls what they wanted," Mooney said of the line's success, "although I don't think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl's room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It's a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business."

Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my next question: Aren't the Princesses, who are interested only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome prince, somewhat retrograde role models?

"Look," he said, "I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must've done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be."

Mooney has a point: There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls' self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs - who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty - are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What's more, the 23 percent decline in girls' participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be "perfect": not only to get straight A's and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be "kind and caring," "please everyone, be very thin and dress right." Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they'd be in business.

*

At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. "There's that princess you don't like, Mama!" she shouted.

"Um, yeah," I said, trying not to meet the other mother's hostile gaze.

"Don't you like her blue dress, Mama?"

I had to admit, I did.

She thought about this. "Then don't you like her face?"

"Her face is all right," I said, noncommittally, though I'm not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) "It's just, honey, Cinderella doesn't really do anything."

Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks - all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart - as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn't want me to be a girl?

According to theories of gender constancy, until they're about 6 or 7, children don't realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it's piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they'll always remain themselves? If that's the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.

Anyway, you have to give girls some credit. It's true that, according to Mattel, one of the most popular games young girls play is "bride," but Disney found that a groom or prince is incidental to that fantasy, a regrettable necessity at best. Although they keep him around for the climactic kiss, he is otherwise relegated to the bottom of the toy box, which is why you don't see him prominently displayed in stores.

What's more, just because they wear the tulle doesn't mean they've drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of girls stray from the script, say, by playing basketball in their finery, or casting themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. I recall a headline-grabbing 2005 British study that revealed that girls enjoy torturing, decapitating and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they like to dress them up for dates. There is spice along with that sugar after all, though why this was news is beyond me: anyone who ever played with the doll knows there's nothing more satisfying than hacking off all her hair and holding her underwater in the bathtub. Princesses can even be a boon to exasperated parents: in our house, for instance, royalty never whines and uses the potty every single time.

"Playing princess is not the issue," argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes." "The issue is 25,000 Princess products," says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. "When one thing is so dominant, then it's no longer a choice: it's a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There's the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you'll see their choices are steadily narrowing."

It's hard to imagine that girls' options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children's store lately? A year ago, when we shopped for "big girl" bedding at Pottery Barn Kids, we found the "girls" side awash in flowers, hearts and hula dancers; not a soccer player or sailboat in sight. Across the no-fly zone, the "boys" territory was all about sports, trains, planes and automobiles. Meanwhile, Baby GAP's boys' onesies were emblazoned with "Big Man on Campus" and the girls' with "Social Butterfly"; guess whose matching shoes were decorated on the soles with hearts and whose sported a "No. 1" logo? And at Toys "R" Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the "Star Wars" figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it's easier this way.

Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter something that isn't pink. Girls' obsession with that color may seem like something they're born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain't so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that's why so many early Disney heroines - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland - are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl's version of pink.)

It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children's marketing (recall the emergence of " 'tween"), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years. That was also the time that the first of the generation raised during the unisex phase of feminism - ah, hither Marlo! - became parents. "The kids who grew up in the 1970s wanted sharp definitions for their own kids," Paoletti told me. "I can understand that, because the unisex thing denied everything - you couldn't be this, you couldn't be that, you had to be a neutral nothing."

The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs - doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we're sure of what we'll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it's deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves - flowing through "Ally McBeal," "Bridget Jones's Diary," "Sex and the City" - of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.

I mulled that over while flipping through "The Paper Bag Princess," a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast's fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is "dressed like a real princess." She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone.

There you have it, "Thelma and Louise" all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom. Alternatives like those might send you skittering right back to the castle. And I get that: the fact is, though I want my daughter to do and be whatever she wants as an adult, I still hope she'll find her Prince Charming and have babies, just as I have. I don't want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, one who loves and respects her and also does the dishes and half the child care.

There had to be a middle ground between compliant and defiant, between petticoats and paper bags. I remembered a video on YouTube, an ad for a Nintendo game called Super Princess Peach. It showed a pack of girls in tiaras, gowns and elbow-length white gloves sliding down a zip line on parasols, navigating an obstacle course of tires in their stilettos, slithering on their bellies under barbed wire, then using their telekinetic powers to make a climbing wall burst into flames. "If you can stand up to really mean people," an announcer intoned, "maybe you have what it takes to be a princess."

Now here were some girls who had grit as well as grace. I loved Princess Peach even as I recognized that there was no way she could run in those heels, that her peachiness did nothing to upset the apple cart of expectation: she may have been athletic, smart and strong, but she was also adorable. Maybe she's what those once-unisex, postfeminist parents are shooting for: the melding of old and new standards. And perhaps that's a good thing, the ideal solution. But what to make, then, of the young women in the Girls Inc. survey? It doesn't seem to be "having it all" that's getting to them; it's the pressure to be it all. In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time. No wonder the report was titled "The Supergirl Dilemma."

The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. "Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change," observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett's original"Little Princess" was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple's film version was a hit during the Great Depression. "The original folk tales themselves," Forman-Brunell says, "spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval - famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability." That's a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps that's why the magic wand has become an essential part of the princess get-up. In the original stories - even the Disney versions of them - it's not the girl herself who's magic; it's the fairy godmother. Now if Forman-Brunell is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.

*

In the 1990s, third-wave feminists rebelled against their dour big sisters, "reclaiming" sexual objectification as a woman's right - provided, of course, that it was on her own terms, that she was the one choosing to strip or wear a shirt that said "Porn Star" or make out with her best friend at a frat-house bash. They embraced words like "bitch" and "slut" as terms of affection and empowerment. That is, when used by the right people, with the right dash of playful irony. But how can you assure that? As Madonna gave way to Britney, whatever self-determination that message contained was watered down and commodified until all that was left was a gaggle of 6-year-old girls in belly-baring T-shirts (which I'm guessing they don't wear as cultural critique). It is no wonder that parents, faced with thongs for 8-year-olds and Bratz dolls' "passion for fashion," fill their daughters' closets with pink sateen; the innocence of Princess feels like a reprieve.

"But what does that mean?" asks Sharon Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael's College. "There are other ways to express 'innocence' - girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you're really talking about is sexual purity. And there's a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It's to hot, sexy pink - exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid."

Lamb suggested that to see for myself how "Someday My Prince Will Come" morphs into "Oops! I Did It Again," I visit Club Libby Lu, the mall shop dedicated to the "Very Important Princess."

Walking into one of the newest links in the store's chain, in Natick, Mass., last summer, I had to tip my tiara to the founder, Mary Drolet: Libby Lu's design was flawless. Unlike Disney, Drolet depended on focus groups to choose the logo (a crown-topped heart) and the colors (pink, pink, purple and more pink). The displays were scaled to the size of a 10-year-old, though most of the shoppers I saw were several years younger than that. The decals on the walls and dressing rooms - "I Love Your Hair," "Hip Chick," "Spoiled" - were written in "girlfriend language." The young sales clerks at this "special secret club for superfabulous girls" are called "club counselors" and come off like your coolest baby sitter, the one who used to let you brush her hair. The malls themselves are chosen based on a company formula called the G.P.I., or "Girl Power Index," which predicts potential sales revenues. Talk about newspeak: "Girl Power" has gone from a riot grrrrl anthem to "I Am Woman, Watch Me Shop."

Inside, the store was divided into several glittery "shopping zones" called "experiences": Libby's Laboratory, now called Sparkle Spa, where girls concoct their own cosmetics and bath products; Libby's Room; Ear Piercing; Pooch Parlor (where divas in training can pamper stuffed poodles, pugs and Chihuahuas); and the Style Studio, offering "Libby Du" makeover choices, including 'Tween Idol, Rock Star, Pop Star and, of course, Priceless Princess. Each look includes hairstyle, makeup, nail polish and sparkly tattoos.

As I browsed, I noticed a mother standing in the center of the store holding a price list for makeover birthday parties - $22.50 to $35 per child. Her name was Anne McAuliffe; her daughters - Stephanie, 4, and 7-year-old twins Rory and Sarah - were dashing giddily up and down the aisles.

"They've been begging to come to this store for three weeks," McAuliffe said. "I'd never heard of it. So I said they could, but they'd have to spend their own money if they bought anything." She looked around. "Some of this stuff is innocuous," she observed, then leaned toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: "But ... a lot of it is horrible. It makes them look like little prostitutes. It's crazy. They're babies!"

As we debated the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét, McAuliffe's daughter Rory came dashing up, pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. "They have the best pocketbooks here," she said breathlessly, brandishing a clutch with the words "Girlie Girl" stamped on it. "Please, can I have one? It has sequins!"

"You see that?" McAuliffe asked, gesturing at the bag. "What am I supposed to say?"

On my way out of the mall, I popped into the " 'tween" mecca Hot Topic, where a display of Tinker Bell items caught my eye. Tinker Bell, whose image racks up an annual $400 million in retail sales with no particular effort on Disney's part, is poised to wreak vengeance on the Princess line that once expelled her. Last winter, the first chapter book designed to introduce girls to Tink and her Pixie Hollow pals spent 18 weeks on The New York Times children's best-seller list. In a direct-to-DVD now under production, she will speak for the first time, voiced by the actress Brittany Murphy. Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest. Aimed at 6- to 9-year-old girls, the line will catch them just as they outgrow Princess. Their colors will be lavender, green, turquoise - anything but the Princess's soon-to-be-babyish pink.

To appeal to that older child, Disney executives said, the Fairies will have more "attitude" and "sass" than the Princesses. What, I wondered, did that entail? I'd seen some of the Tinker Bell merchandise that Disney sells at its theme parks: T-shirts reading, "Spoiled to Perfection," "Mood Subject to Change Without Notice" and "Tinker Bell: Prettier Than a Princess." At Hot Topic, that edge was even sharper: magnets, clocks, light-switch plates and panties featured "Dark Tink," described as "the bad girl side of Miss Bell that Walt never saw."

Girl power, indeed.

A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. "Look, Mommy, I'm Ariel!" she crowed. referring to Disney's Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. "Mommy, do you like Ariel?"

I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years' War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn't. I'll never really know. In the end, it's not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They're just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.

For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.

She smiled happily. "But, Mommy?" she added. "When I grow up, I'm still going to be a fireman."

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What's Wrong With Cinderella? (Published 2006)

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I finally came unhinged in the dentist's office - one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games - where I'd taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I'd held my tongue.

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Do you think that the female characters are believable? there are many versions of this story the Disney movie is adapted from Charles Perrault's 1697 tale Cendrillon another famous version is Ashputtel/Aschenputtel by the Grimm Brothers Stereotypes After having heard the Grimm

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A Young Girl's Responses to Feminist and Patriarchal Folktales

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A Young Girl's Responses to Feminist and Patriarchal Folktales

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This source will be able to help me when discussing weather cinderella has had a negative or positive effect on society.

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Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.