Jameela Wright
Professor Pastore & Professor Voisard
FIQWS Fairy Tales HA5
17 November 2022
“Cinderella”: Gender and Class
People growing up being subjected to one class structure because of their gender can cause an everlasting effect for them in the future. It can cause them to think that they do not belong due to them feeling isolated for being placed in either a higher or lower social class, especially if they are female. The fairy tale “Cinderella” has a similar issue within the children’s tale. The original Grimm Brothers tale is about a girl who was born into a rich family with a rich prince as her father. Her mom dies when she is little, causing her father to remarry to another woman who has two daughters, making them her stepsisters. The sisters feel envious of Cinderella’s higher-class status, so the stepmother forces her to become their servant, demoting her to a lower-class status. This caused Cinderella to feel that they were pinning against her on purpose, and not having the support from her real parents made her feel even worse. The story of Cinderella demonstrates that females who belong to a certain class would have trouble adjusting to a change and make them feel outcasted due to their class and gender roles.
When a female is presented to be in a high social class, they are seen as more desirable for men. Women who dress as if they are rich, gain the attention of any man they are around. In the Yeh-Shen version of Cinderella, Yeh-Shen came from a small village, but had always been humble and grateful about the social class that she came from despite what her mother had told her about not being pretty enough for other men. Yeh-Shen had “magically transformed into a more desirable person of higher social class” (Darwood and Weedon 68), at the festival and she had made the eyes of the prince turn to her instead of her sister because of her gorgeous looks. Despite the social class difference, just Yeh-Shen’s calm and humble presence alone made her desirable to the prince. After meeting Yeh-Shen at the festival, the prince finds her golden slipper that she had lost, and when he comes to ask her family which girl could fit the slipper, Yeh-Shen was the only one that would be able to fit the golden slipper because of her small feet. In Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim explains how the modern versions of Cinderella do not connect attractiveness and beauty to a specific change in the body, like the Chinese version where the men find the females attractive if they had smaller feet. The way women would do this is by the practice of binding their feet, to make them look smaller. Bettelheim says this to show that old fashioned versions of Cinderella have tried to encourage their audience, in which this case are young children, that to be noticed, they must have a certain level of beauty to stand out. This makes children believe that for them to fit in, they must live up to a certain class standard, just based off the things that they were exposed to. However, most children are not raised to believe in social structures and classes.
To determine which class a certain gender belongs to, you would need to look at their social upbringing and how they acted based on that upbringing. In the Grimm version of Cinderella, Cinderella was brought up into a rich family, considering her father was a rich prince. Due to her father is rich, this helps readers interpret that Cinderella had come from a wealthy social background, meaning that she would belong to a higher class. Additionally, the father did not take into consideration who he married, considering that he only looked at the stepmother and the stepsisters because “They had beautiful features but proud, nasty, and wicked hearts” (Grimm 69). While the stepmother and sisters looked pleasant on the outside, that does not mean that they are pleasant on the inside. They are using the fact that because Cinderella’s father comes from a rich background, they can take advantage of Cinderella and use her for their own personal gains. This shows that some people make sure that they look appealing both on the outside and personality wise, just so they can get an advantage and get what they want. In Athena Kartalou’s journal “Gender, Professional, and Class Identities in Miss Director and Modern Cinderella,” Kartalou explains that while male and female differences are the focus, “this opposition can take on additional characteristics that have to do with the female protagonists’ social background” (113), therefore proving the point that with knowledge of a female character’s social upbringing, you can determined the type of person they will become when the get into adulthood. These kinds of characteristics are also due to their personal upbringing and the way they grew up. They also help determine whether they will have a chance of surviving adulthood or not.
When Cinderella went through her change of social class after her mom passed, she felt that the only way she survived was through her mother’s nurturing advice. In the Grimm version of Cinderella before her mother dies, she gives Cinderella her final wish and tells her to plant a tree on her grave, and if she ever needs her help, just rub the tree and she will send help. The lack of a mother and not having that motherly comfort made Cinderella feel as though she was stuck and had nowhere to go, and without her, Cinderella has no power to be able to stand up for herself. However, in Panttaja’s journal “Going up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella.’”, she states how “it is through her mother’s advice that she manages to overcome her own social isolation and the plots of her enemies” (89), meaning that although her mother is not present in the physical world, Cinderella still has that motherly feeling spiritually. This helps her gain her confidence throughout the rest of the story, resulting in her reaching a successful conclusion anyway. Cinderella could gain strength from her mother, so that she is able to prosper in life without having to depend on anyone, despite her fear of believing that she must. Nevertheless, it does not stop readers from wondering whether she was truly ready to become independent.
Using the idea of “the Cinderella complex,” readers can infer that Cinderella was not in fear of her new life, she was in fear of becoming independent and not depending on a masculine figure. In the Grimm version of Cinderella, she was scared to be on her own since not only does she not have her dad with her, but she also does not have her mother with her, meaning she is alone and does not know how to be alone. “After the wedding had now been celebrated, and all three entered the house, a difficult time began for the poor child” (69), in other words stating now that the marriage is official and they are a part of the family, Cinderella is going to have a challenging time of gaining her confidence back as well as trying to become independent. The Cinderella Complex is the idea that a woman fears independence and needs a prince charming to save and take care of. In the story of Cinderella, Cinderella has “an unconscious desire to be taken care of by others” (Wang et al), and when she fits the slipper for the prince, she feels as though she has that prince charming to take care of her. Cinderella has realized that she can both have someone taking care of her and be independent. At the end, Cinderella finally feels as if she has a safe space that she can go to.
When it comes to gender roles and class, females are more subjected to be in a lower class because of the gender stereotype that females are submissive and obedient. Especially during the period that Cinderella was written it, females were only seen as if they have a certain beauty level despite their social class, they are seen as desirable or more appealing for men. However, if Cinderella were written in a modern-day society, there would be a lot of feminist movements that would support her, as well as shine light on how it can reflect to us in the future.
Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. “Cinderella” from The Uses of Enchantment
Brothers, Grimm. #21, “Cinderella”
Darwood Nicola, and Weedon Alexis, Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2020.
ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ccny-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6403516.
Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.
Kartalou, Athena. “Gender, Professional, and Class Identities in Miss Director and Modern Cinderella.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 18 no. 1, 2000, p. 105-118.
Project MUSE,
Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.
Panttaja, Elisabeth. “Going up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella.’” Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1, 1993, pp. 85–104.
JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1499495.
Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.
Xu, H., Zhang, Z., Wu, L., & Wang, J. (2019). The Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and books.
PLOS ONE, 14(11), e0225385.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225385
Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.
“Yeh-Shen” from CBS Storybreak
https://youtu.be/m3JZDb8ddiU
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