Fairytales are a foundational part of any child’s literary development. From a functional perspective, they teach children the world is a dangerous place and should be treated with caution. From a more whimsical perspective, they nourish the imaginations of children from a young age. From a realistic perspective, they do both. But there’s one particular fairytale for which we as a society possess an enduring love: Cinderella.
The origins of Cinderella are often disputed. In Western literature, the earliest written version is Cenerentola, written by Giambattista Basile in 1634. The version which is closest to the one we know today is, Cendrillon by Charles Perroult in 1697. The Brothers Grimm also wrote a version in 1812, Aschenputtel. This version has a wishing tree instead of a fairy godmother, and it is in this version that the step sisters have their eyes pecked out by birds as retribution for their cruelty.
However, there are also claims of Cinderella-esque stories existing in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese legends. Arguments have also been made about Cinderella-esque stories existing within One Thousand and One Nights.
Despite its various iterations, the more brutal of which see the stepsisters’ eyes pecked out by birds at the story’s end, the story is more or less the same.
In this excellent video, Kurt Vonnegut breaks down various story shapes, and succinctly outlines the trajectory of the Cinderella storyline. So we can broadly break the formula down as follows:
Step One: Girl and boy find one another and in finding one another, make each other happier. Sometimes we may see difficulty in how they get together, which makes it all the more rewarding when indeed they do first kiss.
Step Two: Something happens to drive them apart; a misunderstanding, a betrayal—perceived or otherwise, the personal hangups of one or both of the characters; basically any plot device in the shape of a wedge between our happy couple.
Step Three: Reconciliation, which is generally facilitated by a grand romantic gesture.
Modern rom-coms generally lubricate the transition between steps two and three through some kind of introspection, or realisation of a personal foible which is preventing them achieving true happiness. Arguably, the parallel is the prince’s quest throughout the land to find the woman to whom the lost slipper—glass or otherwise—belongs. Nevertheless, a significant number of rom-coms (as the most prominent example) follow this structure with reasonable consistency.
Consider: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Silver Linings Playbook, Trainwreck (which inverts the gender roles of much of the traditional narrative but nevertheless follows the formula quite religiously), Friends With Benefits, Pretty Woman, and Ten Things I Hate About You (which possesses an artful ‘b’ storyline in the form of Cameron and Bianca that actually defies this formula, but I feel we can thank Shakespeare for this nice twisting of the traditional narrative progression).
But while we love the up-down-up element of the narrative, it’s arguably more than simply the manner in which the storyline progresses that makes it so beloved. We can attribute this to some of the key elements within the story.
Let’s look first at the rags-to-riches aspect. This narrative contains a fantasy that it would be hard to argue isn’t daydreamed about by many. The idea that someone middle class (like most of us) can be abruptly swept up and transplanted into a world of luxury and opulence. Really, who wouldn’t want to suddenly be dropped in a glittering world where their every whim is met. When it’s not a question of ‘if’, not even ‘how’, but ‘how long’.
The runaway success of the Fifty Shades trilogy can’t be dismissed, no matter how hard many would like it to be. One could easily argue that the Cinderella element to it is what made it such a deeply enthralling read to so many: a young, relatively unremarkable woman is plucked out of her humdrum life, lavishes luxurious gifts upon her, and eventually transports her to the modern-day equivalent of a castle: the penthouse of a luxury apartment.
Similarly, Crazy Rich Asians, 2018’s big rom-com film which is based on the book by Kevin Kwan. Rachel, our run of the mill college professor who worries about her weekly budget and only owns something like three dresses, finds out that her boyfriend is actually the heir to one of the most wealthy families in the Asian region.
Upon their arrival in Singapore, she is treated to every luxury imaginable, pampered, clothed, and fed like a princess. The sheer opulence with which she finds herself surrounded makes the story engaging and fascinating—especially as many of us can literally only dream of experiencing such things.
I mean, it we wanted to get really deep (always dangerous territory), it could be argued that this functions as an analogue for the American Dream. How? Well, significant upward social mobility within a very short space of time, the idea that anyone can be a princess, can go from literally scrubbing floors to being the person who requests that those floors be scrubbed, the promise that all of us are special enough to be picked from the crowd by a prince, all we need is a little bit of a makeover. Surely one must consider that the nerd-to-hottie transformation trope finds its inspiration in Cinderella, too.
And it’s the point about being singled out by an eligible, interesting (hopefully), wealthy individual of means and status from a sea of anonymous faces that we turn to next. The element of the love story is a fascinating, and enthralling, one. Given that we as a society do, despite our protests to the contrary, really buy into the premise that love at first sight does in fact exist. It’s the idea that Prince Charming (so charming we don’t even really need to know his name) can gaze out onto a sea of women and be captivated by Cinderella. Twilight which served as inspiration for Fifty Shades provides us with this exact story: Bella sees herself as nondescript, not really blessed with any overly impressive attributes, yet Edward— handsome, rich, intriguing Edward—finds her captivating. And this is a conceit that has been adored in stories for a long, long time. Some people consider the original Cinderella story is the Ancient Greek story of Rodopis. You can read a version of the story here and a less romantic analysis of it here. While the slipper element is present too, so is the key theme of someone relatively ordinary being plucked from anonymity by a figure of high status.
And that’s not all. Even Sarah J Maas’ book Throne of Glass has elements of the Cinderella story in it. While Maas claims she found inspiration from the series in the scene in Disney’s Cinderella when she flees the ball as midnight chimes, and its accompanying score, the story itself contains several elements of the Cinderella tale. It contains magic, the translocation of a character who is found at the story’s beginning in abject poverty and misery to somewhere full of opulence and luxury, a love story featuring an actual prince (for the first book, at least)… Even though as the series progresses and it moves sharply away from this, the original book’s use of those parts of the story cannot be denied.
I suppose if I had to remove my customary cloak of cynicism, perhaps I would also suggest that what captivates us about the Cinderella story is the promise that it gets better. Cinderella begins just about as low as it can get—her mother is dead, her father is either dead or so busy trying to provide for his family that he can’t see the abuse Cinderella endures from her stepmother and stepsisters. She is forced to be a servant in her own home where she is treated less well than a servant because, well, she doesn’t actually get paid.
She is alone, she is named for the cinders that she must sweep out from the fireplaces, and she has no obvious way to get out of this situation; a young girl escaping would probably fall prey to all manner of unpleasant travellers. Yet she does manage to escape, and she is given a home, the adulation she was forced to forfeit for so long, with interest no less, as she has an entire country beneath her feet now, she’s comfortable, and she has a prince who loves her. It offers a message to people that things may seem bad now, but they will improve, and you will be compensated for your suffering. And that’s a pretty powerful message.
