Cinderella Ate My Daughter (11 page)

There is no pumpkin in the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel,” no footmen, not even a fairy godmother. Disney cribbed those from “Cendrillon,” a seventeenth-century French version by Charles Perrault. Instead, Jacob and Wilhelm’s heroine plants a hazel branch on her dead mother’s grave, waters it with her tears, and watches it grow into an enchanted tree. Whenever she wishes for something—such as, oh, a gown for the ball—a dove perched among the leaves tosses it down to her. I liked that: her mother’s love was so powerful that it transcended death. Admittedly, the story still sucks for stepmoms. If it is any comfort, psychologists say that splitting the mother into two characters—one good and one evil—serves a developmental purpose: it helps kids work through their inevitable resentment against Mom without directly copping to it. To which my stepmother friends respond: “Whatever.”

That aside, making the mother the source of the magic interested me. One of the things I had found most disturbing about the Disney Princesses was that somehow the wand had been transferred to the girl. The heroines of the stories had never before been magic—not even in the studio’s own movies. It was not enough that the writers had whacked all the mothers and made their surrogates loathsome; now they had given the boot to the fairy godmother as well—the sole remaining symbol of adult female guidance and protection. It was almost sinister, the implication that women had no place in girls’ development. And it certainly reflected the current marketing mentality—cut out the middleman (or, in this case, woman), and sell directly to the child. I often wonder what the long-term results of that change will be: rather than raising a generation of Cinderellas, we may actually be cultivating a legion of stepsisters—spoiled, self-centered materialists, superficially charming but without the depth or means for authentic transformation.

I say: let’s bring back that tree!

But the biggest surprise of “Aschenputtel” is that it’s not about landing the prince. It is about the girl herself: her strength, her perseverance, her cleverness. It is a story, really, about her evolution from child to woman. It is Cinderella herself who plants the magic tree and requests the finery for the ball (which is celebrated over the course of three days). She walks to the party each night rather than traveling by enchanted coach. She leaves not because she has some arbitrarily imposed curfew but because she has danced enough. Then she escapes both the pursuing prince and her own father by hiding in a dovecote or nimbly scaling a tree. When the prince finally comes a-calling, shoe in hand, Cinderella greets him dressed in her sooty rags. He may be looking for the beauty with the dainty foot, but, as Joan Gould, the author of
Spinning Straw into Gold
, notes, she demands that he witness the woman she has been, dirt and all, not just the one she will become. So while he provides the occasion for her transformation, he is not the one responsible for it—she can only do that herself.

Not bad for a pair of medieval chauvinists. Except for this: as usual, the stepsisters try on the tiny golden slipper before Cinderella does; in order to jam their big fat clodhoppers into it, one slices off her heel and the other her toe. Some fancy academic might see that as a metaphor, a warning to girls against contorting themselves to fit unattainable standards of beauty, but, truly, it is just gross. And the Grimms seem to relish it, describing how the sisters grit their teeth, how the blood “spurts” from the shoe, staining their white stockings. Even Cinderella, seemingly so gracious, proves distressingly vengeful in the end. She invites the stepsisters to join her wedding party, but as they enter the church, one on either side of her, doves (again, perhaps, representing her mother) perched on the bride’s shoulders peck out their eyes. That’s right: Peck. Out. Their. Eyes. Imagine
those
wedding photos.

Still, I thought, remembering Bettelheim, I would not want to permanently scar my kid by denying her the blinding of the stepsisters. Maybe I could work up to it, start with something easier, like, I don’t know, “Rumpelstiltskin.” My memory of that story was a little vague, something about a gnome spinning a roomful of straw into gold and flying away on a spoon. How bad could that be?

A few days after the gun incident, I decided to give it a try. I hauled out my annotated Grimms, a 462-page tome with a navy-and-gold filigree cover. Daisy was, well, enchanted. We flipped through, examining its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century illustrations (Bettelheim, who believed that pictures corrupt the power of the text, would have disapproved). Then I started reading.

“Once upon a time…” I began.

At the sound of those ageless words, Daisy snuggled close. I kept going: “there lived a miller who was very poor, but had a beautiful daughter.” Okay, I thought, as the story moved forward, maybe the girl is treated like chattel by her dad and is supposed to be delighted to marry the greedy king who initially imprisoned and threatened to kill her if she did not make him rich, but at least there’s no gushing blood. And the girl is resourceful, tricking the gnome and saving her baby. She even has a vaudevillian’s sense of dramatic timing, stringing her tormentor along, pretending she does not know who he is until…

“Could your name possibly be,
Rumpelstiltskin
?”

Daisy’s eyes shone as I continued. “The little man screamed and in his rage he stamped his right foot so hard that it went into the ground right up to his waist. Then in his fury he seized his left foot with both hands…”

My eye skipped ahead but it was too late: “ . . . and tore himself asunder,” I finished lamely.

Yikes! What happened to the spoon?

“He did what, Mommy?” Daisy asked, confused.

“Well,” I said, “he was so mad, he ripped himself in half.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding.

Then: “Read another!” she commanded.

What to do? I considered ditching the Grimms for Hans Christian Andersen, maybe trying the original “The Little Mermaid.” I have already grumbled about Disney’s Ariel, who gives up her
voice
to get a guy. What kind of message is that? I ask you. I suddenly recalled, though, that Ariel got off easy compared with her precursor. In the Andersen version, the sea witch does not painlessly extract the mermaid’s voice. Oh, no. She grabs a big old knife and hacks out the poor creature’s tongue. Once the girl has her land legs, every step feels like “walking on knife blades so sharp the blood must flow,” yet she dances for the prince on command, never hinting at the agony it causes her. As in the Disney film, the prince seems to return her love but then heaves her over for someone else, a princess he wrongly believes has saved his life. In this version, however, he never discovers the truth; he marries the other woman, explaining to the mermaid that he knows she would want him to be happy. Then the lout asks her to hold up the train of his bride’s gown during the shipboard ceremony—and
she does it
, knowing all along that his marriage to another means her demise. Late that night, the mermaid’s sisters appear; they have shorn their hair and traded it to the sea witch for a magic dagger. All the little mermaid has to do is stab the prince in his heartless heart; his blood on her legs will fuse them back into a fish tail and she will survive. But she can’t do it. Instead, she flings herself overboard and disintegrates into sea foam. The only nod to happily-ever-after is that she eventually becomes a “daughter of the air” who, after three hundred years of good deeds,
might
earn an immortal soul. There may be valuable lessons in all of this—don’t change for a guy; don’t let him treat you like dirt; you deserve to be loved for what is special, magical, unique about you. But jeez, what a buzz kill.

So “The Little Mermaid” was out. But Daisy was still sitting next to me, looking expectant. Okay, Bruno, I thought. It’s now or never. I took a deep breath and turned to “Cinderella.”

Daisy listened intently for a while, then rolled onto her back and began kicking her legs in the air.

“Do you want me to stop, honey?” I said hopefully.

“No,” she said firmly.

So I read it, the whole thing, without censorship, explanation, or any inflection to influence her reaction. Just as Bettelheim said I should. Then I asked what she thought.

“Eh,” she said, waggling her hand.

“You didn’t like it?”

“It was creepy,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “The eye part. Yuck.”

“Would you ever want to hear it again?”

She thought about that for a moment. “No,” she said, then jumped off the couch and skipped away, chanting “Roo coo coo! Roo coo coo! Blood is dripping from the shoe!” and laughing.

Later, I would search out lesser-known traditional fairy tales about spunky, ingenious girls. I was surprised to find how many there were—at least as many as stories that celebrated the bravery of boys or men, perhaps more. Yet none was problem-free: In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the heroine shrewdly foiled her fiancé’s plot to murder her—after she secretly watched him tear off another young woman’s clothes, hack her body into pieces, and salt it. In “Fitcher’s Bird” a feisty girl saved her sisters from an evil wizard who had kidnapped them—by reassembling their limbs, which he had severed so that their “blood ran down all over the floor.” In “Furrypelts,” a Cinderella variant, a princess fearlessly took control of her destiny, fleeing her castle upon discovering she would be forced into marriage—to her father. “The Six Swans,” in which a princess took a seven-year vow of silence to save her cursed brothers, became a favorite with Daisy even though the evil mother-in-law took advantage of the heroine’s muteness by stealing each of her three babies upon their births, smearing chicken’s blood on the princess’s unspeaking mouth, then telling her son that the girl had eaten them (Mom-in-Law also tries to convince the castle cook to make the infants into a stew and feed them to their father). I loved Diane Wolkstein’s adaptation of “The Glass Mountain,” which amped up the princess’s role in her own fate, but Daisy rejected it (as would Dr. Bruno, I reckon). She was partial to an Algonquin Indian legend—admittedly not an official fairy tale—about a young bride who saved herself and her husband from cannibal demons, but… cannibals? I put the kibosh on that. No matter how macabre the stories got, though, Daisy did not flinch. None gave her the kind of nightmares that the movie version of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
had.

Score one for Bettelheim.

Compared with Stephenie Meyer, the Grimms come off like Andrea Dworkin. Meyer, a Mormon homemaker turned novelist, is the author of the most successful fairy tale in recent memory: the
Twilight
saga. Initially imagined in a “vivid dream,” the four-book series had, at this writing, sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, while films based on the first two had grossed more than a billion dollars. No wonder it has been compared to crack for teenage girls.

Twilight
follows the ethereally named Bella Swan, who, at age sixteen, moves in with her father in the Pacific Northwest so Mom can tag behind her new hubby on the minor-league baseball circuit. On the first day of school, Bella meets the prince of her new hometown’s royalty: the hypnotically handsome, brilliant, mysterious, wealthy—did I say handsome?—Edward, who at first seems repelled by her. But no, she has merely confused uncontrollable attraction with open disgust: Edward, it turns out, is a “vegetarian” vampire (that is, he does not feed on humans) who finds the scent of Bella’s blood intoxicating. Being near him puts her in mortal danger, yet she is powerless to resist. As is he. The two fall in love, and for some 2,444 pages (or about 483 minutes of film) pursue their chaste, star-crossed romance, which is further complicated by Jacob Black, a hunky werewolf, also in love with Bella, whose pack members despise vampires.

But it is Bella, not the supernaturals she falls in with, who is the true horror show here, at least as a female role model. She lives solely for her man; when he leaves her in
New Moon
, the series’ second installment—something about needing to protect her from him, which sounds like the vamp version of “It’s not you, babe, it’s
me
”—she is willing to die for him as well. Realizing that she conjures Edward’s image at times of extreme danger, Bella flings herself off a cliff into a stormy sea and nearly drowns: “I thought briefly of the clichés, about how you’re supposed to see your life flash before your eyes. I was so much luckier. Who wanted to see a rerun, anyway? I saw
him,
and I had no will to fight… . Why would I fight when I was so happy where I was?”

Oh yeah
, I want my daughter to be
that
girl.

Even before the self-destructiveness kicks in, Bella has little to recommend her. Scratch that: absolutely
nothing
to recommend her. She is neither smart, interesting, kind, graceful, nor even pretty—more Ugly Duckling than Bella Swan. She is in perpetual need of rescue. She pines for an emotionally unavailable guy who simultaneously vows to protect her and warns that his love for her might make him kill her. She repeatedly reminds him that he is too good for her, and, except for the little business about his being undead, it is hard to disagree. Edward’s (and Jacob’s) attraction to Bella—at least in the books—is inexplicable.

There has been much hand-wringing over why today’s girls would go for such claptrap. Colette Dowling, whose best seller
The Cinderella Complex
explored women’s unconscious resistance to independence, has suggested that perhaps girls still feel “some fear they can’t really take care of themselves.” The social critic Laura Miller mused on
Salon
that “some things, it seems, are even harder to kill than vampires”—specifically, the dream of being rescued by a dreamy-looking, powerful man who instantly perceives how special you are: who will support you, adore you, and cushion you from life’s hardships. Yet why should that fantasy be dead or even surprising? We have drilled our daughters in it from the time they wore diapers—diapers decorated with Disney Princesses.