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Judith Viorst s poemAnd Then the Prince Knelt Down and Tried to Put the Glass Slipper on Cinderella s Foot could be said to subvert the typical representation women are given in traditional fairy tales.
Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, I would spend long delightful hours

reading fairy tales. The story of Cinderella, the beautiful helpless maiden who is rescued from misery by a loving godmother with magical powers, eventually became my favourite in times of sorrow, oh how I longed for Cinderella `s good fairy to come to my help and, honestly, I sometimes still do. Besides, there was the Prince Charming who, struck by Cinderella `s beauty, moved heaven and earth to find her and make her his wife. Now, does not every woman, in her heart of hearts, dream of becoming the Prince Charming `s Princess and living happily for ever after? Against all expectations, Judith Viorst `s Cinderella does not find the Prince charming

enough for her, so she smartly avoids marrying him by pretending the slipper is too tight. In doing so, she radically subverts the typical representation women are given in traditional fairy tales. As Marcia K. Lieberman reveals, most of the heroines of the fairy tales are passive, submissive and helpless, and their most valuable asset is their beauty. Since the heroines are chosen for their beauty (en soi), she explains, not for anything they do (por soi) they seem to exist passively until they are seen by the hero (). They wait, are chosen, and are rewarded. In nearly every fairy tale marriage is their reward. There are very few stories in which the heroine refuses to marry, and these usually have a sad ending. The alternate construction, that they wished to preserve their freedom and their identity, is denied or disallowed (M. Lieberman). In Genre: context of culture in text, Suzanne Eggins states that useful genre analysis involves also reflecting critically on what cultural work is being done, whose interests are being served, by texts of particular genres. In this light, traditional fairy tales may be said to reinforce the sexist values of patriarchal culture or, as Lieberman puts it, they present a picture of sexual roles, behavior and psychology that serve to acculturate women to traditional social roles. Judith Viorst `s poem defamiliarizes the conventions of both fairy tales and poetry: it opens with a long narrative title; it mixes prose -in the title- and verse; it switches from objective voice -in the prose fragmentto subjective voice,

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Cinderella `s voice, in the poem; it depicts the heroine as an agent, not an object, of desire; and it frustrates our expectations about the ending. Judith Viorst `s evocation of Cinderellas tale and then the subversion of the conventional realization of the tale s genre challenge us to interrogate the

representation of women in traditional fairy tales and the way this representation contributes to developing or reinforcing a female identity subservient to patriarchal ideals of gender roles. References
Marcia K. Lieberman `Some Day My Prince Will Come`: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale. Zipes J. (1986). Don`t Bet on the Prince. Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Routledge: New York. Suzanne Eggins. An Introduction To Systemic Functional Linguistics, Chapter 3: `Genre: context of culture in text`