Joelyn Annan

Professor Anna Voisard & Professor Kylee Pastore

FIQWS 10005|FIQWS 10105

28 October 2022

The Glass Slipper Breaks: Cinderella and Its Effect on Abuse

Cinderella is undeniably one of the most recognizable fairy tales ever. The tale of a beautiful young girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters who receives magical help and is elevated into a life of splendor. It is by most accounts a good story, but one must ask themselves – why did Cinderella never stand up for herself, why did she not protest her treatment? Beauty, kindness, and obedience are good qualities but what about resolve, what of courage, what of conviction? The absence of these values has detrimental real-world effect on our collective responses to abuse.

Having something named after you is often lauded as a honor but in the case of the Cinderella effect, coined by psychology professor Martin Daly, it brings the dark undertones of the story to light. The Cinderella effect is the phenomenon of higher rates of incidence and severity of child abuse by stepparents as compared to biological parents. Which should ring a bell when one remembers that Cinderella’s abuse is a crucial part of her story. In the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, she was verbally abused – “What’s this terrible and useless thing doing in our rooms?” (Grimm 69) and had basic needs stripped from her – “The stepsisters took away her clothes and dressed her in an old gray smock,” “when she was tired, there was no bed for her, and she had to lie next to the hearth in the ashes” (Grimm 70).

Greg Tooley, a professor of psychology at the Deakin University, posits in his paper “Generalizing the Cinderella Effect to unintentional childhood fatalities” that evolutionary parental behavior & mechanisms are only partially enacted or not at all in the case of stepparents because the children are not their own. One must ask themselves just how far the fairytale has seeped into our collective consciousness that it affects our psychology, and our treatment of stepchildren. We see the echoes of the Cinderella effect in media where stepchildren are unruly, bothersome, or disrespectful from the stepparent’s view which earns their subsequent mistreatment when in reality – there is no reason that stepchildren should be mistreated, they are a part of the family just as much as anyone else.

Cinderella’s tale should not be informing the behavior of stepparents but unfortunately it does. Children should not have to suffer for the unconscious biases that exist within our minds. David Issacs in his article Sex and violence in fairy tales references Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian psychologist, who believed that fairytales give breadth to unconscious desires that are considered conventionally unsavory. Those desires may then manifest as an emulation of certain characters, even if we know that their behavior is villainous. No one wants to be the wicked stepmother, but we can all become her.

On the other side of the coin, we have the children in these circumstances. A child in a similar situation to Cinderella’s might imprint on the character and conclude that if they “put up with it all patiently, not daring to complain” (Perrault 130), then they too will have a happy ending. The fallacy of false equivalence makes a strong case – the reasoning goes Cinderella was treated badly by her family, but she became a princess & was happy so if I am treated badly, I too will be happy eventually.

But real life is not a fairytale, there are no fairy godmothers or magic wands that fix everything. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales Bruno Bettelheim elaborates on this with poignant analysis – “Many children believe that Cinderella probably deserves her fate at the beginning of the story, as they feel they would, too;…Despite this, she is worthy at the end to be exalted, as they child hopes he will be too,” The tale convinces children that the abuse Cinderella suffers is deserved – this is not a healthy mindset adopt when they could be in a potentially dangerous situation. Because of this perceived deservedness, children might not tell anyone about what they are going through because it does not seem wrong to them even if it hurts. It also allows adults to ignore signs of mistreatment because the child is not speaking out.

Some may argue that as impressionable as children are, they can differentiate between fairytales and reality – that children are able to compartmentalize in this fashion. But Bettelheim references a story a father told him about his five-year-old daughter who was jealous of her younger sister and began to emulate Cinderella, she started to dress poorly, pretended to do hard chores around the house & when asked to get some salt she said, “Why do you treat me like Cinderella?” (Bettelheim 241) There is a reason the phrase “monkey see, monkey do” exists.

The brain does not fully develop until age twenty-five, though as we grow – we understand more of the world around us. Children do not have this experience, coupled with their developing brains – it is not plausible to expect a child to know the difference between fantasy and reality and this is what makes the story’s passive tone regarding abuse so dangerous.

The effects of Cinderella’s signaled values are not only limited to parent-child relationships. Romance has the reputation of being dreamy and magical and while having a romantic partner can be fulfilling and bring much joy to one’s life – it is anything but perfect.

The father in almost all versions of Cinderella is a non-character. He is really only there to introduce us to the stepmother and from then on, he disappears from the narrative. But in some rare versions we get insight into Cinderella’s father. In the Perrault version of the tale specifically with this quote, “not daring to complain to her father, who would have scolded her, because he was completely under the thumb of his wife” (Perrault 130).

 There are many ways one could interpret this but the inclusion of “No sooner was the wedding over than the stepmother gave free rein to her bad temper” (Perrault 130), leads one to believe that Cinderella’s father was not aware of who he was marrying, that he believed his second wife to be a woman of honor and virtue. Perhaps he realized too late that she was not what she seemed, but he was stuck and he wished for company so badly that he stayed.

Some accounts in Patricia Leavy’s Low-Fat Love Stories led credence to this theory. Leala, one of the contributors relays her relationship, “We were om a ballroom dancing class. Like a fairytale, I twirled right into his arms…I truly loved him and believed that he loved me” (Leavy 12). But despite this hopeful beginning her relationship soon took a dark turn, “he became very greedy and then very belligerent…He became overbearing…He bullied and badgered me. He sneered at me. He mocked me”. (Leavy 13-14). Another contributor, Valerie, spoke of her marriage, its deterioration, and why she stayed – “But I was fearful of leaving, since so much of our lives were linked together. I was worried what people would think. So I stayed”. (Leavy 29).

In every example, none of the victims stand up for themselves because of societal norms or because they hoped that things would better up. Chasing the fairytale ideal, worrying about public perception, and enduring abuse for the sake of a relationship is injurious to one’s psyche, as is making excuses for said behavior like Corinne in Eileen Walkenstein’s “Cinderella’s Secret: Who Is Her Prince Charming, Really?”who excuses her husband’s emotional neglect because of his job before Eileen calls her out in it. It can be easy to convince oneself that ‘it’s not too bad’ and stay because good times will come once more. This behavior is parallel to that of children convincing themselves that suffering now will lead to reward later, that obedience and silence are the solution to the problem. They are not. Some may think that leaving these situations should be simple but when fairytales ideals are so pervasive – it can be tempting to stay and this is discounting gaslighting, the possibility of not being believed, and physical injury.

We as a society like to think ourselves advanced and far removed for the morals and norms of the past but movements such as #METOO and Believe Victims suggest otherwise. It is easier to smooth over the wrinkles and pretend that everything is okay. It is easier to believe that the unsavory desires will die out but ignoring the fire will not make it go away. It just gets bigger.

Fairytales are a staple of our society, humans love telling ourselves stories. But we must be aware of what these stories are encouraging. Obedience and a passive outlook do not end well in the real world. Cinderella endured abuse patiently and silently to get a happy ending – but we do not have to, no one should.

Works Cited

  Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment : the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Vintage books ed., Vintage Books, 1989.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. “CINDERELLA.” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 69–77.

Isaacs, David. “Sex and Violence in Fairy Tales.” Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, vol. 49, no. 12, 2013, pp. 987–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/j     pc.12432.

  Leavy, Patricia. Low-Fat Love Stories. 1st ed. 2017., Sense Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-818-1.

  Perrault, Charles, and C. J. Betts. The Complete Fairy Tales. Oxford University Press, 2009. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ccny-ebooks/reader.action?docID=472120

  Tooley, Greg A., et al. “Generalising the Cinderella Effect to Unintentional Childhood Fatalities.” Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 27, no. 3, 2006, pp. 224–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.10.001.

  Walkenstein, Eileen. “Cinderella’s Secret: Who Is Her Prince Charming, Really?” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, vol. 15, no. 3, 2001, pp. 3–15, https://doi.org/10.1300/J035v15n03_02.