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7. Giving Up the Ghost: From “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufl e de verre” to “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper” and “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost”
- Wayne State University Press
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The Bloody Chamber contains retellings of well-known tales such as “Bluebeard ,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” “Cinderella” is surprisingly absent from the collection, especially when we consider that Angela Carter had translated “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” for The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. In her 1977 journal Carter even plans to write a “very primitive, very archaic” Cinderella story. And yet her “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost” would be published nearly ten years later. One part, “The Burned Child,” first appeared in Cosmopolitan in July 1987 and in Merveilles et Contes later that year (1.2, December 1987). The complete threefold text, composed of “The Mutilated Girls,” “The Burned Child,” and “Travelling Clothes,” was anthologized in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (1987) and reprinted in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993).1 Whereas Carter’s translation of Perrault, “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper,” seeks to recover a preromantic tradition compatible with her pedagogical aims, the rewriting for adults harks back to a folk tradition associated with the Grimms in contrapuntal fashion. Upon reviewing the first English translation of the German legends for The Guardian, Carter declared that “no home was complete” without a copy of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen.2 And it is to the Grimm brothers’ version of Cinderella (or rather Ashputtle) that Carter returned in “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost.” Unlike Carter’s translation for children, whose message is neatly encapsulated in the moral, “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost” celebrates the mutability of the tale and its openness to (re)interpretation.3 The subtitle, Giving Up the Ghost from “cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” to “cinderella: or, the little glass slipper” and “ashputtle or the mother’s ghost” 7 264 c hapter 7 “Three Versions of One Story,” already underlines this; there is no canonical version of the tale but rather a multiplicity of unique retellings. Unsurprisingly , Perrault’s “Cinderella” and the Grimms’ “Ashputtle” generated strikingly different responses from Carter. Her translation of the worldly and humorous French conte communicates a matter-of-fact message to young girls about how to get on in the world and marry happily. In contrast , her rewriting of the German Märchen captures the cruelty, dark poetry , and disturbing psychological insights of ancient folktales about mothers who magically return from the grave to help—but also to haunt—their mistreated daughters. Carter’s double take on Cinderella/Ashputtle highlights significant differences in the plot, language, motifs, tone, and atmosphere of Perrault’s and the Grimms’ texts. And yet both the translation and the rewriting amalgamate them in subtle ways, revealing the palimpsestic dimension of the fairy-tale tradition and showing how fusion can be used as a creative strategy.4 Markedly different traditions of the tale indeed tend to become mixed in the process of translation, adaptation, and re-creation. Whereas Carter’s Perrault-based translation is colored by memories of the Grimms’ Märchen, her Grimm-based rewriting still contains traces of Perrault’s text, starting with its title: “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” becomes “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost.” Although the name of the heroine clearly affiliates the tale with the German Märchen, the title’s syntax is modeled on the French conte. The Grimmification of Perrault in English: The Two-Faced Cinderella, or Perrimm and Grimmault Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite. —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, AURORA LEIGH A reversible head of Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother illustrates Iona and Peter Opie’s introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales. Drawn by Rex Whistler “to amuse a child” (10), this optical illusion suggests that the two emblematic fairy-tale characters can metamorphose into each other depending on how we look at the picture, in the manner of an Escher drawing (Figure 7.1). The illustration portrays the Fairy Godmother as a grotesque, [44.212.26.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:00 GMT) Giving Up the Ghost 265 wild-eyed, monkey-faced peasant woman and Cinderella as a waiflike, hollow -eyed girl who looks nothing like Perrault’s dainty heroine. Her heavy eyes and down-turned mouth express the grief of the disconsolate Aschenputtel shedding tears over her mother’s grave rather than the French Cendrillon who cries only when she cannot go to the ball and is immediately consoled by her resourceful godmother. This draws...