The World Wide Cinderella Maiden Archetype
Fairy tales have a way of catching the imagination. They play to the fantasy of childhood and resonate in the psyche of adults because they use archetypal characters to express cultural norms and expectations. One of the best known fairy tales is that of the beautiful girl who is forced to slave away for her evil stepmother and stepsisters after the death of her father. The story of the abused girl and how she wins the heart of the ruler is known throughout the world. While her name varies from culture to culture, she is always the girl who sleeps in the soot and is kind in the face of evil. She is always the Maiden who embodies her culture’s ideals of perfection to show the apparent worth of a woman.
The girl of these Cinderella stories represents the Maiden at her most vulnerable and at her most alluring according to cultural standards. This is achieved by using specific motifs and socially constructed ideals of beauty that are easily interchanged across cultures. More specifically, the Maiden has a lesson to learn and a goal to achieve, and must do so by conforming to mold of the desired female of any given culture. The motifs found within the story are symbolic in nature because they enable the Cinderella meet the challenges of conformity.
Motifs of the Maiden
One of these motifs is the cruel treatment of an innocent girl by an evil and jealous stepmother who represents the Overbearing Mother archetype. In the book 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters, Dr. Victoria Schmidt outlines archetypal characters and how they interact with one another. According to Schmidt, the Maiden depends on others and must be taught to act for herself. The Overbearing Mother—or in this case Stepmother—“pushes the Maiden out of the house where she then learns to fend for herself” (Schmidt 90). While it may appear that Cinderella’s stepmother is attempting to keep her in the confines of the home, she has actually cast her out of the family by making her work as a servant and forcing Cinderella to take her bed in the cinders of the hearth. The stepmother fits the description given by Schmidt perfectly. And is more than up to the task of transforming the Maiden into the desired feminine ideal.
