Tale of the Times The tale of Cinderella has been passed down from generation to generation, in which a young girl transforms from “rags to riches” and overcomes adversity to achieve her “happily ever after”. It is her ability to achieve this happy ending, in spite of the obstacles her wicked stepmother and sisters place in her way, that makes Cinderella an idyllic character; however, it is most often overlooked that in doing so she changes who she is entirely. Despite this, Cinderella is suggested to be the embodiment of all a young woman should aspire to become, Perrault goes as far as saying “beauty in a woman is rare…. Graciousness, however, is priceless” and Cinderella “was no less good than beautiful”. Throughout this essay, I will be …show more content…
While Cinderella is said to have a kind and gracious nature, these are not the qualities that gain her social approval, but instead, it is her unparalleled beauty and her magically transformed attire that does the deed. The moment she walks in the ball “[t]here [is] immediately a profound silence. Everyone stopped dancing, and the violins ceased to play so entranced was everyone with the singular beauties of the unknown newcomer. Nothing was then heard but a confused noise of, “How beautiful she is!””. This tells a reader that in order to be accepted you must change yourself to what society wants to see. Had Cinderella walked into the ball in her usually clothing and natural beauty yet still possessing her kind and graciousness, it is likely she would have been escorted out of the ball by guards rather than into the ball by the prince himself. When Cinderella attends the second ball in even finer clothing than the first, she captivates the Prince’s …show more content…
Obedient and tolerant Cinderella takes orders from her stepmother and sisters without defending her worth even once, in fact, she begins to accept that she will only ever be a Cinderwench. We can arrive at this understanding through Cinderella’s own words, “you only jeer me; it is not for such as I am to go to such a place”. Cinderella truly believes that she is not good enough to be in such imperial company, so instead she “followed them with her eyes as long as she could [and] when she lost sight of them, she started to cry”. Adding to the already weak depiction Perrault gives us of Cinderella, we see her so passively accept her pitiful destiny as a Cinderwench when she begins to cry. At which point the true heroic character of the story, her fairy godmother, shows her that she too is good enough to go to the ball and that she possesses the capacity for greatness. However, yet again this greatness comes at the expense of self-repression and conformity. Once Cinderella is transformed beyond the point of recognition, she finds value within herself. After leaving a trace of her mirage behind in the form of a glass slipper, the prince sets out to find the woman that fits the shoe assuming that she will be his missing princess. This is the point in which a reader might think to themselves, wouldn’t he recognize her voice or personality or even her beauty beneath