Who does not love a Cinderella story? Or for that matter a Cinderella team or a Cinderella ending? Our quintessential story about a rise from rags to riches has also become a cultural meme for capturing dramatic turnarounds, hard-won victories that are earned by a deserving underdog. The tropes that accompany versions of the story-missing shoes or cruel stepsisters—have migrated into many different narratives, flashing out at us as reminders of a fairy-tale drama that mingles persecution at home and class differences with romance that takes the form of love at first sight. The version of "Cinderella” best known in Anglo-American and European cultures comes from Charles Perrault, who published his "Cendrillon” in 1697. Disney's 1950 feature-length animated Cinderella opens to the image of a book with a voice-over that gives us the beginning of Perrault's tale about a beleaguered heroine, an evil stepmother and her daughters, a fairy godmother, a pumpkin, glass slippers, and a midnight spell. Since Disney, the story's staying power has derived from its depiction of maternal cruelty and sibling rivalry as well as its staging of the power of radiant beauty. Both Cinderella and the Prince are transformed, with one rising phoenix-like from the ashes and the other determined to find his soul mate via a sole mate. The double transformation that fuels the narrative energy of “Cinderella” leads to a happily ever after in virtually every version of her story. But the heroine's stepsisters rarely fare well. Who can forget the final scene of the Grimms' "Cinderella,” which graphically describes the fate of those ill-tempered, disagreeable pretenders to the throne? When the couple went to church, the elder sister was on the right, the younger on the left side: the doves pecked one eye from each one. Later, when they left the church, the elder sister was on the left, the younger on the right. The doves pecked the other eye from each one. (see here) For their “wickedness and malice” (see here) the sisters are punished with blindness for the rest of their lives. This ending, along with the details of the mutilation of their feet, is often cited as evidence of the brutal, violent turn taken by German fairy tales. Yet the Grimms' punishment for the stepsisters is relatively mild when compared to what befalls their counterparts in other cultures. An Indonesian Cinderella forces her stepsister into a cauldron of boiling water, then has the body cut up, pickled, and sent to the girl's mother as "salt meat" for her next meal. A Filipino variant shows the stepmother and her daughters "pulled to pieces by wild horses." And a Japanese stepsister is dragged around in a basket, tumbles over the edge of a deep ditch, and falls to her death.1 Many versions of "Cinderella," however, end on a conciliatory note. Charles Perrault offers what is perhaps the fullest elaboration of a reconciliation between the heroine and her stepsisters, who throw themselves at Cinderella's feet and beg her forgiveness. This Cinderella, who is as good as she is beautiful, not only pardons the sisters but also invites them to join her in the palace and loses no time in marrying them to two high- ranking court officials. An Armenian Cinderella falls at the feet of her wicked sisters as they are leaving church, weeps copious tears with them, and bears them no grudge.2 And finally, a recent American version marketed through elementary schools stages a crudely sentimental reconciliation scene, presumably designed to appeal to the educators and parents buying the book: [The sisters] begged Cinderella to forgive them for being so mean to her. Cinderella told them they were forgiven. “I am sure you will never be mean to me again,” she said. "Oh, never," said the older sister. "Never, ever," said the younger sister. Cinderella has been reinvented by so many different cultures that it is hardly surprising to find that she is sometimes cruel and vindictive, at other times compassionate and kind. Even within a single cultural zone, she can appear genteel and self-effacing in one story, clever and enterprising in another, coy and manipulative in a third. Still, Jane Yolen may have a point when she asserts that the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a "passive princess" waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her. Disney's Cinderella, as we shall see, is a shrinking violet by comparison with some of her folkloric ancestors, who refuse to stay at home suffering in silence and who become adept at engineering their own rescues. Just how spirited and resourceful was Cinderella in her earliest incarnations? Answering that question requires surveying a vast array of tales featuring heroines known not only as Cinderella, Cendrillon, Ash Girl, and Cennerentola, but also as Rashin Coatie, Mossy Coat, Catskin, Katie Woodencloak, and Donkeyskin. The Aarne- Thompson-Uther index of tale types identifies two distinct Cinderella tales: ATU 510A ("Cinderella") and ATU 510B ("The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars," also known as "Cap o' Rushes," etc.). The two narratives encoded in the tale-type indexes seem virtually unrelated at first glance. The plots of “Cinderella" stories are driven by the anxious jealousy of biological mothers and stepmothers who subject the heroine to one ordeal of domestic drudgery after another; the plots of “Catskin” tales are fueled by the erotic passion of fathers, whose unseemly behavior drives their daughters from home. In tales depicting the social persecution of a girl by her stepmother, the central focus comes to rest on the unbearable family situation produced by a father's remarriage. But while the father's responsibility for creating turmoil by choosing an inappropriate marriage partner recedes into the background or is suppressed over time (even as the father himself is virtually eliminated as a character), the foul deeds of his wife come to occupy center stage. We see her throwing her stepdaughter into a river, instructing a hunter to kill her and recover her lungs and liver for dinner, sending her into a snowstorm wearing nothing but a shift, depriving her of food, and making her life wretched in every way. In tales depicting erotic persecution of a daughter by her father, stepmothers and their daughters tend to vanish from the central arena of action. Yet the father's desire for his daughter in the second tale type furnishes a powerful motive for a stepmother's jealous rages and unnatural deeds in the first tale type. Psychoanalytic criticism has read “Cinderella” and “Catskin” as enactments of Oedipal desires, with each tale suppressing one component (love for the father or hatred of the mother) of the Oedipal plot. Many "Catskin" narratives, among them Perrault's “Donkeyskin” (see here) and the Grimms' "Thousandfurs," mount two phases of action: in the first the heroine is persecuted by her father, in the second she turns into a Cinderella figure, obliged to spend her days in domestic servitude under the supervision of a despotic cook or a queen. Yet there is an even more compelling case for arguing that the tales captured the hard facts of everyday life, staging domestic arrangements that led to the physical and sexual abuse of girls, with cruel parents and stepparents who exploit rather than protect the young. Our headlines today reveal that the dark side of fairy tales like "Cinderella" and "Donkeyskin” still come true today. They are a stark reminder that domestic violence does not belong exclusively to the "long ago and far away.” While wicked stepmothers figure prominently in fairy tales disseminated in our culture, fathers who persecute their daughters by showing them too much affection are virtually unknown. “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Hansel and Gretel" are the tales from Perrault and from the Grimms that continue to thrive even on foreign soil, while stories such as "Donkeyskin" and "Thousandfurs" have either failed to take root or have been modified beyond recognition, with the result that fathers have a surprisingly limited role in fairy tales transmitted today. It is important to bear in mind that the passive or absent father was, even a century ago, not the rule in fairy tales. As Marian Cox's nineteenth-century study of 345 variants of "Cinderella" makes clear, at least two widespread and pervasive versions of the tale attributed the heroine's social degradation either to what Cox describes in characteristic Victorian language as an “unnatural father” or to a father who attempts to extract from his daughter a statement about her filial devotion. Of the 226 tales belonging unambiguously to one of the three categories labeled by Cox as (1) ill-treated heroine (with mothers, stepmothers, and their progeny as victimizers), (2) unnatural father, and (3) King Lear judgment, 130 belong to the first class, 77 to the second, and 19 to the third. Thus in the tales examined by Cox, the versions that cast (step)mothers in the role of villain only slightly outnumber those that ascribe Cinderella's misfortune to an importunate father. Cinderella and her cousins were, therefore, once almost as likely to flee the household because of their father's perverse erotic attachment to them or because of his insistence on a verbal declaration of love, as they were to be banished to the hearth and degraded to domestic servitude by an ill-tempered stepmother. That our own culture would suppress the theme of paternal erotic pursuit and indulge freely in elaborate variations on the theme of maternal tyranny is perhaps not surprising on a number of counts. Since tales such as Perrault's "Donkeyskin" and the Grimms' "Thousandfurs" make for troubling reading matter for adults, it hardly seems advisable to put them between the covers of books for children. But Marina Warner has argued that there is something more at stake in this evolutionary turn in the Cinderella story: When interest in psychological realism is at work in the mind of the receiver of traditional folklore, the proposed marriage of a father to his daughter becomes too hard to accept. But it is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen, and is known to have done so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring, rather than the other way around. The censorship to which Warner refers seems to have led to dramatic editorial interventions very early on, perhaps as the tale made its way from an oral culture to a literary tradition. In Straparola's seventeenth-century "Catskin” tale, the king is described as a “wicked father” with “evil designs," "execrable lust,” and a “wicked and treacherous passion." Yet it is his wife who decrees that the object of his lust and passion be their daughter Doralice. On her deathbed, the queen beseeches her husband Tebaldo never to take anyone as wife whose finger does not perfectly fit her own wedding ring. Faithful husband that he is, Tebaldo makes it a condition "that any damsel who might be offered to him in marriage should first try on her finger his wife's ring, to see whether it fitted." When the king fails to find a woman whose finger fits the ring, he turns to his daughter and discovers that the fit is perfect. As Tebaldo tells his daughter, he is obliged to marry her for it is the only way “I shall satisfy my own desire without violating the promise I made to your mother.” While some readers will not be persuaded by Tebaldo's logic and by the narrator's efforts to exonerate the king, many others have clearly bought right into the rhetoric of self-justification set forth in other Catskin tales. Consider one critic's gloss on the family dynamics in Perrault's “Donkeyskin”: “The dying queen had a vengeful streak: she made her husband... swear not to remarry unless he found a woman superior to her in beauty and goodness. Entrapped, the king eventually discovers that only his lovely daughter can fill the bill." Another critic finds that “Rashie-Coat's degradation is consequent upon her dying mother's unfortunate imprudence."2 Again and again, mothers are the real villains, extracting promises that end by victimizing both father and daughter. Everywhere we look, the tendency to defame women and to magnify maternal evil emerges. Even when a tale turns on a father's incestuous desires, the mother becomes more than complicit: she has stirred up the trouble in the first place by setting the conditions for her husband's remarriage. The ring episode in Straparola's "Catskin” does suggest one hitherto neglected point of contact between "Cinderella” tales and "Catskin" stories. Finding the perfect fit between fingers and rings and between feet and shoes becomes a task set to both fathers and princes, who now and then collaborate with each other (as in the Grimms' "Cinderella"), who sometimes work in succession (as in Perrault's "Donkeyskin"), and who are occasionally concurrent rivals, as in an Indian tale titled "The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter."10 What these stories demonstrate, perhaps more forcefully than anything else, is the way in which the path to happy heterosexual unions depends on a successful transfer of filial love and devotion from a father to a "prince," on a move from a false "perfect fit" to a true "perfect fit.” While Catskin tales raise the charged issue of incestuous desire and place the heroine in jeopardy, they also furnish a rare stage for creative action. Unlike Cinderella, who endures humiliation at home and becomes the beneficiary of lavish gifts, the heroine of Catskin tales is mobile, active, and resourceful. She begins with a strong assertion of will, resistant to the paternal desires that would claim her. Fleeing the household, she moves out into an alien world that requires her to be inventive, energetic, and enterprising if she is to reestablish herself, to reclaim her royal rank, and to marry the prince. To be sure, her resourcefulness is confined largely to sartorial and culinary arts, but these were, after all, the two areas in which women traditionally could distinguish themselves. The Grimms' Thousandfurs dazzles with her dress, and she successfully uses her cuisine to lure the prince. Donkeyskin's powers of attraction are also explicitly linked to her wardrobe and her baking skills. That these stories are disappearing from the folkloric arena is perhaps not surprising. The theme of incest alone would account for the steady erosion of interest in anthologizing the tale. But in addition, the story's critique of paternal authority and its endorsement of filial disobedience turn it into an unlikely candidate for bedtime reading. What are we to make of a story that positions a father as the agent of transgressive sexuality and the daughter as the enforcer of cultural law and order? Perrault, who felt that fairy tales ought to transmit lessons to children about virtue and vice, was so mystified by “Donkeyskin” that he appended a comment that is absurdly irrelevant to the terms of the text: "The story of Donkeyskin may be hard to believe, but as long as there are children, mothers, and grandmothers in this world, it will be fondly remembered by all" (see here). What is far harder to believe than the story itself is the idea that this particular tale could generate “fond" memories. In staging the attempted violation of a sacred taboo, Catskin stories celebrate daughters as agents of resistance, yet also enshrine them as maintaining the sanctity of cultural codes. Giambattista Basile captured exactly what made this story unacceptable to later generations when he spelled out its moral: The wise man spoke well when he said that one cannot obey commands of gall with obedience sweet as sugar. Man must give only well-measured commands if he expects well-weighed obedience, and resistance springs from wrongful orders, as happened in the case of the King of Roccaspra, who, by asking for what was unseemly from his daughter, caused her to run away at the peril of her life and honor. While there are virtually no male counterparts to Catskin (mother/son incest seems to resist representation in folktales), male Cinderellas abound in the folklore of many cultures. Aarne and Thompson felt obliged to accommodate these male Cinderellas in their index of tale types by setting up a separate category of Cinderella tales identified by the rubric AT 511 (“One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes" for female Cinderellas) and AT 511A (“The Little Red Ox” for male Cinderellas). The distinction is little more than theoretical, for in practice, tales such as "The Little Red Ox” (a story in which the protagonist's mother returns in the form of a donor-ox) seem to feature girls almost as often as boys. These tales neutralize the persecutions of a wicked stepmother with the sustenance, nurturing, and rescue provided by an animal that is clearly identified with the dead mother. The Indian “Story of the Black Cow" (see here) belongs to a tale type that has virtually disappeared from our folkloristic repertoire but once enjoyed the kind of popularity that “Cinderella” has attained today. That male Cinderellas have vanished from our own cultural horizon challenges us to understand exactly what it was that once allowed both girls and boys to participate in the developmental trajectory outlined in the tale.