Cinderella Through the Ages: Greece and China
Ready for a Doctor-Who-esque, Carmen-Sandiego-adjacent romp through geography and time?
Fact: There are 74 ranked YA retellings of Cinderella…on Goodreads…currently, which means there are at least double that number IRL.
Fact: There have been at least 41 movies based on the Cinderella story, at least (including my personal fave, “CinderElmo”) since I was born, some one score and seven years ago.
Most of these are based on the Charles Perrault version of Cinderella, but each has its own twists and tweaks on the familiar story. Some have corrected the odd things that stood out from Perrault’s version; some have only emphasized them. We also have Anne Hathaway’s version of Ella Enchanted, which is a film that I like to pretend never happened.
From this, it appears that most people do think of CP’s version of Cinderella as the authoritative one—which is interesting, as dude was a seventeenth-century academic who really, really wishes that we’d remember him for some of his more studious works. He only wrote out his Contes de ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Stories”) for his children’s amusement—not for further, unrelated progeny, and not to be known as a household name. The moral of that story, is, of course—choose hobbies you want to be known for? Be careful about what you tell your kids? Be flexible about your legacy?
SPEAKING OF LEGACIES, the legend/story of Cinderella had to be a lil bit flexible. Chaz wrote down what he and the other dads in his circle of profs were telling their kids, meaning that Cendrillon is a great snapshot of seventeenth-century French middle-class morality, romanticism, and general hopes+dreams of the middle class. One of the reasons stories are enduring and interesting is simply that they’re one of the most powerful indicators of what people were doing and thinking and trying to teach their kids—more on that later; but, tl;dr, through story, you can literally mind-read and time-travel, figuratively, metaphorically.
Which brings me to today’s excuse to put off my copywriting work and ignore the list of agents I’m querying: CP didn’t originate the story of Cinderella. Who did? What details of the story change from version to version? And—perhaps more interestingly—what remained the same?
I haven’t done any research yet (the tone for this website I'm going for is ‘disarmingly, charmingly, horribly disorganized’), but if I had to distill perhaps the bones of Cendrillon and the Disney/Roger+Hammerstein/Ella Enchanted/Ever After/etc versions that I’ve grown up with, it’s something like this:
Poor girl down on her luck gets an Unprecedented, Once-In-A-Lifetime, Fancifully Incredible Shot at happiness—but wait, it’s a limited time offer, and there’s some kind of classist obstacle in her way. With the help of a few cute and potentially magical friends-slash-rodents, she’s enabled to take up the thinnest of veils to be qualified to Do The Thing—in disguise! Implausibly, no one recognizes her, but her mission is successful—but then the magic/etc wears off and she has to leave. The next day, the ruse is somehow given up, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Something like that, anyway. (Wasn’t there a boxing movie called A Cinderella Story? That’s probably different.) Anyway, when I look for other stories in the Cinderella vein through history, I’m looking for a sort of rags-to-riches and princess-y love story mashup.
*cracks knuckles* Let’s see where the next couple (hundred) Google searches take me, shall we? I’ll link the original texts, if I can find them, for those who want to play along.
- Greece, 0ish AD: The Story of Rhodopis
A Greek historian named Strabo wrote literally one run-on sentence in one of his works about “a courtesan” who inspired one of the pyramids at Giza.
(Maybe it’s just me, but I thought one of the definitions of ‘courtesan’ was a prostitute?)
Nope, not just me. Anyhoo. Let’s get into Strabo’s Cinderella:
Rhodopis is taking a bath, and an eagle takes one of her sandals and flies off with it. Nearby, the king’s holding court; the eagle tosses the shoe at his head and flies off. The king’s overcome with his instant attraction to the shoe (“stirred by the beautiful shape of the sandal”), so he sent his bodyguard out to find the woman who wore it. They get married.
Welp. That’s…different. Moving on!
- China, 860 AD: The Story of Ye Xian
In 850ish (dates disputed), a dude named Duan Chengshi wrote a book called Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang—a compilation of tales and tidbits from the Tang dynasty.
One such tale concerned Wu, a chieftain of a community of cavemen. Wu had two wives, and each wife had one daughter. Ye Xian was a beautiful girl, Wu’s daughter by one wife; and the other wife essentially gave the world the ugly stepsister (‘Jun-Li was plain, cruel, and selfish’). Ye Xian was her father’s favorite; Jun-Li and her mom were jealous.
Ye Xian’s mom and Wu die, a new chieftain takes his place, and the stepmom and Jun-Li force Ye Xian to work for them so they can retain the trappings of wealth. Ye Xian, now an abused servant girl, befriends…a ten-foot-long golden fish in the pond near their house, which, as it turns out, was a guardian spirit that her mother had sent to watch her from beyond the grave.
Ye Xian didn’t have anyone to talk to in her new life, so she spoke to the fish. Jun-Li followed her one day and told her mom about Ye Xian’s apparent insanity. Wow, then the stepmother takes away the rags that Ye Xian is wearing and USES THEM AS A NET to CATCH the GUARDIAN-FISH … and then (I’ve run out of italics and capitals, imagine I’m whisper-yelling this with much intensity) forces Ye Xian to cook it up for Jun-Li’s and the stepmom’s dinner.
WHAT!?!!?!?
Wow, okay, Disney took away the ‘let’s eat the fairy godmother’ vibes, for which I am immensely grateful. Where is this going??
Ye Xian is scarred, understandably. One of her ancestors, an elderly gentleman in white robes (I’m picturing Saruman) arrives and tells her to keep the bones of the fish and sleep with them in little pots hidden behind her bed-posts. Saruman then adds that the fish’s bones will grant her wishes if she speaks to them the same way she did to her mother’s golden fish.
Fast forward to the Chinese New Year festival. Back in 860, this was really The Time of Year for young women to meet young men, so the lil’ community was getting ready to flirt up a storm. However, because dating is and always has been a zero-sum game, the stepmom didn’t want Ye Xian and her inconvenient beauty to get in Jun-Li’s way. Stepmom gives Ye Xian a list of chores to complete, wraps her and her daughter up in finery, then goes off to attend the festival.
Ye Xian goes to talk to her pots of bones underneath her bed. One silent wish later, and she’s suddenly wearing a gorgeous gown of green silk, a cloak ‘of kingfisher feathers’, and golden shoes. The bones warn her: Don’t lose any of it—not even a single slipper! AHEM, FORESHADOWING. She heads over to the festival—very specifically, by foot.
She dances, she wows everyone, she has a great time; she leaves early because she thinks Jun-Li may have recognized her, and she leaves a shoe behind while beating a hasty exit. She hides the other shoe and her finery under her bed (with the bones); however, because she’d disobeyed the bones by leaving behind the secondary slipper, she’s out of luck—the bones aren’t talking to her anymore.
Elsewhere, an unnamed village girl picks up Ye Xian’s missing slipper. Somehow (OG story unclear) the golden shoe makes it all the way into the hands of the king of the To’Han islets? He’s taken by the shoe—but, specifically, because of how small it is. (Stay tuned for an expose on how the Cinderella story’s really just an advertisment for ancient China’s bound-foot preference trickled down to the modern era!) He issues a search warrant for the girl, etc, proclaims he’s going to marry the small-footed girl, etc.
Everyone in the island kingdom (and nearby cave systems) wants to try on the shoe; but the shoe is magic, and shrinks a little whenever any normal-footed woman tries it on. Frustrated, the king makes a regal pavilion for the shoe and puts it on display. (Jun-Li had sent Ye Xian on an errand when the shoe was touring their district.)
She hears about her missing shoe, however, and goes under cover of night to fetch it. Because she’s still dressed in rags and she’s being sneaky, though, she’s apprehended as a thief. When brought before the king, Ye Xian tells him everything—her parents, the fish, the magic bones, the dress, the magic slippers. He believes her, and allows her to go home with everything? But I thought he was going to marry her??
Oh, he just lets her go home to sleep before turning up the next morning to propose and whisk her away. You know what, I’ll allow it, that was nice of him. Stepmom and Jun-Li try one last-ditch effort to keep Ye Xian with them, saying that she’d stolen the gown and the shoes. The king doesn’t believe them, and she goes to marry the king. Stepmom and Jun-Li were banished for their maltreatment of the (new) queen, and they eventually died in the wilderness, pelted by fiery hail.
Wow.
This one comes with an epilogue, though, let’s see where that takes us:
Stepmom and Jun-Li’s bodies were buried in a tomb which came to be known as “The Tomb of the Regretful Women,” an inscription I’d like on my headstone as well, thankyouverymuch. They became goddesses and people would pray at their tomb and miracles would happen. Elsewhere, Ye Xian’s marriage is crumbling; her husband the king went all power-hungry, using the magical fish-bones willy-nilly to get random free stuff.
Ye Xian decided to bury the fish bones in a nearby beach…with a ton of gold, for some reason. Later, there was an uprising by the people, because the king wasn’t much of a king anymore; the royal couple decided to try to appease the dissidents with gold and magic bones, but they’d been washed away, because of course they had, Ye Xian had buried them in sand. The story ends there; the fate of Ye Xian and the king is unknown.
Not the worst ending to a story that I’ve heard recently. Not the best, either.
Next time, we’re headed to Iran—and then, it’s off to France. I really, really, really want to see where the pumpkin carriage came from, and I could see that being a French twist on the story, n’est-ce pas?