The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  The Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella” conveys ever so subtly to the child that, miserable as he may feel at the moment—because of sibling rivalry or any other reason—by sublimating his misery and sorrow, as Cinderella does by planting and cultivating the tree with her emotions, the child on his very own can arrange things so that his life in the world will also become a good one.

  In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” right after we have been told about the tree and the little white bird that fulfills Cinderella’s wishes, we learn that the king has ordered a three-day festival so that his son may select a bride. Cinderella begs to be permitted to go. Despite denials, she persists in her entreaties. Finally the stepmother tells her that she has emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes; if Cinderella picks them out within two hours, she may go to the ball.

  This is one of the seemingly impossible tasks which fairy-tale heroes have to perform. In Eastern versions of “Cinderella,” she has to do some spinning; in some Western stories, sift grain.93 On the surface, this is another example of her being abused. But when this demand is made of Cinderella—after the radical change in her fortunes, since she has gained a magic helper in the white bird which fulfills her wishes, and just before she is to go to the ball—this suggests that hard and difficult tasks must be performed well before Cinderella is worthy of a happy ending. Thanks to the birds she calls in as helpers, Cinderella is able to finish the sorting task, only to have the stepmother repeat her demand with doubly increased difficulties: the second time she is required to sort two dishes of lentils spilled into the ashes and to do so in only one hour. Again with the aid of the birds Cinderella succeeds, but the stepmother still will not allow her to go to the ball, despite her two promises to do so.

  The task demanded of Cinderella seems senseless: why drop lentils into the ashes only to have them picked out again? The stepmother is convinced that this is impossible, degrading, meaningless. But Cinderella knows that something good can be gained from whatever one does if one is able to endow it with meaning, even from stirring around in the ashes. This detail of the story encourages the child in his conviction that to dwell in lowly places—to play in and with dirt—can be of great value, if one knows how to extract it. Cinderella calls on the birds to help her, telling them to pick out the good lentils and put them in the pot, but to do away with the bad ones by eating them.

  The stepmother’s falseness in twice reneging on her promises is thus opposed to Cinderella’s recognition that what is needed is a sorting out of good from evil. After Cinderella has spontaneously turned the task into a moral problem of good versus bad, and eliminated the bad, she proceeds to her mother’s grave and asks the tree to “scatter gold and silver” over her. The bird throws down a gold-and-silver dress and, the first and second times, slippers decorated with silk and silver. The last time the slippers are made of gold.

  In Perrault’s tale, too, Cinderella has to accomplish a task before she can go to the ball. After the fairy godmother has told Cinderella that she is to go, she orders Cinderella to bring her a pumpkin from the garden. Although Cinderella does not understand the meaning of this, she does as she is told. It is the godmother, and not Cinderella, who scoops out the pumpkin and turns it into a coach. Then the godmother tells Cinderella to open a mousetrap, and she changes the six mice found there into horses. One rat is similarly transformed into a coachman. Finally Cinderella is to fetch six lizards, which become footmen. Her rags are made into beautiful clothes, and she is given glass slippers. So equipped, Cinderella leaves for the ball, but not before she is ordered to return before midnight because at that moment all will return to its original form.

  The glass slippers, the pumpkin made into a coach—these are all Perrault’s invention: there is no trace of them in any other version but his and those dependent on his. Marc Soriano sees in these details Perrault’s mockery of the hearer who takes the story seriously, but also the irony with which he treats his subject: if Cinderella can be changed into the most beautiful princess, then mice and a rat can become horses and a coachman.*

  Irony is in part the result of unconscious thoughts; and the wide acceptance of Perrault’s details can be explained only by their touching a responsive chord in the hearer. The obligation to hold on to the best in one’s past; to cultivate one’s sense of morality; to remain true to one’s values despite adversity; not to permit oneself to be defeated by the malice or nastiness of others—all this is so obvious in “Cinderella” that Perrault cannot have remained untouched by it. The conclusion must be that he deliberately defends himself against it. His irony invalidates the demand inherent in the story that we transform ourselves through an inner process. It ridicules the idea that striving for the highest goals permits us to transcend the lowly conditions of our external existence.95 Perrault reduces “Cinderella” to a nice fantasy with no implications for ourselves. And this is how many people want to look at the story, which accounts for the widespread acceptance of his version of it.

  While this may explain Perrault’s manner of reworking the old tale, it does not account for the specific details which he invented according to both his conscious and his unconscious understanding of the story, and which we accept for the same reason. Contrary to all versions in which Cinderella is forced to live among the ashes, only Perrault tells that she chose to do so. This makes her the prepubertal child who has not yet repressed her desire to get herself good and dirty; and who has not yet acquired an aversion to furtive little animals like rats, mice, and lizards; and who scoops out a pumpkin and imagines it to be a beautiful coach. Mice and rats inhabit dark and dirty corners and steal food, all things the child also likes to do. Unconsciously, they also arouse associations to the phallus, indicating the coming of sexual interest and maturation. Irrespective of their phallic connotations, to transform such lowly if not disgusting animals into horses, coachman, and footmen represents a sublimation. So this detail seems correct on at least two levels: it signifies the company Cinderella kept while living among the ashes in her lowly stage, if not also her phallic interests; and it seems fitting that such interests must be sublimated as she matures—i.e., prepares herself for the prince.

  Perrault’s rendering makes his “Cinderella” more acceptable to our conscious and unconscious understanding of what the story is all about. Consciously we are willing to accept the irony which reduces the story to a nice fantasy without serious content, since it relieves us of the otherwise implied obligation to come to terms with the problem of sibling rivalry, and of the task of internalizing our early objects and living up to their moral requirements. Unconsciously the details he adds seem convincing on the basis of our own buried childhood experiences, since they appear to indicate that to become mature we must transform and sublimate our early fascination with instinctual behavior, whether it is the attraction of dirt or of phallic objects.

  Perrault’s Cinderella, who goes to the ball in a coach driven by six horses attended by six footmen—as if the ball would take place at Louis XIV’s Versailles—must depart before midnight, when she will be returned to her mean attire. On the third night, however, she fails to pay sufficient attention to the passage of time, and in her hurry to get away before the magic spell expires, she loses one of her glass slippers. “The guards at the gates of the palace were asked if they had not seen a princess leaving; they said that they had seen nobody leave but a young girl very badly dressed, who looked much more like a country wench than a lady.”

  In the Brothers Grimm’s story Cinderella can stay at the ball as long as she likes. When she leaves, she does so for a purpose and not because she must. When she does leave, the prince tries to accompany her, but she slips away, hiding from him on the first night. “The son of the king waited till the father came and told him that a strange girl had jumped into the dovecote. The old man thought, ‘Could it be Aschenputtel?’ and they had to bring him an ax and a pick so that he could break the dovecote into two; but nobody was in it.” In the meantime Cinde
rella has made her escape and changed back into her dirty clothes. The following day, things repeat themselves, with the exception that Cinderella hides in a pear tree. On the third day the prince has the stairs coated with pitch, so when Cinderella again slips away, one of her slippers gets stuck there.

  There are variations of the story in which Cinderella takes the initiative to be recognized, not waiting passively. In one of them the prince gives her a ring, which she bakes into a cake served to him; he will marry no other girl than the one on whose finger the ring fits.

  Why does Cinderella go three times to the ball to meet the prince, only to run away from him to return to her degraded position? As it often does, the three-times-repeated behavior reflects the child’s position in regard to his parents, and his reaching for his true selfhood as he works through his early conviction that he is the most important element in the threesome, and his later fear that he is the least significant. True selfhood is gained not through the three repetitions, but through something else that these lead up to—the fitting of the shoe.

  On the overt level, Cinderella’s evading the prince tells that she wants to be chosen for the person she really is, and not for her splendid appearance. Only if her lover has seen her in her degraded state and still desires her will she be his. But, for that, a single appearance and losing the slipper the first night would do. On a deeper level, repeating her visits to the ball symbolizes the ambivalence of the young girl who wants to commit herself personally and sexually, and at the same time is afraid to do so. It is an ambivalence which is also reflected in the father, who wonders whether the beautiful girl is his daughter Cinderella, but does not trust his feelings. The prince, as if recognizing that he cannot win Cinderella as long as she remains emotionally tied to her father in an oedipal relation, does not pursue her himself, but asks the father to do it for him. Only if the father first indicates his readiness to release his daughter from her ties to him can she feel good about transferring her heterosexual love from its immature object (the father) to its mature object—her future husband. The father’s demolishing Cinderella’s hiding places—chopping down the dovecote and the pear tree—shows his readiness to hand her over to the prince. But his efforts do not have the desired result.

  On a quite different level, the dovecote and the pear tree stand for the magic objects which have sustained Cinderella up to this point. The first is the living place of the helpful birds which sorted out the lentils for Cinderella—substitutes for the white bird on the tree which provided her with her pretty clothes, including the fateful slippers. And the pear tree reminds us of that other tree which had grown on the mother’s grave. Cinderella must relinquish her belief in and reliance on the help of magic objects if she is to live well in the world of reality. The father seems to understand this, and so he cuts down her hiding places: no more hiding among the ashes, but also no more seeking refuge from reality in magic places. From now on Cinderella will exist neither far below her true status nor way above it.

  Cox, following Jacob Grimm, mentions the ancient German custom of the groom giving a shoe to his bride as sign of betrothal.96 But this does not explain why the fit of a golden shoe decides who is the right bride in the ancient Chinese tale, and in Perrault’s tale, a glass slipper. For the test to work, the shoe must be a slipper that does not stretch, or it would fit some other girl, such as the stepsisters. Perrault’s subtlety is shown in his saying the shoe was made of glass, a material that does not stretch, is extremely brittle and easily broken.

  A tiny receptacle into which some part of the body can slip and fit tightly can be seen as a symbol of the vagina. Something that is brittle and must not be stretched because it would break reminds us of the hymen; and something that is easily lost at the end of a ball when one’s lover tries to keep his hold on his beloved seems an appropriate image for virginity, particularly when the male sets a trap—the pitch on the stairs—to catch her. Cinderella’s running away from this situation could be seen as her effort to protect her virginity.

  The godmother’s order that Cinderella must be home by a certain hour or things will go very wrong, in Perrault’s story, is similar to the parent’s request that his daughter must not stay out too late at night because of his fear of what may happen if she does. The many “Cinderella” stories in which she flees to evade being ravished by an “unnatural” father support the notion that her running away from the ball is motivated by the wish to protect herself against being violated, or carried away by her own desires. It also forces the prince to seek her in her father’s house, thus paralleling the groom coming to ask for the hand of his bride. While in Perrault’s “Cinderella” a gentleman of the court tries the slipper on, and in the Brothers Grimm’s tale the prince only hands it to Cinderella and she herself puts it on her foot, in many stories it is the prince who slips the shoe on. This might be likened to the groom’s putting the ring on the finger of the bride as an important part of the marriage ceremony, a symbol of their being tied together henceforth.

  All this is easily understood. On hearing the story one senses that the fitting on of the slipper is a betrothal, and it is quite clear that Cinderella is a virginal bride. Every child knows that marriage is connected with sex. In past times, when more children grew up close to animals, they knew that sex has something to do with the male putting his organ into the female, and the modern child is told as much by his parents. However, in view of the story’s major topic, sibling rivalry, there are other possible symbolic meanings for the fitting of the precious slipper onto the appropriate foot.

  Sibling rivalry is the topic of “Cinderella,” as it is of many fairy tales. In these other fairy tales the rivalry nearly always exists among children of the same sex. But in real life, more often than not, the sharpest rivalry among the children of one family is between sister and brother.

  The discrimination which females suffer when compared with males is an age-old story now being challenged. It would be strange if this discrimination did not also create jealousy and envy between sisters and brothers within the family. Psychoanalytic publications are full of examples of girls being envious of boys’ sexual apparatus; the “penis envy” of the female has been a familiar concept for quite some time. Less well recognized is that this envy is by no means a one-way street; boys are also quite jealous of what girls possess: breasts, and the ability to bear children.97

  Each sex is jealous of what the other has which it lacks, much though either sex may like and be proud of what belongs to it—be it status, social role, or sexual organs. While this can be readily observed and is undoubtedly a correct view of the matter, unfortunately it is not yet widely recognized and accepted. (To some degree this is due to early psychoanalysis’ one-sidedly stressing the so-called penis envy of girls, which probably occurred because at that time most treatises were written by males who did not examine their own envy of females. This is somewhat paralleled today in writings of militantly proud females.)

  “Cinderella,” the story which more than any other fairy tale deals with the topic of sibling rivalry, would be strangely deficient if in some fashion it did not also give expression to the rivalry of boys and girls due to their physical differences. Behind this sexual envy lies sexual fear, the so-called “castration anxiety” that some part of one’s anatomy is missing. Overtly “Cinderella” tells only about sibling rivalry of girls; but might there not be some covert allusions to these other, deeper-reaching, and much more repressed emotions?

  While girls and boys suffer equally severely from “castration anxiety,” the feelings they suffer are not the same. Both the terms “penis envy” and “castration anxiety” stress only one of many and complex psychological aspects of the phenomena they name. According to Freudian theory, the girl’s castration complex centers on her imagining that originally all children had penises and that girls somehow lost theirs (possibly as punishment for misbehavior) and on the consequent hope that it may grow back. The boy’s parallel anxiety is that since
all girls lack penises, this can be explained only by their having lost them, and he fears the same thing may happen to him. The girl subject to castration anxiety uses many and varied defenses to protect her self-esteem from such imagined deficiency; among these are unconscious fantasies that she, too, has similar equipment.

  To understand the unconscious thoughts and feelings which may have led to the invention of a beautiful, tiny slipper as a central feature of “Cinderella,” and, more important, the unconscious responses to this symbol which make it so convincing that “Cinderella” is one of the best-loved tales, one must accept that many different, even contradictory psychological attitudes may have become connected with the shoe as a symbol.

  A very strange incident which takes place in most versions of “Cinderella” is the stepsisters’ mutilation of their feet to make them fit the tiny slipper. Although Perrault excluded this event from his story, according to Cox it is common to all “Cinderella” stories except those derived from Perrault and a few others. This incident may be viewed as a symbolic expression of some aspects of the female castration complex.

  The sisters’ devious foot-mutilation is the final barrier to the happy ending; it immediately precedes the prince’s finding Cinderella. For the last time the stepsisters, with the active help of the stepmother, try to cheat Cinderella out of what rightly belongs to her. Trying to fit their feet into the shoe, the stepsisters mutilate them. In the Brothers Grimm’s story the oldest stepsister cannot enter the shoe with her big toe. So her mother hands her a knife and tells her to cut off the toe, because once she is a queen, she will no longer need to walk. The daughter does as she is told, forces her foot into the shoe, and goes to the prince, who rides off with her. As they pass Cinderella’s mother’s grave and the hazel tree, two white pigeons sitting on it call, “Look, there is blood in the shoe: the shoe is too small; the right bride still sits at home.” The prince looks at the shoe and sees blood oozing out. He returns the stepsister to her home. The other stepsister tries to put on the shoe, but her heel is too big. Again the mother tells her to cut it off, and the same sequence of events occurs. In other versions where there is only one impostor bride, she cuts off either her toe or her heel, or both. In “Rashin Coatie” it is the mother who performs the operation.