Cinderella's Different Stories - Assignment Example

As an allegory for the triumph of virtue over vice, the story of Cinderella has very few competitors. Cinderella as a story has many versions, but all said and done, all of them send out the same messages of love, hope, kindness, and generosity while reiterating the idea that we all have a greater force taking care of us in all our trials and sorrows. A few modern studies of the Cinderella story though, take the interpretation of the story to a different level and raises it from the realm of a fairy tale to a metaphor for many modern ideas.

Belinda Stott in her research article titled “Cinderella the strong and reader empowerment” on the other hand defines Cinderella as strong and empowered and uses the Disney version of Cinderella and Perrault's version of the tale, to show that Cinderella is able to awaken her inherent potential and move from a dependent girl to a strong and resourceful young woman, with the help and support of a mother figure. The author’s brief here is to show women that they can learn from the story how to throw away the victim’s robe and instead don the mantle of an empowered woman.

“Cinderella Revisited” by Stewart M Cameron is a study of the references to the Cinderella story in medical literature and analyses more than 50 years of various works that mention Cinderella. The paper is obviously aimed at the medical community and the research reveals that the issues of exhaustion, identity, transformation, neglect, and the mixed metaphor are increasingly using Cinderella as a metaphor for these aforementioned conditions. 

In 2004 Hazleton and Hickey’s research paper on the theme of neglect went so far as to propose a separate term for studies using the Cinderella story and called it “Cinderology”.