Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Beauty and Beast (just to mention a few) are problematic for feminist parents for reasons you probably don’t need me to list. Kiera Knightly flat out bans her daughter from watching Cinderella and the Little Mermaid for good reason. Cinderella should obviously go to college or learn a trade rather than dressing up for the prince to notice her, but I think it is a lie to say she isn’t scrappy or she had any other options in the world portrayed in the classic fairy tale. The newer versions of Cinderella set in modern times are the most problematic as the girl really does have other options.
Yet the original intent of setting down this old Cinderella folktale was a morality lesson for children. Charles Perrault wanted to enforce how important it was to be kind and forgiving even in the face of cruelty. So I vote for Cinderella as the least awful of the commonly criticized princess stories..
But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t nervous about my daughter hearing the story for the first time. I prepared her with the story of Cinder Kitty, a little boy cat who is the best mouser in the land, but isn’t allowed to go to the princess’s party. Yet, he magically meets the princess in disguise while she is escaping her party and they become the best of friends.
For my daughter’s real introduction to the story, we made a run around Disney by instead going to see Nicolas Coppola’s puppet adaptation at Puppetworks. The puppet show was not without classic misogyny, but it is like seeing a tiny bit of history through a story told by a kindly grandfather. The step sisters were clowns and the stepmother was a desperate, older woman stereotype. But, as always, the puppets were fantastic and the lightning perfect.
Our daughters are going to get exposed to classic princess mythology sooner or later, so why not make it be in a way that is clearly something interesting from the past rather messages slipped into the subconscious through catchy tunes and pretty animation. Then again, one of my favorite movies as a kid was Sleeping Beauty and I was never one to wait to be kissed. Maybe these stories aren’t as bad as they seem, but just to be sure, I told my daughter another new version of Cinderella after the puppet show. In this one Cinderella is secretly learning to be a architect and wins a contest to design a new castle for Prince Charming. The fairy godmother is a woman who bravely defends her when she is accused of not doing her own work.