PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella A NNE E. D UGGAN W AYNE S TATE U NIVERSITY Imagine a Cinderella who kills her stepmother, or decapitates an ogress, or triumphantly splashes mud on her sisters on her way to trying on the famed slipper. These are not the first images that come to mind when we think of Cinderella tales in our post-Disney world. But all of these variations of the Cinderella story indeed coexisted and competed with each other for generations in Italy, France, Germany, and England. In what follows, I trace the early modern history of Cinderella adaptations, which reveals the ideological underpinnings of each author’s position with respect to gender and social class in ways that might come as a surprise to critics who assume Cinderella always plays a passive role in her story. 1 In A Theory of Adaptation (2006), Linda Hutcheon argues that adaptation is “a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story, and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and talents. Therefore, adapters are first interpreters and then creators” (18). In this examination of adaptations of “Cinderella,” I consider the adapters as interpreters—responding to their understanding of the source tale—and as creators—generating reinterpretations and thus recreating the source tale through different ideological lenses. Specifically, I explore the processes of adaptation of “Cinderella” from Giambattista Basile and Charles Perrault to Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. The very conscious changes Perrault and d’Aulnoy make to the narrative suggest that adaptation can function as a site for ideological debate through these reinterpretations and recreations. The first model for Cinderella, Basile’s Zezolla, proves to be morally 1 Here I am thinking of the feminist work of, i.e., Marcia Lieberman, who uses “Cinderella” as a case in point to discuss passive heroines. While this is important work, we also need to learn more about the histories of these tales and their readers in order to recognize that even in the seventeenth century, Perrault’s passive princesses did not go unchallenged and that there were indeed competing versions of tales like “Cinderella” in circulation. Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 382 ambiguous; the heroine also exercises a level of agency absent in Perrault’s adaptation, which speaks to Perrault’s own ideological position on gender. Through her adaptation, d’Aulnoy reintegrates motifs from Basile eliminated by Perrault, splices in a female-centered version of Perrault’s “Le Petit Poucet” (“Little Thumbling”), and draws from Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s “L’Adroite princesse, ou les aventures de Finette” (“The Clever Princess, or the Adventures of Finette”) to, arguably, engage in ideological debate with Perrault, challenging in particular his position on gender. While my focus will be on the processes and functions of adaptation in the case of early modern Cinderella tales, I will also consider the question: why is the fairy tale particularly supple for the purposes of adaptation? I suggest that genres like the fairy tale that generate a storehouse of variants based on similar plotlines can be used as shorthand to communicate ideological positions on gender, class, and politics, among others. Basile’s “The Cat Cinderella” The very first Cinderella story that is the mother of the classic version we know today, giving the heroine her name, was penned in the first half of the seventeenth century by the Italian writer, Giambattista Basile. 2 Both Perrault and d’Aulnoy would have been familiar with “The Cinderella Cat,” published in Basile’s Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones (1634-36). This earliest Cinderella is a far cry from Disney’s post-WWII domesticated heroine. Basile names his heroine Zezolla, although after her demotion by her stepmother her family refers to her as “Cat Cinderella” because she sits by the hearth where cats would warm themselves. She is also the daughter of a prince, whose wife had passed away. At the beginning of the story, Zezolla has a wicked stepmother, about whom she complains to her sewing teacher, Carmosina, wishing that her teacher was her stepmother instead. Carmosina advises Zezolla on how to kill her stepmother, which Zezolla succeeds in doing, and shortly thereafter Zezolla’s father takes Carmosina as his wife. But when Carmosina brings her six daughters into the household, she raises these commoners above Princess Zezolla, who is forced to carry out the lowliest work in the household. 2 While I recognize that the ATU Classification system, among other works, shows countless tales resembling the story of Cinderella across history and geographical locations, I specifically am discussing the tales that use the name itself, “Cinderella,” which first occurs in Basile. That is, I’m talking about a very specific and traceable genealogy that occurs in Western Europe. Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 383 In Basile’s tale, female figures have the power to halt a ship. A fairy dove informs Zezolla that should she wish for something, she only need send her request through the dove of the fairies in Sardinia and her wish will be granted. When Zezolla’s father prepares to leave for Sardinia on business, the stepsisters ask him to bring them luxury items, whereas Zezolla makes him promise to give his regards on her behalf to the dove of the fairies and to request that she send Zezolla something. If he forgets, he will not be able to move forward or backward. Of course, the father forgets, and his ship is stuck at port until it is brought to the prince’s attention that he broke his promise to Zezolla. He thus seeks out the fairies, one of whom gives the prince a date tree, hoe, golden pail, and silk cloth to bring back to his daughter. Using the tools given to her by the fairy, Zezolla then plants the date tree, it grows, and a fairy emerges from it to grant her wish, which is to attend a feast. Zezolla rides to the feast on a white thoroughbred—a detail retained in d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron”—and the king falls in love with her. Zezolla attends two more feasts, and after the third feast, as she rushes off, she loses her shoe. As we might expect, the king issues a proclamation inviting all women to try on the shoe, and when Zezolla finally gets her chance to try it on, it fits like a glove and she is crowned queen. The last line of the tale concludes with the sisters’ anger. The moral? “[T]hose who oppose the stars are crazy” (89). Basile’s Cinderella wields more authority—backed by fairy power—than her later incarnations in Perrault and Disney. Zezolla kills her first stepmother, and despite her apparent lack of female virtues—innocent maidens don’t usually kill anyone—the fairies assist her in attaining the hand of a king. Although for the second and third feasts she travels by luxury coach, for the first feast she rides a beautiful white thoroughbred, which paints a rather adventurous picture of our heroine. The feast is not being given to find a wife for the king or his son; the king simply falls in love with the mystery woman, who continually evades his men when they try to discover her identity as she flees the festivities, until she loses her shoe. Zezolla is a Cinderella who kills to improve her lot, she is able to overpower her forgetful father—a prince, no less—through the assistance of (female) fairy magic, and she is able to outsmart the king’s men. Cat Cinderella is oppressed by her stepmother and stepsisters; however, it is her initiative and assertiveness—supported by those other strong women, the fairies— that leads to her crowning as queen at the end of the tale. Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 384 Perrault’s “Cendrillon” The fact that Perrault adapted Basile to create his own version of Cinderella only foregrounds the ideological changes he made to accommodate his more conservative perspective on gender. For his “Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre,” which appeared in Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), Perrault makes the heroine’s father a nobleman instead of a prince, and streamlines the story, including only one stepmother and two stepsisters, and two balls. Perrault emphasizes the fact that Cinderella submits to abuse from her family with great patience. When the sisters prepare for the prince’s ball (as opposed to the king’s in Basile), they call upon Cinderella to dress them and then style their hair because they value her fashion sense, and the narrator remarks: “Une autre que Cendrillon les aurait coiffées de travers; mais elle était bonne, et elle les coiffa parfaitement bien” (Perrault 172). 3 Cinderella only receives help from her fairy godmother when she begins to cry, after her sisters leave for the ball, and then arrives at the ball in great style, where she is kind to her sisters, who fail to recognize her. The fairy godmother serves a parental role in setting a curfew of midnight to Cinderella’s evening excursion; in the case of Basile’s heroine, she simply wants to arrive home before her stepsisters return from the feast. At the end of Perrault’s tale, when it is discovered that Cinderella is the mystery lady at the ball and will now marry the prince, the stepsisters ask for her forgiveness, and Cinderella not only forgives them, but she also has them move into the palace with her and finds them noble husbands. Perrault’s Cinderella is much more self-effacing than the heroine of Basile. Zezolla does not display any particular patience; she is commanding, even in her oppression, with respect to her father; and there is no evidence that she readily submits to or forgives her stepsisters. In the case of Perrault’s Cinderella, however, the moral of the story valorizes the heroine’s “good grace” (“bonne grâce”), which could signify in the period doing a favor or service for someone without being obliged to do so. While such values could be viewed as laudible in broad abstract terms, within the context of gender relations in the tale, this suggests that good women should give without expecting anything in return, and in so doing, in the long run, they will win the hand of a prince, who will come to their rescue. That is to say, if they submit to and endure abuse patiently, they eventually will be rewarded with a crown—a message more blatantly communicated through another tale by Perrault, “Griselidis,” whose heroine is seriously mistreated 3 “Any other than Cinderella would have done up their hair awry, but she was good, and she did their hair perfectly well.” Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 385 by her husband, supposedly in order to make her patience and virtue shine all the more. Given this pre-marital training, we can easily imagine the submissive role Cinderella will continue to play in her life with the prince. From Finette to Finette-Cendron Let’s now imagine that d’Aulnoy has read or heard both Basile’s and Perrault’s tale. She doesn’t agree with Perrault’s representation of Cinderella, and is thinking of playful ways to respond to this problematic tale. She is familiar with another tale by Perrault, “Le petit poucet”—a sort of “Hansel and Gretel” tale—in which the youngest and smallest of seven brothers saves his siblings from parental abandonment and from a childeating ogre. She is also familiar with Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s tale, “L’Adroite Princesse, ou les aventures de Finette” (1695), which became quite popular in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from which d’Aulnoy clearly drew in the shaping of her Cinderella tale. L’Héritier and Perrault were related through their mothers. Perrault’s mother was Pâquette Le Clerc (d.1652); also a Le Clerc, Marie-Jeanne’s mother, Françoise, would have been significantly younger (more likely Pâquette’s niece and not sister), having married Nicolas L’Héritier in 1660. Probably cousins to some degree, Charles being thirty-six years her senior, L’Héritier and Perrault frequented the same circles and Marie-Jeanne dedicated a tale about a maiden warrior, “Marmoisan,” to Perrault’s only daughter, Marie-Madeleine. However, Marie-Jeanne did not share the gender ideology of her cousin, which is clear in “L’Adroite Princesse,” problematically rendered as “Discreet” in most English translations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, thus toning down the agency of the heroine who, in French, is adroite—meaning clever, skilled, accomplished, or nimble. One could imagine that d’Aulnoy names her heroine “Finette- Cendron” as a way of supporting L’Héritier’s representations of women, perhaps foregrounding the implicit gender debate occurring between the two cousins. Dedicated to another fairy-tale writer, Henriette Julie de Murat, L’Héritier’s “L’Adroite Princesse, ou les aventures de Finette” is framed by two messages: idleness is the mother of all vices, and distrust is the mother of safety. The second message specifically has to do with sweet-talking men, who swoon over women in the salons without actually being in love with them. The tale takes place in the period of the Crusades and concerns a widowed king with three daughters who is preparing to leave for Palestine. He worries in particular about leaving his two older daughters, the lazy and messy Nonchalante and the gossipy Babillarde. Finette, on the other hand, is Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 386 less worrisome; she typically occupies herself with dancing, singing, and playing music as well as watching over the administration of her father’s kingdom and advising him on political treaties. In order to know if his daughters behaved appropriately in his absence, the king obtains three enchanted distaffs, which will break of they dishonor themselves, and he then locks them up in an apparently inpenetrable tower. In their boredom, Nonchalante and Babillarde are duped into letting the prince known as Riche-cautèle into the tower, and he succeeds in seducing and impregnating them. Of course, Finette, able to negotiate treaties between kings, not only outsmarts the prince, but on several occassions also violently punishes him. First, when he breaks into her room, she arms herself with a hammer, “dont elle badinoit comme on fait d’un évantail” (265), an image that blends elegance with violence. 4 Then she sets a trap and the prince falls into a sewer, injuring himself. When the prince wishes to throw Finette in a barrel lined with knives, razors, and nails, she ends up pushing him into the barrel instead and rolls him down a mountain. The fairy who furnished the enchanted distaffs punishes the two sisters by having them work picking peas and weeding, and they both end up dying, while Finette marries a handsome prince and brother of Riche-cautèle named “Bel-à-voir,” who had sworn to his dying brother to avenge him, another sticky mess Finette adeptly resolves. The opposition between the morally compromised and frivolous older sisters and the youngest virtuous one is typical of tales about kind and unkind sisters in the tradition of “Cinderella.” However, in L’Héritier, the sisters do not mistreat Finette. For her part, Finette is hardworking not because she is forced to be so, and this work is not limited to the domestic, but she also engages in intellectual and political domains: she is no simple housewife. Although Finette is considered virtuous, it is not the kind of passive virtue we see in Perrault’s “Cendrillon.” She actively protects herself from male violence and sexual predation, ready to harm any prince who threatens her well-being, and she even tries to protect her sisters who had children out of wedlock. The prince Bel-à-voir does not swoop in to save Finette. Instead, he nearly kills her due to an oath to a perfidious brother, and Finette in fact saves them both from dishonor and death. More morally justified than Basile’s Zezolla, L’Héritier’s Finette provides an example of a virtuous heroine who can exercise violence to protect herself. By calling her Cinderella character “Finette-Cendron,” then, d’Aulnoy draws on L’Héritier’s empowered heroine to rewrite Perrault’s “Cendrillon.” She also regenders another tale by Perrault, which works to grant the 4 The English reads, “which she waved around as if it were a fashionable fan.” Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 387 heroine further agency: d’Aulnoy sutures together a female-centered version of Perrault’s “Le petit poucet” to her Cinderella tale, which foregrounds Finette’s cleverness and ability to carry out violent actions. And last but not least, d’Aulnoy integrates certain motifs from Basile’s “Cat Cinderella” that also work to create a stronger heroine than that of Perrault. D’Aulnoy’s Cinderella Tale “Finette-Cendron” concerns an impoverished king and queen, chased from their kingdom which they lost, who have three daughters: Fleur d’amour, Belle de Nuit, and Finette. Because they can no longer offer luxuries to the spoiled princesses, the queen proposes to the king that they abandon them in the forest. Finette, also referred to as “Fine Oreille,” overhears the conversation, and brings fresh butter, eggs, milk, and flour to her fairy godmother Merluche in order to make her a cake and ask for her advice. On her way, Finette tires and Merluche sends her a beautiful Spanish horse—a motif from Basile’s “Cat Cinderella”—and later Merluche gives her a ball of thread to help her find her way back home from the forest. When the queen abandons the princesses, Finette helps them all return home despite the fact that her sisters beat and scratch her. Finette overhears her parents again speaking about abandoning the princesses, and this time brings chickens, a rooster, and some rabbits to Merluche, who gives her ashes to spread to help her back home—ashes also anticipating her association with cinders—but this time the godmother warns her not to bring her nasty sisters back home with her. Of course, Finette saves her sisters a second time, and when the third outing occurs, she fears going to see Merluche since she had disobeyed her and, after packing fine clothes and diamonds to bring with her, Finette drops peas to make her way home. However, birds eat up the peas, and the sisters are lost in the forest. Finette then finds an acorn, plants it—saying everyday “crois, crois, beau gland”—and it grows into a tree. She climbs the tree every day as it grows, and one day she spies a beautiful castle. Thinking the castle might be the abode of princes, the sisters steal Finette’s elegant clothes and make themselves up and have Finette pass as their scullery maid (as in Perrault’s “Cendrillon”). But it turns out that the castle belongs to an ogre couple. The three princesses are greeted by the ogress, who is fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide, and who wants to hide the girls from her husband so she can eat them all up herself. Eventually Finette tricks the ogre husband into the oven and he is reduced to ash—a motif that likely shaped the oven scene in “Hansel and Gretel” and another wink to the cinders (cendres) of Cinderella (Cendrillon)—and then she decapitates the ogress with an ax while doing Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 388 her hair. The three sisters take over the castle, and despite Finette’s heroism, her sisters make her sweep and clean the house, and won’t allow her to accompany them to the many balls they attend in town. But one evening, while sitting in the ashes by the hearth, Finette finds a key that opens a beautiful chest filled with luxurious clothes, diamonds, and lace, and she dresses for the ball, “plus belle que le soleil et la lune” (378). As soon as she appears, guests either admire or envy the mystery woman who now goes by the name of “Cendron.” Her sisters, who are not unattractive in d’Aulnoy’s version, are jealous of the mystery lady who takes attention away from them. Importantly, Finette attends many balls, setting fashion trends at court, and she never encounters a prince: she simply has a good time and makes all of the men unfaithful to their lovers (as the narrator informs us), suggesting that this Cinderella is a worldly one. One night Finette-Cendron leaves the ball later than usual and on her way home loses one of her mules. The next day, the Prince Chéri—not mentioned until this point in the story—is out hunting, finds Finette’s mule, and actually falls in love with the shoe! He can no longer eat, and the king and queen send for doctors from Paris and Montpellier, who conclude that he is in love, albeit without having seen the mistress of the mule. The prince informs his parents that he will only marry the woman whose foot fits the shoe. Anticipating the scene in the version published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in which women cut off their toes, here ladies starve themselves and flay their skin in order to try to squeeze their foot into the mule. In d’Aulnoy’s twist on “Cendrillon” it is Finette who takes the initiative to go to seek out the prince to try on the shoe—no one comes to fetch her, and she waits for no one—dressing magnificently in a blue satin dress covered in diamonds. She rides away on her beautiful Spanish horse to court, splashing her sisters with mud en route: “Elle se prit à rire et leur dit: ‘Altesses, Cendrillon vous méprise autant que vous le méritez’” (382-83). 5 The sisters suddenly realize that Cendron and Finette are one in the same. Finette tries on the mule, which of course fits, and Prince Chéri kisses her feet. The prince, king, and queen all beg Finette to marry the lovesick prince. But she will not agree until she tells her story. Delighted to discover that Finette is a princess, the prince’s parents also realize they were the ones who appropriated the land of Finette’s parents, and Finette will not marry the prince until her parents’ kingdom is restored. The tale ends by informing the readers that Finette as well as her sisters all become queens. The moral of the story is a bit tongue-in-cheek: “Tous tes présents et tes services / Sont 5 “She began to laugh and said to them: Your Highnesseses, Cinderella despises you to the extent that you deserve it.” Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 389 autant de vengeurs secrets . . . Belle de Nuit et Fleur d’Amour / Sont plus cruellement punies, / Quand Finette leur fait des grâces infinies, / Que si l’ogre cruel leur ravissait le jour” (384). 6 D’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron” presents several important contrasts with Perrault’s “Cendrillon.” First, d’Aulnoy establishes Finette’s agency at the outset by showing the heroine’s ingenuity through her ability to outwit her parents, albeit with the assistance of her fairy godmother Merluche. However, Finette doesn’t simply passively receive help from her fairy godmother; the heroine brings her offerings of sorts, which suggests a relation of reciprocity. Her agency is further demonstrated in her ability to outmaneouver the ogre and ogress, killing them both, thus recalling Basile’s Zezolla and L’Héritier’s Finette, both of whom resort to violence to overcome their oppressors, an action not typically associated with normative forms of femininity in early modern European society. Significantly, Finette decapitates the ogress while doing her hair, which could be a playful reference to the more obedient heroine of Perrault, who does up her enemies’ hair without seeking revenge. Second, and like L’Héritier’s Finette, d’Aulnoy’s Finette-Cendron, in Tatiana Korneeva’s words, “doesn’t dream about her passive rescue by Prince Charming, even if she ultimately marries him” (735). Indeed, Finette takes initiative time and time again to determine her own future. When she learns that her parents wish to abandon her and her siblings in the forest, she seeks help from her fairy godmother. When the sisters are lost in the woods, Finette locates the ogres’ castle, which eventually brings them wealth. Later Finette-Cendron finds on her own the resources she needs to attend the ball and becomes a fashion icon, fashion, as Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario has argued, being a marker of social status and even “political cunning” (19) in the period. When it comes time to try on the shoe, Finette-Cendron doesn’t wait for someone to bring her the shoe; instead, she climbs on her Spanish horse and rides off to the castle to reclaim her mule. And rather than be rescued by a prince, Finette- Cendron rescues Prince Chéri, and furthermore restores her family’s wealth by negotiating the terms of her marriage with the prince, recalling the ability of L’Héritier’s Finette to negotiate treaties between monarchs. Finally, Finette-Cendron doesn’t, technically, forgive her sisters, although she does help reestablish their social positions by negotiating the return of her family’s wealth. In fact, she takes little and bigger pokes at them throughout the tale, which only foregrounds her mastery of the 6 “All of your presents and services / Are so many secret avengers . . . Flower-of- Love and Night-Beauty / Are more cruelly punished / When Finette grants them infinite favors, / Than if the cruel ogre robbed them of their life.” Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 390 situation. When her sisters would describe the beauty of Cendron (for, again, there were many balls), Finette would playfully reply under her breath so that her sisters could barely hear her: ainsi j’étais, ainsi j’étais, or: so was I, so was I. Most importantly, as she galops past her sisters on her way to the castle to try on the mule, she splashes them with mud, dirtying their beautiful gowns in a gesture that is both playful and vengeful. As a thirteen-year-old (and married! ) girl, d’Aulnoy herself showed such playfully mischievous proclivities. Volker Schröder documents the inscription a young d’Aulnoy wrote in one of her books: “Adieu, Lecteur, si tu as mon livre et que je ne te connaisse pas et que tu ne face point de cas de ce quy est de dans je sou hait[e] que tu ay la teigne, la galle, la fièvre, la peste, [la] rougeole, et le cou cassé. [Que] Dieu t’assiste contre mes malédictions” (“The Birth and Beginnings of Madame d’Aulnoy”). 7 For Korneeva, through this act of vengeance, “d’Aulnoy’s Finette assumes the position typically occupied by the male character in narratives, a position which is even more underlined by the comparison with [Perrault’s] Cendrillon’s passive forgiveness of her evil stepsisters” (747). Interestingly, in Perrault Cendrillon shares fruit and is generous with her sisters at the ball; in d’Aulnoy, the sisters pay Cendron—“faite que pour commander” (379)—tribute at court, just like the other courtisans; that is, they pay homage to her as if she were already the queen. While both Perrault and d’Aulnoy evoke the idea of “grace” in the morals to their tales, in d’Aulnoy it has more of the sense of noblesse oblige—Finette giving “from above”— rather than from a position of subservience, or (for)giving “from below.” We have to keep in mind that, as Korneeva has astutely observed, “at the time d’Aulnoy wrote Finette Cendron, there was no tradition of literary fairy tales with established conventions to which she could conform” (745). One might say that her implicit quarrel with Perrault was not about a feminist combatting a predominant and antifeminist tale about Cinderella that was widely circulating in French society; that is, it was not what we would call today a feminist fairy-tale “revision” of a classic tale in the tradition of authors like Tanith Lee, Emma Donoghue, or more recently Marissa Meyer, for the two tales were published within months of each other, neither being predominant. Even as d’Aulnoy was reacting to Perrault’s “Cendrillon,” it was about writing against a new story produced by her male contemporary; it was about producing a competing narrative about women and gender. And that “competition” didn’t end in the 1690s. 7 The English, rendered by Schröder, reads: “Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions.” Fairy Tale and Adaptation: The Case of Cinderella PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 391 Although we know that Perrault’s “Cendrillon” endured the test of time as it formed the basis for the Disney film, we simply don’t know about the history of d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron,” which enjoyed its own legacy, feeding not only into oral tale traditions but also into the popular Czech- German filmic adaptation, Three Hazelnuts [Wishes] for Cinderella (1973). 8 Through this analysis of the processes of adaptation from Basile to Perrault to d’Aulnoy, notions of gender as well as social class change significantly based on what might seem like an insignificant detail within a similar plotline; the fact that Perrault and then d’Aulnoy very consciously made changes to their source tales can be read as a sort of shorthand to communicate different ideological meanings through the tale. In both Basile and d’Aulnoy, the ball scenes are unmotivated, so to say; the heroine simply wants to go out and enjoy herself; she isn’t necessarily seeking to marry a prince or anyone at all. Perrault, however, confines what little female agency we find in the tale to the marriage plot by creating a more motivated ball scene, and also modifies the narrative to allow a heroine of lower social status to rise, whereas Basile and d’Aulnoy marry socioeconomic and political equals—which can also translate into increased gender equity within marriage. D’Aulnoy’s tweaks to and borrowings from Basile, L’Héritier, and other tales by Perrault open up the possibilities for female agency in her version of Cinderella in ways that seriously challenge the heroine’s limited agency in Perrault. Already by naming her heroine, and by taking that name from a tale by another conteuse in which the heroine needs no man to come to her defense, d’Aulnoy infuses her heroine with significant agency. One could argue that intertextuality in general can function as ideological shorthand, a fact that is bolstered in fairy tales due to a storehouse of similar plotlines, which makes adaptation an economical means of expressing conflicting ideologies, as we see in the case of early modern adaptations of “Cinderella.” Works Cited A ULNOY , Marie-Catherine, baronne d’. Contes I. Intro. Jacques Barchilon. Ed. Philippe Hourcade. 1697. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997. _____. Nouveaux contes des fées. Tome 1. La Haye: Meindert Uytwerf, 1700. B ASILE , Giambattista. The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones. Trans. Nancy L. Canepa. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. 8 Directed by Václav Vorlíček, Three Hazelnuts was a DEFA film inspired by the nineteenth-century writer Božena Němcová’s version of “Finette Cendron” and another, likely German-inspired Cinderella tale. See Duggan and Cravens. Anne E. Duggan PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0027 392 C RAVENS , Rebecca, trans. “‘Cinderella’ by Božena Němcová.” Marvels & Tales 35.2 (Fall 2021): forthcoming. D UGGAN , Anne E. “Introduction: Božena Němcová Adapts Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s ‘Finette-Cendron’ into Czech.” Marvels & Tales 35.2 (Fall 2021): forthcoming. H UTCHEON , Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2006. New York: Routledge, 2013. K ORNEEVA , Tatiana. “Rival Sisters and Vengeance Motifs in the contes de fées of d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier and Perrault.” Modern Language Notes 127.4 (September 2012): 732-53. L’H ÉRITIER , Marie-Jeanne. “L’Adroite Princesse, ou les aventures de Finette.” Oeuvres meslées. Paris: Jean Guignard, 1696. 229-98. L IEBERMAN , Marcia R. “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale.” College English 34.3 (December 1972): 383-95. P ERRAULT , Charles. Contes. Ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. S CHRÖDER , Volker. “The Birth and Beginnings of Madame d’Aulnoy.” Anecdota. https: / / anecdota.princeton.edu/ archives/ 995. Consulted 8 July 2020. V ORLÍČEK , Václav, director. Three Hazelnuts [Wishes] for Cinderella. DEFA, 1973.