Rags to Riches: Cinderella and the American Dream
At its core, the story of "Cinderella" is a story about class mobility. In just about every culture in which some version of the story is told, a young girl is forced into a life of quite, impoverished, and yet righteous desperation, either by the cruelty of an evil stepmother or by the incestuous advances of her own father. She is then rescued from this state through a combination of her own hard work (often involving domestic chores) and the love of a prince or other powerful and wealthy character. The shape that the story seems to take is almost always that of a rags to riches tale - of the Cinderella character starting out poor and becoming rich. After having read and watched several versions of the story over the past week, however, I am starting to think that it may not actually be quite this simple.
The source of this complexity arises from differences in how the Cinderella character starts off in different versions of the story. In the version of the story that we often see being told today in the United States, we are either given very little information on the economic condition that the Cinderella character is originally born into or we are told that she has always been poor or at least solidly middle class. In Disney's Cinderella, for example, the only background that we are given is that her father loved her very much and then died, leaving her with the evil stepmother. Although the grandness of her house certainly seems to imply money, this is never made out to be a big deal, such that we are never really given much reason to see Cinderella as formerly rich. In more recent American versions of the story, such as the movie Pretty Woman, the Cinderella character is made out to have always been poor, making the rags to riches transformation even clearer.
This way of telling the Cinderella story stands in sharp contrast to how it has been told historically in most cultures. The version of the story recorded by the brothers Grimm, for example, begins by specifically telling us that Cinderella's father was a rich man, while in Perrault's "Donkeyskin," we are told that she is daughter of a king. This detail is fairly consistent across cultures, from the Indian "Story of the Black Cow" to the Egyptian "Princess in the Suit of Leather." While these stories are generally quite similar to the American versions described above, the inclusion of this detail does seem to significantly change the message from being one of class mobility to one of the restoration of an intrinsic ruling class. Like Homer's righteous beggar (who almost always turns out to be either a noble or a god in disguise), Cinderella only appears to be a symbol of some sort of equality, when she was, in fact, originally a symbol of a feudal status quo.
Interestingly, the adaption of these sorts of stories by Americans as stories of class mobility is by no means limited to the realm of fairy tales. To use an example from a particularly American art form, the first musical to become popular in the United States, Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, was viewed in a similar way. In the show, the main character Ralph, a low ranking sailor, falls in love with his Captains daughter, Josephine, but is not allowed to marry her due to his low status. The fact that he does eventually marry Josephine made the play popular in the United States as a supposed rejection of the European class system. A closer reading, however, seems to show that this was probably not the original intent, since Ralph is only able to actually marry Josephine when it is discovered that (you guessed it) he is actually of noble blood! Nonetheless, this "rags to riches" story line has since become a staple of musical theatre (and American culture in general) as a literary or dramatic representation of the American Dream.
In comparing these two versions of the rags to riches story - the one defending a rigid class structure and the other celebrating mobility - it seems to me at least that the latter is almost certainly the better one. However, this must be said with an important caveat - the story must be, as much as is possible, a true one. In other words, if we are to place the rags to riches story at the center of our culture, then there must actually be the possibility of economic mobility. In their musical Assassins, Stephan Sondheim and John Weidman question this notion in an examination of the stories of various presidential assassins through the lens of their failure to achieve the American Dream. In the end, the assassins try to kill their respective presidents in order to achieve some level of recognition in a culture that insists that anybody can be successful if they try hard enough, while the Balladeer character is so blinded by his near religious belief in the American Dream that he cannot seem to figure out why the others would be feeling so hopeless. Assassins certainly does not ask us to sympathize with these figures who had committed such horribly violent acts, but it does raise an interesting question - is it not possible that taking our own Cinderella story too seriously might result in it functioning, like the Grimm version, as something which actually prevents us from building a society of true mobility? Considering the nature of arguments being made by certain politicians against welfare programs and measures to address income inequality, I think that this is an important question to be asking.
The source of this complexity arises from differences in how the Cinderella character starts off in different versions of the story. In the version of the story that we often see being told today in the United States, we are either given very little information on the economic condition that the Cinderella character is originally born into or we are told that she has always been poor or at least solidly middle class. In Disney's Cinderella, for example, the only background that we are given is that her father loved her very much and then died, leaving her with the evil stepmother. Although the grandness of her house certainly seems to imply money, this is never made out to be a big deal, such that we are never really given much reason to see Cinderella as formerly rich. In more recent American versions of the story, such as the movie Pretty Woman, the Cinderella character is made out to have always been poor, making the rags to riches transformation even clearer.
This way of telling the Cinderella story stands in sharp contrast to how it has been told historically in most cultures. The version of the story recorded by the brothers Grimm, for example, begins by specifically telling us that Cinderella's father was a rich man, while in Perrault's "Donkeyskin," we are told that she is daughter of a king. This detail is fairly consistent across cultures, from the Indian "Story of the Black Cow" to the Egyptian "Princess in the Suit of Leather." While these stories are generally quite similar to the American versions described above, the inclusion of this detail does seem to significantly change the message from being one of class mobility to one of the restoration of an intrinsic ruling class. Like Homer's righteous beggar (who almost always turns out to be either a noble or a god in disguise), Cinderella only appears to be a symbol of some sort of equality, when she was, in fact, originally a symbol of a feudal status quo.
Interestingly, the adaption of these sorts of stories by Americans as stories of class mobility is by no means limited to the realm of fairy tales. To use an example from a particularly American art form, the first musical to become popular in the United States, Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, was viewed in a similar way. In the show, the main character Ralph, a low ranking sailor, falls in love with his Captains daughter, Josephine, but is not allowed to marry her due to his low status. The fact that he does eventually marry Josephine made the play popular in the United States as a supposed rejection of the European class system. A closer reading, however, seems to show that this was probably not the original intent, since Ralph is only able to actually marry Josephine when it is discovered that (you guessed it) he is actually of noble blood! Nonetheless, this "rags to riches" story line has since become a staple of musical theatre (and American culture in general) as a literary or dramatic representation of the American Dream.
In comparing these two versions of the rags to riches story - the one defending a rigid class structure and the other celebrating mobility - it seems to me at least that the latter is almost certainly the better one. However, this must be said with an important caveat - the story must be, as much as is possible, a true one. In other words, if we are to place the rags to riches story at the center of our culture, then there must actually be the possibility of economic mobility. In their musical Assassins, Stephan Sondheim and John Weidman question this notion in an examination of the stories of various presidential assassins through the lens of their failure to achieve the American Dream. In the end, the assassins try to kill their respective presidents in order to achieve some level of recognition in a culture that insists that anybody can be successful if they try hard enough, while the Balladeer character is so blinded by his near religious belief in the American Dream that he cannot seem to figure out why the others would be feeling so hopeless. Assassins certainly does not ask us to sympathize with these figures who had committed such horribly violent acts, but it does raise an interesting question - is it not possible that taking our own Cinderella story too seriously might result in it functioning, like the Grimm version, as something which actually prevents us from building a society of true mobility? Considering the nature of arguments being made by certain politicians against welfare programs and measures to address income inequality, I think that this is an important question to be asking.
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