The Story Of Cinderella By Simone De Beauvoir

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Recommended: Gender roles in fairytales

Over years fairytales have taught children that every thing in life is a “happy ever after”, when in reality that is not always the case. Anne Sexton’s poem version of the story of Cinderella is a more contorted version of the classic tale. She focuses on the dark and graphic descriptions of how Cinderella was lead to her happy ever after. Alongside this fairytale, there is a theory of “the Other” that Simone de Beauvoir develops throughout her story of The Second Sex. The theory of “the Other” is a degrading way of describing women, as objects.
It is seen that once upon a time, decades ago, woman had accepted the role as the object. Men are known as the subject. Men need and desire woman, or the object when they come home everyday. Speaking in a literature and grammar sense, a sentence with just a subject is incomplete. It must be followed up with an object. Relating this notion to people is that men are incomplete without woman. Simone de Beauvoir explains this throughout the story that without women there is nothing men have to bounce off of. Beauvoir states, “…through her is made unceasingly the passage from hope to frustration, from hate to love, from good to evil, from evil to good,” (de Beauvoir 144). This quote coincides with the cliché that without evil there is no good. A man needs that balance of life when he is in a bad place to have a woman show him the good, or even the other way around so that he is taught everyday lessons.
Back in the day when woman did not take a stand is when they were portrayed as “the Other”. Simone de Beauvoir speaks about the idea of women when she says, “She is made guardian of morals; servant to man, servant of the powers that be, she will tenderly guide her children along appointed...

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...man as known as the good and the Other (or woman) is known as the evil. One must work to make the opposites attract.
Fairytales are meant for us to remember that “happy ever after” is another way of saying everything will balance out and eventually be okay. These two stories portray the image of “the Other” very similarly. In Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, they describe it as evil but needed. And in the poem Cinderella by Anne Sexton it shows the aspects of how “the Other” is an object. All of these aspects within the two stories come together when it comes to serving and catering to others as well as making a man feel whole. In order for the world to stop degrading woman as objects they must become more assertive.

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