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"Cinderella" is a story we all know. Despite a range of oral tales from many cultures, and some distinctly different literary incarnations, one "Cinderella" eclipsed the others in English. In 1950, Disney Studios produced this version in cinematic form. In this way it is now perpetuated globally.
Fixed in print, a folktale becomes a different creation, losing the nuances of performance and gaining the literary conventions of its day. When illustration is added, another level of interpretation is formed and perpetuated.
The narrative now popularly known as "Cinderella" was published originally with only one picture-Cinderella fleeing from the ball, leaving her slipper behind. As it was propagated in English books during the nineteenth century, this tale began to acquire what we might call signature images.1
Studying surviving editions of "Cinderella" dating from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century in the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum's National Art Library, I discovered a great variety of treatments. Nevertheless, in many English versions, both writers and illustrators seem to be constructing an ideology that was also being developed in visual art and in the popular press.2
By the early twentieth century, a fairly standard form of "Cinderella" had emerged in most English editions-an adaptation of the French tale written by Charles Perrault and published in 1698: "Cendrillon ou la Petite Pentoufle de Verre." Perrault's tale had been addressed largely to an adult and highly sophisticated audience. By the late eighteenth century, however, it had been watered down in English cheap editions, or chapbooks, read by adults and children alike. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it entered the realm of popular entertainment in pantomime theater.
Why Perrault's story, above all others? Considering its origins, there were many contestants for the dominant tale. "Cinderella" is really a large family of tales first analyzed by folklorists in the nineteenth century. Studying more than 300 related narratives from Europe and Asia, Marian Roalfe Cox identified Cinderella stories according to the presence of certain themes: an abused child, rescue through some reincarnation of the dead mother, recognition, and marriage.
The earliest known Cinderella story is actually a literary version from ninth-century China. Already it has the familiar elements. Yeh-hsien (Cinderella) has lost both her father and mother...