The Endlessly Evolving Cinderella : Monkey See : NPR"Woman gives birth to a gourd."This is the opening to the description of an Italian variant of the Cinderella folk tale — or, really, a relative of one of its relatives — taken from a book called Cinderella; three hundred and forty- five variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o'Rushes, abstracted and tabulated, with a discussion of mediaeval analogues, and notes, written by Marian Roalfe Cox and published in 1. In this version of the story, the heroine is born inside a gourd and accidentally abandoned in the forest — understandable, given that her mother has just brought forth a squash from within her person, and the last thought she's entertaining is probably, "Hey, I'll take that with me."Our heroine is discovered by a prince, who finds the talking gourd and takes it home. If nothing else, perhaps it has a future in show business. At some point, she presumably emerges from it — the details offered in the book about this particular folk tale are limited — and she becomes a servant. The prince keeps her at the palace but mistreats her terribly, even beating her and kicking her to prevent her from attending his ball, but she gets there anyway without his knowing it's her (which is one reason it seems certain she's out of the squash by now).

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They meet and he gives her gifts and so on. Later, when she prepares his breakfast in the guise of his once- ensquashed servant, she slips into the breakfast the gifts he gave her at the ball when they danced. When he finds jewelry in his food, he realizes she is his beloved, and they get married. Ah, the classic "boy meets gourd."What is the name of this young lady who was born inside a vegetable? Her name, of course, is Zucchettina. It could be worse to our modern ears: One of the Cinderella variant entries is called "Little Saddleslut."). In 1. 81. 2, the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, published Children and Household Tales, a collection German fairy tales.

This illustration accompanied the tale "Cinderella" and shows Cinderella being left by her stepsisters to do the housework. This image is from Grimms Eventyr (Grimm's Fairy Tales) by Carl Ewald, published in 1. Ivy Close Images/Landov. Ivy Close Images/Landov. In 1. 81. 2, the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, published Children and Household Tales, a collection German fairy tales. This illustration accompanied the tale "Cinderella" and shows Cinderella being left by her stepsisters to do the housework. This image is from Grimms Eventyr (Grimm's Fairy Tales) by Carl Ewald, published in 1.

Watch Naruto Shippuden, Bleach, Anime Videos and Episodes Free Online. Directed by Damon Santostefano. With Lucy Hale, Freddie Stroma, Missi Pyle, Megan Park. Cyrano De Bergerac meets Cinderella. Over-worked, harried and terrified of. A Cinderella Story: Once Upon A Song Katie is 17 years old fostered by stepmother, abused without complaints. But she feels uncomfortable when obscured by Bev Van.

Ivy Close Images/Landov. This version is an obvious relative of Cinderella but not quite Cinderella; it's presented as one of the variants of Catskin, a related tale that also has a hard- working girl who meets a prince at a ball while in disguise and is then recognized and rescued. Watch Regular Show: The Movie Online Ibtimes. That's not the strangest variant in the book, and it is certainly not the darkest. One begins with Cinderella, her two older sisters and their mother agreeing to a whimsical bet: First one to drop her spinning spool will be eaten by the others.

When Mom proves clumsy, the sisters indeed eat her. A deal's a deal?) Cinderella decides not to eat her mother, but to wait until the killing and eating is over, then bury her mother's bones. You know, out of respect. Fortunately, her mother's bones turn into coins and beautiful magic dresses. It's no fairy godmother, but you don't look your mother's gift bones in the ..

I suppose. There's a Vietnamese variant called Kajong And Haloek in which the evil foster mother of the Cinderella figure, Kajong, is tricked into eating the flesh of her own dead daughter (who boiled herself alive trying to be as beautiful as Kajong) — punishment for them both. And here is a direct quote from Cox's book, summarizing a variant called Gold- dice: "King goes to war, leaving three daughters in mound with victuals for seven years. Father slain; princesses forgotten.

Dog and cat eaten; elder sisters die. Heroine eats mouse; digs way out."Kind of makes you think having your eyes pecked out is getting off easy, right?

Lily James is Cinderella in Disney's live- action version of the classic fairy tale, which it helped make famous in a 1. Jonathan Olley/Disney. Jonathan Olley/Disney. Lily James is Cinderella in Disney's live- action version of the classic fairy tale, which it helped make famous in a 1. Jonathan Olley/Disney.

As Disney releases another Cinderella adaptation — this one live- action, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Lily James as Cinderella and Cate Blanchett as her evil stepmother — we see again how perplexingly durable this story is, particularly for something so slight. The film that's coming out this weekend may be bent and polished, stripped of some of its themes and relieved of its bone- burying — and Cinderella may now be an established part of the Disney princess racket — but this is still recognizably a story of which 3. What Is Cinderella, Exactly? To try to figure out what exactly that story is and why we still have it, we have to separate out the folk tale that is Cinderella, though, from the turn of phrase that is "Cinderella story." Americans will call almost anything a Cinderella story that involves a good thing happening to someone nice. We slap that title on movies and books, but also on basketball games won by tiny schools full of scrawny nerds, small businesses that thrive and even political ascendancies that upend established powers.

The actual Cinderella tale, while a nebulous thing that can be hard to pin down with precision, is more than that. There's very little that's common to every variant of the story, but in general, you have a mistreated young woman, forced to do menial work, either cast out or unloved by her family.

She has an opportunity to marry well and escape her situation, but she gets that chance only after being mistaken for a higher- status person, so she has to get the man who may marry her to recognize her in her low- status form, which often happens either via a shoe that fits or some kind of food that she prepares. It's partly a fantasy about simplifying the relationships between social standing and coupling — one that makes the most sense in a world in which class differences arean accepted barrier to a good man choosing to marry a woman.

If the prince is a man who believes from the outset that love conquers all, the story doesn't really make any sense. It would be hard to set Cinderella on a properly functioning egalitarian collective. The idea that animates the classic Cinderella is that the prince would not be free toconsider Cinderella a desirable mate if he first saw her as she is, but he can meet her under false pretenses and fall in love with her. And, most importantly, once achieved, that love will be durable enough to survive her reversion to her real identity. Getting him to literally recognize her — getting him to look at a woman in rags and realize she's the woman he wants to marry — seems to function as sort of a stand- in for him proving that he can overlook her low status and choose her as a partner. Whether that's more a fantasy of romantic love or a fantasy of economic security, power and rescue from a lifetime of washing floors may depend on who's telling it and who's hearing it and when. The story means different things at different times — trying to nail down a single origin for Cinderella is somewhat beside the point, since folk tales are narrative mashups done and redone, assembled from existing pieces and experimented upon.

The tales Catskin and Cap O'Rushes, mentioned in Cox's title, for instance, are close relatives to what we know as Cinderella, but with characteristics that make their own offshoots easy to group together. There's actually an entire multi- volume index for folk tales, called the Aarne- Thompson system, which groups tales of similar types together. Cinderella is type 5.

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