Cinderella A Classic Fairy Tale example essay topic

Michelle Black Black ENG OA 1 Ms. MacDonald 20 May 2003 Every Girls Dream: An Anaylsis of The Tale of Cinderella Through Time and Culture Remember back to sitting in a large circle in kindergarten. The game is Telephone; the game starts with the first person whispering a phrase in to the next person's ear and that person repeats the phrase into the next, and so on and so forth. When it come to the last person the line stops and they say the sentence aloud and it usually ends up being much different then that of the what the first person said. The more people in the cycle the more distorted your phrase becomes.

This is the best metaphor to use when describing what happens to fairy tales as they cross through cultures and generations: although the character, plot, or moral (s) stays the same the detail of the story changes to suit the current society. Fairy tales as we know them today are much different then they used to be, originally fairy tales were meant for adult audiences and were not intended for children's ears for they contained gruesome acts, and sexual conduct. It was not until the Victorian era that fairy tales became stories meant for children. Also it wasn't until the Victorian era that the fairy tales were told by men, prior to this era, fairy tales were told and written by educated women, the Victorian era brought about middle class men writing fairy tales, and even still many of them admitted to collecting or being inspired by women for their tales. This is when most of the drastic "cleaning up" of the stories took place, and this process of sweetening up has continued in to the present. One of the world's most famous fairy tales of all time is Cinderella a classic fairy tale which has been dated back to the stone ages.

Through all the various versions of Cinderella it creates the ideal story for a children's fairy tale and in all of the versions ultimately shows the triumph of good over evil and shares a universal theme despite it's cultural influences in additional characters and setting to becomes the world's most popular and timeless classic. In all of the versions of Cinderella is the man's daughter, and he always obtains an evil stepmother, who has another daughter or two who are as evil as the mother herself. The fact that Cinderella is always the daughter of the man due to historical accuracy and the talking of the real life in the times that these fairy tales started, many times women died during labour. And that the stepmother is evil because many times men would be presauded in to marrying some one who is not nice because they wanted a women to raise the child because they were better at it then men were. Also the evilness of the other women in the household is brought out by jealousy.