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Children's Literature 31 (2003) 142-154



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Saving "Cinderella":
History and Story in Ashpet and Ever After

Elisabeth Rose Gruner


An orphan is mistreated by a cruel surrogate family. The orphan is special, however, and with the intervention of kind and magical parental substitutes, rises to dizzying heights and achieves a happy ending. It's a familiar tale, from "Cinderella" to Harry Potter—the difference is all in the details. In two fairy tale films of the 1980s and 1990s, those details remove the Cinderella story from the realm of fantasy. Ashpet and Ever After take pains to "realize" Cinderella—to remove almost all elements of magic and fantasy and to imagine, instead, what might make such a story real. Both incorporate a tale-teller and historical detail to do so, and both, in the process, uncover elements of the tale that may reclaim it for modern viewers. Drawing on a variety of Cinderella themes, both Tom Davenport's Ashpet, in his film of the same name, and Ever After's Danielle de Barbarac engineer their own destinies, with the significant help of an elder, a storyteller or an artist rather than a magician. Neither becomes that antifeminist archetype analyzed by Karen Rowe and other feminist critics, the passive recipient of the prince's favor. 1 Both stories are also framed by storytelling devices that serve to place the tales in a specific historical time and place; rather than once upon a time, these tales take place then and there, and are bridged to our here and now by the tellers who introduce them. These films replace Cinderella's central image of female competition with one of the storyteller as a guide to young women. 2 In so doing, they foreground the telling of the tale itself—they become, as it were, meta-tales which, as they tell the tale, also ask us to reflect on what we do as we tell the tales ourselves. The audience thus becomes a part of the meaning of the tale, focusing our attention on the power of narrative to shape our interpretations of reality.

And reality, it turns out, is what Cinderella is about. While many fairy tales, as Bruno Bettelheim and others have noted, deal with standard childhood conflicts symbolically, it takes little symbolic work to see the point in Cinderella. 3 Certainly the version the Grimm brothers told had elements of realism in it, despite the magical overlay of [End Page 142] the giving tree and the sliced-up feet; the mother and stepsisters find themselves in competition with a younger, kinder, prettier, woman, and they retaliate as best they can, forcing her into servitude and trying to prevent her from marrying well. The tales told in the two films I discuss here are such tales: tales of familial competition, of dysfunctional families, of competing legacies and conflicting loyalties. 4 While the tales themselves are clearly fictional, they insist on their status as, if not historical truth, family legend: the kind of truth that empowers and regenerates. Realistically set in recognizable times and places, they remind us that Cinderella may indeed have originated in any number of true stories of mothers dead in childbirth, stepmothers anxious for their own children, families riven over inadequate legacies. 5

Although I would argue that both of these films are suitable for and perhaps even intended for children, their realism marks them as distinctly different from the typical (i.e., Disney) children's versions of Cinderella, which rely heavily on the technology of magic for their appeal. 6 Ashpet is clearly a children's film, most often found in libraries. (It was never released theatrically and is now only available on video, although it has aired on public television.) Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, Davenport's From the Brothers Grimm series films are all short enough for classroom use. With little or no violence, overt sexuality, or suggestive language, Ashpet would certainly qualify for a G rating were it to be submitted to the ratings...

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