Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Blogger is Bugging Me and Google Needs to Fix It. Now!

I got up early this morning and having nothing better to do I read several blogs. I read Eat, Pray...Hate? at Girls Write Out, the gist of which is that people don't like the "truth" of some people's stories, even going so far as to criticize Eat, Pray, Love because the woman left her husband. To that post, I wrote a response saying that it is natural for readers to feel hurt when someone hurts someone they like. In this case, the writer of Eat, Pray, Love hurt her husband, who appears to have wanted the marriage to work, whatever his failing might have been. I said that readers will feel the story is unresolved if the person doesn't admit wrong doing and apologize to not only the other person but the reader. Of course, the character can get comeuppance and that works too (sometimes even better).

But what got me is that I included a link to For the Love of a Devil and to a couple of Bible verses because I felt that For the Love of a Devil was relavant to what I had to say and I wanted to talk about how the Bible says that God hates divorce[1] and that Jesus only allowed the cause of fornication as a justifiable reason for divorce [2]. I sent my comment on its way and I thought it took, but I went back later and it wasn't there. I suspect it got caught in the spam filter, but how would I know? It is possible that someone will approve the comment for posting later, if that is the case, but I simply don't know if I should repost or not (not that I really want to write that post again). For all I know Kristen Billerbeck or Colleen Coble or one of the others has a problem with me saying what I did. But what I really think happened is that it got caught in the span filter because of the links. We used to be able to put links in comments with no problem at all. And if we aren't allowed to continue that, that is a real problem. The veins of the Internet are links. If we can't post links, the Internet will die. And if Blogger automatically removes comments with links in them, it is going to be very hard for us to carry on a conversation. So, there's the problem. Now, Google, have your overpaid engineers go fix it.

Cinderella's Magic

Today, I want to continue the topic of Cinderella from yesterday, but I want to discuss Cinderella’s magic. Where does it come from?


We don’t normally think of Cinderella having magic of her own, but magic is used to give her gifts. It appears to be in the control of a fairy godmother or a tree, depending on which version you read. Indirectly, the magic appears to come from her mother, who is watching over her from heaven. None of the stories make a huge deal about her mother, but some do talk about God and her mother looking down on her. In the Gimms’ version, the tree is planted on her mother’s grave and watered with Cinderella’s tears. Even the fact that some versions reference a fairy godmother alludes to a higher power. I don’t know much about godmothers, but my understanding is that they are to help protect their godchildren.


In terms of storytelling, the power comes from none of those things but from Cinderella. Had Cinderella not been “pious and good,” I don’t think it would’ve made sense for someone to give her all she was given. We see that in A Little Princess. In the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett and the 1995 film, the fact that Sara has so much taken from her gives us reason to cheer when thing turn around. Contract that with The Little Princess, which is a 1939 Shirley Temple film that is based on the same book. That version makes you want to just smack that girl.