Numerous countries for countless of years have told Cinderella stories in different languages and in many different ways. These worldwide Cinderella stories may have different characters or even have different ways to interpret them.
Also these Cinderella stories may have completely different magical interventions that help Cinderella throughout the story. For example the stories “Aschenputtel” and “The Twelve Months” are both a Cinderella story but have a lot of differences. Although these two Cinderella stories are not a lot alike they still have much in common.
In the Cinderella story “Aschenputtel”, the girl is approached with the magical intervention of birds helping her. As for “The Twelve Months”, the girl is approached with magical intervention by the months that change the seasons for her. This magical intervention is very different from one another for these two stories even though they both involve nature.
The nature plays a different type of role for each story. In “Ascheputtel” the nature is animals around her helping her, while in “The Twelve Months” the nature is Mother Nature herself helping the girl.
Also one of the differences is the attitude of the stepmother and her daughters in each of the stories. In “Aschenputtel” the stepsister’s attitude is all about trying to outdo Aschenputtel band trying to force their feet into “the golden shoe” (Aschenputtel 186), so that they might marry the prince. In “The Twelve Months” the step sisters are not trying to outdo her. They simply want to be mean and cruel to her.
Fairy Tale Essay Children Story Cinderella
Children encounter problems with family, life, and love all throughout their younger years and have many questions that may be difficult to answer or discuss. In his essay The Struggle for Meaning, Bruno Bettelheim argues that the fairy-tale provides the child with information about death, aging, and poverty and many other issues that the typical safe story would never even attempt to conquer ( ...
Although these stories are very different from on another they are also alike. They both follow the five factors of being considered a Cinderella story. The five factors to be considered a Cinderella story are to have a girl that is put down, an evil influence, magical intervention, an item that identifies the girl, and the girl has to marry a prince.
These factors must be met but can have various different ways to illustrate them. The first two factors are the same for both the stories because each story has a girl who is put down by the evil influence of her stepmother and stepsisters. The magical intervention is in both stories and is represented by nature.
An item that identifies each girl from the stories is a little different though. In Aschenputtel the item is her shoe in which she has lost. In The Twelve Months the item is the apples. Finally the last factor is shown in both stories by marriage. Overall, Cinderella stories including “Aschenputtel” and “The Twelve Months”, have differences but in the end they all come down to the five factors. All Cinderella stories are not as different as you may think.
Works Cited The Brother Grimm “Aschenputtel.”: Page 186.
