Caldecott Monday: Cinderella

[osprey_archer]

The Caldecott book for the week is Marcia Brown's Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper, and the illustrations are gorgeous! They're pen and ink outlines with great washes of color in them, like the world's most beautifully done coloring book, simply and lively and sometimes slyly funny, like the illustration where Cinderella tugs her stepsister's corset strings tight. Her stepsister looks so pleased about it, and Cinderella is pulling with all her might.

I'm so used to authors attempting to put their own stamp on the tale - in particular, attempting to give it a feminist spin - that it actually almost surprised me to read a plain retelling. Cinderella is sweet and beautiful and good, and her stepfamily is ugly and foul-tempered, and they all live in France in the 18th-ish century, and that's that.

In fact Cinderella is so good in this retelling that after her marriage to the prince, she not only brings her stepsisters to court - this is a 1950s picture book, so they do not of course cut their toes off in an attempt to fit into the glass slipper - but marries them off to noble lords, which is clearly their dream come true.

Now, I've never been a big fan of the ending of the stepfamily story in Drew Barrymore's Ever After, where the stepmother and mean stepsister end up working in the castle scullery - it seems so pettily vengeful to make them labor forever - but this seems like going to far in the other direction. Maybe you shouldn't marry your petty spiteful stepsisters into situations where they'll have power over yet MORE people, you know? Maybe just leave them in their house to stew over their loss of the prince.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, her images are really beautiful. I remember as a **very** little child being put off because the colors didn't stay in the lines, but when I got older, I loved the delicacy.

Maybe we're supposed to imagine that, abashed and ashamed, the stepsisters turned over a new leaf?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I like that idea. Perhaps now that they're away from their mother's influence they'll start to discover a kinder, gentler side to themselves.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Maybe you shouldn't marry your petty spiteful stepsisters into situations where they'll have power over yet MORE people, you know? Maybe just leave them in their house to stew over their loss of the prince.

I like it! It puts them in her debt, but in a way they can't easily complain about, which seems like a very shrewd thing to do. There's always the risk of them causing trouble at court, but that's an intrinsic problem of having a court in the first place and maybe Cinderella figures it's better to keep your enemies close and stick with the evils you know etc..

I mean, generally I agree that they shouldn't get more power over more people, but it makes sense if Cinderella's thinking like a princess and not like an ethicist.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. I think it depends very much just how powerful Cinderella's stepfamily is: if they're just country gentry or something, she should just leave them to their quiet obscurity, but if they're already a powerful family in their own right, then marrying off her stepsisters is very shrewd. Keeps them under her watch and ensures their marriages don't enable them to build up anti-Cinderella alliances.

Are there any Cinderella retellings that deal seriously with her adjustment to the power politics of princesshood afterward? I know of a couple where the prince turns out to be a jerk, but I can't think of any where princessing is difficult for all the other reasons it might be tough.