Escaping the Cinderella Complex
Summary
In Perrault’s Cendrillon, the ideal woman of the 17th century is portrayed. This same image of women is reflected on by Colette Dowling in her Cinderella Complex, in which she studies women from her own time in 1981: the ideal woman is a woman who is raised to be demure and dependent on others, while waiting to be rescued by her prince. This woman is also complicit in her own repression.
This thesis uses Vladimir Propp’s functions of the dramatis personae, as described in Morphology of the Folktale, as a framework for identifying and analysing literary uses of the Cinderella Complex, starting with Perrault’s Cendrillon.
The modern young adult novels, Cinder (2012) by Marissa Meyer, and Pantomime (2013) by Laura Lam, also rely on the complex to shape the females portrayed in their worlds. This study finds that these modern retellings manifest the Cinderella Complex by making their main characters subordinate to the parents who govern them. The girls are furthermore repressed by their systems. Fitting in, however, is complicated for both main characters due to physical defects, not found in Perrault’s Cendrillon. This limits even more their fitting into their systems. These modern stories also deviate from Perrault’s tale as the heroines to the novels try to escape their situations rather than be subject to it, like Cinderella.
Escaping the Cinderella Complex comes through breaking the enforced behavioural patterns that the women are subjected to. Whereas Cendrillon is a tale without a hero, Cinder and Pantomime both have what Propp describes as victimized heroes as their leads. Both novels physically displace their main characters and turn them into active agents, opposed to the passive Cinderella, whose escape from the complex never materializes. In Cinder’s case the heroin chooses to save the boy she likes rather than herself and in Pantomime the heroin becomes a hero who does not break free from the system, but rather places him/herself on the other side of the dichotomy.