Escape and Rescue — Adapting Grimm’s Cinderella
My upcoming book The Fairy Godmother’s Tale releases this week, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about the process of adapting one of the most famous fairy tales of them all: “Cinderella.”
(I am, of course, leaving many details out when it comes to my particular adaptation.)
“Cinderella” is one of the oldest fairy tales we know of — variations of the story can be found going all the way back into ancient Greece, with the story of a slave girl marrying the King of Egypt after a bird brings him her sandal. Today, there are two main versions of the fairy tale — “Cendrillon,” by Charles Perrault, and “Aschenputtel,” by the Brothers Grimm, both of which are usually translated into “Cinderella.” Perrault’s version is the better known — it is his retelling that gives us the fairy godmother, the pumpkin being turned into a carriage and transforming back at midnight, and the glass slipper. But the story told by the Brothers Grimm is, in many ways, by far the more complex and interesting.
Grimm’s “Cinderella” has no fairy godmother. Instead the wish granter is the spirit of Cinderella’s deceased mother. The slipper in question is gold rather than glass, and she gets a new dress and slippers for each of the three days of the festival. She and the prince fall in love at first sight — Cinderella is the only person he takes as a dance partner, and he spends the entire festival with her. Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters are blinded by birds at the end, after her stepmother tries to pass them off as Cinderella by cutting off parts of their feet to make them fit into the slipper. But, what truly stands out to me is the strong implication that Cinderella’s father recognizes her:
She danced till it was evening, and then she wanted to go home. But the King’s son said, “I will go with thee and bear thee company,” for he wished to see to whom the beautiful maiden belonged. She escaped from him, however, and sprang into the pigeon-house. The King’s son waited until her father came, and then he told him that the stranger maiden had leapt into the pigeon-house. The old man thought, “Can it be Cinderella?” and they had to bring him an axe and a pickaxe that he might hew the pigeon-house to pieces, but no one was inside it. And when they got home Cinderella lay in her dirty clothes among the ashes, and a dim little oil-lamp was burning on the mantle-piece, for Cinderella had jumped quickly down from the back of the pigeon-house and had run to the little hazel-tree, and there she had taken off her beautiful clothes and laid them on the grave, and the bird had taken them away again, and then she had placed herself in the kitchen amongst the ashes in her grey gown.
This scene repeats for both of the first two nights of the festival. It also results in no consequences for Cinderella — her father does not tell his wife/Cinderella’s stepmother about the incident. Further, the prince knows what house she has gone home to. All of this suggests that when the prince comes to the house with the golden slipper, he knows who he is looking for.
It should be noted that many of Grimm’s Fairy Tales are less stories as outlines to stories. Any adaptation has to flesh out what is there, and this is done in part by answering the questions raised by the events in the tale. For the Grimm’s Cinderella, these include:
- Why does the prince need to have a royal festival to find a bride, instead of the usual practice of an arranged marriage?
- Why does Cinderella’s father allow her to be mistreated?
- Why does Cinderella’s father not reveal her activities at the festival to his wife/her stepmother?
- Why does Cinderella not ask the prince for help, allowing her to stay at the palace?
- Why does the prince go to the house with a golden slipper to find somebody who he has been in close quarters with for three full days
The first question is answered by the location. Grimm’s Fairy Tales do have a geographical setting — a number of references to currency (specifically, the Thaler) place them in the area of northern Germany, while other references to firearms in multiple tales suggest those particular stories (at least) are set in the early modern period. During this time, northern Germany was in the Holy Roman Empire, which contained up to three hundred principalities at any given time. Once a principality was granted to a noble family, that family was required to keep the line going with male heirs — should any prince die without one, the entire principality would be returned to the Reich (a general term referring to the empire) to be granted to somebody else, or absorbed by a neighbouring principality. And this meant that if a principality was poor and could not attract an arranged marriage, they needed to be able to marry off their male children somehow. And, suddenly, the festival makes sense — the principality is poor, there are no families that want to marry into it, and the prince must find a match for his son through other means.
The second and third questions have a number of possible solutions, but the one that came to my mind was an unconventional one: Cinderella’s father is actually on her side. To understand how this would work, you need to look at the dynamics of a household like Cinderella’s. There was a broad division of responsibilities — the husband would take care of matters outside of the house, while the wife would be responsible for matters inside. This does not mean there would not be overlap. Wealthy German peasant families, of which Cinderella’s was almost certainly one, would frequently leave the finances in control of the wife rather than the husband.
With this dynamic, Cinderella’s stepmother would exercise immense power over the day-to-day affairs inside the house, with her father essentially cut out of any influence on them. This would allow his wife to abuse Cinderella to her heart’s content, with her husband helpless to intervene. This, in turn, puts her father in a situation where her appearing at the ball incognito and enchanting the prince gives him a mechanism for helping her escape the mistreatment — all he has to do is make sure his wife doesn’t figure it out.
The fourth question is, unfortunately, one that all too many people watching friends or loved ones in abusive relationships face — why don’t they just leave? The answer is often fear. Many victims of domestic abuse would rather continue to face the devil they know than risk falling into the hands of a devil they don’t. Cinderella is no different, and leaving the life she knows for a better life in the palace is a terrifying prospect — after all, what would happen if the prince mistreated or abandoned her?
And this brings us to the final question, and a new interpretation of the scene with the golden slipper. Cinderella has taken all of the steps she is capable of to escape, but they were not enough. She must now be rescued. To finish the job of freeing her from the abusive household without arousing the suspicions of the wicked stepmother, the prince carries out a subterfuge with the golden slipper in which he pretends to not know the identity of the woman he danced with.
This is not the only possible interpretation of “Cinderella,” but it is the one I used — a story of both escape and rescue from a life of domestic abuse.
The Fairy Godmother’s Tale releases on March 7th, and can be pre-ordered in print and in Kindle.
