It is important to bear in mind that the passive or absent father was, even a century ago, not the rule in fairy tales. As Marian Cox’s nineteenth-century study of 345 variants of “Cinderella” makes clear, at least two widespread and pervasive versions of the tale attributed the heroine’s social degradation either to what Cox describes in characteristic Victorian language as an “unnatural father” or to a father who attempts to extract from his daughter a statement about her filial devotion.5 Of the 226 tales belonging unambiguously to one of the three categories labeled by Cox as (1) ill-treated heroine (with mothers, stepmothers, and their progeny as victimizers), (2) unnatural father, and (3) King Lear judgment, 130 belong to the first class, 77 to the second, and 19 to the third. Thus in the tales examined by Cox, the versions that cast (step)mothers in the role of villain only slightly outnumber those that ascribe Cinderella’s misfortune to an importunate father. Cinderella and her cousins were, therefore, once almost as likely to flee the household because of their father’s perverse erotic attachment to them or because of his insistence on a verbal declaration of love, as they were to be banished to the hearth and degraded to domestic servitude by an ill-tempered stepmother.
That our own culture would suppress the theme of paternal erotic pursuit and indulge freely in elaborate variations on the theme of maternal tyranny is perhaps not surprising on a number of counts. Since tales such as Perrault’s “Donkeyskin” and the Grimms’ “Thousandfurs” make for troubling reading matter for adults, it hardly seems advisable to put them between the covers of books for children. But Marina Warner has argued that there is something more at stake in this evolutionary turn in the Cinderella story:
When interest in psychological realism is at work in the mind of the receiver of traditional folklore, the proposed marriage of a father to his daughter becomes too hard to accept. But it is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen, and is known to have done so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring, rather than the other way around.6
The censorship to which Warner refers seems to have led to dramatic editorial interventions very early on, perhaps as the tale made its way from an oral culture to a literary tradition. In Straparola’s seventeenth-century “Catskin” tale, the king is described as a “wicked father” with “evil designs,” “execrable lust,” and a “wicked and treacherous passion.” Yet it is his wife who decrees that the object of his lust and passion be their daughter Doralice. On her deathbed, the queen beseeches her husband Tebaldo never to take anyone as wife whose finger does not perfectly fit her own wedding ring. Faithful husband that he is, Tebaldo makes it a condition “that any damsel who might be offered to him in marriage should first try on her finger his wife’s ring, to see whether it fitted.” When the king fails to find a woman whose finger fits the ring, he turns to his daughter and discovers that the fit is perfect. As Tebaldo tells his daughter, he is obliged to marry her for it is the only way “I shall satisfy my own desire without violating the promise I made to your mother.”7
While some readers will not be persuaded by Tebaldo’s logic and by the narrator’s efforts to exonerate the king, many others have clearly bought right into the rhetoric of self-justification set forth in other Catskin tales. Consider one critic’s gloss on the family dynamics in Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”: “The dying queen had a vengeful streak: she made her husband … swear not to remarry unless he found a woman superior to her in beauty and goodness. Entrapped, the king eventually discovers that only his lovely daughter can fill the bill.”8 Another critic finds that “Rashie-Coat’s degradation is consequent upon her dying mother’s unfortunate imprudence.”9 Again and again, mothers are the real villains, extracting promises that end by victimizing both father and daughter. Everywhere we look, the tendency to defame women and to magnify maternal evil emerges. Even when a tale turns on a father’s incestuous desires, the mother becomes more than complicit: she has stirred up the trouble in the first place by setting the conditions for her husband’s remarriage.
The ring episode in Straparola’s “Catskin” does suggest one hitherto neglected point of contact between “Cinderella” tales and “Catskin” stories. Finding the perfect fit between fingers and rings and between feet and shoes becomes a task set to both fathers and princes, who now and then collaborate with each other (as in the Grimms’ “Cinderella”), who sometimes work in succession (as in Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”), and who are occasionally concurrent rivals, as in an Indian tale titled “The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter.”10 What these stories demonstrate, perhaps more forcefully than anything else, is the way in which the path to happy heterosexual unions depends on a successful transfer of filial love and devotion from a father to a “prince,” on a move from a false “perfect fit” to a true “perfect fit.”
While Catskin tales raise the charged issue of incestuous desire and place the heroine in jeopardy, they also furnish a rare stage for creative action. Unlike Cinderella, who endures humiliation at home and becomes the beneficiary of lavish gifts, the heroine of Catskin tales is mobile, active, and resourceful. She begins with a strong assertion of will, resistant to the paternal desires that would claim her. Fleeing the household, she moves out into an alien world that requires her to be inventive, energetic, and enterprising if she is to reestablish herself, to reclaim her royal rank, and to marry the prince. To be sure, her resourcefulness is confined largely to sartorial and culinary arts, but these were, after all, the two areas in which women traditionally could distinguish themselves. The Grimms’ Thousandfurs dazzles with her dress, and she successfully uses her cuisine to lure the prince. Donkeyskin’s powers of attraction are also explicitly linked to her wardrobe and her baking skills.
That these stories are disappearing from the folkloric arena is perhaps not surprising. The theme of incest alone would account for the steady erosion of interest in anthologizing the tale. But in addition, the story’s critique of paternal authority and its endorsement of filial disobedience turn it into an unlikely candidate for bedtime reading. What are we to make of a story that positions a father as the agent of transgressive sexuality and the daughter as the enforcer of cultural law and order? Perrault, who felt that fairy tales ought to transmit lessons to children about virtue and vice, was so mystified by “Donkeyskin” that he appended a comment that is absurdly irrelevant to the terms of the text: “The story of Donkeyskin may be hard to believe, but as long as there are children, mothers, and grandmothers in this world, it will be fondly remembered by all” (see here). What is far harder to believe than the story itself is the idea that this particular tale could generate “fond” memories.
In staging the attempted violation of a sacred taboo, Catskin stories celebrate daughters as agents of resistance, yet also enshrine them as maintaining the sanctity of cultural codes. Giambattista Basile captured exactly what made this story unacceptable to later generations when he spelled out its moral:
The wise man spoke well when he said that one cannot obey commands of gall with obedience sweet as sugar. Man must give only well-measured commands if he expects well-weighed obedience, and resistance springs from wrongful orders, as happened in the case of the King of Roccaspra, who, by asking for what was unseemly from his daughter, caused her to run away at the peril of her life and honor.11
While there are virtually no male counterparts to Catskin (mother/son incest seems to resist representation in folktales), male Cinderellas abound in the folklore of many cultures. Aarne and Thompson felt obliged to accommodate these male Cinderellas in their index of tale types by setting up a separate category of Cinderella tales identified by the rubric AT 511 (“One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes” for female Cinderellas) and AT 511A (“The Little Red Ox” for male Cinderellas). The distinction is little more than theor
etical, for in practice, tales such as “The Little Red Ox” (a story in which the protagonist’s mother returns in the form of a donor-ox) seem to feature girls almost as often as boys. These tales neutralize the persecutions of a wicked stepmother with the sustenance, nurturing, and rescue provided by an animal that is clearly identified with the dead mother. The Indian “Story of the Black Cow” (see here) belongs to a tale type that has virtually disappeared from our folkloristic repertoire but once enjoyed the kind of popularity that “Cinderella” has attained today. That male Cinderellas have vanished from our own cultural horizon challenges us to understand exactly what it was that once allowed both girls and boys to participate in the developmental trajectory outlined in the tale.
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1. Neil Philip, The Cinderella Story: The Origins and Variations of the Story Known as ‘Cinderella’ (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 21–31, 113–21, 32–35.
2. Ibid., pp. 46–51.
3. Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” Children’s Literature in Education 8 (1977): 21–29.
4. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature: A Feminist Perspective,” in Teaching Children’s Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources, ed. Glen Edward Sadler (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), pp. 101–08.
5. Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’ Rushes, ed. Andrew Lang (London: David Nutt, 1893).
6. Marina Warner, “The Silence of the Fathers: Donkeyskin II,” in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. 349.
7. Giovan Francesco Straparola, The Facetious Nights of Straparola, trans. W. G. Waters (London: Society of Bibliophiles, 1901), p. 82.
8. Philip Lewis, Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996), p. 155.
9. W. R. S. Ralston, “Cinderella,” in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981), p. 41.
10. A. K. Ramanujan, ed., Folktales from India (New York: Pantheon, 1991), pp. 186–89.
11. Giambattista Basile, “The She-Bear,” in The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, trans. Benedetto Croce, ed. N. M. Penzer (London: Bodley Head, 1932), p. 170.
Rhodopis†
They tell the fabulous story that, when [Rhodopis] was bathing, an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried it to Memphis; and while the king was administering justice in the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung the sandal into his lap; and the king, stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal; and when she was found in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis, became the wife of the king, and when she died was honoured with the above-mentioned tomb.
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† The story of Rhodopis was told in the 1st century B.C.E. by the Greek historian Strabo in his work Geography. Reprinted from Geography, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library Volume 267 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1928; reprint 1935, 1949), IV:391. Loeb Classical Library® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Yeh-hsien†
Among the people of the south there is a tradition that before the Ch’in and Han dynasties there was a cave-master called Wu. The aborigines called the place the Wu cave. He married two wives. One wife died. She had a daughter called Yeh-hsien, who from childhood was intelligent and good at making pottery on the wheel. Her father loved her. After some years the father died, and she was ill-treated by her step-mother, who always made her collect firewood in dangerous places and draw water from deep pools. She once got a fish about two inches long, with red fins and golden eyes. She put it into a bowl of water. It grew bigger every day, and after she had changed the bowl several times she could find no bowl big enough for it, so she threw it into the back pond. Whatever food was left over from meals she put into the water to feed it. When she came to the pond, the fish always exposed its head and pillowed it on the bank; but when anyone else came, it did not come out. The step-mother knew about this, but when she watched for it, it did not once appear. So she tricked the girl, saying, “Haven’t you worked hard! I am going to give you a new dress.” She then made the girl change out of her tattered clothing. Afterwards she sent her to get water from another spring and reckoning that it was several hundred leagues, the step-mother at her leisure put on her daughter’s clothes, hid a sharp blade up her sleeve, and went to the pond. She called to the fish. The fish at once put its head out, and she chopped it off and killed it. The fish was now more than ten feet long. She served it up and it tasted twice as good as an ordinary fish. She hid the bones under the dung-hill. Next day, when the girl came to the pond, no fish appeared. She howled with grief in the open countryside, and suddenly there appeared a man with his hair loose over his shoulders and coarse clothes. He came down from the sky. He consoled her saying, “Don’t howl! Your step-mother has killed the fish and its bones are under the dung. You go back, take the fish’s bones and hide them in your room. Whatever you want, you have only to pray to them for it. It is bound to be granted.” The girl followed his advice, and was able to provide herself with gold, pearls, dresses and food whenever she wanted them.
When the time came for the cave-festival, the step-mother went, leaving the girl to keep watch over the fruit-trees in the garden. She waited till the step-mother was some way off, and then went herself, wearing a cloak of stuff spun from kingfisher feathers and shoes of gold. Her step-sister recognized her and said to the step-mother, “That’s very like my sister.” The step-mother suspected the same thing. The girl was aware of this and went away in such a hurry that she lost one shoe. It was picked up by one of the people of the cave. When the step-mother got home, she found the girl asleep, with her arms round one of the trees in the garden, and thought no more about it.
This cave was near to an island in the sea. On this island was a kingdom called T’o-han. Its soldiers had subdued twenty or thirty other islands and it had a coast-line of several thousand leagues. The caveman sold the shoe in T’o-han, and the ruler of T’o-han got it. He told those about him to put it on; but it was an inch too small even for the one among them that had the smallest foot. He ordered all the women in his kingdom to try it on; but there was not one that it fitted. It was light as down and made no noise even when treading on stone. The king of T’o-han thought the cave-man had got it unlawfully. He put him in prison and tortured him, but did not end by finding out where it had come from. So he threw it down at the wayside. Then they went everywhere through all the people’s houses and arrested them. If there was a woman’s shoe, they arrested them and told the king of T’o-han. He thought it strange, searched the inner-rooms and found Yeh-hsien. He made her put on the shoe, and it was true.
Yeh-hsien then came forward, wearing her cloak spun from halcyon feathers and her shoes. She was as beautiful as a heavenly being. She now began to render service to the king, and he took the fish-bones and Yeh-hsien, and brought them back to his country.
The step-mother and step-sister were shortly afterwards struck by flying stones, and died. The cave people were sorry for them and buried them in a stone-pit, which was called the Tomb of the Distressed Women. The men of the cave made mating-offerings there; any girl they prayed for there, they got. The king of T’o-han, when he got back to his kingdom made Yeh-hsien his chief wife. The first year the king was very greedy and by his prayers to the fish-bones got treasures and jade without limit. Next year, there was no response, so the king buried the fish-bones on the sea-shore. He covered them with a hundred bushels of pearls and bordered them with gold. Later there was a mutiny of some soldiers who had been conscripted and their general opened (the hiding-place) in order to make better provision
for his army. One night they (the bones) were washed away by the tide.
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† “The Chinese Cinderella Story,” Folk-Lore, vol. 58 (London: The Folklore Society, 1947), pp. 226–38. Narrated by Li Shih-yüan and recorded by Tuan Ch’eng-shih (c. 850 C.E.); translated by Arthur Waley (1947). Reprinted by permission of the Folklore Society. www.folklore-society.com.
BROTHERS GRIMM
Cinderella†
The wife of a rich man fell ill. When she realized that the end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said: “Dear child, if you are good and say your prayers, our dear Lord will always be with you, and I shall look down on you from heaven and always be with you.” Then she shut her eyes and passed away.
Every day the girl went to the grave of her mother and wept. She was always good and said her prayers. When winter came, the snow covered the grave with a white blanket, and when the sun had taken it off again in the spring, the rich man remarried.
His new wife brought with her two daughters, whose features were beautiful and white, but whose hearts were foul and black. This meant the beginning of a hard time for the poor stepchild. “Why should this silly goose be allowed to sit in the parlor with us?” the girls said. “If you want to eat bread, you’ll have to earn it. Out with the kitchen maid!”
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