So maybe it is because I found, bought, and later read "A Naughty Treasury of Classic Fairy Tales" at a Half-Price Books
and certainly because I am a pervert, but when I saw the new Cinderella movie I saw easy potential for an incest story between the Dad and Cinderella. The whole time he keeps talking about how:
-He misses his beautiful wife.
-Cinderella is the spitting image and personality of his wife.
-How he can only be happy if he has his wife again.
The way he looks at her and "innocently" touches her screams "I'm desperate and you look like your mother."
For Cinderella the whole time she talks about how much she desperately loves him, wants to help him, and would do anything to make him happy.
The way she looks at him and touches him screams "I would do anything to please you."
I'll be honest, I don't like the original Disney Cinderella and even in the much more dynamic and progressive new one I am still pissed that the only truly independent and self-assured woman in the movie is the villain. Our hero is a submissive woman who’s seeming strength is being kind to those who treat her like garbage. If you are in an abusive relationship you have the right to do what you must.
So! My point? I would love to see this story in a new light. The fact that it is perverted is mere coincidence. ;P
Alongside the undertones of incest the Stepmother is cast ever so slightly in a new light. When she hears her new husband talking about he loves his old wife so much she looks genuinely sad. She feels betrayed. Later she talks about how her old husband was the light of her life and she married for love. However, after he died she tried to look out for her daughters and married for advantage. Why does she treat Cinderella so poorly? “Because you are young, and beautiful, and good and I am…”
I want to see this other side of her more. Frankly I wish she wasn’t a villain at all. Working along side those incest themes and her own femme fatale motif I think she could play an excellent Dominatrix. Her daughters look to her as is and would become her submissives. When her husband was alive he was her submissive and she never touched her daughters, far too taboo for her. ;) However, when her husband passes she no longer has an outlet. In time her desire to instruct her daughters only grows and in a desperate hope she looks for a husband.
Cinderella’s Father wasn’t a perverted man at first, but as their marriage went on he began to become adulterous, first with household servants ready to pass a favor to a wealthy master and in time competitors’ wives. As he spent more time away from home on business and pleasure he could not be there as his wife fell ill. With her illness and later passing all life was drained from him and his only joys became time spent with his daughter and time spent on his business. As time went on and Cinderella grew into her full womanhood he felt a life return to him and in fear of what it would mean reached out in a desperate hope toward a recently widowed merchant’s wife.
Thus they both look to each other in a vain hope of finding the peace they once had, but neither can give it. The Father desires the daughter, the daughter desires the father, the Mother desires submissives, and the daughters can be nothing but submissive to their mother.
One night as the Stepmother hopes to bring laughter back into their country home her new husband toils away balancing books in his office. Cinderella desiring none of the party goes to him. She wants him to only be happy and in a room so far back in the house can pursue it. As a relationship of hidden kisses and passions grows the perceptive femme fatale will not miss the easy clues her daughters miss.
If he can have his desires than so can she.
I am not sure how to bring the prince into this yet, if at all. It just seems a waste to leave him out.