The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  That Cinderella’s position is the consequence of an oedipal relation is suggested by many versions in this cycle of fairy tales. In stories which are diffused all over Europe, Africa, and Asia—in Europe, for example, in France, Italy, Austria, Greece, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia—Cinderella flees from a father who wants to marry her. In another group of widely distributed tales she is exiled by her father because she does not love him as much as he requires, although she loves him well enough. So there are many examples of the “Cinderella” theme in which her degradation—often without any (step)mother and (step)sisters being part of the story—is the consequence of oedipal entanglement of father and daughter.

  M. R. Cox, who has made a comprehensive study of 345 “Cinderella” stories, divides them into three broad categories.82 The first group contains only the two features which are essential to all: an ill-treated heroine, and her recognition by means of a slipper. Cox’s second main group contains two more essential features: what Cox in her Victorian manner calls an “unnatural father”—that is, a father who wants to marry his daughter—and another feature which is a consequence of this—the heroine’s flight, which eventually makes her into a “Cinderella.” In Cox’s third large grouping, the two additional features of the second are replaced by what Cox calls a “King Lear Judgment”: a father’s extracting from his daughter a declaration of love which he deems insufficient, so that she is therefore banished, which forces her into the “Cinderella” position.

  Basile’s is one of the very few “Cinderella” stories in which the heroine’s fate is clearly her own creation, the result of her plotting and misdeed. In practically all other versions, she is on the surface entirely innocent. She does nothing to arouse her father’s wish to marry her; she does not fail to love her father, although he banishes her because he thinks she does not love him enough. In the stories now best known, Cinderella does nothing that would warrant her debasement in favor of her stepsisters.

  In most “Cinderella” stories, except Basile’s, Cinderella’s innocence is stressed; her virtue is perfect. Unfortunately, in human relations it is rare that one of the partners is innocence incarnate while the other is the sole guilty party. In a fairy tale this is of course possible; it is no greater miracle than those performed by fairy godmothers. But when we identify with a story’s heroine, we do so for our own reasons, and our conscious and unconscious associations enter into it. A girl’s thoughts about this story may be strongly influenced by what she wishes to believe about her father’s relation to her, and what she desires to dissemble about her feelings toward him.83

  The many stories in which innocent Cinderella is claimed by her father as his marital partner, a fate from which she can save herself only through flight, could be interpreted as conforming to and expressing universal childish fantasies in which a girl wishes her father would marry her and then, out of guilt because of these fantasies, denies doing anything to arouse this parental desire. But deep down a child who knows that she does want her father to prefer her to her mother feels she deserves to be punished for it—thus her flight or banishment, and degradation to a Cinderella existence.

  The other stories in which Cinderella is expelled by her father because she does not love him enough may be viewed as a projection of a little girl’s wish that her father should want her to love him beyond reason, as she wants to love him. Or the father’s expulsion of Cinderella because she does not love him enough could equally well be regarded as giving body to paternal oedipal feelings for a daughter, in this way making an appeal to the unconscious and by now deeply repressed oedipal feelings of both father and child.

  In Basile’s story Cinderella is innocent in relation to her stepsisters and the governess turned stepmother, although she is guilty of murdering her first stepmother. Neither in Basile’s story nor in the much more ancient Chinese tale is there any mention of Cinderella being mistreated by her siblings, nor of any debasement other than being forced by a (step)mother to perform menial tasks in tattered clothes. She is not deliberately excluded from attending the feast. Sibling rivalry, so dominant in the presently known versions of “Cinderella,” hardly plays a role in these early stories. For example, when the sisters in Basile’s story are envious of Cinderella becoming queen, this seems no more than a natural reaction at losing out to her.

  Matters are quite different in the “Cinderella” stories known today, where the siblings actively participate in Cinderella’s mistreatment and are appropriately punished. Even so, nothing untoward happens to the stepmother, although she is very much an accessory to what the stepsisters inflict on Cinderella. It is as if the story implies that abuse by the (step)mother was somehow deserved, but not that by the stepsisters. What Cinderella may have done or wished to do which could justify the (step)mother’s mistreatment can only be surmised from stories such as Basile’s, or those others where she arouses so much love in the father that he wants to marry her.

  Given these early “Cinderella” stories in which sibling rivalry plays only an insignificant role while oedipal rejections are central—a daughter flees from her father because of his sexual desires for her; a father rejects his daughter because she does not love him sufficiently; a mother rejects her daughter because the husband loves her too much; and the rare case where a daughter wishes to replace her father’s wife with a choice of her own—one might think that, originally, thwarted oedipal desires account for the heroine’s degradation. But there is no clear historical sequence in regard to these fairy stories forming one cycle, if for no other reason that, in oral tradition, ancient versions exist side by side with more recent ones. The lateness of the period when fairy stories were finally collected and published makes any sequential ordering of them before this happened highly speculative.

  But while there are great variations in less important details, all versions of this story are alike in regard to the essential features. For example, in all stories the heroine at first enjoyed love and high esteem, and her fall from this favored position to utter degradation occurs as suddenly as her return to a much more exalted position at the story’s end. The denouement comes about by her being recognized by the slipper which fits only her foot. (Occasionally another object, such as a ring, takes the slipper’s place.84). The one crucial point of difference—in terms of which (as discussed) various groups of the stories are distinguished—lies in the cause of Cinderella’s degradation.

  In one group, the father plays a central role as Cinderella’s antagonist. In the second group, the (step)mother cum stepsisters are the antagonists; in these stories, mother and daughters are so closely identified with each other that one gets the feeling that they are one unit split into different figures. In the first group, too much love of a father for his daughter causes Cinderella’s tragic condition. In the other, the hatred of a (step)mother and her daughters due to sibling competition accounts for it.

  If we trust the clues provided by Basile’s story, then we may say that inordinate love of a father for his daughter and hers for him came first, and her reduction to the Cinderella role by mother cum sisters is the consequence. This situation parallels the oedipal development of a girl. She first loves her mother—the original good mother, who later in the story reappears as fairy godmother. Later she turns from her mother to her father, loving him and wanting to be loved by him; at this point the mother—and all her siblings, real and imagined, most of all the female ones—become her competitors. At the end of the oedipal period the child feels cast out, all alone; then when all goes well in puberty, if not sooner, the girl finds her way back to the mother, now as a person not to be loved exclusively, but as one with whom to identify.

  The hearth, the center of the home, is a symbol for the mother. To live so close to it that one dwells among the ashes may then symbolize an effort at holding on to, or returning to, the mother and what she represents. All little girls try to return to the mother from the disappointment inflicted on them by the father. This att
empted return to Mother, however, no longer works—because she is no longer the all-giving mother of infancy, but a mother who makes demands of the child. Seen in this light, at the story’s beginning Cinderella mourns not only the loss of the original mother, but grieves also at the loss of her dreams about the wonderful relation she was going to have with Father. Cinderella has to work through her deep oedipal disappointments to return to a successful life at the story’s end, no longer a child, but a young maiden ready for marriage.

  Thus, the two groups of “Cinderella” stories which differ so greatly on the surface, in regard to what causes her misfortune, are not at all contrary on a deeper level. They simply render separately some main aspects of the same phenomenon: the girl’s oedipal desires and anxieties.

  Things are considerably more complex in the “Cinderella” stories now popular, which may go a long way to explain why these superseded some of the older versions, such as Basile’s. The oedipal desires for the father are repressed—except for the expectation that he will give her a magic present. The present her father brings Cinderella, such as the date tree in “Cat Cinderella,” gives her the opportunity to meet her prince and gain his love, which leads to his replacing the father as the man she loves most in the world.

  Cinderella’s wish to eliminate Mother is completely repressed in the modern versions and replaced by a displacement and a projection: it is not Mother who overtly plays a crucial role in the girl’s life, but a stepmother; Mother is displaced by a substitute. And it is not the girl who wants to debase Mother so that she will be able to play a much bigger role in her father’s life, but, in a projection, it is the stepmother who wants to see the girl replaced. One more displacement further assures that the true desires remain hidden: it is her siblings who want to take the heroine’s rightful place away from her.

  In those versions, sibling rivalry takes the place of an oedipal involvement that has been repressed, as the center of the plot. In real life, positive and negative oedipal relations, and guilt about these relations often remain hidden behind sibling rivalry. However, as happens frequently with complex psychological phenomena which arouse great guilt, all that the person consciously experiences is anxiety due to the guilt, and not the guilt itself, or what caused it. Thus, “Cinderella” tells only about the misery of being degraded.

  In the best fairy-tale tradition, the anxiety Cinderella’s pitiful existence evokes in the hearer is soon relieved by the happy ending. By feeling deeply for Cinderella, the child (implicitly and without its coming to conscious awareness) deals in some fashion with oedipal anxiety and guilt, and also with the desires which underlie it. The child’s hope of being able to disentangle herself from her oedipal predicament by finding a love object to whom she can give herself without guilt or anxiety is turned into confidence, because the story assures that entering the lower depths of existence is but a necessary step toward becoming able to realize one’s highest potentials.

  It must be stressed that it would be impossible, upon hearing the story of Cinderella in one of its presently popular forms, to recognize consciously that her unhappy state is due to oedipal involvements on her part, and that by insisting on her unrivaled innocence the story is covering up her oedipal guilt. The well-known “Cinderella” stories consistently obscure what is oedipal, and offer no hints to cast doubt on Cinderella’s innocence. On a conscious level, the evilness of stepmother and stepsisters is sufficient explanation for what happens to Cinderella. The modern plot centers on sibling rivalry; the stepmother’s degrading Cinderella has no cause other than the wish to advance her own daughters; and the stepsisters’ nastiness is due to their being jealous of Cinderella.

  But “Cinderella” cannot fail to activate in us those emotions and unconscious ideas which, in our inner experience, are connected with our feelings of sibling rivalry. From his own experience with it, the child might well understand—without “knowing” anything about it—the welter of inner experiences connected with Cinderella. Recalling, if she is a girl, her repressed wishes to get rid of Mother and have Father all to herself, and now feeling guilty about such “dirty” desires, a girl may well “understand” why a mother would send her daughter out of sight to reside among the cinders, and prefer her other children. Where is the child who has not wished to be able to banish a parent at some time, and who does not feel that in retaliation he merits the same fate? And where is the child who has not wanted to wallow to his heart’s desire in dirt or mud; and, being made to feel dirty by parental criticism in consequence, become convinced that he deserves nothing better than to be relegated to a dirty corner?

  The purpose of elaborating on “Cinderella’s” oedipal background was to show that the story offers the hearer a deeper understanding of that which is behind his own feelings of sibling rivalry. If the hearer permits his unconscious understanding to “swing” along with what his conscious mind is being told, he gains a much deeper understanding of what accounts for the complex emotions which his siblings arouse. Sibling rivalry, both in its overt expression and in its denial, is very much part of our lives well into maturity, as is its counterpart, our positive attachments to our siblings. But because the latter rarely lead to emotional difficulties, and the former does, greater understanding of what is psychologically involved in sibling rivalry could help us deal with this important and difficult problem in our lives.

  Like “Little Red Cap,” “Cinderella” is known today mainly in two different forms, one which derives from Perrault, the other from the Brothers Grimm—and the two versions are considerably at variance.85

  As with all of Perrault’s stories, the trouble with his “Cinderella” is that he took fairy-tale material—either Basile’s or some other “Cinderella” story known to him from oral tradition, or a combination of both sources—freed it of all content he considered vulgar, and refined its other features to make the product suitable to be told at court. Being an author of great skill and taste, he invented details and changed others to make the story conform to his aesthetic concepts. It was, for example, his invention that the fateful slipper was made of glass, which is in no other versions but those derived from his.

  There is quite a controversy about this detail. Since in French the word vair (which means variegated fur) and verre (glass) are sometimes pronounced similarly, it was assumed that Perrault, on having heard the story, mistakenly substituted verre for vair and thus changed a fur slipper into one made of glass. Although this explanation is often repeated, there seems no doubt that the glass slipper was Perrault’s deliberate invention. But because of it he had to drop an important feature of many earlier versions of “Cinderella,” which tell how the stepsisters mutilated their feet to make them fit the slipper. The prince fell for this deception until he was made aware by the songs of birds that there was blood in the shoe. This detail would have been immediately obvious had the slipper been made of glass. For example, in “Rashin Coatie” (a Scottish version) the stepmother forces the slipper onto her daughter’s foot by cutting off her heel and toes. On the way to church a bird sings:

  “Minched fit, and pinched fit

  Beside the king she rides,

  But braw fit, and bonny fit

  In the kitchen neuk she hides.”86

  The bird’s song brings to the prince’s attention that the stepsister is not the right bride. But such coarse mutilation would not have fitted in with the polite way in which Perrault wished to retell his story.

  Perrault’s story and those directly based on it depict the character of the heroine quite differently from all other versions. Perrault’s Cinderella is sugar-sweet and insipidly good, and she completely lacks initiative (which probably accounts for Disney’s choosing Perrault’s version of “Cinderella” as the basis for his rendering of the story). Most other Cinderellas are much more of a person. To mention only some of the differences, in Perrault it is Cinderella’s choice to sleep among the cinders: “When she had done her work, she went to the corner of the chimney
and sat down among the cinders,” which led to her name. There is no such self-debasement in the Brothers Grimm’s story; as they tell it, Cinderella had to bed down among the ashes.

  When it comes to dressing the stepsisters for the ball, Perrault’s Cinderella all on her own “advised them the best way in the world, and offered herself to do their hair,” while in the Brothers Grimm’s version the stepsisters order her to comb their hair and brush their shoes; she obeys but weeps while doing so. As for getting to the ball, Perrault’s Cinderella takes no action; it is her fairy godmother who tells her that she wishes to go. In the Brothers Grimm’s story Cinderella asks her stepmother to let her go to the ball, persists in her request although turned down, and performs the impossible tasks demanded of her so that she can go. At the ball’s end she leaves of her own accord and hides from the pursuing prince. Perrault’s Cinderella does not depart because she considers it right to do so, but simply obeys a command of her fairy godmother not to remain one moment after midnight because otherwise the coach will again become a pumpkin, etc.

  When it comes to the trying on of the slipper, in Perrault it is not the prince who searches for its owner, but a gentleman sent to look for the girl it fits. Before Cinderella is to meet the prince, her godmother appears and equips her with beautiful clothes. Thus, an important detail in the Brothers Grimm’s and most other versions gets lost—namely, that the prince remains undismayed by Cinderella’s appearance in rags because he recognizes her inherent qualities, apart from her outer appearance. Thus, the contrast between the materialistic stepsisters, who rely on externals, and Cinderella, who cares little about them, is reduced.