The Fairy Godmother

The tree was a choice that both Basile and the brothers Grimm opted for, but it may as well have been another object to help the story, like the magical lamp in Aladdin, or maybe a person...

The trees in the other versions were important to the story and an understandable choice, but other versions of Cinderella do not include a tree at all. This is the case with the French version written by Perrault: there is no tree present in his fairytale. This version, like the Italian one, dates back to the Baroque period and was published in the year 1697. There is an object, or actually a character, in Perrault’s version that is similar to the tree in Basile’s La Gatta Cenerentola in terms of the function it fulfills within the story: the fairy godmother.

The fairy godmother is a well-known character from the Disney animated version of Cinderella (1950). The tree in both the Italian and German version and the fairy godmother in the French version aid Cinderella by providing her with other objects that help proceed with the story. Nonetheless, the Cinderella in the version by Perrault plays a less active role in the transformation of the objects compared to the fairy godmother, who is the figure who mostly and almost exclusively takes action. Other than this, we can observe that the group of objects related to the tree and the fairy in Basile’s version have now assimilated and are reduced completely to the fairy godmother in Perrault’s version. Thus omitting the tree aspect, the fairy, now a wise old magical lady, becomes the only one that remains in the French fairytale.