Multiple metamorphoses, or “new skins” for an old tale: Emma Donoghue’s queer Cinderella in translation

Through an analysis of Emma Donoghue's fairy-tale rewriting “The Tale of the Shoe” and its French translation by Valérie Cossy, this chapter examines the multiple transformations of the well-known Cinderella figure: in the famous rags-to-riches tale itself, in Donoghue's rewriting, and again in the French translation. Through the interrogation and re-creation of the heroine's story, Donoghue both fashions queer figures and enacts various meanings of the term “queer”, including “calling into question”, marginality, and even “state of malaise” or “queasiness”. In the second part of the chapter, a comparative analysis of tale and translation demonstrates that the French version, sometimes surprisingly, sometimes highly effectively, provides the well-known tale with a “new skin”, in line with the context of its new publication and in particular the sensual and ambiguous photographs in the French-language journal. The translation choices which lead to a resemanticization of the tale for its new context are highly effective, although the attenuation of some of the key characteristics of Donoghue's text, such as mockery, criticism, ambiguity and bathos, may lessen the overall impact of the story. Nevertheless, both versions offer the reader new possibilities for identification and identity construction, demonstrating that, like the Cinderella figure, like fairy tales, like our notions of ideal settings and ideal endings, the reader can also be transformed.