100 Books, #28: Ella Enchanted

[osprey_archer]

Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted was my first fairy tale retelling: Cinderella with a twist. Well, a number of twists, but the main one is this: when the heroine, Ella, was born, the foolish fairy Lucinda gave her a gift. But it was a gift that was really a curse: Ella must always be obedient.

One of the reasons this book remains so fresh in my mind is that this curse provides endless fruit for speculation. We know that Ella will obey any order given to her, even if it threatens her life, and we know that she obeys orders even in languages that she doesn’t speak. But what are the exact parameters of her obedience?

If, for instance, she came to a stop sign in the middle of nowhere, and there was no one around to tell her to move, would she just have to stay there forever? What about orders that aren’t directed at her, but at someone else? “Go save little Timmy from the well!” barked Lassie. How could poor Ella even try to obey that? And must she obey orders even from animals? I am pretty sure sheepdogs consider it an order when they try to herd you, after all...

In short, this is not a very workable curse, but it’s a great literary device. It ratchets up the tension in any scene - and this means most scenes - where someone might give Ella an order. Will the ogres order Ella to let them eat her? Will her father order her to marry someone horrid? What awful new orders will Ella’s stepsister Hattie think of?

Hattie eventually hits on the idea of ordering Ella to give up her friendship with Areida. (Another one of the twists in the retelling is that Levine adds a couple of fun female characters to offset the stepmother and stepsisters: Ella’s fairy godmother, Mandy, a no-nonsense cook with crinkly gray hair who offers more mentorship than magical aid, and Areida, their boarding-school classmate from Ayortha who teaches Ella her language and jokes with her about the finishing school regimen.)

Ella is so horrified by the idea of hurting Areida that she runs away from boarding school that very night: a neat way of following the order (can’t be Areida’s friend if she’s on the other side of Kyrria, after all!) but also thumbing her nose at Hattie. Ella, as you can see, does not take her curse lying down. As she puts it: “Instead of making me docile, Lucinda’s curse made a rebel of me. Or perhaps I was that way naturally.” Although she doesn’t know how to break the curse, she hates being ordered around and, though she has to follow the letter of orders, always tries to wriggle out of their spirit.

One of the most chilling sequences in the book is the one where Ella asks Lucinda to take her curse away; and Lucinda, after thinking about it a bit, orders Ella to be happy about being obedient. Oh, it is terrifying! She almost traipses blissfully into marriage with a suitor her father finds for her, nearly forgetting about her love for Princess Charmont (or Char, as he is called) until Mandy saves her.

Ella’s relationship with Char is the last and perhaps greatest of the changes in this retelling. Rather than meeting at the ball, he and Ella meet long before - at her mother’s funeral, in fact, where they soften the awfulness of the day by making each other laugh. Their courtship consists of sliding down banisters, fighting ogres, and sending each other letters when he leaves the country on a diplomatic mission. An epistolary courtship! It is a most satisfactory romance.

***

In keeping with my “think of ideas for fic_corner stories!” project, I have given some thought to fic ideas for Ella Enchanted But I can’t actually think of any stories I would want for it. The romance wraps up so satisfactorily, and while I really like Ella and Areida's friendship, I'm not sure where a story would go with it.

Comments

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Those are the Bruce Coville ones, right? I read the first one...or two...yes, I think I read the first two, but they came out so far apart that I never finished the whole series because I forgot what had happened in the earlier ones. The heroine turns out to be a member of a unicorn-hunting family, right? Kara Diana Hunter.

[silverusagi]

Yeah, that's them. I really liked the first two. Though, you're probably not missing much by not reading the last two, lol. They just had a different tone, and about three POVs going, where the first books had all been from Kara's POV. They also seemed to be trying to do a "The Magician's Nephew" thing, where the whole origin of worlds is explained, and it's kind of like, I was good with just knowing it was a magical world adjacent to Earth, you know? Don't need more than that. IDK, it felt like the author had spent all the intervening years thinking of things he wished he had put into the first two.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I will take them off my Infinite Reading List, then. I've never been a big fan of "Let's explain this fantasy world down to the last drop!" style of fantasy - like, I read fantasy because I like the sense of mystery, and the last thing I want is for it to be solved.