9 - Cinderella: Glass Slippers and Ancestors

Cinderella is the fairy tale that, perhaps more than any other, sets our standard for how we expect a fairy tale to behave. But this story tells us more than what happens if you have some fancy shoes and a fairy godmother on your side. In this episode, let's explore the Cinderella of Charles Perrault as well as the Cinderella version of the Grimms—how these stories might give us hints of ancestral practices, and then how we equate shoes and lust with Ye Xian from China.

Stories in this episode:

• Charles Perrault's Cinderella
• The Grimms' Cinderella
• Ye Xian

Resources mentioned:

• Shoes Never Lie by Mimi Pond
• The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola to Basile to the Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes
• Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak
• The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales by Oliver Loo

More from Christine A. Jones:

• Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales
• Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives
• Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws
• "Mother Goose’s French Birth (1697) and British Afterlife (1729)"
• "Thoughts on 'Heroinism' in French Fairy Tales"