“Fairy tale” is the term also used to describe something containing unusual happiness, like “fairy tale ending” a happing ending, or “fairy tale romance”, though not all fairy tales have a happy ending. According to Arthur Schlesinger, classical tales “tell children what they unconsciously know-that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is, happy-and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self” (229). Despite the fact that both Perrault and the Grimm brothers versions of Cinderella are fundamentally similar to each other, but the differences between them show two different moral universes. …show more content…
Cinderella had a fairy godmother in Perrault version, while she had a dead mother in form of a magic tree in the Grimms’ version. In Perrault version, the king invited all the young girls in the kingdom to the ball and in the Grimm’s brother’s version, the king invited all of the young girls to a festival for his son to be able to choose a bride. In Perrault version, Cinderella’s fairy godmother made all her dreams come true, turning huge a rat into a fat coachman with “the finest mustache and whiskers ever seen”, mice into fine horses in “beautiful mouse-colored dapple gray”, lizards into a carriage, and her rags turned into cloth of gold and silver all decked with jewels. In the Grimm version, Cinderella had to lay on her mother’s grave beneath the hazel-tree and cry to her mother before the birds threw down a “gold and silver dress and slipper embroidered with silk and silver”. In the Perrault version, when the two stepsisters tried the slipper on and it didn’t fit them perfectly, they were disappointed. Their mother told them to cut off their toes for the slipper to fit, in the Grimm brothers’ …show more content…
Even though Cinderella two wicked step-sisters were heartless and arrogant, “she still embraced them and forgave them with all her heart and married them to two great lords of the Court”. In the Grimm’s brother’s version, the folktale ended violently and fiercely because “the two step-sister’s eyes were pecked out by pigeons for their wickedness and falsehood” and they were blind as long as they lived. According to Maria Tatar the author of numerous articles on fairy tales and also ten scholarly books, “fairy tales have modeled behavioral codes and development paths, even as they provide us with terms for thinking about what happens in our world”