Today’s topic is the well-known story of Cinderella in two of its most famous incarnations. The archetype of the Cinderella is widely spread around the world, originated according to various hypothesis maybe from China or ancient Egypt, and there exist at least 300 versions! The two I chose to review are a famous japanese version of the 10th century and an italian version of the 16th century. It is unlikely the author of the latter had any knowledge of the former, they are two completely independant versions but it is almost sure that Charles Perrault took his most famous Cinderella from the latter.
Let’s start with the “Tale of Sumiyoshi”. It has been written by an unknown author many decades before the famous “Tale of Genji” (Genji Monogatari, 源氏物語) and features a young orphan girl, a bad stepmother, two stepsisters and a young Captain in love, just like the well-known versions of Perrault and the Grimm brothers. Here, on the other hand, nobody believes the bad stepmother, the two stepsisters literally adore our young heroine, and the whole story is framed inside a Buddhist paradigm. The three girls’ names are Himegimi, Nakanogimi and Sannogimi: literally, “first daughter”, “middle daughter” and “third daughter”. Here’s the story: the Second Chamberlain has a secret relationship with the daughter of a previous Emperor, a boundary so strong that the anonymous author attributes it to a previous existance, and from this relationship Himegimi was born. But short after that Himegimi’s mother suddendly dies. The Chamberlain also has two daughters who were born from his wife, i.e. Nakanogimi and Sannogimi. And here it is one of the major differences between the japanese version of the story and its western counterpart: the story takes place inside the Imperial court. All characters are, or have been, important personalities of the court, except for three: the monk which the bad stepmother lets inside Himegimi’s room, in order to create a scandal, Himegimi’s nurse, and the young servant Jījū.
A young Captain is in love with Himegimi, but the bad stepmother somewhat manages to make him marry Sannogimi instead. Then it comes the above mentioned scandal, which Himegimi someway avoids, but the girl decides anyway to flee to Sumiyoshi, a place near Ōsaka in which there is a famous buddhist sanctuary. The Captain dreams of Himegimi and suddenly goes to Sumiyoshi, and here there is the first supernatural intervention of the bodhisattva Kannon. A bodhisattva (sanscrit “the one who searches for the enlightenment”, or “an enlightened being”) is roughly, in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, a being who tries to achieve Buddhahood by its compassion toward all living beings. Following a chinese tradition soon passed to Japan by the japanese translation by Kumarajiva of the Lotus Sutra, Kannon is both male and female, and protects all living beings. In the japanese tradition he/she is principally the protector of sailors and mothers. It is not casual that at the end of the story, Himegimi will give birth to two children, while the other mother of the story, the bad stepmother, is punished for she has been a bad mother to Himegimi. Kannon appears in three distinct parts of the story: in the dreams of the young lieutenant, in the shape of a child playing with pine tree needles (a symbol usually referring to Kannon), and finally at the end of the story, where it is said explicitly that Kannon protects those who read carefully the sutras and practice the compassion. Many puns are dedicated to the pine tree of Sumiyoshi (e.g. the similarity between the japanese word for “pine tree”, 松, and “to wait”, 待つ, which are both pronounced “matsu”), symbol of immortality (the pine tree is an evergreen plant).
The young Himegimi wants to “leave this world” becoming a nun, but fortunately an old nun who had been a member of the Imperial court before dissuades her. Maybe it is this will of personal sacrifice that provokes the intervention of the bodhisattva Kannon. The Captain dreams of Himegimi and understanding that Kannon was responsible for that dream he goes to Sumiyoshi with 900 (!) followers looking for his beloved one. The two lovers finally meet and, after a little resistance of Himegimi who is concerned about what the bad stepmother would have done if she had discovered their relationship, they decide to get married and not to let know it to anyboby. They have two beautiful children and, many years after, during a ceremony, they finally confess everything to Himegimi’s father, who finally meets again his lost daughter. The bad stepmother, on the other hand, is sent away from the court and dies alone.
Here the unsaid is, Himegimi’s self renounce activates the whole device. Since she wants to consacrate herself to Buddhism becoming a nun, the bodhisattva Kannon protects her. Kannon wants Himegimi to become a mother, and her piety shows Kannon that she is worthy of protection. In the monogatari (litterally “narration of things”) genre, the unsaid is usually more important of what is actually said. Kannon is present along the whole story, yet we perceive his/her very presence only three times, and it appears to be a minor presence until the end, where the unsaid is explicitly said by framing the whole story in the Buddhist paradigm.
On the other hand, the Gatta Cenerentola (literally “the Cat Cinderella”) is very explicit. It is a short story collected in the book Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenimiento de piccerille (in old dialect of Naples, roughly “The tale of tales, or the entertaining for little ones”, but here “trattenimiento de piccerille” could also refer to the pregnancy). The whole book is built as a collection of stories told to a pregnant princess which is not able to give birth to her son. The royal fortune-tellers say that the only way to let this baby come to this world is to tell to the princess many and many stories, until the baby finally decides to come out of his mother’s womb.
The Gatta Cenerentola is the story of Zezolla, the first daughter of a prince, which is tormented by her stepmother. Under advice of her mistress, she kills her stepmother! Yes, exactly so! Did you ever expect Cinderella to kill her stepmother? But this is only the beginning. The mistress somewhat manages to marry the merchant, becoming the new Zezolla’s stepmother, and now we discover that this was her plan from the beginning. But Zezolla has powerful allies in the fairies of the island of the King of Sardinia. The new stepmother has six daughters, which she prefers to Zezolla. As a joke, when Zezolla’s father is going to travel to Sardinia, the stepmother asks the girl if she would like to receive a souvenir from him and our heroine answers that yes, she would like her father to greet the faeries of the island, but she also says that he must promise it and if he failed to do this a curse would have fallen on him and his horse forcing them to stay completely still! We have here sort of a self-made princess which has no scruple whatsoever! In fact the father forgets his promise and is striken by the curse, and only when he finally greets the faeries he is free to go back home.
The faeries send Zezolla a jar, a seed, a little woe, a golden watering can and a silk handkerchief. A little palm tree grows out of the seed and, one night when the family is away from home, she raises a chant to the little tree, which can be roughly translated:
“My magical palm tree, night and day I watered thee; with the golden can I watered thee, with the silk hankerchief I dried thee; undress yourself and dress me, make me more splendid than the daughter of the King”.
And then Zezolla is no more the Cat Cinderella but a beautiful princess, and a Prince falls in love with her during a royal ball. She flees home but not before losing a slipper, which later proves her true identity. In another version of the story, Zezolla has to kill her stepmother first by leaping hot tar on her! (The stepmother isn’t half better than Zezolla, for she forces one of her daughters to cut her toes in order to make her foot fit the slipper…). Body and physicity, pain and death are always around. We have the image of a heroine that wants to marry the Charming Prince no matter what, a Cinderella ready to kill any of the characters which step before her. Not the usual image of the submissive, shy girl we got used to. If it’s true that the most famous version by Charles Perrault is taken by this one, timid Perrault sure had to work hard to purge it from those creepy details. And yet this version is still fresher than the usual one. Zezolla does not wait for the Charming Prince next to the chimney, covered in ashes, and suspiring to the moon, no. She wants to get him and, dammit, she does! As a matter of fact, even if she is sort of a serial killer (!), she is a truly positive character. The magical intervention of the faeries of Sardinia only give Zezolla an upstart, while she does all – and I mean all – the dirt job. Her qualities are initiative and courage.
In conclusion, both version differ from the one we knew better for the two heroines are, each in her own way, very positive characters. Perrault’s Cinderella is in fact more submissive than Himegimi or Zezolla, for Himegimi breaks with the treacheries of her stepmother fleeing from the palace and bravely willing to devote herself to Buddhism (and it’s because of her piety that bodhisattva Kannon helps her), while Zezolla is, from the very beginning to the end, the only ruler of her destiny, the magical intervention only comes once (and we can say, Zezolla didn’t really need it for she can do sorceries of her own, like the one which freezes her father and his horse) and everything depends from her. In both stories, the Charming Prince is not the hero which comes and saves the poor girl eventually socially promoting her condition, for Himegimi is already a princess and her boundary with the Captain depends from the positive karma she accumulated from a previous life, while for Zezolla the Prince is merely an object she conquers through a solitary effort. For all those who don’t have read these versions yet, my advice is to search for them (there are many translations of both, and for the Gatta Cenerentola there is also a musical version by Roberto De Simone). If you never liked the stories in which the usual poor, shy girl only waits for a man to save her, The Tale of Sumiyoshi and The Cat Cinderella are what you’re looking for.
