Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (review)

Born out of an interdisciplinary conference that took place in Rome, Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives provides a well-rounded cultural and transnational analysis of a pervasive folk story. The editors provide eighteen essays that seek to “examine how Cinderella has been mobilized in specific contexts and periods and also across national frontiers and boundaries” (15). On this front, the book proves to be successful. Cinderella Across Cultures does not seek to provide an in-depth overview on all things “Cinderella;” rather it shows how the folktale has been transformed throughout time and space in order to illuminate various eras and cultures. This focus on context and transformation moves the articles away from an Urtext and into how the “Cinderella” tale actually functions within a given location.

The collection, which is edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak, is broken into three sections: Contextualizing Cinderella, Regendering Cinderella, and Visualizing Cinderella. While these subheadings are rather broad, they allow the reader a lens through which to focus. All three sections provide a contextualization that moves beyond the Disney version of “Cinderella,” mostly by focusing on European versions of the story. The combined result demonstrates the power of both folktales and interdisciplinary research, as “Cinderella” becomes both reflective and refractive of the cultures and times from which it emanates.

The first section contains articles that outline how context significantly impacts how a text can be read. Cyrille François’s article “‘Cendrillon’ and ‘Aschenputtel’” gives a close reading of the two versions in order to demonstrate the importance of cultural context. “A comparative textual analysis,” he claims, “not only affects the ideology of the tales … but also the way in which the tales are told” (109). The texts themselves are also shaped within the context of their translations, adding another layer of understanding that scholars should consider. Gillian Lathey addresses this in her article “The Translator as Agent of Change.” Kathryn A. Hoffman moves beyond the text to analyze how objects, particularly the glass slipper, can be interpreted in the context of eighteenth-century bourgeois French society. The opening article by Ruth B. Bottigheimer examines how both, context and translation, can greatly impact interpretation, as it focuses on how Cinderella was stripped away from her aristocratic background to become the people’s princess. Although the entire book is interesting, the articles from the first section have the broadest appeal to those wishing to study “Cinderella.” Bottigheimer’s article, “The People’s Princess,” provides a good historiography of the tale, at least in Western Europe. It also shows how variation occurs in “Cinderella” and how transcription can begin to solidify a particular version as correct, particularly with regards to Disney’s adaptation of Perrault’s “Cendrillon.”

As the title heading suggests, “Regendering Cinderella” contains articles which deal with contemporary retellings of the story that subvert or invert traditional patriarchal “Cinderella” narratives. From Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1965), which deconstructs the story as a rejection of gender binaries and expectations, to Prince Cinders (1987), which reconfigures gender in the context of queer theory, the authors of this section seek to demonstrate how the story transforms in a way that is reflective of contemporary cultural movements. Mark McLoad’s, “Home by Midnight: The Male Cinderella in LGBTI Fiction for Young Adults,” provides contemporary examples from American teenage literature and television to show how the Cinderella trope has been reworked into LGBTI inclusive stories. “The Cinderella story as the Grimms tell it,” he claims, “is about being marginalized and finally having your true worth acknowledged” (202). As with Jennifer Orme’s article “I’m Sure it all Wears Off by Midnight: Prince Cinders and a Fairy’s Queer Invitation,” which I previously alluded to, the author in this section utilizes feminist and queer theory to show how modern culture has evolved...