Criticism In Perrault's Cinderella

Perrault was born to an upper middle class family in Paris, France in 1628. He was a lawyer who wrote verses from the tales he heard. According to him, he did not record the tales as he was being told, rather, “adapted folk material to his own theories of juvenile letters” (Perrault 1977: 5). He wrote a version of Cinderella in 1697 from a moralist point of view, hence the opening,

Once upon a time there was a gentleman who took the haughtiest and proudest woman in the world for his second wife. She had two daughters with the same temperament and exact appearance. On the other hand, the husband had a daughter whose gentleness and goodness were without parallel. She got it from her mother, who had been the best person in the world (The Great Fairy Tale 449-450).

Perrault wrote Cinderella “to please an aristocratic audience” (Tatar 1987). This audience are majorly men, who tend to decide what the acceptable behavior of a woman is. It is filled with messages on submission, dependence and beauty. There is no voice or agency for the oppressed. In this tale, readers are introduced to the two

She goes to her mother’s grave to weep and express the bitterness in her soul. Here, she is not all that passive or emotionless, however, she cries every day, which is a gender stereotype that it is feminine to cry. The father then prepares to go to a fair and asks what the young ladies want, the reply is very stereotypical – beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels. Cinderella however requests the first twig that brushes against her fathers’ hat. The father brings them what they wish for. And Cinderella plants the hazel twig on mother’s grave and waters it daily with her tears until it grows into a big tree. She talks to the bird on the tree who grants her wishes whenever she is in need. The tree is said to be an essential life force with connections to earth and mothers (Casdan, qtd.In Parsons