Encyclopedia of fairy-tale characters: "Cinderella". Types of characters in the fairy tale “Cinderella”

Cinderella

CINDERELLA (fr. Cinderella) - the heroine of the fairy tale “Cinderella” by C. Perrault (1697). “Kind, friendly, sweet” - this is how the author characterizes her heroine. This is truly one of the most subtle and charming images among fairy-tale heroines. Cinderella is modest, hardworking, flexible, and friendly. The daughter of a respectable and noble man, Cinderella, oppressed by her evil stepmother, lives in her own house as a servant, performing, and completely resignedly, all the black homework. She cleans cauldrons and pots, washes stairs; she takes care of her stepsisters, who repay her with black ingratitude, sleeps in the attic right under the roof, on a prickly straw bed, and silently endures all insults, not even daring to complain to her father. She was nicknamed Cinderella for her dress that was always stained with ash. A fairy tale is a fairy tale, and Cinderella goes to the ball. Her fairy godmother helps her. Cinderella is so beautiful that the prince singles her out from all the ladies present, and the guests are also fascinated by the stranger. And here Cinderella would have taken revenge on her sisters and stepmother, done something unpleasant to them, but she, on the contrary, “found them, said a few pleasant words to each, and treated them to oranges and lemons, which the prince himself brought her.” Having married the prince, Cinderella immediately forgave her sisters for all their insults, because, as Perrault writes, “she was not only pretty, but also kind.” The image of Cinderella has captivated many artists. The German storytellers Brothers Grimm created their version of the Cinderella story (1814). Italian composer D. Rossini wrote a lyric-comic opera on this plot (1817), and S.S. Prokofiev wrote a ballet of the same name (1944). Domestic film “Cinderella” (1947) with J. Zheimo in leading role(based on the play and script by E.L. Shvarts) is recognized as a classic of children's cinema.

All characteristics in alphabetical order:

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Cinderella is the daughter of a nobleman, a girl of “meekness and unparalleled kindness.” By order of his stepmother, Z. performs all the menial housework. She sews dresses and combs the hair of her stepmother and her two daughters for the ball given by the king's son. The godmother (sorceress) sees the grief of Z., who was not taken to the ball, and helps her go there, turning mice, a pumpkin, etc. into a carriage with horses, her wretched dress into a luxurious outfit, giving her shoes trimmed with fur, but setting the condition to leave the ball before midnight, when the magic ends. Z. went to the ball twice, and then listened to stories from her stepmother and her daughters about the beautiful princess with whom the prince was infatuated. But the second time she was almost late to leave the ball before midnight and, while running away, dropped her shoe. The prince, in search of a beautiful stranger, orders all the women to try on the found shoe: the one to whom it fits will become his wife. The shoe turned out to be too small for the stepmother’s daughters, but Z. came up, then she took out the second shoe. The godmother appears and turns Z.’s dress into an even more beautiful outfit than those in which she appeared at the balls.

The sisters ask her forgiveness for their bad treatment, and Z. forgives them. The prince marries Z., and she marries her two sisters to noble courtiers. The name of the heroine is unknown, only nicknames are given (Zamarashka, Cinderella). Her appearance is indefinable: her stepmother and sisters cannot recognize her in a different outfit. Fairytale world Perrault is strange: faces are not visible in him, voices are not distinguishable, only things have certainty. This is a shoe trimmed with fur (due to the fact that in some French publications the word vair - “fur for trimming” was mistakenly replaced by the word verre - “glass”, in translations of Perrault’s fairy tales into a number of languages, including Russian, an exquisite but incomprehensible image appeared “ glass slipper”).

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CINDERELLA (fr. Cinderella) - the heroine of the fairy tale “Cinderella” by C. Perrault (1697). “Kind, friendly, sweet” - this is how the author characterizes her heroine. This is truly one of the most subtle and charming images among fairy-tale heroines. Cinderella is modest, hardworking, flexible, and friendly. The daughter of a respectable and noble man, Cinderella, oppressed by her evil stepmother, lives in her own house as a servant, doing all the menial housework, completely resignedly. She cleans cauldrons and pots, washes stairs; she takes care of her stepsisters, who repay her with black ingratitude, sleeps in the attic right under the roof, on a prickly straw bed, and silently endures all insults, not even daring to complain to her father. She was nicknamed Cinderella for her dress that was always stained with ash. A fairy tale is a fairy tale, and Cinderella goes to the ball. Her fairy godmother helps her. Cinderella is so beautiful that the prince singles her out from all the ladies present, and the guests are also fascinated by the stranger. And here Cinderella would have taken revenge on her sisters and stepmother, done something unpleasant to them, but she, on the contrary, “found them, said a few pleasant words to each, and treated them to oranges and lemons, which the prince himself brought her.” Having married the prince, Cinderella immediately forgave her sisters for all their insults, because, as Perrault writes, “she was not only pretty, but also kind.” The image of Cinderella has captivated many artists. The German storytellers Brothers Grimm created their version of the Cinderella story (1814). The Italian composer D. Rossini wrote a lyric-comic opera on this plot (1817), and S.S. Prokofiev wrote a ballet of the same name (1944). The domestic film “Cinderella” (1947) with Y. Zheimo in the title role (based on the play and script by E.L. Shvarts) is recognized as a classic of children's cinema.

“Where are the sacrifices, and especially the cannibalism?” - you will be surprised. The tale is about a kind and meek girl who picked through the ashes until her time struck. The thing is that the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault are fairy tales written down already in the 18th-19th centuries. Ekah, that is, close to our time.

The original, mythological context in later treatments is greatly distorted. The mythological elements present in the earlier versions of the tale are forgotten, because the myth is not always logical and understandable. The myth is much more archaic and frightening, and the fairy tale is an attempt to rationalize it.

“Cinderella” is one of the most popular “vagrant stories”, which has over a thousand incarnations in folklore different nations peace.

Where is Cinderella's mother? She was eaten!

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One of the most important images in the fairy tale “Cinderella” is the image of the deceased mother. The reader does not question why the unfortunate woman could have died. The appearance of the good fairy godmother in Charles Perrault's version is also not surprising. And few people realize how closely these two images are related to each other.
So, at the very beginning of the fairy tale, Cinderella’s own mother dies, and her father, having grieved, finds himself another wife. Why does death occur? In most fairy tales this is not covered, but is given as a given, but there are still fairy tales that have preserved the most ancient motifs that provide an answer to this question.
In the Greek version of "The Wench on the Roost" (Edmund Martin Geldart, Folk-Lore of Modern Greece: The Tales of the People, Little Saddleslut), a mother suffers death at the hands of her own daughters:

One day three sisters were sitting and spinning flax. And they said: “Whose spindle falls to the ground, we will kill and eat.” Their mother's spindle fell first, but they did not touch her, but sat down to spin further. And again mother’s spindle fell, and again, again... “Well! - they said. “Now we’ll eat it.” But Cinderella stands up for her mother, although to no avail: “No!” - said the youngest of the sisters. - Don't eat it. Since you want meat so much, eat it better than me.” But the sisters refused; two of them killed and then cooked the mother.

This is how the daughters brutally dealt with their own mother. Cinderella refuses the meal and will subsequently be rewarded for this.
From the text it can be assumed that the mother deliberately drops the spindle to save her children. Subsequently, in the fairy tale Little Saddleslut, it is the mother who becomes the magical giver for the youngest daughter, whom the sisters mocked:

Then the youngest, who was called the Girl on the Roost [after the death of her mother, the girl sat all the time on the chicken roost, for which her sisters gave her this nickname], collected all her mother’s bones and buried them under the hedge. For forty days the girl fumigated them with incense, and then wanted to take them to another place. As soon as she lifted the stone, rays of light blinded her. She found there a beautiful robe, as if woven from the sky and stars, from spring and sea ​​waves. In addition to the dress, there were many coins.

But this is not an isolated case. There are quite a lot of examples mentioning the eating of a mother by members of her family. Often the motive of so-called endocannibalism (eating a relative) is performed in a milder form, that is, there is no direct mention of eating human flesh. The mother in these versions is transformed into an animal - often a cow - and only then is eaten.

Breaking a magical ban

In some fairy tales, the transformation of the mother into an animal is a consequence of a violation magical ban. This is what the Serbian fairy tale “Pepelyuga” (Woislav M. Petrovitch, Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians, Pepelyuga) tells us:

In the high mountain pastures, near deep abysses, several girls were spinning yarn and looking after the cattle. Suddenly they noticed a strange man with a long white beard reaching to his waist. He stopped and said: “Beautiful maidens, beware of the abyss. After all, if one of you drops your spindle into it, that girl’s mother will turn into a cow at that very moment!” Having said this, the old man disappeared. The girls, puzzled by his words and discussing the strange incident, approached the very edge of the cliff... They looked into the crevice with curiosity, as if they hoped to see something unusual there. Suddenly the spindle slipped out of the hands of the most beautiful of them and, hitting the stones, flew into the abyss. When the girl returned home in the evening, her worst fears came true. Instead of her mother, she saw a cow in front of the door.

The cow helps Marra (Serbian Cinderella) when her father marries an evil and obstinate woman. But the stepmother is not stupid - she tells her daughter to follow Marra and see how she manages to always be well-fed. The deception is discovered, and the stepsister informs her mother that the cow feeds the girl and helps her stepmother complete her tasks. The evil stepmother orders the cow to be killed, but she, anticipating death, tells Marra not to taste its meat, but to collect the bones and bury them in a certain place.
Quite often, a mother turned into an animal foresees her death and is not afraid of it.
Another example of punishment for a broken ban is the fairy tale “The Wicked Stepmother” (J. Hinton Knowles, Folk-Tales of Kashmir, The Wicked Stepmother) of the state of Kashmir. In this fairy tale, Cinderella's mother is the wife of a brahmin. When leaving home, the brahman urgently asks his wife not to eat anything until his return. Otherwise she will turn into a goat. If he himself tastes food outside the house, he will turn into a tiger.
Having disobeyed her husband's commandment, the wife tries food in his absence and turns into a goat. Her ex-husband remarries. In this version of the fairy tale, Cinderella has other brothers and sisters, who are rescued by a magical goat until the evil stepmother identifies their assistant. After this, the new wife, pretending to be sick, tells the doctor to say that only goat meat can save her. The doctor meekly fulfills her command. The brahman at this time did not have money for another goat, so a sad fate befalls his ex-wife.

What does sacrifice have to do with it?

There are two main reasons for cannibalism as a real phenomenon: forced cannibalism associated with difficult living conditions (hunger, drought, etc.), and ritual cannibalism. In the context of this story, we can with relative confidence reject the version of eating a relative due to hunger, since fairy tales repeatedly mention fat flocks of sheep and other signs of prosperity.
The phenomenon of endocannibalism has deep archaic roots and is often mentioned in myths and fairy tales. If initially cannibalism was characteristic of the supreme deities, then as the ban spreads, it becomes a feature of lower mythological creatures: vampires, werewolves, and so on. He is usually severely punished.

Thus, in most fairy tales about Cinderella, in which there is a motif of indirect or direct cannibalism, animals, which are the spirit of the deceased mother, forbid her to try their meat.

Vengeful Cinderella from Vietnam

At times the plot turns into completely unimaginable directions. In one of the Vietnamese versions of the fairy tale “Tấm Cám,” Cinderella punishes her stepmother in the cruelest way, forcing her to taste the flesh of her own daughter.
When the Vietnamese Cinderella Tam has already married the prince, her stepsister Cam asks her how she manages to maintain her beauty. Tam replies that she is just taking a bath with boiling water. Having done as her sister advised her, Cam dies, boiled alive. Tam cuts her body into pieces and cooks the meat into food, then sends it to her stepmother. The woman starts her meal without hesitation, but then a raven lands on the roof of her house and croaks: “Yummy! A mother eats her own daughter's flesh! Is there any left? Give me a piece too!” And only after finishing it, the stepmother discovers her girl’s skull at the bottom of the pot, after which she dies of shock.

Helper animals: from cow to fish

Over time, the motive of cannibalism has gone through a long path of rationalization. The fairy tale remained for a very long time oral genre. Passing on a familiar plot from mouth to mouth, storytellers brought something of their own to the story of Cinderella, often omitting or rationalizing what was incomprehensible to the narrator. Thus, the gap between Cinderella’s mother and the good helper who appears on her path began to increase.
In many versions of the tale, the image of the mother loses its significance, but at the same time the image of an animal helper is retained, the appearance of which is not explained in any way. In the Irish, Scottish and Serbian analogues of “Cinderella”, such an animal is a sheep or a cow, which to some extent makes this fairy tale similar to the equally well-known story of “Little Khavroshechka”.

Most often, a female acts as an animal helper, but there are also male variations that go far from the idea of ​​a mother-savior. And if in the Malay folk tale “Bawang Putih Bawang Merah” the fish also admits that she is the girl’s mother, then in the Vietnamese “Tam and Cam” the fish clearly symbolizes a male figure - according to some versions, the Buddha himself helps the girl.
Fish appears in Asian fairy tales for a reason: it often symbolizes God.
Other animals also help Cinderella: the bull takes her away from her evil stepmother in the Norwegian fairy tale “Katie the Wooden Cloak”; A red calf in a Scottish Rashin-Coatie leads her through the forest. There are also characters from the “lower world”: a mouse, a toad and others.
At the next stage of rationalization, birds or a tree that grew on the mother’s grave act as Cinderella’s assistants. According to the Brothers Grimm, Cinderella made a pilgrimage to the burial place of her mother and there watered the earth with her tears until a tree grew in that very place. As soon as Cinderella shook it, nuts fell from the branches, in which magical gifts were hidden for her. Joseph Jacobs' Cinderella does exactly the same thing when she plants a hazel tree. A bird flies to her and advises her to shake the tree so that a nut falls from it.
In the Italian fairy tale “Cinderella” (Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales, Cinderella), the father brings youngest daughter the little bird Verdelio, which gives Cinderella her beauty. The image of a bird is ubiquitous in the myths of various countries. human soul. Thus, deceased relatives come to the living in the form of birds and help in trouble or warn of misfortune. The bird is a heavenly inhabitant, close to the gods. It is the birds who warn the prince about deception when Cinderella's stepsisters, wanting to marry a royal person, cut off part of their foot so that the shoe fits.
Why exactly hazel becomes Cinderella’s protector is also clear. Among many peoples, hazel (hazel) was considered closely connected with the afterlife. In some places in Europe, on Christmastide, homeowners scattered nuts on the floor and in corners to feed the souls of the dead. In the German fairy tale Aschenputtel, Cinderella asks her father to bring her the first branch that will knock off his hat so that she can plant it on her mother's grave. This branch turns out to be a hazel branch. In addition to connecting with the afterlife, the hazel tree also endows its owner with great wisdom; among the Druids this tree was considered sacred.

Birth of a Fairy

If the images of birds or trees as magical helpers already embodied the spirit of the deceased mother only purely symbolically, then later this image completely lost its original meaning. At this stage, Cinderella's assistant is either a being of divine nature or a human friend.
In the well-known fairy tale by Charles Perrault, Cinderella is helped not by animals or birds, but by a fairy godmother who appears out of nowhere. In the Georgian Cinderella, “The Little Ragged One” (Conkiajgharuna), the poor girl is helped by a devi - a mystical creature, one of the forms of the mother goddess. She does this in a rather creepy way:

One day, when Little Ragged was tending a cow, she accidentally ran onto the roof. [Note author: in some areas of the Caucasus, peasant houses are dug into the ground, so it is quite possible to accidentally walk onto the roof]. The girl followed the cow to return it to the road, but accidentally dropped the spindle into the house. Looking inside, she found an old woman there and asked her: “Good woman, give me my spindle.” “I can’t, my child,” answered the old woman, “go in and take it yourself.” This old woman was a virgin. When Tattered Girl picked up the spindle, the mistress of the house turned to her with a request: “Daughter, daughter, come to me and look at my head, I’m almost eaten.” The girl came closer and looked at the old woman's head. Her heart sank when she discovered worms crawling inside. But Tattered Girl gathered her courage and cleaned off a few worms, after which she said: “What is there to look at? Your head is clear!”

The gods help not only Tattered Man. Goddess Bhagavani took pity on Mugazo, the heroine of the Vietnamese fairy tale “The Golden Slipper.”
Cinderella is also supported by just women - kind and not so kind. Zezolla, the Italian Cinderella from the fairy tale by Giambattista Basile (1575−1632), conspiring with her nanny, breaks her stepmother’s neck with the lid of a chest. The kind neighbor from the Georgian fairy tale orders her birds to collect all the millet that the stepmother scattered and ordered her stepdaughter to collect.
And in the Greek fairy tale already mentioned above, Cinderella is directly helped by God. Finding herself in the desert, she prays: “Lord, give me a hole in the ground so that only I can stick my head there, so as not to hear the howling of wild animals.” After Cinderella’s request was fulfilled, she asked for a larger hole, one that would fit waist-deep. And only for the third time Cinderella prayed for a hut where she could live.

Thus, the image of Cinderella’s mother, hidden behind layers of numerous transformations and distortions, acquires a mystical, sacred meaning.
Having rejected the later, softer versions, where Cinderella forgets or forgives her evil stepmother and sisters, we encounter a common motif in which the spirit of the dead mother cruelly avenges her grievances. The stepmother breaks her neck, birds peck out her daughters' eyes, Cinderella forces her stepmother to taste the flesh of her own child...
In light of all of the above, the question arises: who is really the main character in this story? Isn't Cinderella just a tool, a conductor, with the help of which the spirit of the deceased mother administers its, sometimes bloody, justice? Dying, she does not completely leave the world of the living, but is invisibly present in it, conveying her will to her daughter and showing her the way.