Donkeyskin/Cinderella

My initial aversion to Tatar’s grouping of the Cinderella and Donkeyskin stories came from the very knee-jerk reaction that Tatar anticipates: the two story types are driven by entirely different things, the “anxious jealousy of biological mothers and stepmothers” on the one hand and the disconcerting incestuous efforts of fathers on the other. Furthermore, the apparent points of contact between the story types are really quite generic elements of patriarchal society and can hardly be considered unique to these two narrative traditions. For one, the requirement of a heroine to complete arduous domestic tasks (or to complete normal tasks like baking exceptionally well) seems to require no special explanation given the overwhelmingly domestic role that has been imposed on women for millennia—the second century story of Cupid and Psyche provides a telling example outside the immediate tradition of fairy tales, as the heroine must sort grain and shear sheep for her heroic quest. Likewise, the idea of the heroine revealing her beauty in order to convince a prince (or whoever) of her goodness or acceptability as a mate is only an extension of an idea so universal and obvious that it can’t properly be assigned as a literary maker: human civilization has long associated beauty with other logically unrelated character qualities, sometimes quite openly but always on a subconscious level.

Though I still believe the above points have some validity, other considerations shifted my viewpoint much closer to Tatar’s. Perhaps the most important realization was that the enormous differences I saw between the two tale types (i.e., incest vs. wicked stepmother) resided in elements that the narratives themselves didn’t always focus on. The idea of incest immediately jumps out to a modern reader, but is quickly abandoned in stories like Fair Maria Wood—the only mention of the princess’s early tribulations lies in a throwaway line about the wedding company “staying to hear her story.” Similarly, Perrault’s Donkeyskin only reintroduces the heroine’s father in one conciliatory paragraph at the very end of the story. Rather than dominating the plot, the King’s/father’s advances really only enable it; considering how variable the fates of Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters are (as Tatar notes in the beginning of her Introduction), it seems a small jump to claim that they are also only catalysts in the Cinderella stories, not the substance of them. Meanwhile, the resulting “bulks” of both types of stories seem perfectly homologous, most notably in the repeated “ball” scenarios of anonymous beauty (the “ball” is not always an actual ball, of course—in Fair Maria Wood, the prince only spies on the heroine in her house) and in the “perfect fit” investigations that Tatar mentions only briefly. I still have some resistance to her idea of the Cinderella and Donkeyskin traditions as two sides of the oedipal coin (perhaps because I don’t see those sections as crucial to the story, or perhaps because psychoanalysis isn’t very romantic), but Tatar’s insistence on reading the story types together is spot on.