Be Good, and You’ll Be Chosen

Be good.

Of everything you were told as a child, it may be the thing you heard most: at doorways, in the back seat, at the edge of the bed with the light about to go out. Nobody said what came after it. Nobody had to. The stories said it for them. Be good, and you’ll be chosen. The patient girl gets the slipper. The obedient puppet wakes up a boy. The duckling who lives through the winter finds the swans at last.

What the stories leave out is who does the choosing, and by what measure, and what becomes of the ones who aren’t picked. In every one of them, someone is holding the prize and someone is reaching for it, and the story is only ever told from the reaching side.

Cinderella

Before the shoe, before the pumpkin, before any of it, there is a deathbed. In the Grimms’ telling, a rich man’s wife falls ill and calls her only daughter to her, and tells her to stay good and devout, and heaven will look after her. Then she dies. The girl goes to the grave every day and weeps, and she stays good.

It is the first instruction in the story, and she never once breaks it.

Her father remarries. The new wife brings two daughters of her own, fair of face and black of heart. They take the girl’s dresses, give her an old gray smock and wooden shoes, and put her to work in the kitchen: hauling water, lighting the fire, cooking, washing. At night she sleeps in the ashes by the hearth. Perrault gives her a garret and a straw mattress, while her stepsisters have mirrors tall enough to see themselves from head to foot, and he gives her a father who says nothing, because his new wife rules him entirely. She doesn’t complain to him. She doesn’t complain to anyone.

Then the king’s son holds a ball. In Perrault, a godmother with a wand turns a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman and lizards into footmen, dresses the girl in cloth of gold and silver, puts glass slippers on her feet, and warns her to be home by midnight. In Grimm there is no godmother. There is a hazel twig the girl planted on her mother’s grave and watered with her tears until it grew into a tree, and a white bird in its branches that throws down whatever she asks for. She goes to the festival three nights running. On the third, the prince has the stairs smeared with pitch, and one golden slipper sticks.

Either way, the prince goes looking for the foot.

Here is the part the nursery version drops. In the Grimms’ story, the elder sister takes the slipper to her room and can’t get her big toe into it, so her mother hands her a knife and tells her to cut the toe off: once she’s queen, she’ll never need to walk. She does it. She rides away with the prince until two doves in the hazel tree call out that there is blood in the shoe. The younger sister cuts off a piece of her heel. Same horse, same doves, same blood. Only then does the prince ask whether there’s another daughter, and the father, who has not spoken up for her once in the whole story, says there’s only a grubby little kitchen girl left from his first wife, who can’t possibly be the bride, and his wife adds that she’s not fit to be seen. The slipper fits her as if it had been made for her. At the wedding, the doves peck out the sisters’ eyes.

Now look at the shoe. It is one exact shape, and the man holding it measures every woman in the house against it. Cinderella is chosen because she fits. Her sisters are cut down, literally, trying to. The story calls the difference goodness and invites you to be glad about the birds.

Being the foot that fits is one of the best feelings there is. It sounds like: You’re not like the others. You’re the only one who really understands me. Everyone in my life has been so difficult, and then there was you. For a while it feels like being seen. But look at what it stands on. You are rising because other people have been sorted into the rejected pile, and the pile is right there in the house with you, where you can watch what happens to the ones who don’t fit. The ones in it are usually the people who might have told you what they saw: the old friends, the sister, the partner before you, the whole crowd of “everyone else.”

Midnight is in the story too. The coach goes back to being a pumpkin, and the gown goes back to rags. The slipper was never a promise. It was a measurement, and measurements get taken again.

The Decoder: Anyone who builds you up by tearing others down will eventually tear you down too.

In the Decoder: Card 12, Selective Idealization.