The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  In Perrault’s version it does not make all that much difference whether one is vile or virtuous. In his story the stepsisters are considerably more abusive of Cinderella than in that of the Brothers Grimm; nevertheless, at the end Cinderella embraces those who have vilified her and tells them that she loves them with all her heart and desires them always to love her. From the story, however, it is incomprehensible why she would care for their love, or how they could love her after all that has happened. Even after her marriage to the prince, Perrault’s Cinderella “gave her two sisters lodging in the palace, and married them the same day to two great lords of the court.”

  In the Brothers Grimm’s version the ending is quite different, as it is in all other renderings of the tale. First, the sisters mutilate their feet to make the slipper fit. Second, they come on their own to Cinderella’s wedding to ingratiate themselves and have a share in her good fortune. But as they walk to the church, the pigeons—probably the same birds which had helped Cinderella earlier to meet the impossible tasks set her—pick out one eye from each, and as they return from church, the other. The story ends: “And thus for their wickedness and falsehood they were punished with blindness for the rest of their days.”

  Of the many other differences in these two versions, only two more will be mentioned. In Perrault’s tale the father plays no role to speak of. All we learn about him is that he married a second time and that Cinderella “did not dare to complain to her father because he would only have scolded her, because he was entirely run by his wife.” Also, we hear nothing about the fairy godmother until she suddenly appears from nowhere to provide Cinderella with her coach, horses, and dress.

  Since “Cinderella” is the most popular of all fairy tales and is distributed worldwide, it may be appropriate to consider the important motifs woven into the story which, in their combination, make for its great conscious and unconscious appeal and its deep significance. Stith Thompson, who has made the most complete analysis of folk-tale motifs, enumerates those appearing in the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella” as follows: an ill-treated heroine; her having to live by the hearth; the gift she asks of her father; the hazel branch she plants on her mother’s grave; the tasks demanded of the heroine; the animals which help her perform them; the mother, transformed into the tree Cinderella grew on her grave, who provides her with beautiful clothes; the meeting at the ball; and Cinderella’s threefold flight from it; her hiding first in a pigeon house and second in a pear tree, which are cut down by her father; the pitch trap and the lost shoe; the shoe test; the sisters’ mutilation of their feet and acceptance as (false) brides; the animals which reveal the deception; the happy marriage; the nemesis wreaked on the villains.87 My discussion of these story elements also includes some remarks on the better-known details of Perrault’s “Cinderella” which are not part of the Brothers Grimm’s tale.

  Cinderella’s mistreatment as a consequence of sibling rivalry, the story’s main motif in its modern form, has already been dealt with. This is what makes the most immediate impact on the hearer and arouses his empathy. It leads him to identify with the heroine, and sets the stage for all that follows.

  Cinderella’s living among the ashes—from which she derives her name—is a detail of great complexity.* On the surface, it signifies abuse, and degradation from the fortunate position she enjoyed before the beginning of the story. But it is not without reason that Perrault has her choose to dwell among the ashes. We are so accustomed to thinking of living as a lowly servant among the ashes of the hearth as an extremely degraded situation that we have lost any recognition that, in a different view, it may be experienced as a very desirable, even exalted position. In ancient times, to be the guardian of the hearth—the duty of the Vestal Virgins—was one of the most prestigious ranks, if not the most exalted, available to a female. To be a Vestal Virgin was to be much envied in ancient Rome. A girl was selected for this honor when she was between six and ten years old—roughly the age of Cinderella as we imagine her during her years of servitude. In the Brothers Grimm’s story Cinderella plants a twig and cultivates it with her tears and prayers. Only after it has grown into a tree does it provide her with what she needs to go to the ball—thus, several years must have passed between the planting and the ball. Six to ten years old is also the age of children on whom this story makes the deepest impression, and it often stays with them and sustains them for the rest of their lives.

  Speaking of Cinderella’s years of servitude: only at later times did it become customary for Vestal Virgins to serve for thirty years before they gave up office and could marry. Originally they remained priestesses for only five years: that is, until they reached marriageable age. This is about the amount of time one imagines Cinderella’s sufferings to last. To be a Vestal Virgin meant both to be a guardian of the hearth and to be absolutely pure. After they had performed well in the role, these women made prestigious marriages, as does Cinderella. Thus, innocence, purity, and being guardian of the hearth go together in ancient connotations.* It is possible that with the rejection of paganism, what had been a highly desirable role became devalued in the Christian era to be the meanest. The Vestal Virgins served the sacred hearth and Hera, the mother goddess. With the change to a father god, the old maternal deities were degraded and devalued, as was a place close to the hearth. In this sense, Cinderella might also be viewed as the degraded mother goddess who at the end of the story is reborn out of the ashes, like the mythical bird phoenix. But these are connections of a historical nature which the average hearer of “Cinderella” will not readily establish in his mind.

  There are other, equally positive associations to living by the hearth which are available to every child. Children love to spend time in the kitchen, watching and participating in the preparation of food. Before central heating, a seat close to the hearth was the warmest and often the coziest place in the house. The hearth evokes in many children happy memories of the time they spent there with their mothers.

  Children also like to get themselves good and dirty; to be able to do so is a symbol of instinctual freedom to them. Thus, being a person who stirs around in the ashes, the original meaning of the name Aschenbrödel, has also very positive connotations for the child. Making oneself “good and dirty” is both pleasurable and guilt-producing today, as it was in times past.

  Finally, Cinderella mourns her dead mother. “Ashes to ashes” is not the only saying which establishes close connection between the dead and ashes. To cover oneself with ashes is a symbol of mourning; living in dirty rags is a symptom of depression. Thus, dwelling among the ashes may symbolize both lovely times with Mother in proximity to the hearth, and also our state of deep mourning for this intimate closeness to Mother which we lost as we grew up, symbolized by the “death” of Mother. Because of this combination of images, the hearth evokes strong feelings of empathy, reminding us all of the paradise in which we once dwelt, and how radically our lives changed when we were forced to give up the simple and happy existence of the very young child, to cope with all the ambivalences of adolescence and adulthood.

  As long as the child is little, his parents protect him against the ambivalences of his siblings and the demands of the world. In retrospect this seems to have been a paradisal time. Then, suddenly, these older siblings seem to take advantage of the now less-protected child; they make demands; they and Mother become critical of what the child does. The references to his disorderliness, if not dirty habits, make him feel rejected and dirty; and the siblings seem to live in splendor. But their good behavior, the child believes, is a sham, a pretense, and a falsehood. And this is the image of the stepsisters in “Cinderella.” The young child lives in extremes: at one moment he feels himself vile and dirty, full of hate; in the next he is all innocence, and the others are evil creatures.

  Whatever the external conditions, during these years of sibling rivalry the child experiences an inner period of suffering, privation, even want; and he experiences misunderstandings, even mal
ice. Cinderella’s years among the ashes tell the child that nobody can escape this. There are times when it seems that only hostile forces exist, that no helpful ones are about. If the child being told the story of Cinderella did not come to feel that she had to endure a considerable stretch of such bad times, her relief would be incomplete when finally the helpful forces overcame the hostile ones. The child’s misery at moments is so deep that it seems to last a very long time. Therefore no fleeting period in Cinderella’s life would seem comparable to this. Cinderella must suffer as much and as long as the child believes he does, for her delivery to carry conviction and give him the certitude that the same thing will happen in his life.

  After we have felt compassion for Cinderella’s dejected state, the first positive development in her life occurs. “It once happened that the father wanted to go to a fair, so he asked the two stepdaughters what he should bring them. ‘Beautiful clothes,’ said one. ‘Pearls and gems,’ said the other. ‘What about you, Aschenputtel,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’ ‘Father, the first twig that pushes against your hat on your return trip, break it off for me.’ ” He acts accordingly; a hazel branch not only pushes against his hat, but knocks it off. This branch he brings home to Aschenputtel. “She thanked him, went to her mother’s grave and planted the branch on it; she wept so much that her tears fell on it and watered it. It grew and became a beautiful tree. There she went three times a day and wept and prayed; and each time a white bird lighted on the tree, and when she expressed a wish, the bird threw down what she had wished for.”

  Cinderella’s asking her father for the twig she planned to plant on her mother’s grave, and his meeting her desire, is a first tentative re-establishment of a positive relation between the two. From the story we assume that Cinderella must have been very disappointed in her father, if not also angry that he married such a shrew. But to the young child, his parents are all-powerful. If Cinderella is to become master of her own fate, her parents’ authority must be diminished. This diminution and transfer of power could be symbolized by the branch knocking the father’s hat off his head, and also the fact that the same branch grows into a tree that has magic powers for Cinderella. Therefore, that which diminished the father (the branch of the hazel tree) is used by Cinderella to increase the power and prestige of the archaic (dead) mother. Since her father gives Cinderella the twig which enhances the memory of the mother, it seems to be a sign that he approves of her returning from her heavy involvement with him to the original unambivalent relation to the mother. This diminution of the father’s emotional importance in Cinderella’s life prepares the way for her transferring her childish love for him eventually into a mature love for the prince.

  The tree which Cinderella plants on her mother’s grave and waters with her tears is one of the most poetically moving and psychologically significant features of the story. It symbolizes that the memory of the idealized mother of infancy, when kept alive as an important part of one’s internal experience, can and does support us even in the worst adversity.

  This is told even more clearly in other versions of the story where the figure into which the good mother becomes transformed is not a tree but a helpful animal. For example, in the earliest recorded Chinese rendering of the “Cinderella” motif, the heroine has a tame fish which grows from two inches to ten feet under her devoted care. The evil stepmother discovers the importance of the fish, and cunningly kills and eats it. The heroine is desolate until a wise man tells her where the fish’s bones are buried and advises her to collect and keep them in her room. He tells her that if she prays to these bones, she will obtain whatever she wishes. In many European and Eastern variations it is a calf, cow, goat, or some other animal into which the dead mother is transformed to become the heroine’s magic helper.

  The Scottish tale of “Rashin Coatie” is older than either Basile’s or Perrault’s “Cinderella,” since it is mentioned as early as 1540.89 A mother, before her death, bequeaths her daughter, Rashin Coatie, a little red calf, which gives her whatever she asks for. The stepmother finds out about this and orders the calf butchered. Rashin Coatie is desperate, but the dead calf tells her to pick up its bones and bury them under a gray stone. She does and henceforth receives what she desires by going to the stone and telling the calf. At Yuletide, when everybody puts on their best clothes to go to the church, Rashin Coatie is told by her stepmother that she is too dirty to join them in church. The dead calf provides Rashin Coatie with beautiful clothes; in church a prince falls in love with her; on their third meeting she loses a slipper, etc.

  In many other “Cinderella” stories the helpful animal also nourishes the heroine. For example, in an Egyptian tale a stepmother and step-siblings mistreat two children, who beg, “O cow, be kind to us, as our mother was kind to us.” The cow gives them good food. The stepmother finds out and has the cow butchered. The children burn the cow’s bones and bury the ashes in a clay pot, from which a tree grows and bears fruits for the children, and this provides happiness for them.90 So there are stories of the “Cinderella” type in which the animal and the tree representing the mother are combined, showing how one can stand for the other. These tales also illustrate the symbolic replacement of the original mother by an animal that gives us milk—the cow or, in Mediterranean countries, the goat. This reflects the emotional and psychological connection of early feeding experiences which provide security in later life.

  Erikson speaks of “a sense of basic trust, which,” he says, “is an attitude toward oneself and the world derived from the experience of the first year of life.”91 Basic trust is instilled in the child by the good mothering he experiences during the earliest period of his life. If all goes well then, the child will have confidence in himself and in the world. The helpful animal or the magic tree is an image, embodiment, external representation of this basic trust. It is the heritage which a good mother confers on her child which will stay with him, and preserve and sustain him in direst distress.

  The stories where the stepmother kills the helpful animal but does not succeed in depriving Cinderella of what gives her inner strength indicate that for our managing or coping with life, what exists in reality is less important than what goes on in our mind. What makes life bearable even in the worst circumstances is the image of the good mother which we have internalized, so that the disappearance of the external symbol does not matter.92

  One of the main overt messages of the various “Cinderella” stories is that we are mistaken if we think we must hold on to something in the external world to succeed in life. All efforts of the stepsisters to gain their goal through externals are in vain—their carefully selected and prepared clothes, the fraud through which they try to make their feet fit the shoe. Only being true to oneself, as Cinderella is, succeeds in the end. The same idea is conveyed by the mother’s or the helpful animal’s presence not being required. This is psychologically correct, because for one’s inner security and feeling of self-worth, no externals are necessary once one has developed basic trust—nor can externals compensate for not having attained basic trust in infancy. Those so unfortunate as to have lost out on basic trust at the beginning of life can achieve it, if at all, only through changes in the inner structure of their mind and personality, never through things that look good.

  The image conveyed by the tree growing from a twig or the calf’s bones or ashes is that of something different developing out of the original mother, or the experience of her. The image of the tree is particularly pertinent because growth is involved, whether it is Cat Cinderella’s date tree or Cinderella’s hazel branch. This indicates that simply to retain the internalized image of the mother of a past period is not enough. As the child grows up, this internalized mother must undergo changes, too, as he does. This is a process of dematerialization, similar to that in which the child sublimates the real good mother into an inner experience of basic trust.

  In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” all of this is refined even more. Cinderel
la’s inner processes begin with her desperate mourning for her mother, as symbolized by her existence among the ashes. If she remained stuck there, no internal development would occur. Mourning as a temporary transition to continuing life without the loved person is necessary; but for survival it must eventually be turned into something positive: the erection of an internal representation of what has been lost in reality. Such an inner object will always remain inviolate within us, whatever happens in reality. Cinderella’s weeping over the planted twig shows that the memory of her dead mother is kept alive; but as the tree grows, so does the internalized mother grow inside Cinderella.

  Cinderella’s prayers, also said over the tree, bespeak the hopes she cultivates. Prayers ask for something that we trust will happen: basic trust reasserts itself after the shock of adversity has worn off; this trust restores in us the hope that eventually things will again go well for us, as they have in our past. The little white bird which comes in answer to Cinderella’s prayers is the messenger of Ecclesiastes: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which has wings shall tell the matter.” The white bird is easily recognized as the mother’s spirit conveyed to her child through the good mothering she gives him; it is the spirit which originally became implanted in the child as basic trust. As such, it becomes the child’s own spirit, which sustains him in all hardships, giving him hope for the future, and the strength to create a good life for himself.

  Whether or not we recognize consciously the full significance of that which is symbolically expressed through the image of Cinderella’s asking for the twig, planting it, cultivating it with her tears and prayers, and finally through the little white bird alighting on it whenever Cinderella needs it, this feature of “Cinderella” touches us all, and we respond, at least preconsciously, to the meaning. It is a beautiful and effective image, even more meaningful and instructive to the child who is just beginning to internalize what his parents mean to him. It is as significant to boys as it is to girls because the internalized mother—or basic trust—is a crucially important mental phenomenon, whatever a person’s sex. By eliminating the tree and replacing it with a fairy godmother who appears suddenly and unexpectedly out of nowhere, Perrault has robbed the story of some of its deepest meaning.