Body and identity : a feminist interpretation of the tale of Cinderella

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The body has become an important element in the discourse of the humanities. It is now a prism, through which art and literature is being rediscovered, and their key terms are being redefined. Basing on this kind of approach, I draw some reflections on woman’s social identity, her place and role in a social group, her being perceived by others, and on the changes in her identity, in the context of one of the world’s most famous fairy tales - the story of Cinderella. 1 treat the children’s literature’s canonical text as full of hidden meanings, metaphorical tale of a social and cultural forming of a woman’s identity - the tale being ahistorical and still actual, despite the time that has passed since its writing. I make use of the feminist interpretation, which, giving women the right to speak, postulates rereading the most popular texts of our culture, emphasizing the role of sexual categories, present in them in the sociological and psychological perspective. Fables, fairy tales as well as legends and folk tales had often been made by women, and then spread by word of mouth. That is why cultural feminism postulates going back to that sort of texts and rereading them in the perspective of women’s experience. Analyzing the problem of dependency between the body and identity, I use one of the most complete analyses of corporeality in the feminist philosophy - the theory of Elizabeth Grosz. According to her views, all aspects of subjectivity can be adequately accounted for by reference to a person’s corporeality, and not only to that person’s consciousness and unconsciousness. The graphie illustration of this innovatory theory can be the Mobius Strip (named so after a German mathematician, who invented it in 1958) - an eight-shaped, a little flattened strip lying horizontally. It is the interdisciplinary symbol of infinity, and, at the same time, a sign of the body’s smooth transformation into consciousness, into a psychical personality... It is a figure of a woman’s identity - that identity being an inseparable connection of body and mind. Elizabeth Grosz shows how the social conditioning influences the body, and, consequently, the identity of women. In this view, the body becomes a sort of a key to understanding the psychical and social existence of women. In the contemporary culture, the body is just as important and influential to the female identity, as in the world of the analyzed fairy tale. The exemplary Cinderella’s shoe is what now are the ideal schemes of look, presented by the mass media and popculture. The role of the Fairy Godmother is now played by pharmaceutical companies, clothing factories, beauty salons. The temptation of a metamorphosis is ubiquitous - it affects not only the women, but some men as well (metrosexuality). In the work I analyze the gallery of fairy-tale heroes and heroines - paying special attention to the way of presenting the body and its functions - and the social order described in that specific, fictional reality.