Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions And Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak (review)

The foreword to Cinderella across Cultures observes that the contents “collectively provide new insights into contextualizing, retelling and reimag(in)ing Cinderella, and, though they wisely do not aim for a global survey, they do engage cultural traditions that, while remaining rooted in a Euro-American context, decenter the Basile-Perrault-Grimms-Disney genealogy” (Bacchilega xiii). The volume delivers quite well on this promise. A study of the Cinderella narrative no longer confined to folkloristics, it draws from fields as diverse as cultural and media studies, queer theory, translation studies, and museum studies. The essays are, indeed, exclusively devoted to Euro-American productions of the narrative, though versions of the story from Egypt, China, and India are mentioned. Collectively, they thoroughly trouble the reader’s idea of Cinderella as a limpid-eyed heroine, revealing instead a multifaceted narrative that bears the marks of cultural flux and translation.

The volume is divided into three sections that respectively look at how texts “contextualize,” “regender,” and “visualize” Cinderella. In each of these, the author is relegated to just one among the various agents of transformation, and the reader, illustrator, and translator are all made visible. Since fairy tales tend to read as timeless narratives, the contributors aim to situate the text in its historical context and particular milieu, at the same time interpreting it as a potent site of resistance to these very contexts.

The first section looks at the shifting values and aesthetics that the protagonist embodies across time and region. Examining the versions of Perrault, Basile, Grimm, and other contemporaries, Ruth Bottigheimer traces the development of Cinderella as a “people’s princess,” identifying “[l]osses of autonomy and a stripping away of individuating characteristics” in the process (29). Taking up the aesthetic aspect of Cinderella, Kathryn Hoffmann studies the now-iconic glass slippers as a product of the baroque fetish for glass and mirrors in seventeenth-century Italy and France, putting to rest the long-standing debate about the possible misinterpretation of vair (fur) as verre (glass). Gillian Lathey examines the rather colorful oeuvre of Robert Samber, the first to translate Cinderella into English from Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales in 1729, and his role in the infantilization of the text. What emerges in this section is Cinderella as a text of acculturation, promoting values as diverse as political acumen, social grace, and passive obedience in response to varying contexts of production and reception.

The second section focuses on adaptations that utilize Cinderella as a site of feminist, homosexual, and queer resistance—subverting a text that had, over time, robbed its female protagonist of agency. Babette Cole’s Prince Cinders is the object of analysis for Jennifer Orme, who uses Judith Halberstam’s concept of queer failure to read the trickster figure of the fairy godmother in the text, arguing that she is the truly queer element in a text that only superficially reverses gender roles. Roxane Hughes’s essay presents the sole instance of sustained engagement with non-Western versions of Cinderella, though it is through an American text: Napoli’s Bound, which is set in Ming China in the sixteenth century and presents an empowered heroine.

The final section looks at Cinderella in visual media, be they illustrations, posters, or film. Of note in this section is Xenia Mitrokhina’s exploration of Cinderella as a working-class Everywoman in the Soviet Union’s radical communist revisions of fairy and folk tales.

The editors make it amply clear in the introduction that the “new directions” taken imply a poststructural approach, delineating this collection from its well-known precursor, Alan Dundes’ Cinderella: A Casebook. Whereas Dundes’ 1982 collection responded to the dominant structural paradigm in folkloristics at the time, seeing deviant interpretations as “alternative readings,” it is precisely these approaches...