At the touch of the wand, the girl’s “wretched clothes” become “a dress made of cloth of gold and silver bedecked with precious stones.” Finally, the godmother gives Cinderella “a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the world.” Her godmother, who happens to be a fairy, says, “You wish you could go to the ball, n’est-ce pas?” Together, they a change a pumpkin into a coach, six mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, and six lizards into footmen. They’re beauty and effort is not enough to win the prince’s heart and instead he picks Cinderella for her beauty and goodness.In the tale by Charles Perrault published in Paris in 1697, Cinderella watches her two stepsisters depart for the ball, then bursts into tears.

They insult Cinderella through out the story and at the end they chop off parts of their feet in hopes of marrying the prince.

The Grimm brothers first describe the stepsisters as “beautiful, with fair faces, but evil and dark hearts” (third paragraph). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm seemed to have framed the same moral through the failures of the stepsisters rather than through the success of Cinderella. Perrault writes that Cinderella was “no less good than beautiful” (forty-eighth paragraph). Later, when she marries the prince she lodges her sisters in the palace and finds them high class husbands. Cinderella overcomes her disappointment and her sisters’ insults and fixes their hair anyway because Cinderella “was very good”(eleventh paragraph) Then, once she arrives at the ball, Cinderella is sure to sit with her sisters and share the fruits that the prince had given her. Perrault frames this goodness in many parts of the story. The story emphasizes Cinderella’s astonishing beauty but also frames her “unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper” (first paragraph). In Perrault’s version this moral is taught through the success of Cinderella in finding a husband in the prince. As I read the two stories of Cinderella, “Cinderella or, The Little Glass Slipper”, by Charles Perrault, and “Cinderella”, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, I tried to find similarities and differences between the two.īy my interpretation the stories both seem to have the same moral: Kindness and goodness is more valuable than beauty.

The little glass slipper story