As interdisciplinary scholarship becomes more and more popular, it is often hard to tell whether or not a collection invokes the term to check a box and cash in on this interest or whether it is truly interdisciplinary. Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives lives up to its title, with its greatest strength being its interdisciplinary approach and the variety of views and scholarship presented, as seen in the backgrounds and expertise of the authors, particularly their access to different cultural and linguistic perspectives. The collection is divided into three sections: Contextualizing Cinderella, Regendering Cinderella, and Visualizing Cinderella. While the chapters in each section bring up interesting and new viewpoints and research, the first section reads as the most complete. Many of the pieces in the second section address interesting topics but are not as fully formed or in-depth as the first section.
One of the few weaknesses in the collection is that two of the Regendering Cinderella pieces, “Home by Midnight” and “Prince Cinder,” don’t seem to fully reconcile the inconsistencies apparent when the tale is re-gendered, or assess the significance of doing so, and stick instead with surface issues. Section three, Visualizing Cinderella, builds on the ideas of cultural context and of material culture introduced in the first two sections and has useful explorations of previously ignored mediums. However, while I understand the concept of placing color photos in the middle of a text, it is nice if they are embedded, in color, in the text segment that discusses them. With chapters that focus so heavily on the Cinderella tale in print and visual media, the media are not always included or placed within the discussion in the text.
Many of the chapters in the collection focus on Cinderella as representative of the people, as does Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s “Cinderella: The People’s Princess,” which explains how schooling, access to print, and popular culture representations make her a figure of the people. Talitha Verheij’s “The Dissemination of a Fairy Tale in Popular Print: Cinderella as a Case Study” brings in similar ideas. In “Cinderella from a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Connecting East and West in Donna Jo Napoli’s Bound,” Roxane Hughes grounds her analysis in cultural contexts while also examining the impact of gender roles, particularly the “forms that female oppression takes” (233). Daniel Aranda’s “Moral Adjustments to Perrault’s Cinderella in French Children’s Literature (1850-1900)” depicts the original presentation of the figure, and then shows how the figure was made more palatable to particular cultures and worldviews. In a different section, Rona May-Ron’s “Rejecting the Glass Slipper: The Subversion of Cinderella in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman” can be read in a similar way, though Atwood’s revision would seem to make the figure less palatable to certain audiences. Cyrille François’s “‘Cendrillon’ and ‘Aschenputtel’: Different Voices, Different Projects, Different Cultures” explores the “particular cultural and historical contexts in which the tales of ‘Cendrillon’ and ‘Aschenputtel’ were written” (97), as well as Cinderella’s role as a “prototype of bourgeois education” (99), which connects back to Bottigheimer’s analysis of Cinderella as a heroine of the people. Monika Wo?niak’s “Imagining a Polish Cinderella” depicts the figure as representative of the Polish people’s national history, from its first arrival in the early nineteenth century (297), through the communist period, and to the modern day. Agata Ho?obut’s “Cinderella in Polish Posters” builds on these ideas of representing the people and using iconography as narrative shorthand. Xenia Mitrokhina’s “On the Evolution of Success Stories in Soviet Mass Culture: The ‘Shining Path’ of Working-Class Cinderella” makes an excellent ending to Bottigheimer’s beginning, by analyzing the movie “Shining Path” as a Cinderella revision while also revealing the way Cinderella is again presented as a heroine of the people.
Kathryn A. Hoffman’s “Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’ among the Glass Tales” identifies “bundles of relations” (53) between material objects and meaning both in historical contexts and in the Cinderella tale specifically. In another section, Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère’s “Fairy-Tale Refashioning in Angela Carter’s Fiction: From Cinderella’s Ball Dresses to Ashputtle’s Rags” also focuses on material objects, and links this theme to “self-fashioning” (162). De la Rochère also connects Carter’s role as translator and her literary creations to expand our understanding of readings and texts as objects to analyze (165). This focus on close reading and side-by-side comparisons would be a good model for the classroom. Ashley Riggs’s “Multiple Metamorphoses, or ‘New Skins’ for an Old Tale: Emma Donoghue’s Queer Cinderella in Translation” also analyzes the parallel ideas of material objects (skins), translation, and reception.
The role of translators, printers, and publishers is a field of inquiry that is still new, and Gillian Lathey’s contribution, “The Translator as Agent of Change: Robert Samber, Translator of Pornography, Medical Texts, and the First English Version of Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’ (1729),” is an excellent addition. She considers how translators need to be analyzed for the agency they have as well as for the historical and cultural context in which they operate, in order for their work to be truly understood; and she examines the way translators can influence reception for years to come, since Samber’s translation “places the tales firmly in the realm of childhood, and that is where they were to remain in subsequent English-language editions” (87). Jan Van Coillie’s “The Illustrator as Fairy Godmother: The Illustrated Cinderella in the Low Countries” in section three builds on these ideas of the importance of translators, printers, and illustrators in shaping reception and understanding. Jack Zipes’s examination of various films in “Triumph of the Underdog: Cinderella’s Legacy,” and Sandra L. Beckett’s “Revisualizing Cinderella for All Ages,” which examines illustrations in different children’s editions, also draw in ideas of presentation and reception.
This collection is well crafted at the chapter level and also in the ways the chapters and sections build on each other and are interwoven. Overall, this is an excellent and useful addition to the literature, one that will enhance the study of fairy tale and folklore studies. It is a worthy successor to Alan Dundes’s Cinderella: A Casebook.
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[Review length: 1009 words • Review posted on October 10, 2017]