FOLKLORISTS CRITERIA FOR #510:
For purposes of creating a variant for the 2006 exhibition #510: If The Shoe Fits..., review the R.D. Jameson elements of a Cinderella story and his Episodic Chart of Classifications found (in bold text) below.

How Cinderellaesque tales came to be classified as #510
Folklorists, beginning with the germinal scholarship of Marian Rolafe Cox in 1893, have endeavored to classify Cinderella by comparing the narrative across cultures and categorizing relevant similarities. Shared characteristics of the wonder tale include the introduction of magic elements and an assurance that anything can happen. The structure of Cinderellaesque tales follows a pattern of exposing a serious familial problem and inciting a series of magical adventures that ultimately lead to marriage or some variation of the "happily ever after" theme.

The Folklore Society of Britain commissioned Cox to study all known Cinderella stories. She investigated published variants as well as unpublished folklore archives from various countries. She produced the pioneering volume, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and, Cap o'Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated with a Discussion of Medieval Analogues and Notes.

Without benefit of folklore indexes or widespread anthologies Cox blazed a trail by dividing the tales she discovered into five broad categories. She devised five key Cinderella Types:

Type Classification According to Cox
A - Cinderella (Ill treated heroine. Recognition by means of a shoe.)
B - Cat-skin (Unnatural father. Heroine flight.)
C - Cap o'Rushes (King Lear judgment. Outcast heroine.)
D - Indeterminate
E - Hero Tales (Masculine Cinderella.)

Breakdown of types:
Type A (refers to nearly all Cox classified variants) presents a tale of a persecuted girl who becomes the recipient of magical assistance from uncommon sources, uncovering her actual value and enabling her to gain a mate of a higher social status.

Type B expands upon the mysterious behavior of the father figure who offers the girl little or no assistance; this father is the cause of her suffering via incestuous intent or practice. He causes the girl to flee under cover of disguise (most notably a donkeyskin). She chooses to rebel by running away from home and into the arms of a lover. These tales became highly censored and the muse for many surrealists.

Type C focused on another type of father figure, one who abandons the girl based upon his own misjudgment of her character. The girl is likened to King Lear's daughter Cordelia whose sisters are akin to the evil stepsisters.

Type D is a catchall for those related versions that are not so easily catalogued but share a mixture of elements typical of Cinderellaesque stories. Similarities to Type A include the heroine's abusive family, her assistance from benevolent and magical animals and her marriage to a gentleman of higher social status. A German variant of this type Little One-Eyes, Little Two-eyes, and Little Three-eyes provides examples of the difference between Type A and Type D. Two-eyes does not attend a dance, church or leave her home. In addition, her prospective husband recognizes her value by her gift to harvest the fruit of a magical tree.
Type E refers to Cinderella variants told with a male protagonist.

Between 1893 and 1930 modest research of fairy tales was realized, with the notable exception that stories were anthologized and folklore indexes were finally devised. In 1932, R. D. Jameson, while a professor at the National Tsing Hua University, discovered and lectured on the Chinese variant Yeh-hsein.
Jameson cited five succinct elements of a Cinderella story:
1) A young girl is ill treated.
2) She is forced to do menial service at home or abroad.
3) She meets a prince or a prince becomes aware of her beauty.
4) She is identified by her shoe.
5) She marries the prince.
Jameson created an episodic chart to develop his five-part classification. His chart illustrates the complex web of motifs contained within the tale.

R.D. Jameson's Episodic Chart of Cinderella Classifications

A. A young girl is ill-treated
A1 By her step-mother and step-sisters who are unkind to her; or
A2 By her father who wishes to marry her. She flees after receiving gifts of clothes; or
A3 By her father whom she tells she loves as she loves salt and is driven from home; or
A4 By her entire family who wish to kill her.

B. During a time of menial service at home or abroad
B1 She is advised, supported (fed) and given clothes by her dead mother, a tree on her mother's grave or a supernatural creature.
B2 She is helped by birds,
B3 Goat, sheep or cow.
B4 When the animal has been killed, a gift-bearing tree grows from its entrails, a box with clothes is found inside it or its ossuaries are otherwise useful in providing clothes.

C. She meets the prince
C1 Disguised in her pretty clothes she goes to a ball and dances several times with the prince, who tries in vain to find out who she is, or he sees her as she goes to church.
C2 Sometimes she hints to him about sufferings and thus both mystifies and interests him.
C3 Sometimes the prince peeps through a keyhole and sees her dressed in her finery.

D. She is identified by
D1 The shoe test,
D2 The ring she leaves in his soup or bakes in his bread.
D3 Her ability to perform some difficult task, such as picking the golden apples.

E. She marries the Prince.

F. If her suffering is due to the fact that she told her father she "loves him as she loves salt," - she now serves him unsalted food to prove how necessary salt is to human happiness.

Research related to the evolution of folklore heightened exponentially in 1951 with Swedish folklorist Anna Brigitta Rooth's doctoral dissertation published as the Cinderella Cycle, an examination of seven hundred versions of the fundamental Cinderella story, including authentic and distinctive subtypes. Her mission was to discern which type of Cinderella variant was the original and to determine how the tale spread. The combined scholarship of Rooth and Cox continues to be a valued reference of folklorists today who have in general deserted the quest for folklore's origins to seek the study of its living traditions.

In1961, Stith Thompson revised the Finnish scholar Antti Aarne's index of tale types first published in 1910 as The Types of the Folktale. Aarne had typed Cinderella as tale Type # 510. Thompson's revisions revealed additional subtypes of #510.

Alan Dundes combined the scholarship of Cox, Rooth, Aarne and Thompson to create a comparative typological chart, enabling one to review the evolutionary research at a glance for similarities and differences of perspective.

Alan Dundes' Comparative Typological Chart *

* Alan Dundes, Cinderella A Folklore Casebook. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982), xiv