The Cinderella complex[1]
and Ugly Betty
The Cinderella story is one of the most popular tales
with strong roots in cultures all around the globe. It was adapted and re-told
multiple times eventually becoming a productive and even archetypical theme
especially in Western culture. The Cinderella story is almost synonymous with
the quest of a person to endure injustice and to evolve in a higher society
role overcoming the odds. Similar motifs were categorized and analyzed in theory
by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp[2] and his analytical
approach proved to be very influential. His work scrutinizes the folk tales and
develops a pattern of well organized repeatable structures and motifs.
His model gives the theoretical thought a coherent
paradigm used by scholars from various fields of study. I argue in this thesis
that instances of popular culture use and build upon themes like the Cinderella
story, using repeatable motifs and themes. Ugly
Betty can be considered as a text influenced by such repeatable motifs. A
lot has been written about the ABC TV series with the focus on the beauty theme
and ethnicity. The two themes are very strong throughout the series and no
doubt are fundamental for its understanding and placing in popular culture
discourses. I argue that both themes are part of the building the Ugly Betty leitmotiv as yet another
incarnation of the Cinderella story with both supporting and subverting
dominant discourses and readings concerning gender, sexuality and social roles.
There is hardly a child that does not know the
Cinderella story[3] as
it is well incorporated at the social construction of gender roles. The
mechanisms are easily recognized. The humble, diligent, hard-working girl that
shines with natural and genuine beauty is to be rewarded by showing all good
features of her strong character like tenderness, obedience and friendliness.
The reward however turns to be a nice, sparkly beautiful dress and the Prince.
If not acting and performing in this particular way the girl is destined to see
herself in the role of the stepsisters - deprived of the beautiful dresses and
out of princes. The suggested idea for boys’ behavior is also plain. They have
to be persistent in their ideals and to choose the one girl out of many offered
that have the good qualities listed above. Thus the young girls and boys get
the impression of an example provided, example that can be seen as a product similar
to Lacan’s mirror stage[4] where the subject
constructs and recognizes an ideal ego in the characters[5]. The mirror they are shown
reflects society’s desire of reaching the ultimate norm - everything that is considered
proper and good. Future women and men have to strive to fulfill the
expectations. Not only fairy tales create a unified model of masculinity and
femininity, but they also include the idea of not merely punishment but
suffering that waits at the end of improper behavior. Every tale incorporates a
moral lesson that ties the patterns of behavior with moral categories. Good and
Evil are the two essential components of morality that constitutes the moral of
a fairy tale. This binary corresponds adequately with the simplistic structure
of the fairy tale and the schematic characters. This, of course, eases the
young reader. He/she is taught that a character should act according to the
limitations of the dyad otherwise an antagonistic mechanism is triggered. Good
is repaid with happy ending, evil – with righteous punishment. Thus the fairy
tale discourse inevitably brings together the gender discourse and morals and
places gender roles within the moral categories of good and evil. Far-fetched
as it may seem it supposes that obeying the norm is the right, the good thing,
while deviance is read as something bad, abnormal. One can derive from this
initial dichotomy all kinds of similar binaries. Beauty, of course, essentially
falls in the category of good and right and thus is at the “positive” end of
the polarity. And as the ancient philosopher Parmenidas saw the world divided
into pairs of opposites, similarly the fairy tale creates a world of positives
and negatives. Logically ugliness is incorporated in the negative end of the
spectrum. It is only convenient for TV productions and other instances of popular
culture to operate in similar fashion and to use fairy tale models since they
are so well incorporated in Western society. Ugly
Betty is not exception although it includes modified scheme of the initial
oppositions and tries to convince that beauty is concealed in the beauty of the
heart. Alongside the active constructing of stereotypical gender roles, it also
builds on the notion that change in social status is easily acquired through
hard work and fulfilling certain codes or modes of behavior. This idea
correlates with the American dream that proclaims equality for all men[6]. Thus the ethnic motif in Ugly Betty can easily be interpreted as
another instance of fulfilling the American dream by occupying a substantial position
at work in a sphere dominantly considered as a white upper-middle class
territory. Betty lives her American dream walking all the way from New York
ghetto to the heart of the fashion business winning everybody over with her
exceptional way of understanding and forgiving. Unlike Wilhelmina, who also
represents ethnic group, Betty does not sacrifice her family or her ideals in
the quest of reaching the top. Quite the contrary, she is persistent in staying
true to herself. In this way the motif of her perfection is backed up with the
notion that she embodies goodness, kindness and rightness. However the TV
series dangerously risk on some occasions to present their heroine if not
flawless, than the moral judge of everybody else. On the other hand “the always
right” character not only does not violate the simple dichotomy of good/bad,
but supports the idea that the positive hero/heroine is always at the positive,
respectively good side of the opposition.
As Stuart Hall points out developing his
encoding/decoding model producers rely on shared understanding with viewers to
create the product and count that it will be understood as intended. The model
relies on the idea that producers encode certain meaning or meanings in the
product, expecting that the viewer will be able to decode the message thanks to
shared codes of understanding. The cultural frame, added later to the model
includes the idea that people are able to perform the decoding operation
because of the conventional understandings people from certain cultural groups
have. This model is especially helpful when such broadly known models like the
Cinderella fairy tales are used, because they can reach theoretically huge
number of people. A basic reading of Ugly
Betty can show exactly the unfolding of the paradigm of the Cinderella
story. Betty, a young girl who has just graduated from college, enters the
glamorous world of haute couture and tries to find her place while swimming
with sharks. Betty can easily be read as modern Cinderella. Several
similarities can be pointed in this direction. Betty lost her mother and lives
in Queens[7] which automatically says
she cannot afford a Gucci purse. What is more, she has to work to support her
family. Throughout the series the heroine is depicted as a bit naïve, kind
hearted and hardworking and very fair-minded. She has a retinue of good friends
that are actually her supportive family members and the co-worker advisor in
the face of Christina. The Mode editor and fashion icon Wilhelmina Slater seems
to occupy the role of the evil stepmother who uses every convenient moment and
her two useful pickles (Mark and Amanda) to show Betty that she does not fit at
all in her world. On the other hand Claire Meade is the God (or even “good” as
Wilhelmina and she create a polar opposition) mother who does not provide the
beautiful dress but does something equally important - acknowledges Betty for
her hard work and accepts her for her good qualities. Daniel, the playboy
prince, is forced by his father to accept the burden of responsibility and to
assume a leading role at Meade Corporations (read - the kingdom). To do so,
however, he needs to find the matching princess, who will help him overcome the
difficulties. And episode after episode Ugly
Betty works in the direction that actually Betty is the right girl to stand
by Daniel. This of course is revealed gradually and thus works in more
convenient ways for the viewer who sometimes tends to doubt the happily ever
after of the mainstream narrative. In order the fairy tale ending to be reached
both Betty and Daniel have to undergo certain changes - she has to change to
fit more in the beauty section and he has to become more responsible and able
to pick the “right” among many “wrong” princesses. It is very curious exactly
in what way the two characters evolve in this kind of new maturity, where they
can be right for each other. In order to turn into “Mr. Right” Daniel gradually
drops the pointless affairs and quits going out with models. He even marries a
school teacher and is forced to grow up by first staying by her side when she
fights cancer and then by losing her. Betty, on the other hand, first dates a
boy from the neighborhood, then Gio, for whom and whose sandwiches the other coworkers
display aspirations, then a nerdy playwright, whom she kinds of pick up, being
the active part and taking the first step and at some point the millionaire son
of Claire Mead’s lover. One is tempted to assume that Betty is prepared to the
role of Daniel’s princess being acknowledged and recognized by other men. In
this sense it is rather difficult to read Betty as eminence of independence,
when the series depict her climbing the dreamed heights, accompanied by
relationships that obviously are supposed to measure her development. This
gradation also goes along with Betty’s physical transformation. In this sense
the Cinderella discourse resembles another exemplary one from the tales- The Ugly Duckling, where the gaze of the
others is again essential for constituting the change.
“Ugly is the new beautiful”
That is the slogan the TV series use to promote,
arguing that beauty is a changeable category and more important - a subjective
one. The TV series also try to prove that beauty is not visible and skin deep
but more or less a moral category. Similar to The Ugly Duckling they try to show that beauty cannot be recognized
and seen from first sight. This is achieved first by the opening technique
which I find symptomatic. Ugly Betty
starts with moving pieces of face collages. Fragmented faces are used to apply
the idea that beauty can be constructed (element which brings to mind similar
introduction to another TV series Nip/Tuck
that starts with a woman’s face supposedly embodying the perfection and plays
with the idea that beauty is constructed not only surgically but socially
also). The fashion business of course is often times accused of implying beauty
stereotype that prove to be very influential among people. Ugly Betty introduces a character that does not possess the
acquired physical appearance to match the beauty standard of the fashion world
presented by Mode. She is not model skinny, wears glasses and braces, does not
have a fashionable haircut and most importantly she is not fashion smart in clothing.
The most controversial thing however is that she is chosen as Daniel assistant
exactly because she does not fit in the beauty category. Betty acknowledges the
reason she was hired and though first it upsets her, then she decides to make
her way up the cruel world of Mode.
Some analyses state that exactly in Betty’s active way
of dealing with the situation come the difference between her and Cinderella.
In the tale the heroine is the passive sufferer who waits for the helper to get
her out of the mess. In the contrary Betty acts in order to be accepted in the
hostile environment (“I don‘t hate your shoes“, states Wilhelmina which is the
closest Betty gets to recognition from her. But one starts to wonder why
exactly Betty‘s shoes are the carte blanche. An explanation can be pretty
obvious - in the same way the crystal slipper helped Cinderella to become the
princess, Betty’s shoes are the matching pass to the world of fashion princes
and princesses). From this angle one cannot say that Betty suffers from what
Collette Dowling names The Cinderella complex - the hidden women’s fear of
independence. As I pointed above Ugly
Betty does not so much reflects the Cinderella complex as a psychological
state, but it does use the stereotypical gender roles that the tale implies to
fit in a mainstream narrative easily recognized by the common viewer. The TV
series use the repeatable motifs from the tale to construct its own
interpretation, namely that Betty is the princess in disguise that will beat
the odds to get the reward - the prince, counting on her kind hearted nature
and her inner beauty.
One of the reasons of Betty’s popularity is that very
successfully the heroine challenges norms of beauty and serves as an example of
the successful women. Many young women identify with Betty and are inspired by
her. At the Golden Globe ceremony America Ferrera (the actress staring as
Betty) in her speech after winning the best actress award stated that fans felt
inspired and with lifted spirits because of Betty, that thanks to her they felt
more worthy and lovable. This comes to show that Ugly Betty not only undermines norms of beauty and/or ethnicity but
gives another path of possible identification. Although supporting everything
said so far, this teary speech opens more possibilities of further reading Ugly Betty as subverting the Cinderella
story. For instance, some of the characters that fit in the tale paradigm are
portrayed as exaggerated stereotypes and thus presented as parody. For example
Wilhelmina is depicted as a Medusa - like monster who terrifies everyone and
tends to fire people because their style does not cover hers. At the same time
she is failed mother whose own daughter blackmails her because she only paid
attention to advancing in her career. Claire on the other hand shows exactly
how the beautiful fairy tale can turn wrong. Married to a very successful
businessman she appears to have miserable marriage and an affair, one of her
sons changes sexes and she is forced to deal with alcoholism. Not exactly the
exemplary God mother with the magic solution in her pocket. But the most
striking is the way Daniel is depicted in the series. He is indeed the
desirable young prince with eminent fortune and social position. But he also is
very helpless and not very competitive. On occasions he is a bit sloppy and
makes the general impression of not very mature person. Towards the end the TV
series give the general impression that Daniel is the one who needs saving.
This puts him in unnatural passive position which is usually occupied by the
female character. Not in Ugly Betty
though. The positions are dramatically reversed and often times Betty is the
one who saves Daniel or shows him what the right way is. This reversal is one
of the significant wins over the stereotypical gender roles that see the man as
the strong, powerful and thus dominant person, whereas the women is provisioned
as the sensitive, vulnerable person who needs to be saved or taken care of. In
this way Ugly Betty shows that the
successful women of today is independent and does not necessarily need to win
the man to be regarded as such ( a point very well made in the article The Analysis of
Transition in Woman Social Status—Comparing Cinderella with Ugly
Betty ) . Although at the end of the series Daniel goes after Betty
in well known re-play of the Cinderella story, it is because he needs her not
the other way around.
Betty starts work in Mode because Daniel constantly
has affairs with his assistants. One of his many crushes is Amanda and they
keep casual sexual relationship which does not include commitment. And Amanda
wants Betty’s position as Daniel’s assistant. This rivalry can be seen as the
exterior embodiment of the conflict between the two characters’ types. Amanda
is interesting character not only because she evolves during the series but
because she can be read according to the tale example as unhappened Cinderella.
She is an orphan, beautiful, stylish and smart about what is trendy and what is
not. She fits perfectly in the fashion world and Mode magazine. But she is
stuck at reception and on top of that constantly underrated by Daniel,
Wilhelmina and even her best friend Mark. Amanda dreams for the moment when her
qualities are going to be uncovered by Prince Charming. Her conviction that she
is destined to be a princess is strengthened by the revelation that Fey Summers
(the mythical death Mode editor) is her mother. But unlike Betty Amanda always
tries the shortcuts to get what she wants - either by her relationship with Daniel
or with a plan to discredit Betty and take her place. Not sticking to the
conventional norms of “good” behavior directly positions Amanda in the role of
the evil stepsister who is simple not as good as Cinderella to win the prince.
And she does not; her sexual relation with Daniel does not lead to anything
serious. During the series however Amanda and Betty befriend and Betty is the
one who points out that Amanda has a talent in styling. In this way the series
try to show that redemption is possible and not everything is painted black or
white.
Concerned with the ways Ugly Betty reinforces and reflects stereotypes, this paper focuses
on the twofold process of supporting and creating hegemonic concepts in
society. By comparing Cinderella and Betty some valid points about femininity
and normativity are erected. This thesis speculates with the idea that the
success of the TV series is due to its rather postmodern way of combining polar
ideas. It also argues that more than one possible reading is applicable to the
film.
Works Cited
Barreiro, Paula.
"Understanding Ugly Betty: Nego-tiating Race in a Culturally-Mixed Text." Divergencias. Revista de
Studios Linguisticos y Literarios 8.1 (2010): 34-40.
Benjamin, Walter. The
work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Penguin, 2008.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of
taste. Harvard University Press, 1984. 1-7
Su, Tiping, and Qinyi Xue. "The Analysis of Transition in Woman Social
Status—Comparing Cinderella with Ugly Betty." Journal of Language Teaching
and Research 1.5 (2010): 746-752.
[1]
This paper engages with the Cinderella complex as a social construct of gender
stereotyping, not as a psychological phenomenon, although it touches upon that
perspective too.
[2] In
Morphology of the Folk Tale Propp
argues that every fairy tale can be divided into substantial elements which
reappear in different tales depending on their genre. He analyzes separately 31
functions of the folk tale and describes 8 main character types.
[3]
This paper uses the Cinderella story collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm
because I think this particular version is the most popular nowadays. The story
however is quite old and wide spread. The oldest considered story is an
Egyptian one recorded by the Greek historian Strabo.
[4]
Mainly used for its symbolic value, Lacan’s mirror stage is a prominent moment
in the process of the infant’s identification. The French philosopher and
psychoanalytic is also very well known for binding his psychoanalytical ideas
with linguistic ones, which proves to be very useful in critic and in media
studies. This relation between language and psychology is very tightly
connected with the idea that society creates roles and stereotypes using
different types of narratives – the fairy tale or the TV series for example.
[5]
Barthes experiment in Mythologies
also could come in handy to describe this tendency in society to create myths.
[6]
What about women, one might want to ask, although women didn’t have the right
to vote at that time, still significant is that black people and natives were
also excluded from this “all men” idea.
[7]Interesting
analogy arises when one thinks of Eddie Murphy’s character from the movie Coming to America, who was sure he will
be able to find his future wife and queen not anywhere else but Queens.
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