Cinderella Doesn't Have to Be a Passive Servant Girl Who Gets By on Her Looks
There are ways to empower the fairy-tale heroine—just look at <em>Ella Enchanted</em>.
Cinderella is the ur-princess, which means she's also, in a lot of ways, feminism's ur-bane. Oppressed and downtrodden, she slaves away until she gets her heart's desire, which isn't revenge or escape, but just to go to some stupid party. And she's saved not through any particular virtue of her own, but just by being pretty, changing her clothes, and marrying up. It's a story that glorifies self-sacrifice and sitting on your butt till a man comes to save you—and worst of all, little girls insist on loving it to death.
No wonder,'s Alyssa Rosenberg with a certain . The "fairy tale" is "ripe for revision," Rosenberg argues, and hopes that we might see a Cinderella who is not just a "passive, pursued object" but "does a little something to improve her own circumstances, and to prove that unlike all those fairy tale stepmothers who get their positions with their pretty faces, there's something more she has to offer."
