The Cinderella tale usually involves a gap in class. One of the important aspects is that an "ordinary" (gentry-level) maiden ends up with the prince. The gap in class creates "no, you mustn't" reactions from the prince (and sometimes the maiden's) family and friends.
It is a variation on the Romeo & Juliet tale.
So I am reposting "When Romeo and Juliet Works, Parts I & II."
* * *
Despite generations of heart-sick teenagers taking Romeo & Juliet as a blueprint for "success," Shakespeare likely meant it as a cautionary tale--directed more at the parents than the teens.
The Romeo & Juliet trope rests on the premise that two people from
opposite sides of the tracks meet and fall in love. Maybe their families
are enemies. Maybe one is a liberal and one is a conservative. Maybe
one is poor and the other is rich. Maybe one is royalty and the other is an obscure non-royal (Cinderella). Maybe one is a spy or con-artist and the other is
the mark.
The tension arises from (1) outside forces stating, "You must not be
together." And (2) inner forces stating, "I don't really get you."
Sometimes the tensions are resolved in accordance with this literary tale's most celebrated example: lots of death. Sometimes it ends with sacrifice and acceptance (Casablanca). Sometimes it ends with an utter lack of realism. And sometimes, if handled correctly, it ends with a sweet, romantic resolution.
The first two are not the focus of this post (despite Casablanca being a great movie). The focus is the last two: what separates the positive romantic unbelievable ending from the positive romantic believable ending.
The difference lies in acknowledgement of the accompanying problems.
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| In Frasier, Niles meets Daphne's lay-about |
| brothers and still wants to marry her. |
Internal qualms count because people cannot be magically stripped of their familial/cultural/monetary expectations. There is a reason that most people do, in fact, marry within their "class" (even in America). One reason Austen is so popular even now is that she verbalizes issues that have become taboo in our own culture (every culture has, as Tom Wolfe argued, its own Victorian Gent).
Truth: money and background impact relationships.
Elizabeth can argue fiercely with Lady Catherine de Bourgh that she equates to Darcy since she is a gentleman's daughter. Yet Austen never allows any of her heroines to contemplate marrying a farmhand or a minor clerk in an office. Love conquers all within a specific social milieu.Austen was not being naive or prejudiced; she was being realistic. Money, where people want to live, how people want to live, their friends, their families, their social settings: all these things are factors in a relationship. To pretend they are not is to leave the door open for worse problems.
Austen perfectly encapsulates these "worse problems" in Sense & Sensibility. At the end of the book, Willoughby--who married for money--regrets that he didn't marry for love. Elinor wisely reflects that if Willoughby had married her sister, he would have ended up resenting their mutual poverty.
So how does a Romeo & Juliet tale end without the couple, in the long run, hating each other's guts because "you estranged me from my family...you buried me in poverty...you forced me to live in a horrible city/country/town...you prevented me from accomplishing what I could have accomplished..."
To be continued . . .
