What Is The True Story Behind Cinderella'S Sisters In The Novel?

For my research last year, I read a lot of different versions of Cinderella and noticed how interesting the sister dynamic was. In the oldest story “Ye Xian” from Chinese folklore, there is no real conflict with the stepsister. The main antagonist is the stepmother. The European versions of Cinderella created more conflict between Cinderella and her stepsisters. The stepsisters share a room with Cinderella, refuse to give her clothes, and force her to do household chores. The two women are obsessed with status and appearance, and they are used as foils to highlight Cinderella’s superior inner qualities. Most novelizations of Cinderella, including those by Frances Hodgson Burnett and many modern YA authors, try to give the stepsisters back stories and even attempt to make them somewhat likable. But this really misses the point of the folkloric story. The stepsisters exist to be defeated by Cinderella. They are flat characters in the original fairy tales, created solely to be overcome by the heroine. This is why the most faithful adaptations of Cinderella stories keep the stepsisters fairly one-dimensional and even somewhat nasty. Their purpose in the story is to be defeated by Cinderella, and that is all.

They’re bullies. A simple story of bullying. The Grimm brothers wrote this up to depict how seriously horrible cheating is, and then how the cheating crowd gets punished in ways both violent and poetic – after first mutilating themselves. End of story.

I saw that someone posted this already, but oh well. So the ‘sisters’ in Cinderella are portrayed pretty poorly in a lot of retellings, including modern ones. However, I believe that in the Grimm version, they are not just mean and ugly. They are actually kind of horrifying. At the end of the story, they have their eyes pecked out by birds. The Perrault version of Cinderella is what Disney generally uses, but it is not as harsh as the Grimm version. In the Grimm version, the stepsisters are desperate to marry Cinderella, and cut off their own toes in order to try to fit into the glass slipper. It really brings a new light to their perspectives and how the story would be if it were told from theirs instead of Cinderella’s. As if she got to meet Prince Charming because of some magic that they didn’t. I read ‘Ella Enchanted’ recently, and while the stepsisters in that are not as mean as in the Grimm version, they are still sort of humanized. The true story behind the ‘sisters’ in Cinderella is actually quite fascinating. The versions of Cinderella from hundreds of years ago contained a lot of horrible and even supernatural elements, which were cut out in order to make children’s stories. The elements that were left in order to make the ‘villains’ clear are sort of brutal and even horror-like at times.

As for the ending of the two sisters, the comeuppance of the two sisters in the Grimm’s version is very vivid and has lingered with me longer than the ball and the glass slipper. It’s not necessarily about being kind and that good things will come to you. Rather, it is a cautionary tale that tells of the dangers of envy and the consequences of cruelty in a very gritty and realistic (albeit fantastical) fashion.

I feel so sorry for the sisters of Cinderella. They must have been influenced by their evil stepmother as much as Cinderella was. The wicked stepsisters are a great archetype, and the stories of their lives can vary so much from version to version. Sometimes they are just very vain and silly, while in other versions they are very nasty. I think there is no one “true” version of their lives. Each culture and author would use them to fit the story that they were trying to tell, perhaps as a big obstacle for Cinderella, perhaps as a symbol of how unfair it is that they have everything and didn’t have to work for it, or perhaps they are just a funny character in the story. The stepsisters’ lives are left up to the teller of the story.