I didn't know that about Cinderella. Actually I know that many traditional fairy tales had quite a scary evil basis - such as Hansel and Gretel. Not cosy reading really, but I grew up loving reading big books of fairy tales that fired my imagination.
The original fairy tales (Grimms and others) were written as "morality stories", intended to scare children into better behavior.
For instance, the "Red Shoes" tale was about a little girl who received a pair of new red shoes that she was extremely pleased with. Her parents, very poor, gave her their last coins to walk to town to buy a loaf of bread to stave off their starvation. On the way back, she came across a mud puddle that blocked the road. To protect her shoes, she threw the loaf of bread in the puddle to step on. Her parents starved to death, of course.
Because of this, the shoes made her dance and she couldn't stop. She was dancing herself to death and came across a woodsman carrying an axe. She begged him to cut off her feet to stop the dancing. He obliged and then carved her a pair of wooden feet, on which she walked in extreme pain for the rest of her life. Boy, did SHE learn a lesson, huh?
Just the story to read your kid at bedtime. "Hey, honey, do you want Mommy to read you a nice restful story just before you go to sleep? How about The Red Shoes? That's a good story!"
Oh, and Little Red Riding Hood? Spoiler alert: Grandma is NOT safely locked up in the closet while the wolf is dressed in her clothes and is in her bed. The wolf has eaten her and after Little Red kills the wolf, she has to cut him open and pull Grandma's body out.
