Cinderella...

I just learned that Nick didn't know the Cinderella story. I can't remember not knowing it, and I can't remember first telling or reading it to Mariah--I think at some level I thought it was just one of those stories that's in the culture that everyone knew. (I thought everyone knew who Bob Dylan was, too, but it recently came to my attention that Mariah didn't know what his voice sounded like. And references to Barry Manilow are equally meaningless to her, though that doesn't trouble me quite as much...)

It came up with Nick because he wanted me to read to him, and I was tired of all his books. He's big into repetition right now--repetition of chapter books. So we have read Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, Mr. Popper's Penguins, and Homer Price over and over again. I have also read him the entire Chronicles of Prydain (the 5-volume set by Lloyd Alexander) once, and some books in it more than once, and the other day we finished reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But for some reason we just don't have shelves-full of chapter books for pre- and early-readers (I think maybe Mariah skipped this stage) and so I was scanning my shelves for something--anything!--new to read, and I came across Philip Pullman's I Was a Rat!. I pulled it off the shelf (along with a few others) and offered Nick some choices. He was curious about the Pullman book but wanted to know more, so I started to tell him.

"It's about the boy--the rat in Cinderella who gets turned into a boy."

"What rat?"

"Well, the rat who becomes a little coach boy. Remember?"

"No."

"Do you know the story of Cinderella?"

"No."

No joke. So I offered to tell it to him.

OK, big feminist dilemma here. I've written about Cinderella fairly extensively, teach various versions in my children's lit course, know all the parodies and revisions and "PC" versions and everything. I've read The Paper-Bag Princess to Nick a hundred times (give or take...) When I teach Cinderella to my children's lit students they always moan that I've ruined it for them by pointing out the feminist objections to the tale: that it emphasizes female competition, the undesireability of older women, the need for young women to be "saved" by men, the necessity of beauty rather than wit or goodness for that "salvation." There's a lot to object to, and I don't really mind "ruining" it for 20-year-olds, who are old enough to handle some complexity. On the other hand, it's a pretty foundational text in our culture, and it expresses some useful things about sibling relationships, the value of fantasy, and the ability of even the poor and oppressed to make changes in their situations. And, it's a pretty good story--rich with magic and cruelty and happy endings.

So: what to do? Tell him the "real" version (and if so, which one?) or alter it? But wait, I need there to be a rat-coach boy, or the whole thing makes no sense. And really the rat-coach boy is fairly insignificant in my understanding of the tale (which is, of course, why the Pullman book works).

So I told him the classic version, pretty much straight out of Perrault. (No rat boy in the Grimms as far as I could remember...) It was a pretty bare-bones version, nothing fancy, but it did have the pumpkin coach and the various animal transformations.

And that was it. He didn't ask me to read the Pullman book after that, and he hasn't mentioned it again. Instead we read Regarding the Fountain, a complex novel-in-letters and memos and newspaper clippings by Kate Klise. I have no idea how much of it he got--it's really more a book for independent readers in, oh, 3rd grade and up--but he got enough. Puns and everything. And there were no references to Cinderella.