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Paper short abstract

In King’s Cinderella (1924), the heroine learns wax-relief textile design (batik) to make her own gown, using materials from home and garden. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter,” I explore this depiction of non-human animals and plantlife as active collaborators in the tale’s magic.

Paper long abstract

In How Cinderella Was Able To Go To the Ball (1924), Scottish illustrator and designer Jessie Marion King has a godmother teach Cinderella skills of wax-relief textile design, using materials from home and garden, so she can upcycle an existing dress into a gown grand enough for entrance to a royal ball.

I will consider the ways King’s recrafting of the Cinderella story resonate with current conceptions of ecofeminist aesthetics and material feminism, specifically what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter” (2010). Bennett seeks to “dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic” (x) – challenges to binary thinking that resonate with King’s retelling of ATU 510A in word and picture. More specifically, Bennett offers a model for thinking about the vitality of matter (as opposed to “dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter”), attuned to “a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (ix). Beehives and flowering plants (not human figures) serve as visual icons for King’s story, depicted on the front and back covers. Bees surround Cinderella in illustrations of the gown-making processes, which we may take as visual signs of their status as “donor” figures in this version of the tale, but King imagines relations between humans, non-human animals, and plantlife in more dynamic and reciprocal terms than those encoded in Propp’s morphology. King highlights the “magic” of textile arts and dressmaking, as aesthetically and socially transformative practices, enacted through processes of collaboration between human actors and the vibrant matter of their environment.