Wrote this years ago and found it on MySpace. 

Summary

Just some ramblings about Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast.

When I was younger, I loved reading fairy tales and watching the Disney versions of them. In fact, I still enjoy them. Some of my favourites were Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Frog Prince, Thumbelina, and, of course, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.

As I grew older and continued reading and watching television, however, I began to notice something interesting. Out of all the fairy tales that exist, and believe me, there are a lot of them – Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast seem to be the ones that continually return.

As an English major, I have had the opportunity to read a great deal of literature written in English as well as literature translated into English. Through that reading, I discovered just how many fairy tales have counterparts in other languages and cultures. There isn't simply one version of Cinderella. There is the Brothers Grimm version, originally written in German, and Charles Perrault's version, written in French. There are also stories from ancient Egypt, Greece, India, and other cultures that contain elements remarkably similar to the Cinderella story.

In other words, there are countless versions of fairy tales across cultures and throughout history. Yet, despite all of these stories, I kept coming back to the same question: Why are Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast the ones that novelists, filmmakers, and television writers seem to remake over and over again? What is it about these two stories that allows them to stand the test of time?

I think part of the answer may lie in something I would call the Cinderella complex.

When I was younger, I assumed Cinderella was simply a story about a poor girl who was mistreated by her family and eventually rescued by a prince. As an adult, however, I think there is something much more universal about the fantasy behind the story.

Many of us, both men and women, have probably experienced some version of the Cinderella feeling. We work; we clean; we take care of other people; we feel overlooked or mistreated by family members, friends, or colleagues or simply by circumstances beyond our control. We may not have an evil stepmother or live in a house where we are forced to scrub floors, but we understand the feeling of being stuck in a life we did not choose.

And, naturally, we dream of something better.

We dream that our circumstances will change. We dream that someone will recognise our worth. We dream that the life we are living now isn't the life we will always have to live.

Hollywood seems to have understood this fantasy very well.

There are countless movies that take the basic Cinderella formula and give it a modern setting. Cinderella Man, Ever After, The Princess Diaries, and Maid in Manhattan are just a few examples. The characters may not literally lose a glass slipper at a royal ball, but the basic idea remains: an ordinary person, often overlooked or underestimated, is given the opportunity to enter a completely different world.

And it isn't only women who get this fantasy.

For women, the fantasy might involve the handsome prince arriving at the door, recognising her hidden worth, and carrying her away to his kingdom. For men, the fantasy can work in much the same way—the ordinary or struggling man is suddenly recognised, successful, desirable, and worthy of his own princess.

In that sense, Cinderella is not really about a prince.

It is about transformation.

It is the fantasy that our current circumstances do not define us.

Romance novels understand this particularly well. Many romance stories feature an ordinary, sometimes financially struggling or middle-class woman who possesses Cinderella-like qualities: she is kind, intelligent, hard-working, or beautiful in ways that she doesn't necessarily recognise in herself. Then comes her version of Prince Charming—perhaps a king, a prince, a billionaire, or simply an extremely wealthy and powerful man. Often he lives in some distant mansion, private island, luxury hotel, or other world far removed from hers.

The details change, but the fantasy remains remarkably consistent.

Someone sees something in the ordinary person that everyone else overlooked.

And perhaps that explains why these stories continue to appeal to us.

When I think about Cinderella, I realise that perhaps what so many of us want is the promise of a happily ever after. Even though we know that real relationships are complicated and that marriages do not always end happily, we still want to believe that happily ever after exists—or at least that something close to it is possible.

This brings me to Beauty and the Beast.

If Cinderella represents the fantasy of transformation through circumstance, Beauty and the Beast represents something different: the fantasy of transformation through love.

Many of us seem to have our own version of the Beauty and the Beast syndrome. We imagine a beautiful, intelligent, caring woman encountering a wild or difficult man—not necessarily physically ugly, but someone with what we might call "beastly" characteristics. He may be arrogant, emotionally closed off, angry, selfish, or simply incapable of relating to other people in a healthy way.

The fantasy is that her love will change him.

And this is where I think the story becomes much more complicated.

The Cinderella fantasy, to me, is at least plausible. Life really can change dramatically. People can move from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to fame, from loneliness to love. Unexpected opportunities really do happen.

The Beauty and the Beast fantasy, however, can become much more troubling when we apply it to real life.

In fairy tales, the Beast can be transformed because the story operates according to magical rules. In real life, however, trying to "tame" a person who is abusive, cruel, violent, or deeply unhealthy can have devastating consequences. The idea that enough love can transform a "beast" is romantic in fiction, but dangerous when applied without limits to real relationships.

And yet, despite this, Beauty and the Beast continues to survive.

Perhaps because the fantasy is incredibly powerful.

It tells us that appearances can be deceiving. It tells us that someone who seems frightening, unpleasant, or unloveable may have a hidden heart. It tells us that love can reveal the person underneath the surface.

And once again, the story is about transformation.

That brings me back to the question that started all of this:

Why Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast?

Why these two?

Why not Sleeping Beauty? Why not Snow White? Why not The Frog Prince or Thumbelina? Why have some fairy tales remained relatively confined to the world of traditional fairy tales while Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast have continually been rewritten, reinvented, modernised, filmed, and turned into novels?

I think the answer may be that these two stories are unusually adaptable because their central fantasies are so universal.

Cinderella is about the dream that your circumstances can change.

Beauty and the Beast is about the dream that people can change.

One promises transformation of the self's circumstances; the other promises transformation of the self or another person through love.

Both stories also leave room for endless reinterpretation. Cinderella can be poor or simply ordinary. The prince can be a literal prince, a billionaire, a celebrity, or simply the person who changes the protagonist's life. The Beast can be physically monstrous, emotionally damaged, arrogant, angry, lonely, or simply misunderstood.

The settings can change. The characters can change. The culture can change.

But the fantasies remain.

Maybe that is why these stories have survived for so long.

We may grow older, become more cynical, learn that real life rarely provides neat endings, and discover that princes do not always arrive with glass slippers or that love does not magically cure someone's worst qualities.

But somewhere inside us, many of us still want to believe in transformation.

We want to believe that the person nobody notices might someday be recognised.

We want to believe that the life we have now is not necessarily the life we will have forever.

We want to believe that the person who seems impossible to love might have something beautiful hidden underneath.

And perhaps, more than anything, we want to believe that happily ever after is still possible.

Maybe that is the real reason Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast have stood the test of time.

Not because they are necessarily the best fairy tales.

But because they tell us something we never seem to stop wanting to hear:

Things can change. People can change. And our story might not be over yet.