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Cinderella 2 The Stolen Identity

© Mary C. Legg

Ask a class of students which is their favorite story, after a few minutes of hand-waving and jabbering, the consensus may be Cinderella. Universally appealing, the name appears frequently in romance novels and the perennial film industry with the boy-meets-girl happily-ever-after ending. Is that all there is?

The frosting on the cake may attract the surreptitious fingers of a passerby or five-year old, but not satisfy the appetite of a mature person without making them ill. How much of the story is actually devoted to the boy-girl meeting? Not much in comparison to the hardship and the trials that she goes through. Looking deeper, there are reasons why the reader identifies and sympathises with Cinderella and why the story is a favorite.

A brief look into the Grimm biography reveals that the boys were members of a large, but impecunious family of six children when their father died unexpectedly in 1796, leaving them with no place to live and no income for survival. The story of Cinderella opens with the deciding crisis that shapes her character and fate. Her mother calls the child to her deathbed with the exhortation:

"Dear child, be pious and good, and God will always take care of you, and I will look down upon you from heaven, and will be with you."

(Grimms' Fairy Tales, Wordsworth Edition, c 1993 ISBN 1-85326-101-7)

Certainly, the Grimm brothers knew of hardships and tests that confronted them as they struggled to assist their mother in keeping their family alive and together, as well as supporting themselves early on. Certainly, they disdained the ways ill-gotten gain and defended the spirit of German nationalism against the invading Napoleonic imperialism. The story is based clearly upon their own personal values and principles, presenting allegory that can be interpreted several ways. Central to the story is the injustice of stolen identity: an ursurped rightful social position by invasive and abusive authoritarian control. Within a short time of the mother's death, winter descends, covering the world in white. A few months later, the father took a new wife. Perfidious behaviour in a world of strict religious observations, for not even a year has passed since his wife's death.

The symbols are clear as Cinderella enters the winter of her young life. Although the daughter of a wealthy man, she lives with deprivation-- her rightful position as heiress is ursurped. A plot good for the newspaper columns of bungled murders as greedy conspirators prey on rich heiresses, but frequently get caught in the mayhem of the legal courts disposing properties of the deceased. The father, a merchant, becomes absent and negligent in his obligations to Cinderella. Turning a blind eye, he appeases the new mistress of his life.

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