Skip to main content

'Ella Enchanted': The Best of Both Worlds

 'Ella Enchanted': The Best of Both Worlds

- Ilisha Tanna


"Instead of making me docile, the curse made a rebel of me. Or perhaps I was that way naturally."


Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine is a retelling of Cinderella centring around Ella, who is inadvertently cursed at birth by a fairy to have the “gift” of obedience. She must do anything anyone tells her to do, and when her beloved mother dies, leaving her in the care of an absent father, a hateful stepmother and two treacherous stepsisters, her life is in peril. It reaches a turning point when Ella decides to seek out the fairy who cursed her, and regain agency and autonomy over her own life.

This book was one of the first ones I ever read, and I’m still extremely fond of it. The story is a spectacular blend of adventure, romance, and self-discovery, with a beautiful set of characters and a fairy tale quality that can only really come from a fairy tale retelling. It is also surprisingly intricate, set in one kingdom but managing to contain details for many languages and cultures, showing that despite its fun-loving and light-hearted nature, it was clearly very well-thought out and deliberately written. It explores themes like choice, free will, identity, and love and hope through hardships, and in-cooperates them in an enjoyable and thoughtful way.

My favourite part of it was probably its protagonist, Ella, who is a blend of fiery, warm, independent, clumsy, clever, and loving, making her seem endearingly human. This story also manages to give the prince an actual personality, which was very refreshing, and takes time to let the two of them form a deep connection, thus making their romance very easy to root for. 

The true selling point of it, though, is how it manages to look at Cinderella from a similar yet different perspective. Ella’s story does have a fairy godmother, an evil stepmother, and a handsome young prince. It also has a girl who fends off ogres, befriends elves, attends a giant’s wedding, and goes off on an adventure to break a curse and save herself. 

Ella Enchanted is thus the best of both worlds, managing to take some classic elements of Cinderella and remakes it into something completely new. It does not rely on its fairy tale inspiration to be a selling point, and nor does it shy away from the framework it’s following. It’s both delightfully nostalgic and incredibly unique, and although it is mostly aimed towards a younger audience, people of all ages would probably enjoy it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of "The Tale of the Rose" by Emma Donaghue

 A Review of "The Tale of the Rose" by Emma Donaghue - Mayura Bhandari “The Tale of The Rose” is a retelling of the popular children’s fairy tale, “The Beauty and The Beast”. It is one of the short stories in the collection by Emma Donoghue, called Kissing The Witch . The story is narrated from the point of a young woman who describes herself as having an appetite for magic. She doesn’t desire suitors, finery or riches. When her father’s ships get lost at sea, her cushy life disappears. But without despair, she gets to work. She washes her father’s clothes, finding peace and satisfaction in it. When fortune smiles upon their family, her siblings ask for riches and finery, but she desires a red rose bud. Her father returns and hands her the rose, explaining that the price of that flower was that he had sold her to a Beast. Obediently, she heads over to the castle, nervous and excited for a new chapter in her life. She recalls the lore the villagers told her. About a young ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Psychological Analysis Of Waiting For Godot

Psychological criticism adopts the methods of "Reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. Here, we are going to apply the same form of criticism on Samuel Beckett’s play, ‘Waiting for Godot.’  Unanswered questions behind the characters behaviour are answered here. We would be looking further to the psychoanalytical approach, Sigmund Freud being the important proponent here. A major focus on the language and how dreams reflect our mental personality are given in his second essay, “Interpretation of Dreams.” The plot clearly states that Estragon has nightmares and Vladimir never addresses them and remains unhelpful towards it, being the one who is aware about their sufferings. The nightmares contain flashbacks and images of a gruesome and horrific event that has hap...
1 comment
Read more

Marxism in Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett, the most eminent Irish playwright wrote ‘’Waiting for Godot’’ in French in 1949 and then translated it into English in 1954. This play has been performed as a drama of the absurd with astonishing success in Europe, America and the rest of the world in the post second world war era. For this reason, Martin Esslin calls it, “One of the successes of the post-war theatre” (Esslin, Martin, 1980) In this play, the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait expectantly to see a man simply known as Godot, a character who does not make an appearance in the play, despite being the titular character. The play begins with waiting for Godot and ends with waiting for Godot. Marxism refers to the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism. Marxism introduced ideas such as Dialectical Materialism, Alienation, and Economic Determination. Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ has a minimalist setting...
Post a Comment
Read more