Cinderella Vs Grimm Brothers Essay

527 Words3 Pages

The many attributes about fairytales that make them so appealing are things such as, having a valuable lesson within, a hero or heroine in the story, and of course the classic “Happily Ever After” stories. Classics like Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel have not lost their meaning or valuable lessons within but have only modernized them by adding in contemporary elements in the recreations of the old books. The classic Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has been rewritten multiple times over the years and has had numerous changes made to it. The most recent Cinderella story has a more modernized atmosphere to it than the classics that started in the 1950s. In the new releases of these books, the meaning and lessons taught throughout them were not lost but only enhanced by adding elements of current reality. Cinderella has always been a movie that is every girls dream; to find a handsome prince and live happily ever after, and even in the rewrite, this dream is not lost but only enriched with a fancier gown and breath taking glass slippers. The classic created by the Grimm Brothers is more …show more content…

The most essential alteration in the text of "Hansel and Gretel" is transformation of the children's mother into a stepmother (Ashliman, 2000). In both the manuscript version and the first printed edition of this tale the woodcutter's wife is identified unmistakably and repeatedly as "the mother" (Ashliman, 2000). The Grimms' final version of the famous tale (seventh edition, 1857) refers to the woodcutter's wife once as "the stepmother," twice as "the mother," and about a dozen times generically as "the woman”(Ashliman, 2000). In keeping with revisions made to other tales, Wilhelm added numerous small embellishments to "Hansel and Gretel," making the tale more dramatic, more literary, and more sentimental in succeeding editions (Ashliman,