I’m tired of hearing people say “Disney’s Cinderella is sanitized. In the original tale, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to make the slipper fit and get their eyes pecked out by birds in the end.”
I understand this mistake. I’m sure a lot of people buy copies of the complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, see their tale of Aschenputtel translated as “Cinderella”, and assume what they’re reading is the “original” version of the tale. Or else they see Into the Woods and make the same assumption, because Sondheim and Lapine chose to base their Cinderella plot line on the Grimms’ Aschenputtel instead of on the more familiar version. It’s an understandable mistake. But I’m still tired of seeing it.
The Brothers Grimm didn’t originate the story of Cinderella. Their version, where there is no fairy godmother, the heroine gets her elegant clothes from a tree on her mother’s grave, and where yes, the stepsisters do cut off parts of their feet and get their eyes pecked out in the end, is not the “original.” Nor did Disney create the familiar version with the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, and the lack of any foot-cutting or eye-pecking.
If you really want the “original” version of the story, you’d have to go back to the 1st century Greco-Egyptian legend of Rhodopis. That tale is just this: “A Greek courtesan is bathing one day, when an eagle snatches up her sandal and carries it to the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh searches for the owner of the sandal, finds her and makes her his queen.”
Or, if you want the first version of the entire plot, with a stepdaughter reduced to servitude by her stepmother, a special event that she’s forbidden to attend, fine clothes and shoes given to her by magic so she can attend, and her royal future husband finding her shoe after she loses it while running away, then it’s the Chinese tale of Ye Xian you’re looking for. In that version, she gets her clothes from the bones of a fish that was her only friend until her stepmother caught it and ate it.
But if you want the Cinderella story that Disney’s film was directly based on, then the version you want is the version by the French author Charles Perrault. His Cendrillon is the Cinderella story that became the best known in the Western world. His version features the fairy godmother, the pumpkin turned into a coach, mice into horses, etc, and no blood or grisly punishments for anyone. It was published in 1697. The Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, with the tree on the grave, the foot-cutting, etc. was first published in 1812.
The Grimms’ grisly-edged version might feel older and more primitive while Perrault’s pretty version feels like a sanitized retelling, but such isn’t the case. They’re just two different countries’ variations on the tale, French and German, and Perrault’s is older. Nor is the Disney film sanitized. It’s based on Perrault.
#i’m mostly taking from perrault’s version but i want to take elements from the others too#they’re all so interesting
One of my favorite retellings is the YA novel Mechanica by Betsy Cornwell, a steampunk retelling where the Cinderella character is an inventor, and one of my favorite aspects of it is the way it draws on different versions of the story. Besides Perrault and Grimm, it also takes some significant inspiration from Ye Xian by giving the heroine an animal friend (in this case a tiny, sentient mechanical horse her mother built) which her stepfamily kills, but which later comes back in a different form to help take her to the ball. That aspect of the story is common in Asian variants, but almost unheard of in Western versions, yet it definitely adds some poignancy and heart to the tale. The book also has some clever allusions to the Disney version, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Ever After and other retellings.
