Cinderella
The following is Charles Perrault’s version of this ‘best-known fairy story in the world’:
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There was once a girl who lived among the cinders of the hearth place and was called ‘Cinderella’ as a result. Her mother had died and her father had remarried. Her step-mother and two step-sisters continuously taunted and exploited her: it was they who forced her to wear rags and to sleep in the fireplace.
One day a royal ball was announced. The two step-sisters and the step-mother dressed up in their finery; Cinderella was forbidden to go. While everyone was at the ball, however, Cinderella’s fairy godmother appeared and conjured up a magical means of travel to the ball, together with clothes of silver and gold cloth. Unrecognised, Cinderella arrived in splendour at the royal palace and danced with the prince. The spell broke at midnight, whereupon Cinderella had to run home in rags, leaving her glass slipper behind. The prince toured the kingdom, searching for the woman whose foot would fit the slipper he had retrieved. At last, he arrived at Cinderella’s home. The step-sisters tried on the slipper in vain, while Cinderella’s tiny foot fitted perfectly, qualifying her to become the prince’s bride.
The spirits of blood and fire
The dramatic interest of this story centres on the relationship between Cinderella and her step-sisters. A vast number of versions of Cinderella have been recorded. In all of them, the contrast between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ bride or brides can be shown to concern the contrast between the two traditionally counterposed roles of womankind, namely her marital availability on the one hand versus her menstrual solidarity and (from a male standpoint) corresponding ‘unattractiveness’ on the other.
Cinderella’s association with fire is unambiguous. Even if we leave aside versions in which she is explicitly the bringer of cooking fire to a cold hearth, the evidence is plentiful. In the familiar version, she sleeps every night in the fireplace; in a Scottish version, she hides ‘behind the cauldron’; in an Armenian version, she ‘sits in the stove’. In short, there is no doubt that she is, as Cox puts it, ‘the guardian of the hearth’.
Role exchanging (‘masking up’) is also a prominent theme. In some versions, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sisters exchange dresses, so that one is taken for the other. Even in the familiar version, Cinderella is unrecognised by anyone at the ball. All this makes sense given lunarchist theory, which precisely specifies the initial situation. The familiar exchanges of roles, slippers and clothes express a lunar logic of metamorphosis and alternation between opposed states associated with ‘fire’ versus ‘blood’ as symbols of marriage and kinship respectively.
Notice that Cinderella lacks menstrual attachments or solidarity. She is detached (by death) from her mother and also gets married; the other two sisters (note that there are two – their sisterhood defines them) never marry. They stay with each other and with their mother. That is, they put kinship soldarity first. Recall the initial situation. Following through its implications, we expect Cinderella to be ‘cooked’ as a mark of her marital availability. By the same token, the other two sisters should be ‘bloody’ and ‘raw’ – attached in the first instance to their own blood.
The fact that Cinderella’s flesh is ‘cooked’ is suggested unequivocally: Cinderella sleeps every night in the fireplace. But do the other sisters really menstruate?
The answer is that they do. In Grimm’s version – paralleled in this respect by hundreds of others – the following events take place during the final slipper-trying episode. The king’s son has arrived with the slipper, which the two step-sisters are determined to try on:
‘The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: ‘Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.’ The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son’.
The prince now rides off with the eldest sister. However, they have to pass the grave of Cinderella’s mother, on which grows a tree with two pigeons perched in its branches. As the prince and his bride pass, the pigeons expose the false bride’s bloody secret. They sing out to the prince:
‘Turn and peep, turn and peep,
There’s blood within the shoe,
The shoe it is too small for her,
The true bride waits for you.’
It is therefore not because the sister is ‘ugly’ that the prince rejects her. In fact, he is perfectly prepared to accept her as the beautiful young maiden with whom he had danced at the ball. He rejects her purely and simply when he is informed that she is bleeding from her ‘shoe’ (an obvious vagina-symbol). Grimm’s narrative continues:
‘Then be looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one.’
The other sister tried on the shoe and – when it did not fit – cut off her heel. This, too, deceived the prince until he was informed by the pigeons of the blood in this sister’s shoe:
‘He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. This also is not the right one, said he...’
Cinderella is summoned and the shoe fits her like a glove. ‘No blood is in the shoe... The true bride rides with you...’ the two pigeons confirm.
So Cinderella is ‘cooked’, whereas her sisters’ wounds are bloody and raw. An Icelandic version clarifies this contrast still more starkly. The two ugly sisters are sent off to fetch cooking-fire from the cave in which it dwells, but each comes back unsuccessfully – one with a cut and bleeding hand, the other with her nose bitten off. The beautiful youngest daughter, however, arrives in the cave, finds the fire, cooks some bread and meat ‘well and carefully’, and returns home with the gift of domestic fire. She then marries a prince who, in his former incarnation, had been the terrifying monster guarding the fire in his dark cave.
Not only is Cinderella ‘cooked’, whereas her step-sisters are bloody and raw – she is also associated with light, whereas the step-sisters are left in the dark. Grimm’s version describes how Cinderella’s dress, when she goes to the ball, is woven out of gold and silver. A Norwegian version specifies that the three dresses correspond to ‘sun, moon and star’. The bleeding sisters, by contrast, in Grimm’s version have their eyes plucked out by the two pigeons which settle on each of Cinderella’s shoulders as she gets married in the church. Just as Cinderella (in Grimm’s version) had been forced by her step-mother to separate a bowlful of lentils from the ashes into which they had been thrown, so now the prince has separated lightness from the dark, beauty from ugliness, ‘the good’ from ‘the bad.’
A further feature in Grimm’s Cinderella is that the royal ball lasts for three nights. Three times, Cinderella’s appearance is transformed; three times, she dances with the prince in her dazzling finery but is recognised by no-one; three times she runs home afterwards to hide, allowing her face to become dirty and putting on rags. Cinderella’s three trips between home and the ballroom and her disguising of her identity match Jack’s repeated trips up his magic beanstalk and his discolouring of his face to avoid being recognised. In Cinderella, too, the motif of incest is present. The ‘ugly’ sisters are associated with ‘blood’ and matrilineal kinship; Cinderella has no female kin and instead prioritises marriage. Not only is she not incestuous: she makes a strong point of escaping from incest – the motif of Cinderella’s father’s incestuous advances and her escape is quite explicit in numerous versions. In Grimm’s version, she has to repeatedly run from her father who turns out to be in league with the prince in attempting to catch her before she is ready. Fortunately, she escapes, in a process which involves not merely hiding but also the exchanging of one identity for another. After the ball, the prince tries to accompany her home:
‘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 unknown 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’.
Cinderella has escaped through the back, left her dazzling dress on her mother’s grave and seated herself back among the ashes in her grey gown. This happens twice. It is only on his third attempt that the prince succeeds in catching Cinderella, by pouring pitch on the staircase of the ballroom so that her shoe gets stuck in it for him to retrieve. The suggestion is that Cinderella is only ready for marriage after her three trips to the ballroom and her three escapes. It is all a matter of timing (as Perrault’s version confirms, with its story about Cinderella’s obligation to return from the ballroom at midnight). Had she allowed herself to be caught earlier, this would have been to violate the special three-day period of magical self-transformation which she had been given by her mother’s spirit. Once her three days of disguises, escapes and hiding are over, marriage can properly ensue.
___________________________________________________________________________________
There was once a girl who lived among the cinders of the hearth place and was called ‘Cinderella’ as a result. Her mother had died and her father had remarried. Her step-mother and two step-sisters continuously taunted and exploited her: it was they who forced her to wear rags and to sleep in the fireplace.
One day a royal ball was announced. The two step-sisters and the step-mother dressed up in their finery; Cinderella was forbidden to go. While everyone was at the ball, however, Cinderella’s fairy godmother appeared and conjured up a magical means of travel to the ball, together with clothes of silver and gold cloth. Unrecognised, Cinderella arrived in splendour at the royal palace and danced with the prince. The spell broke at midnight, whereupon Cinderella had to run home in rags, leaving her glass slipper behind. The prince toured the kingdom, searching for the woman whose foot would fit the slipper he had retrieved. At last, he arrived at Cinderella’s home. The step-sisters tried on the slipper in vain, while Cinderella’s tiny foot fitted perfectly, qualifying her to become the prince’s bride.
The spirits of blood and fire
The dramatic interest of this story centres on the relationship between Cinderella and her step-sisters. A vast number of versions of Cinderella have been recorded. In all of them, the contrast between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ bride or brides can be shown to concern the contrast between the two traditionally counterposed roles of womankind, namely her marital availability on the one hand versus her menstrual solidarity and (from a male standpoint) corresponding ‘unattractiveness’ on the other.
Cinderella’s association with fire is unambiguous. Even if we leave aside versions in which she is explicitly the bringer of cooking fire to a cold hearth, the evidence is plentiful. In the familiar version, she sleeps every night in the fireplace; in a Scottish version, she hides ‘behind the cauldron’; in an Armenian version, she ‘sits in the stove’. In short, there is no doubt that she is, as Cox puts it, ‘the guardian of the hearth’.
Role exchanging (‘masking up’) is also a prominent theme. In some versions, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sisters exchange dresses, so that one is taken for the other. Even in the familiar version, Cinderella is unrecognised by anyone at the ball. All this makes sense given lunarchist theory, which precisely specifies the initial situation. The familiar exchanges of roles, slippers and clothes express a lunar logic of metamorphosis and alternation between opposed states associated with ‘fire’ versus ‘blood’ as symbols of marriage and kinship respectively.
Notice that Cinderella lacks menstrual attachments or solidarity. She is detached (by death) from her mother and also gets married; the other two sisters (note that there are two – their sisterhood defines them) never marry. They stay with each other and with their mother. That is, they put kinship soldarity first. Recall the initial situation. Following through its implications, we expect Cinderella to be ‘cooked’ as a mark of her marital availability. By the same token, the other two sisters should be ‘bloody’ and ‘raw’ – attached in the first instance to their own blood.
The fact that Cinderella’s flesh is ‘cooked’ is suggested unequivocally: Cinderella sleeps every night in the fireplace. But do the other sisters really menstruate?
The answer is that they do. In Grimm’s version – paralleled in this respect by hundreds of others – the following events take place during the final slipper-trying episode. The king’s son has arrived with the slipper, which the two step-sisters are determined to try on:
‘The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: ‘Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.’ The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son’.
The prince now rides off with the eldest sister. However, they have to pass the grave of Cinderella’s mother, on which grows a tree with two pigeons perched in its branches. As the prince and his bride pass, the pigeons expose the false bride’s bloody secret. They sing out to the prince:
‘Turn and peep, turn and peep,
There’s blood within the shoe,
The shoe it is too small for her,
The true bride waits for you.’
It is therefore not because the sister is ‘ugly’ that the prince rejects her. In fact, he is perfectly prepared to accept her as the beautiful young maiden with whom he had danced at the ball. He rejects her purely and simply when he is informed that she is bleeding from her ‘shoe’ (an obvious vagina-symbol). Grimm’s narrative continues:
‘Then be looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one.’
The other sister tried on the shoe and – when it did not fit – cut off her heel. This, too, deceived the prince until he was informed by the pigeons of the blood in this sister’s shoe:
‘He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. This also is not the right one, said he...’
Cinderella is summoned and the shoe fits her like a glove. ‘No blood is in the shoe... The true bride rides with you...’ the two pigeons confirm.
So Cinderella is ‘cooked’, whereas her sisters’ wounds are bloody and raw. An Icelandic version clarifies this contrast still more starkly. The two ugly sisters are sent off to fetch cooking-fire from the cave in which it dwells, but each comes back unsuccessfully – one with a cut and bleeding hand, the other with her nose bitten off. The beautiful youngest daughter, however, arrives in the cave, finds the fire, cooks some bread and meat ‘well and carefully’, and returns home with the gift of domestic fire. She then marries a prince who, in his former incarnation, had been the terrifying monster guarding the fire in his dark cave.
Not only is Cinderella ‘cooked’, whereas her step-sisters are bloody and raw – she is also associated with light, whereas the step-sisters are left in the dark. Grimm’s version describes how Cinderella’s dress, when she goes to the ball, is woven out of gold and silver. A Norwegian version specifies that the three dresses correspond to ‘sun, moon and star’. The bleeding sisters, by contrast, in Grimm’s version have their eyes plucked out by the two pigeons which settle on each of Cinderella’s shoulders as she gets married in the church. Just as Cinderella (in Grimm’s version) had been forced by her step-mother to separate a bowlful of lentils from the ashes into which they had been thrown, so now the prince has separated lightness from the dark, beauty from ugliness, ‘the good’ from ‘the bad.’
A further feature in Grimm’s Cinderella is that the royal ball lasts for three nights. Three times, Cinderella’s appearance is transformed; three times, she dances with the prince in her dazzling finery but is recognised by no-one; three times she runs home afterwards to hide, allowing her face to become dirty and putting on rags. Cinderella’s three trips between home and the ballroom and her disguising of her identity match Jack’s repeated trips up his magic beanstalk and his discolouring of his face to avoid being recognised. In Cinderella, too, the motif of incest is present. The ‘ugly’ sisters are associated with ‘blood’ and matrilineal kinship; Cinderella has no female kin and instead prioritises marriage. Not only is she not incestuous: she makes a strong point of escaping from incest – the motif of Cinderella’s father’s incestuous advances and her escape is quite explicit in numerous versions. In Grimm’s version, she has to repeatedly run from her father who turns out to be in league with the prince in attempting to catch her before she is ready. Fortunately, she escapes, in a process which involves not merely hiding but also the exchanging of one identity for another. After the ball, the prince tries to accompany her home:
‘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 unknown 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’.
Cinderella has escaped through the back, left her dazzling dress on her mother’s grave and seated herself back among the ashes in her grey gown. This happens twice. It is only on his third attempt that the prince succeeds in catching Cinderella, by pouring pitch on the staircase of the ballroom so that her shoe gets stuck in it for him to retrieve. The suggestion is that Cinderella is only ready for marriage after her three trips to the ballroom and her three escapes. It is all a matter of timing (as Perrault’s version confirms, with its story about Cinderella’s obligation to return from the ballroom at midnight). Had she allowed herself to be caught earlier, this would have been to violate the special three-day period of magical self-transformation which she had been given by her mother’s spirit. Once her three days of disguises, escapes and hiding are over, marriage can properly ensue.