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With the perceptiveness of a fairy godmother, Mrs. Sandford presents Miss B as Cinderella, emerging from the youngest child's state of despair to shed her ungainly clothing so that she too can go to the ball and win her Prince Charming.
Cinderella is always the youngest. This attribute is more important than her sex. The German Cinderella, Aschenbroedel, literally means a “kitchen boy who rummages in ashes.”1 In all versions, Cinderella is the youngest who does the dirty chores and unexpectedly rises to great splendor. Her family romance includes two stepsisters and a wicked stepmother who replace the idealized omnipotent mother of early childhood.
The girl in prepuberty, envious of her older siblings, feels like Cinderella even though no one relegates her to the kitchen or treats her like a slave. She feels dirty and ugly, exasperated by the incessant references to her disorderliness. Wanting to be beautiful and grown up, she longs at the same time for the passivity of early childhood when she was cleaned and dressed by a loving mother.
Cinderella's plight is that of a child beset by pregenital urges, dirty through no fault of his own and at odds with the environment that threatens his autonomy. In Grimm's version, especially, one can recognize Cinderella's transformation from the baby, greedy, envious, dirty, hateful, wetting and demanding, into a child struggling to grow up and establish sex identity.
Fantasies of sex fusion, sex substitution, lost and found genital symbols, preoedipal and oedipal objects, all play an important role in the process of transformation. As oral envy changes into competition, cinders and slavery turn into gold and power; revenge may turn into forgiveness while hated antagonists are castrated by agents of the child's repudiated and projected aggressive impulses. Inner genitals are equated with dirt and babies; male, outer genitals become symbols of power and maturity. The youngest child comes to represent an anal baby, weak and female.
Mrs.