The story of Cinderella has always struck me as the most incomprehensible of all the moral fables known as fairy tales. Here is a plain, depressed slave of a girl, beaten and maltreated y her family (her stepfamily, actually—as is usual with these matriarch-oriented narratives, the father is absent), whose miserable life consists of cleaning pots, waiting on tables and sleeping on straw, who suddenly finds herself magically transformed into a radiant, opulently dressed beauty, sought after by the Prince of the Kingdom, and who three times flees the palace where she is the belle of the ball to return to the hole in a corner of the house where she is a virtual prisoner. And she can’t decide which place to choose? (In the anodyne Perrault version, she is forced to be back by the stroke of midnight, or be exposed as the fraud she is, but in the Grimm version it is her choice.) It takes an accidental circumstance to solve her problem: she loses a slipper, leading the prince to find her and take matters in his own hands. But what exactly is her problem? No one in five hundred—plus years has given a plausible explanation of her indecisiveness until Lapine came along with a startling solution: Cinderella doesn’t lose her slipper, she deliberately leaves it behind. She knows she’s an impostor and doesn’t want willingly to mislead the Prince (and the world). She figures that if the Prince really cares to see her again, he’ll follow the clue she has left. She doesn’t want an accident of fate to fix her life, she wants to be loved for herself. Viewed in this light, the story makes more sense; not only that, it explains the universality of its appeal and why, more than any other fable, it exists in every culture.
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
gummygunk
origamiaround
vaporwave
