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Still Chasing that Missing Slipper: A Cinderella Story from Japan Reaches a Stormy Bermuda
October 8, 2022 @ 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Professor Fay Beauchamp has been tracking Cinderella stories from East to West since she first compared the Akashi Chapter from The Tale of Genji (c1000CE) and Shakespeare’s 1611 The Tempest.
In exile, lonely daughters live along ocean shores until supernatural beings bring princes to take them home. In this illustrated presentation, Dr. Beauchamp will compare strange ‘fairy god-fathers”: Japan’s Thundergod Sumiyoshi; a Chinese wind god; and Shakespeare’s Ariel and explore the idea that the real Cinderella is the freed-slave Caliban, not Miranda. The seminal story is an 850 CE tale told by an ethnic minority storyteller in Southeast China in 850 CE — How this Cinderella story traveled by boat is part of Dr. Beauchamp own storytelling.
Dr. Fay Beauchamp, Professor of English Emerita, Community College of Philadelphia (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania). Fay has been selected as its 2022 Distinguished Asianist by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Asian Studies.