CINDERELLA AND HER SISTERS IN NEW WOMAN WRITING AND ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON'S FICTION

ISSN： 0969-9082

Source： Women's Writing, Vol.19, Iss.1, 2012-02, pp. : 23-40

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Abstract

This essay explores feminist forms of retelling the Cinderella story in a fin-de-siècle context. Cinderella as a fairy-tale figure stands at the centre of women's interrogation of contemporaneous formations of fantasy and a growing disenchantment with a paragon of femininity defined by suffering, passivity and salvation through marriage. Proliferating reformulations of Cinderella's tale in New Woman writing suggest that protofeminist authors were preoccupied with the literary representation and social function of this story since Cinderella's self-abnegating tendencies were perceived as feminine virtues by many Victorians. At the same time, the tale also became a paradigmatic narrative of sisterly antagonism and rivalry, and was therefore revised by Ella Hepworth Dixon and other New Woman writers, who advocated work, independence and sisterly solidarity, and enquired what it meant to be both bound to and unable to fit into restrictive orthodox narratives, metonymically expressed in the trope of a tiny slipper.