At the surface, it is the tale of the compassionate and beautiful girl, mistreated by her stepfamily, saved by the fairy godmother and rewarded with the coveted love of the prince. It's got it all: love and dreams, rags to riches and good triumphing over evil. Let’s start at the end: the ‘happily ever after.’ Cinderella’s reward, at the end of her struggles, is not a poor but loving woodcutter, it is the prince, and with it the castle, the title and the financial windfall. We have a word for that today - it rhymes with coal digger. Mind you he's no Shrek either - he's gorgeous.
And what does she have to be to get this happy ending: beautiful and obedient. The unnamed prince falls in love-at-first-sight with a woman, based only on her good looks, clearly uninterested in any mutual interests, intelligence or accomplishments. They spend the night in each others arms and forget to exchange names. If that happened at a bar today it would involve a bit of excessive drinking and a possible walk of shame home. In a Freudian analysis the slipper, as any other hollow object, is symbolic of the female genitalia. Needless to say, in such a reading the prince’s intentions would be even less noble.
If the movies we watched growing up are anything to go by, the ideal woman must be dependant and submissive and wholly lacking agency. Poor little Cinderella moves from her dependency on her critter friends, the well choreographed rats and the birds, to the fairy godmother and finally the prince. The women who do display authority in the movie, are either inhuman (the stepmother) or not human (the fairy godmother).
Which begs the question, what in the world did we idolize as children? And could there be a chance it has influenced the way we think, the values we hold, our sources of happiness and how we look for love?
No comments:
Post a Comment