Cinderella (2021) Teaches Us To Be Dumb
How this capitalist "retelling" takes the classic story further away from its roots as a metaphor for the process of maturing and of inner strength
As a society, we should learn that any project with James Corden attached to it will always be either dumb or traumatizing (see: Cats (2020)). The latest example of the former is the new Amazon Prime movie, Cinderella (2021), starring Camila Cabello as a token Latina Cinderella who is not a damsel in distress, mind you; she is a girlboss who makes dresses in a world where women are not supposed to girlbosses. Girlboss feminism is a trend within white feminism that, instead of critiquing and targeting capitalist systems of power, aims to simply put women at the head of them. It glorifies ‘hustle’ culture and defines female empowerment by how much labour a woman can produce, or how many employees she can exploit. If you are curious, save yourself some time and brain cells and watch witty YouTuber Cindy Pham react to the movie instead of watching the whole thing. But what exactly is the harm in the girlbossification of an ancient tale belonging to an ancient storytelling tradition? The answer is that we miss the entire point of the story and train our children to see storytelling from a very literal, superficial perspective.
Let’s start with the first obvious critique of this movie; historically, women were allowed to operate businesses in feudal Europe, it just wasn’t called a business, it was called survival. The concept of owning and growing a business in Cinderella (2021) is seen through a primarily capitalist perspective. The idea that women in the past couldn’t work or have money certainly applied to ladies of status, who could afford poorer women to do the labour. But women who did not have any status had to earn a living and were indeed expected to work just as hard as and for less than men. In the movie, Cinderella is belittled by the townspeople for wanting to sell her dresses at the market. This would not have been a problem even in medieval Europe because as mentioned, women of no status were allowed to sell things at the market, especially if it was dresses — which was a very proper good for a woman to sell. No one cared what women of no status did, and as Cinderella is treated as a servant, there is no reason why the stepmother should be embarrassed that Cinderella becomes a dressmaker.
What would be more feminist than ‘fixing’ the older Cinderella’s lack of business opportunities is to go back to the root of the storytelling tradition — one in which it was understood that tales are allegorical. Stories such as that of Cinderella predate Christian cultural domination (by a lot), and indeed were passed down to us through traditions much more ancient than we care to realize. These stories were told by women to their children, not only to pass the time as they cooked or weaved or gathered, but also to teach them about nature and our relationship to it, and especially about the human psyche. They were distinctly meant to be taken as allegorical tales, similar to how Jewish texts were not written to be taken literally and in fact had to be studied carefully because of their allegorical and metaphorical nature.
Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes believes that women’s wild instinctual nature is just as endangered as wildlife itself. She explains in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories from the Wild Woman Archetype that “women’s flagging vitality can be restored by extensive ‘psychic-archeological’ digs into the ruins of the female underworld.” This involves analyzing stories in the way they were supposed to be — by seeing the symbols and metaphors that teach us about the psyche. For example, many fairy tales, including Cinderella, start when the kind and nurturing mother dies. Rather than being merely a misogynistic plot point, this trope symbolizes a psychic process that Dr. Pinkola Estes calls ‘letting the too-good mother die’. She explains that, “In our lives as daughters, there is a time when the good mother of the psyche — the one which served us appropriately and well in earlier times — turns into a too-good mother, one which by virtue of her overly safeguarding values begins to prevent us from responding to new challenges and thereby to deeper development.” The death of the “too-good mother” is the first stage towards maturing.
The evil stepmother and sisters are also a recurring trope in traditional tales, symbolizing “the undeveloped but provocatively cruel elements of the psyche.” Estes claims that these are “shadow elements, meaning aspects of oneself which are considered by the ego to be undesirable or not useful and are therefore relegated to the dark.” Thus, we start to see what these stories are really trying to teach us, which is an understanding of the psyche. Many young women are taunted by “the stepfamily” in their own psyches and become slaves to demands to be something or someone they are not. Until our fairy godmother, the all powerful “Wild Woman,” as Dr. Estes calls her, appears to us from deep within our instinctual nature, and helps us rebel. Then, the charming prince represents that mature aspect of our psyche that we reach once we have rebelled and danced all night. Of course, the evil stepmother of our psyche, or the ego, is unwilling to loosen its grip over us. But in the end, the marriage, or union of the self to the mature unconditional love of the psyche, triumphs and completes the initiation process of the mature Wild Woman.
But we’re talking about a movie made by Amazon, and Amazon has to make easy money. Girlboss feminism is, in all its capitalist glory, a great way to do that, it seems. Scenes such as the one in which the prince’s sister is prevented from sitting at the table (to which she asks “are you literally not going to give me a seat at the table?”) are hard to watch for a) their blatant token feminism, and b) for treating the audience as if we were dumb by showing as well as telling. To truly give Cinderella a feminist twist we would have to bring her back to her allegorical roots and teach children not to simply watch a story, but to interpret it. And Cinderella’s capitalist makeover does the opposite of that.
By A. Jordan Ortiz
If you’re interested, here are some great further readings on this topic!
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
‘How Cinderella lost its original feminist edge in the hands of men’ by Alexander Sergeant
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner