Origins-Disney Version

Cinderella

In my opinion this one of the most cringest  movie i ever watched. No hate though.

While the Disney version is based on a retelling by Perrault, Cinderella is probably one of the oldest and most widespread fairy tales in western culture. The earliest known version is from about 50 BCE, and it’s about a Greek slave girl named Rhodopis. She gets a nice pair of beautiful slippers from her master as a reward for her graceful dancing. Jealous, the other slave girls torment her. Then one day a falcon grabs one of her slippers and drops it in the lap of the visiting Pharaoh. He takes it as a sign from the gods, and declares he will marry whoever the slipper fits. After the slave girl tries it on and shows him that the other one is in her possession, he declares he will marry her.

What does it say about us that female jealousy and sexy footwear are the parts of this tale that survived for over two thousand years? At least we know why the Pharaoh/King/Prince can’t recognize her without the shoe, something that’s downright baffling in the Disney version. When the part about the shoe was created, the story didn’t include any prior meeting between Rhodopis and her royal love interest.

The girl we call Cinderella has supernatural help in every version I’ve found, but the nature of that help has changed dramatically over time. In the Rhodopis version, the falcon who stole her shoe was the god Horus. In later versions, she plants a tree, and a fairy that lives inside it gives her gifts as needed. Perrault made it a fairy godmother with no tree. In another European version, the tree was a representation of Cinderella’s dead mother. She planted it over her mother’s grave, and watered it with her tears. To get her dresses she would shake the tree, and a pair of doves would drop nuts that contained her clothing. The Grimm version is very similar, but God, and not the mother’s spirit, is given credit for these miracles.

In all the versions where Cinderella meets her royal admirer at a ball, she actively hides her identity from him. This is especially baffling in the Grimm version, where the ball lasts for three days and her dresses do not automatically turn into rags at midnight. When the prince tries to follow her home to find out who she is, she evades him by sneaking into a pigeon house, then later through the garden. Even in the Perrault version, the Prince only gets the shoe by putting tar on the staircase to hinder her flight. It’s never clear why she’s trying to get away. It can’t be because she doesn’t like the prince, otherwise she wouldn’t keep coming to the ball to dance with him. Whatever it is, once the Prince/King/Pharaoh finally manages to find her and get her to try on the shoe, all that unreasonable fear goes away.

While today we see Cinderella as a story about how a common girl can marry a prince, that’s not true in every version. Rhodopis may have been a slave, but in the Perrault version, she’s a noblewoman. Only eligible ladies were invited to the ball with the prince. The crime of her step-sisters was making her into a servant in her own home.

And of course, the Brothers Grimm couldn’t let that crime go without gruesome punishment. In their version, the step-sisters cut off part of their feet in order to fit into the shoe. It even works until the magic doves tell the prince that they are bleeding. Then when Cinderella gets married, the doves peck out their eyes – because they are mean but beautiful, and that can’t be allowed to continue.