Fairy Tale Project: Cinderella

Yay! We finally got back to our fairy tale project!

And, wow, there really are a lot of versions of Cinderella!

Some of the versions can get extremely dark - did you know that Grimm's version include the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to try to fit the shoe? And then getting their eyes pecked out by birds as retribution for their treatment of Cinderella? Yikes.

The Kid doesn't like her stories to be that dark, so we went a different direction: Cinderella stories from around the world. I had no idea how much the stories varied. Here's what we read:

Cinderella by Loek Koopmans (based on the Charles Perrault version)
The Golden Sandal by Rebecca Hickox
The Rough-Face Girl by Rafe Martin
The Korean Cinderella by Shirley Climo
The Egyptian Cinderella by Shirley Climo
The Irish Cinderlad by Shirley Climo
Cinderlily by David Ellwand (doesn't really fit in with the round-the-world theme, but pretty and whimsical)

We could have gone on and on. The versions above were chosen because they were readily on my library's shelves the day we went.

The discussions we had from this were quite interesting. I've always thought the tale a little ridiculous with the they-danced-for-a-few-hours-and-then-the-prince-was-utterly-obsessed-and-they-decided-to-marry-from-this-one-interaction bit. But The Golden Sandal is set in a time and place that includes arranged marriages, so the two never even meet until they are betrothed! The Kid didn't know anything about this custom, and we talked about how marriage is treated in different cultures and during different times.

After reading them all, we talked about what made a Cinderella story a "Cinderella story". Many of the versions were big departures from the story known in the U.S. The common threads we found were that the "Cinderella" character had to be badly treated by at least some family members, there had to be a very desirable male, there had to be a "test" of some sort (like fitting the glass slipper), and there was always some element of magic/supernatural. All the rest of what we know as a Cinderella story is quite negotiable in other versions.

The Kid wrote her own version, with the only "rule" being that she had to follow the things we had outlined as being non-negotiable for Cinderella stories. And since she is learning to type, she was determined to write it herself, so this is the first Fairy Tale Project that I haven't taken dictation for! She is so proud of the story that she wrote all on her own!