Gail Carson
Levine
Ella Enchanted
(1997)
Gail Carson was born in 1947 in New York and graduated from the City College of New York – today she lives with her husband, David Levine, in Brewster, New York, which is not far outside of the city. Ella Enchanted was her first children’s book, and an example of what appears to be her particular narrative interest, the re-telling of fairy tales (an entire series of books, the Princess Tales, consists of retellings and original fairy tales). Before publication of Ella, Levine worked for New York State, as an interviewer, administrative assistant, and welfare administrator. Ella Enchanted (1997) was a Newbery Honor book.
Levine recalls being raised in a home where creativity was held in high esteem – her father owned a commercial art studio and her mother was a teacher, and her sister is a painter and art professor. Levine herself began writing early on, but did not conceive of herself as a writer – rather, she was inclined to be an actress or painter. Her interest in the theatre led her to collaborate with her husband on a children’s musical. She turned to writing following a class on writing and illustrating children’s books, where she discovered to her surprise that she found the writing more interesting than the illustrating, her original interest.
According to Levine, Ella began as a class assignment: “I had to write something and couldn’t think of a plot, so I decided to write a Cinderella story because it already had a plot! Then, when I thought about Cinderella’s character, I realized she was too much of a goody-two-shoes for me. . . . That’s when I came up with the curse: she’s only good because she has to be, and she is in constant rebellion.” She discovered in retrospect that the book addresses the problem of “attending too much to other people’s expectations. We are cursed with constraints on our freedom to act as we wish, even uncertainty about what we wish.”
Ella Enchanted belongs to a fairly robust genre in contemporary children’s fantasy: the fairy tale retold and extended. (Other examples include Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Donna Napoli’s The Magic Circle and Zel, and the film Ever After) Several different approaches to “modernizing” fairy tales include:
A fairly straightforward retelling of the “original” story, with enhanced psychological realism for the characters and more detailed settings and dialogue.
A parody of the fairy tale, consciously poking fun at fairy-tale conventions and/or using fairy-tale structures to make ironic comments on current issues (the latter is technically a satire).
A story tangentially connected to the fairy tale, focusing on one of the minor characters or telling the story from the point of view of the unlucky child, or the villain.
A story that purports to tell the events previous to the familiar tale, so as to explain why things occur as they do.
A story that continues a familiar tale, examining what happens in the “happily ever after.”
Of course, it is entirely possible for two or more of these possibilities to be evident in the same story. Thus, Ella Enchanted in some ways is a straight retelling of “Cinderella,” but it alters the character of the heroine from the traditional tale and expands the presentation of her life before the traditional tale’s beginning. (You can refresh your memory of the original “Cinderella” by going to the Cinderella project at the University of Southern Mississippi, which has several versions of the story along with historical illustrations.)
Modifications of “Cinderella” in Ella Enchanted:
Levine adds the “curse” of being obedient. This accomplishes two things: it adds to the “Cinderella” story a common fairy-tale element, the tradition of the fairies visiting and bestowing gifts on favored children; and it provides an explanation for Cinderella’s acceptance of her servitude in the original story. The curse also provides motivation for some of Ella’s wandering, as she seeks to find Lucinda to get her to lift the spell. The particular nature of the curse makes Ella appear to be a more realistic child – expected to obey her elders, but resistant to doing so. Her experience of being forced to obey others is similar to how a child might feel being at the mercy of the grownups.
Levine accentuates the role of Ella’s father. In the “original” fairy tale, the father practically does not exist; in the Disney version (as in Ever After), he is killed off before the story proper begins, leaving Cinderella to her stepmother’s care alone. We might see the original Cinderella as exploring the sense of abandonment; here, the father doesn’t exactly “abandon” her, but is constantly on the road. Is this a more realistic vision of the father’s absence? The father also has more significant direct responsibility for her plight, since it is he who sends her to boarding school, and his marriage to Dame Olga is shown to be motivated by his more venal motives – the need to gain an influx of money.
She adds the fairy’s prohibition on “big” magic. Could this provide a rational explanation for the absence of magic in the observed world? At the very least, it creates an interesting complication in Ella’s story – when she finds Lucinda, first she cannot get the spell reversed because Lucinda doesn’t see it as a problem – just a minor correction. Then, when Lucinda has learned the problem with big magic, she cannot reverse the spell because that, too, would be big magic.
She introduces the prince early in the story. This is consistent with other modern fairy-tale revisions – e.g., Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. In this particular case, the early introduction of the prince doesn’t distort the story as Disney had to with SB, but rather provides some romantic foreshadowing – we know that prince Charmant and Ella are compatible, sharing a sense of fun, even before they meet at the ball.
Ella Enchanted as a Coming-of-Age Novel
In the course of the novel, Ella advances from a relatively young child with a strong attachment to her mother (or mother-surrogate, her fairy godmother, Mandy), to an adolescent making it on her own, to a young marriageable woman. In “children’s” books that feature protagonists who marry, the marriage seems inappropriate for the age of the readers; however, marriages frequently occur at the end of fairy tales, and the marriage itself suggests a rite of passage into adulthood. This may mark the novel out as a “coming-of-age” story – a Bildüngsroman.
We can follow the plot elements that contribute to this coming-of-age story, beginning with the child’s enforced separation from her mother. Other key elements include her father’s sending her to boarding school, where her curse of obedience ironically helps her to accomplish the polished exterior that he desires; her rebellion against the school (and against Hattie, who plans to use Ella’s curse to control her) and subsequent flight; her appearance on the marriage market; her rational decision to give up her love for Char, in order to save him and the kingdom; and finally, her ability through her own willpower to break the curse.
A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401
Updated
December 10, 2005
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