Alice Munro's Cinderella

The Theme of Luck in Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage
Cinderella is a fairy tale that has been around for a long time. Having made it through generations with Disney’s help, it became a prominent figure in literature, inspiring authors to follow in the story’s footsteps. Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage is one of those stories. Correspondingly, the motifs found in Cinderella are also easily found in Alice Munro’s short story. Alice Munro implemented the theme of luck in her story with the help of Cinderella motifs. Throughout the narrative, the theme is substantiated using various motifs; the persecuted heroine, the magical helper, meeting and marrying the prince, the proof of …show more content…
The two main male characters in Cinderella and in Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage have multiple women chasing them. In the fairy tale, the prince is looking for a princess to marry and in Munro’s story, meaning that he has myriad of suitors. In Munro’s tale, Boudreau has two women chasing after him. Both found who they wanted with the help of a certain object. The Prince found his princess due to her losing a glass slipper at the Castle Ball, and Ken found a woman that could take care of him. In Alice Munro’s story, Johanna’s purse, containing “a bright blue bankbook” with a sum that is “not dazzling, but […] certainly impressive” (46) is what tells Ken Boudreau that she is the one for him, since he was in financial trouble due to the hotel “[he had] taken sight unseen in the payment of a debt” (47). The money in the story is saliant to the theme of luck since, if Ken would not have been interested in finding the name of the woman who took care of him whilst he was sick, he would have never opened her purse to see her name. Hence, he would not have found out what her financial …show more content…
The antagonist’s goal is to cause harm to the leading character, but their scheme backfired. In Munro’s story, Edith is the antagonist, since it was her idea to craft romantic letters to Johanna pretending to be her own father to make Johanna feel miserable once she realizes Ken never wrote these letters and does not love her. To the teen’s surprise, the leading woman and her father got married and had a son, all due to the prank she pulled at age 12. To Edith, “on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, [there was not] any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar” (52). Edith thought her actions would only have the consequences that she expected, but what she learned that everything does not always go according to plan. Luckily, Ken never actually got Johanna’s letters, since he was sick and could not get up. Additionally, Johanna never talked about them and got rid of all of them in order to, ironically, keep them away from the hands of Sabitha and Edith, who fabricated their content in the first place. Through the Cinderella motifs, Alice Munro shows that luck is the dominant theme in Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage. From the motif of the persecuted heroine to the outside help Johanna had, she managed to meet and marry her prince due to the money found in Johanna’s purse. The story’s moral is what rounds up the key theme of the