Motherhood Quote by Charles Perrault

Fairy tales love speed, and Perrault wastes none: in two sentences he sketches a family portrait that doubles as a moral verdict. The phrasing is deceptively soft - "Once upon a time" lulls, "widow" solicits sympathy - then the knife turns. The elder daughter is "so much like her" mother that the two blur into one. Perrault isn’t offering a cute resemblance; he’s setting up heredity as destiny, especially in the realm that matters most to a 17th-century moralist: character.

That doubling does a few jobs at once. It establishes a villainous axis without naming villains. By collapsing mother and daughter into the same figure, Perrault suggests a self-replicating entitlement: beauty, status, and temperament passed down like property. The line "whoever saw the daughter saw the mother" reads like a social warning about surfaces. In salons and courts, where Perrault’s audience lived by reputation and display, the ability to "read" people quickly was treated as survival skill. Here, perception becomes judgment: you can spot the mother’s values in the daughter’s face, implying hypocrisy isn’t even trying to hide.

The widow’s status matters too. A widow can be precarious, but also newly autonomous - a woman managing a household, marriages, and inheritances. Perrault’s opening frames her as the gatekeeper of domestic power, shaping daughters into outcomes. In the architecture of "Cinderella"-style stories, that’s not backstory; it’s the mechanism. Before any glass slipper appears, Perrault primes the reader to see cruelty not as a random act, but as a family tradition wearing the same smile.