Cinderella

Cinderella is not treated as a fully developed story character here, but as a durable cultural figure through whom Simone de Beauvoir examines women’s dependence on male rescue. The fantasy promises that a man will transform a woman’s prospects; its appeal rests on real economic and social inequalities, while its costs include weakened independence and a life organized around being chosen. Its reversal is equally revealing: a woman who wakes, refuses, or takes the initiative unsettles the role assigned to her, exposing the power concealed inside the rescue.

Identity and the Marriage Fantasy

Cinderella represents the hope that a woman may obtain fortune and happiness not through her own difficult, uncertain work but through marriage to a socially advantageous man. Beauvoir connects the myth’s persistence to a world in which marriage is still treated as a more honorable career than participation in collective life. A married woman can count on her husband’s support and enjoys greater social dignity than an unmarried woman, while an unwed mother is treated as a scandal. Against these conditions, the expectation of a Prince Charming is not merely a fairy-tale wish: it offers the possibility of rising into a higher social position through a husband, a transformation that a woman’s own labor may not secure.

The promise nevertheless divides a woman’s strength and interests. Parents continue to prepare daughters for marriage rather than foster their individual development; daughters may come to desire the same future. They are then often less specialized and less firmly trained than their brothers, and less fully committed to their professions. Their resulting disadvantage can reinforce the wish to find a husband, tightening a circle in which dependence helps reproduce itself. Work may offer a route out of marriage, yet economic inequality and the possibility of marrying a privileged man make independence harder to choose. The Cinderella hope thus draws power from the very circumstances that limit women’s alternatives.

The Rescuer and the Gift

Beauvoir places Cinderella among familiar rescue fantasies: Prince Charming awakens Sleeping Beauty, while the rich man gives to a woman who provides a destination for his otherwise abstract wealth. In prosperous societies, she argues, the rescuer’s generosity may serve his own affirmation. Her example is Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, who showers gifts on an obscure singer and imposes her on the public as a great opera singer. The apparent gift carries an exercise of power: he decides what she will become and seeks to establish his own authority through her.

The rescuer’s role also depends on the woman’s subordination. If the princess is to be rescued, she must first be captive; if Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened, she must be asleep. Beauvoir describes the Western male ideal not simply as a woman who never resists, but as one who argues intelligently and then yields to his reasoning. The contest can seem exciting to the man precisely because he expects its outcome to confirm his authority. Cinderella’s compliance is therefore not incidental to the fantasy: it is what allows rescue to appear as benevolence rather than domination.

Reversal and Conflict

The rescue story changes when the woman wakes and does not welcome her rescuer. Beauvoir imagines Sleeping Beauty displeased by the awakening and unable to recognize Prince Charming in the man who performs it. In the Kane example, the singer is seen as oppressed, and the benefactor’s generosity becomes legible as a will to power. The wife listens indifferently to her husband’s exploits; the Muse yawns at the poet’s verses. The woman on whom the man expected admiration may refuse even to play the audience.

A woman may also decline the contest or emerge victorious in it. Beauvoir contrasts the expected Cinderella, for whom the man gives, with a woman who takes or imposes her own will. What had been staged as play then becomes self-defense: the man experiences as a struggle the freedom the woman exercises for herself. Once free, she has no prescribed destiny beyond the one she creates. Cinderella’s reversal marks the point at which the supposed gift no longer settles the relationship; the conflict between the sexes becomes visible as a contest over whose freedom will govern.

The Myth’s Wider Significance

For Beauvoir, Cinderella belongs to a broader set of images through which men imagine themselves as benefactors, liberators, or conquerors. The rescue fantasy flatters both the man who gives and the woman who hopes to be elevated, but it makes the woman’s dependence seem like the natural condition of the story. Its happy promise can obscure how unequal economic prospects and social expectations direct women toward marriage, even when work has become possible.

The figure’s significance lies in the instability of that promise. The woman who wakes, refuses admiration, or makes her own destiny cannot remain the passive object that the rescue plot requires. The contrast between sleeping princess and self-directed woman brings the myth’s underlying bargain into view: male generosity offers independence on terms that preserve male control. Cinderella therefore serves not as a simple emblem of romance, but as a measure of the distance between promised rescue and actual freedom.