The Cycle Of Violence In Walt Disney's Cinderella
I decided to genderbend and retell the story of Cinderella. The Cinderella story goes back as far as the 800s in China with the main character named Yeh-Shen (Northrup). There are hundreds of versions of this story that can be found around the world in places in Africa, the Middle East, and South American. The Cinderella story that inspired Walt Disney’s popular movie and is the one that most European and American audiences know came from the French tale that originated in the 1690s. In that version, Cinderella is named Cendrillon (Northrup). For my retelling, I use the name Elena for the Cinderella character.
I changed the story that Cinderella is still a woman, but her evil stepmother and step-sisters, are instead her stepfather and stepbrother. …show more content…
My mission with this story is to raise awareness to the horrors of domestic abuse and the cycle of violence that it creates. I was extremely inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s while I was writing this story. One of her most profound quotes is: “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or crisis, even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender” (Solnit “The Longest War” 21). Women experience violence at the hand of men far too frequently than they …show more content…
I wanted to show that domestic abuse is not just something that goes away once the woman leaves her abuser. A woman can quickly fall into another abusive relationship through no fault of their own. Some men seek damaged girls and know exactly what to say to get them to fall for them. This is not to demean women, but to show the reality. I also thought that in order to truly depict the dreadfulness of domestic abuse, Xavier had to murder Elena. As hard as it was to murder Elena, I needed to stay true to the horrible world that we live in. “1,509 women were murdered by men they knew in 2011 and out of the 1,509 women, 926 were killed by an intimate partner and 264 of those were killed by an intimate partner during an argument.”
I changed the story that Cinderella is still a woman, but her evil stepmother and step-sisters, are instead her stepfather and stepbrother. …show more content…
My mission with this story is to raise awareness to the horrors of domestic abuse and the cycle of violence that it creates. I was extremely inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s while I was writing this story. One of her most profound quotes is: “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or crisis, even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender” (Solnit “The Longest War” 21). Women experience violence at the hand of men far too frequently than they …show more content…
I wanted to show that domestic abuse is not just something that goes away once the woman leaves her abuser. A woman can quickly fall into another abusive relationship through no fault of their own. Some men seek damaged girls and know exactly what to say to get them to fall for them. This is not to demean women, but to show the reality. I also thought that in order to truly depict the dreadfulness of domestic abuse, Xavier had to murder Elena. As hard as it was to murder Elena, I needed to stay true to the horrible world that we live in. “1,509 women were murdered by men they knew in 2011 and out of the 1,509 women, 926 were killed by an intimate partner and 264 of those were killed by an intimate partner during an argument.”