Clarke Speaker Series: The Other Cinderella: The Legacies of "Finette-Cendron" by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy

Imagine a Cinderella who kills her stepmother or decapitates an ogress or triumphantly splashes her sisters with mud 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 variants of the Cinderella story competed with one another for generations.  

One 17th century French author, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, produced a variant—“Finette-Cendron” or “Finette-Cinders”—that not only was frequently reprinted in France, England, and Germany, but also added to oral traditions in these countries as well as in the United States and Czechoslovakia, eventually serving as inspiration for the celebrated 1973 German-Czech film, Three Hazelnuts [Wishes] for Cinderella. This talk will explore the history and legacies of d’Aulnoy’s Cinderella tale, whose heroine proves much more enterprising than that of Charles Perrault or Disney.