Cinderella

Juan Reynaga
Professor Firth
EN-101-ME4
May 3, 2012

Fairy tales often depict an idealization of love as being a pure and innocent feeling. However, in reality this idealization of love can be just an unreachable dream. In many of the internationally known fairytales that have been told for centuries, pure and sincere love is the ultimate reward represented as a form of a prince charming for having a good behavior in life. Therefore, in the case of fairytale “Cinderella” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version, love differs with my idea of true love for been unrealistic, too innocent, and unfair.
The best seller shows many nonrealistic examples of love. For example, when Cinderella meets the prince charming and immediately wants to marry him. In reality this does not happen, a person needs to know the person who’s she or he is about to marry. In addition, she or he needs to know her or his background, like criminal records, previous partners, and maybe diseases that this person has. This fairytale is entirely different than the present cruel and modern reality.
Cinderella’s fairy tale is innocent by being too silly about some of their ideas. For example, when the prince proclaimed that, he would marry the person whose foot fit the golden slipper; there could many women with the same foot size as Cinderella in the moment. How would he know that Cinderella was going to be the one whose foot will fit in the golden slipper? People today are not too innocent, as they were represented in this fable. People often turn to be smarter and think with a cool head before going into a compromising relationship. Unlike Cinderella that is always dreaming, thinking that everything is beautiful in life, and caring less about evil. Want it or not? Present events often make our reality uglier.
The universally recognized fairytale is often unfair by not distribute love to all its characters. The fairytale only centers on Cinderella to be only the lucky one to find true love. In fact, there is another version of this fairytale that narrates Cinderella’s story from a complete different perception, narrated by the stepsister’s point of view. What about the stepsisters’ feelings? How do we know that the stepsisters were really evil? They could have been guided by their mother for acting that way against Cinderella. Why there were other princes for them? Well, that’s the way fairytales are.
For all this examples, I think that the Cinderella story is very different from the actual reality, and it’s one of the most damaging fables ever written. It has functioned as a double-edged ideological weapon by encouraging young, and “not to young” girls to seek for the ultimate reward called prince charming. In addition, according to some sociologists, one of the reasons of the actual increased divorce rate is due to this ideology. Women look for their maximum reward, “prince charming”, which are not their husbands. This fable totally differs from the idea of responsible and conscious love. It’s nice to dream, but always having awareness of the actual reality.