Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

The Other Side of the Fairy Tale

Before Wicked, Gregory Maguire had already established his revisionist method with a Cinderella retelling set not in a vague fairy-tale kingdom but in seventeenth-century Haarlem — the world of Vermeer and Rembrandt, of Dutch merchants and the tulip mania, of a society that was simultaneously producing great art and building a commercial empire on the exploitation of others.

Iris is one of the stepsisters — not the beautiful one, by any conventional measure — and her account of the events we know as the Cinderella story upends the familiar moral geometry. Clara, the Cinderella figure, is genuinely beautiful and genuinely damaged by that beauty — it has made her an object rather than a person, protected and imprisoned in equal measure. Iris, watching her, sees something that the fairy tale tradition refuses to acknowledge: that beauty is not a straightforwardly good thing to possess.

The Dutch Golden Age Setting

Maguire’s choice of Haarlem is the novel’s most important decision. The Dutch Golden Age is a world organized around the observation of things — around the precise rendering of light, shadow, fabric, and human expression — and this gives the novel’s meditation on beauty an institutional backdrop. The painters who populate the story are interested in what beauty actually is, as opposed to what convention declares it to be, and their interest becomes a structural counterpoint to the fairy-tale logic that would simply reward the prettiest girl.

The tulip mania — the Dutch financial bubble built on the absurd overvaluation of tulip bulbs — provides the novel’s economic subplot and its central metaphor: the arbitrary assignment of value to things based on social agreement rather than intrinsic worth.

The Stepmother Question

One of the novel’s quiet achievements is its treatment of Iris’s mother, Margarethe — the wicked stepmother of the original tale — who is given a full human history and a set of genuinely understandable motivations. She is not sympathetic, but she is comprehensible, and her comprehensibility is part of Maguire’s larger project of insisting that the fairy tale’s villains had inner lives as real as its heroes.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Maguire’s most visually beautiful novel — a richly imagined Dutch Golden Age Cinderella retelling that takes the perspective of the overlooked and finds genuine moral complexity there.