Cinderella vs. Hemingway

2262 Words10 Pages
It always takes another perspective to see change. Sometimes for the person who experiences this, it is hard to recognize any difference or even accept that anything happened. Such is the case for the Grimm Brothers’ “Cinderella” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldiers Home.” Although Harold and Cinderella face similar life-altering conditions, they ultimately ended up on different paths. In order to understand how they change so radically, it is necessary to distinguish what influenced them. For both of these characters, the relationships they have with their parents are dysfunctional. Communication tends to be stiff and shallow in depth. These fractured relationships serve as the root of how the two characters change throughout their stories. For Cinderella, her father forced her into accepting a new family while she was grieving the loss of her mother. As for Harold, he was continually fed a strict, religious lifestyle and pressured by his decisions. The most noticeable contributing factor in how Cinderella changed developed out of bitterness and grief. Consider the time frame in which Cinderella’s father was separated to the time he remarried: although it is not a defined number, readers can assume with the information provided, that it was not. Following the mother’s death, the Brothers Grimm write, “When winter came the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and when the spring sun had drawn it off again, the man had taken another wife” (1). Winter is considered to start in December, while spring begins in March. Therefore, only three months pass between the death of Cinderella’s mother and her father’s remarriage. This appears to be a shortened or arguably condensed amount of time at best for coping with such an immense loss. Cinderella was absolutely devastated by the loss of her mother. She routinely went to her mother’s grave to weep, well after acquiring her
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