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Cinderella

Once upon a time, in a land far away, lived a girl by the name of Cinderella. Now depending on the version of Cinderella a person reads, the story might be different, but the ending is always the same; they live happily ever after. Cinderella is always considered the heroine and the stepmother and stepsisters villains. She was abused and tortured by her stepmother and stepsisters, while her father ignored it all. Now I know growing up I thought of the stepmother and stepsisters as the worst people imaginable. They were so mean and unreasonable for no reason, and I never understood why. In Jaqueline M. Schectman’s essay, “‘Cinderella’ and the Lost of Father-Love,” she brings up the idea of how the stepmother and her children ended up the way they are and how it is might be possible to empathize with them rather then loathe.

Now we all know that the beginning of the story starts with Cinderella’s original mother dying, leaving her and the father. He then married, “his second wife the proudest and haughtiest woman imaginable. She had two daughters of the same character, who took after their mother in everyway” (Perrault 548). Once the father and stepmother were married, Cinderella was downgraded to a servant. “They took away her fine clothes and gave her an old gray dress and wooden shoes to wear… From then on she had to do all the work, getting up before daybreak, carrying water, lighting fires, cooking and washing” (Grimm and Grimm 553). Now I cannot personally understand how a women, who is a mother to her own children can do something like this to another child that she should care about as much as her own. But in Schectman’s essay she discusses how the stepmother’s, “widowhood has left her hard and dry. Her husband and the father of her family has gone… She has had to raise her family alone… She’s determined that her daughters have a better life than she… Her stepchild is a mere distraction from her overall campaign” (Schectman 602). Now, from experience, I...