Cinderella greatly exaggerates the emphasis beauty has on the nature of its female characters, a clear example of which can be found in the variation Lin Lan. Lin Lan centers on two sisters: “The elder was very beautiful, and everyone called her Beauty. But the younger had a face covered with pock marks, so that everyone called her Pock Face” (Lin Lan 127). The story later describes Pock Face as “so spoiled that she was a very unpleasant girl”, yet describes Beauty as a kind, loving girl who “adored the yellow cow”; that is, the reincarnation of her mother (Lin Lan 127). Despite outward appearances usually having nothing to do with a person’s character, Lin Lan’s author reinforced this female stereotype by attributing benevolent characteristics with Beauty and vicious ones with Pock Face.
In addition to the author relating looks to their perceived desirable personalities for characters, Cinderella’s characters themselves are widely influenced by characters’ looks. As demonstrated in Lin Lan, Beauty refuses to marry the fishmonger, rice broker, and oil merchants, insulting them by calling them “[stinky]... [dusty]... [and] greasy” (Lin Lan 128), while agreeing to marry the scholar only because he was handsome. However, in all instances, Beauty had simply asked for one of the four to pick up her shoe for her, which had fallen into a ditch, but all four men demanded marriage in exchange (Lin Lan 128-129). Clearly, Beauty overlooked the scholar’s greedy personality because of his outward appearances, demonstrating that not only is beauty used by the author of Lin Lan to define a character’s nature, but that it is also used by the characters themselves. To conclude, naive readers may even perceive these kinds of biases as correct because Beauty fails to learn from her mistakes over the course of Lin Lan as the author evidently does not view this kind of behavior as wrong.
Works Cited
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. Second ed., Norton, 2017.
“Cinderella” (Pages 139 - 181)