Ruth stops. She is older than Iris, a solid thing, already more than normal adult size, but simple. A pendulum of spit swings out and makes a tassel. Iris reaches and wipes Ruth’s mouth. Ruth has a set of shoulders that would grace an ox, but she doesn’t have an ox’s patience. Her brown eyes blink. She lunges toward the nearest rack of produce, a tray heaped with sun-spotted early pears.
Traditionally, there are two ugly stepsisters to Cinderella and despite Gregory Maguire’s penchant for reinterpreting familiar tales in a way that gives them a very unique spin, that convention holds true he as well. Note that the title says these are the confessions of an ugly stepsister, but it doesn’t clarify which of the two. These somewhat less than lovely young lasses are those two: Ruth and Iris. Of course, the narration is quite clearly third-person which doesn’t really seem to add up to the book being a work of confessional literature, does it? On the other hand, the chapter which precedes this early chapter is narrated in the first person by a character that is clearly one of the three sisters, but it is absolutely not clear which one in particular. Right of the bat this novel becomes something of a hidden mystery: whose confessions are these, anyway?
Clara sighs. She stands, a young thing with a heavy adult thought in her mind, as Iris backs away. It’s almost a dark thought, though Iris can’t quite name it. A sudden slide of light comes through a shifting of clouds, slanting between two roof boards that have been pulled aside. Clara’s hair blazes, white fire; suddenly Iris can’t see her, just a glare of light, a child in an inside garden. For an instant Iris believes Clara really is a changeling.
Cinderclara doesn’t quite have the same ring as Cinderella, but you know that’s only because you have become familiar with the latter, right? Nevertheless, where the story to be titled after the Cinderella character, Cinderclara would be appropriate. Clara is the poor cinder girl here, set against her will into a world she never asked for. Still, she’s not quite the poor cinder girl we expect. Oh, she’s beautiful, all right and nothing is more unwanted in an ugly family than an attractive in-law. (If you doubt this, just track down a certain second wife/Princess named Camilla and watch how her in-laws treat her.) Much like Elphaba defies not just gravity by conventions of wicked witchery in Maguire novel which precedes this one, Clara is not exactly what most of us expect from a Cinderella story.
“It’s your own job to change yourself.”
Well, not really so much a queen of the gypsies so much as simply a nearly deaf old crone dependent upon canes. But it’s not so much the source as the content. And the content of this quote is central to the overarching theme of the novel. At the heart of the narrative is the idea of self-transformation and taking charge of the agency of that change. The three sisters that dominate the story are to a certain extent acted upon by external forces rather than being the captains of their own fates. At least, that is the state of affairs at the commencement of the story. What plays out from that origin point becomes the thematic focus which is encapsulated in this assertion by the old crone who has become—by virtue of the action of one of the stepsisters—a Gypsy queen.
