In the Brothers Grimm version of the fairy tale "Cinderella," the marginalized heroine's marriage to the prince and her rise to the position of princess is prefaced by distinct moments that renounce, repudiate, or announce the repression of the body's physicality at a conscious, subconscious, cultural, or textual level. This study examines a series of women's maturation novels that in some way enact this narrative, elevating a marginalized young woman through marriage to a position of social prominence by casting a certain physicality as suspect and then purging that suspect physicality from the text--a process that culminates in the death or exile of a stepsister figure. This study examines ways in which notions of class and gender are both constructed and revealed through shifts in the specific physical signs cast as suspect, and it explores how the renunciation of this suspect physicality is conceptualized in the text.;However, the final two novels discussed here--George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920)--both activate and subvert this narrative by involving us emotionally with the character cast as suspect, the stepsister figure, revealing how this notion of a suspect physicality works to confound and condemn her. This shift in perspective effects a profound shift in our emotional response to the narrative, particularly the sacrificial death or exile of the stepsister figure, and works to undermine both the power of the Cinderella narrative and the ideology of purity that informs it.;This study suggests that in the first three novels discussed here--Fanny Burney's Camilla (1796), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847)--the definition of the suspect physicality becomes linked with notions of a lower class sensibility so that the renunciation of this suspect physicality both allows for and sanctifies the marginalized heroine's marriage to an upper class suitor. Thus, the death or exile of the stepsister figure functions to purify the heroine of the taint of marginality, rendering her as suitable and proper for her new position.
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