Who Wrote "CINDERELLA"?

Muse, Apr 2004 by Wolkomir, Richard, Wolkomir, Joyce Rogers

Once upon a time, in fairy-tale land . . .

Snow White ate a poisoned apple. Rapunzel, in her tower, lowered her hair to reel up a prince. Meanwhile, a wolf put on Granny's bonnet to fool Red Riding Hood. And a witch plotted to turn Hansel and Gretel into little-kid sandwiches.

Do you know those old stories? Are you sure? Over the centuries, people have fiddled so much with fairy tales that each story comes in many variations. Take "Cinderella." Most of us know the Disney movie version, which ends with Cinderella forgiving her nasty stepmother and stepsisters, while sweet-singing doves flutter around. The movie is close to a French version written down in the 1600s by Charles Perrault. But you may also have read the German version, as told by the Grimm brothers. That's the one where one stepsister squeezes her foot into the tiny glass slipper only by cutting off her own big toe. The Grimms' version ends with birds, too. But they are not Disney doves: instead they are pigeons that peck out the stepsisters' eyes.

And that's just the start of it. One scholar counted 345 versions of "Cinderella." According to Maria Tatar, a Harvard University fairy-tale scholar, the story's earliest known version dates to A.D. 850 in China. In that version, the "fairy godmother" is a 10-foot-long fish. And the wicked stepmother and stepsisters are killed in the end by flying stones.

"Cinderella" is the champion, but most fairy tales exist in at least dozens of variations. What is the name of the little man who asks for a child in return for spinning straw into gold? Depending on which version you read, it is Titeliture, Doppelturk, Purzinigele, Batzibitzili, Panzimanzi, Whuppity Stoorie, Ricdin-Ricdon, Tom Tit Tot, Terry-Top-or Rumpelstiltskin.

Why are there so many versions of fairy tales? Where do the tales come from anyway? Were they originally children's stories? Why are they so violent? And why do children love them so much?

Have you ever noticed how much spinning goes on in fairy tales? In "Rumpelstiltskin" the miller's daughter must spin straw into gold. In "Sleeping Beauty," the princess falls asleep when she pricks her finger on a spindle. Scholars think that fairy tales were originally told by peasants at the fireside or in spinning circles to keep one another awake and relieve boredom. As the writer John Updike puts it, they were the television of their time. Some of the earliest illustrations for collections of the tales show the storyteller spinning as she talks. Sometimes there are children in the illustrations, but judging by the tales themselves, many of which are very rude, scholars think they were told to amuse adults.

The peasants could neither read nor write and so told stories strictly from memory. Tracing these memorized stories back to their origins is virtually impossible. There never was a sacred original, just endless retellings. Storytellers constantly adjusted their tales to match audiences. And stories changed between countries.

But this oral tradition came to an end when printing presses appeared and scholars began writing down the old stories. Among the earliest of the fairy-tale collectors was a French official, Charles Perrault, born in 1628. He chose the architects for two of the world's most famous buildings, Versailles and the Louvre. For fun, he met with a group of aristocratic women and their children to swap fairy tales. And in 1697 he published a collection of eight fairy tales called Stories, or Tales from Past Times, with Morals, also known as Tales of Mother Goose.

Perrault's audience consisted of sophisticated aristocrats, not rude peasants, and he altered the tales to suit them. The old peasant-told tales featured millers and half-starved woodcutters. "Perrault revised them to emphasize beautiful dresses and elegant architecture and ballrooms and servants," says Alison Lurie, a professor at Cornell University who studies fairy tales. In his stories, characters notice if a dress is out of style or another character behaves impolitely. Not surprisingly, most modern retellings of "Cinderella" are based on Perrault's version, and the illustrations show characters dressed in the fashions of his time.

Perrault focused on heroines because he was writing mainly for aristocratic women and their daughters. He also ended his stories with rhyming morals, mostly directed at girls. But how seriously should we take these morals? Perrault tells the story of Bluebeard, a maniac who chops up his wives and stores their bloody corpses in a little room. When Bluebeard is called away, he gives his new wife the key to the room and tells her she is not on any account to enter it. Of course she goes into the room, of course he finds out, and of course he tries to kill her for disobeying him. Perrault says the moral of the story is that curiosity can get women into trouble. But shouldn't the moral be: Don't marry a serial killer?

Maybe Perrault's morals were tongue-in-cheek. After all, he was a sophisticated man. Do you remember the plot of "Puss in Boots"? In an elaborate con, the cat convinces the king that a miller's son is a wealthy man called the Marquis de Carabas. Perrault says the moral is that hard work will get you farther than an inheritance, but in the story the miller's son barely lifts a finger. It would be nearer the truth to say that the moral is that you can get what you want if you are a good liar. Perrault's morals are so ill-suited to the tales that Tatar suggests they might be his way of poking sly fun at the attitudes of his aristocratic friends.