Transforming Rags to Riches? : Material Culture in Cendrillon and Pretty Woman

• Main Authors: Cheng, Ya Wen, 鄭雅雯
• Other Authors: Chen, Chao Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/78338378192272004805

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 98 === To de-mythicize a fairy tale means to discover its cultural, historical and political aspects and therefore, in my thesis, it helps to distinguish Perrault’s Cendrillon (1697) from other Cinderella variants. My thesis approaches Perrault’s Cendrillon in a materialist method: with the employment of the late seventeenth-century French material culture, Cendrillon is transformed into a modernized literary fairy tale about her restoration to her original social status. This French Cinderella is quite distinct from the traditional rags-to-riches Cinderella story since Perrault champions a modernism with which he intends to change the future of the French literature. The film Pretty Woman (1990) is to serve as a contrast and to elucidate the idea that different eras make different Cinderella stories. The Cinderella in the Anglophone world is getting more and more debased and the Americanized Cinderella is the most debased ever, the street walker. Her rags-to-riches transformation manifests the social expectations toward in the eighties toward what a woman should be and possess. On the other hand, there is another side of the story in the film. On Edward’s part, I am going to approach the material culture via American masculinities in order to illustrate what a man should be and have. Besides, Edward also plays the roles of the male Cinderella and the fairy godfather in the film. The two roles Edward plays will be further developed in my thesis. The materialist approach has its own limits: it cannot include the conformist and the individualist aspects and I thus fail to incorporate it in my thesis.