Cinderella around the World
In the root of each take on Cinderella we find similar morals and purposes although the stories use different plot structures and storylines. All four stories use young women who are put into dangerous situations due to evil step relatives. With a well mannered but poorly groomed main character and juxtaposes them to exemplify their attitudes. Then each main character is given help from some type of motherly figure, like the fairy god mother from Charles Perrault’s ‘’Cinderella’’ or the aunt from ‘’The Baba Yaga’’. By the end of
the each story, the same element appears that each girl’s kindness or generosity lead her to prevail against the evils she faced. So each stories real purpose was to show that the most important quality in a young girl is not beauty or intelligence but graciousness.Out of all six stories, three had more distinct rise plot elements and three were more like exemplary fairy tales. First in ‘’the Magic Orange Tree’’ we see how the girl was obedient and gracious so she was rid of her step mother while the step mother was ‘’broken into a thousand pieces’’. While in the Egyptian fairy tale Rodopis rose from a slave to the queen. Although these two elements of plot don’t affect the overall moral getting across, it seems in the exemplary stories the ending is harsher. For example in ‘’Baba Yaga’’ the father ends up killing the stepmother and in ‘’The Magic Orange Tree’’ the stepmother also dies.
Also in the Russian version of the story the father figure kills the step mother and takes a more assertive and dominant role in the story. While the fathers in the other versions of the story played very passive roles or weren’t even in the story. But all the stories did have the same element of a
something either woman or god helping the young girl who could not help herself. The way they were helped varied from some stories having magical helpers like in Perrault’s ‘’Cinderella’’ to just aunts giving advice like in ‘’Baba Yaga’’.
Cover of Cinderella (Puffin Pied Piper)
Poverty is also a major element in all the stories and it seems like this is essential for the development of the story. No matter what, the young girl has to be in an impoverished environment, so that her graciousness can be exemplified. But some cultures, like the Vietnamese, seemed to focus on the obedience of Tam and for that reason she deserved the royalty she got. While the Native American story ‘’A Poor Turkey Girl’’ focused on how motherly and caring she was to her turkeys.
So the greatest differences in these stories seem to be their core plot evolution and even then they only vary between a rise and an exemplary tale. But I would say that the whole purpose of the tales are the same in that they want to make clear that graciousness is a young girls best virtue. Although there are some variations or subgroups of how societies would define their graciousness. Like Vietnamese might prefer obedience in young girls while Russian might prefer generosity and caring that is where the difference in culture really comes out in these stories.
Read more: http://authspot.com/short-stories/essay-on-the-comparison-of-cinderella-stories-around-the-world/#ixzz1k4hwH9Q4