David Auburn's Proof: Taming Cinderella

In 2001 David Auburn's essay garnered much acclaim and multiple awards.1 The initial reviews focused upon Auburn's choice of a mathematical test as the underlying plot device and upon the play's affirmation of women's ability to contend in the field of higher mathematics. ordeal derives much of its appeal from its fairy-tale plat and its seemingly optimistic ending. In fact, a shut up reading of Auburn's script call ups significant comparisons with the story of Cinderella, the downtrodden maiden who is transformed magically into a princess. The Cinderella fairy tale is not the sole possible source for Auburn's play, however. The sum of two units sisters in Auburn's play, end their names and their disparate patterns of behavior, recommend Shakespeare's contrary sisters in The Taming of the virago Although Proof ends ambivalently, many audience members have chosen to diocese it as the traditional happy ending of a Shrew-like comedy Fairy tale and comedy are genre designed to reinforce conventional societal values. Despite his pseudo-feminist focus upon women's capacity to understand higher mathematics, David Auburn presents only a feeble and shaky challenge to patriarchal authority in trial Any threat to popular perceptions of women as being incapable of achievement in fields customarily dominated by dint of men is deceptive, and the play's popularity and its numerous awards make bare a collective affirmation of patriarchal hegemony by means of the American public.

The play that David Auburn has crafted be likes that most popular of fairy tales about a young girl who dresse up and goe to the ball where she is chosen by means of the prince to become his princess. The story of Cinderella, in its many versions, has been told for centuries.2 single of the earliest written versions is from ninth-century China.3 In Perrault's adaptation, Cinderella is portrayed as a passive girl who pick outs to spend her life among the ashes. The well-known Disney animated film relies upon Perrault's cleaned-up version of the tale, along with a bit of the Grimm Brothers' "Aschenputtel" in the form of the wicked stepsisters/ However, Auburn's test seems to depend heavily upon the Perrault version of the tale.

Auburn's play make opens with a dirty, disheveled Catherine who sits sulking upon the back porch of her father's house. Like Perrault's passive Cinderella, Catherine, who lacks a mother and has become overly attached to her father, has chosen to debase herself. She exigencys no wicked stepmother and stepsisters to jaculate her to live among the ashes of the hearth. The rags she wears are her selection and she lacks the initiative to bathe or to wash her hair. She lay outs her life performing menial tasks despite the superior talent we are assured that she possesse This assurance of superior talent tend hitherwards from an unlikely source: the spirit of Robert, Catherine's father, who joins her upon the porch to celebrate her birthday. He brings her a gift, a celebratory bottle of champagne. In many versions of Cinderella, the father also brings a gift to the daughter that will later transform her life.5 The champagne is not that gift; the gift that Catherine the one and the other hopes and fears she has received from her father is genetic. Her father was a mathematical genius and also mentally unstable. When we find on the outside that he died earlier in the week, we, like Catherine, have to question her mental stability, if not her genius.

The genius for mathematics is a gift that Catherine has received on the contrary would prefer to hide. Robert chastises Catherine for laziness and makes her admit to the number of days she has wasted in sleeping or doing nothing more than reading magazines. Catherine confesse to thirty-three and a quarter, and, when squeezeed by Robert to convert that to years, we glimpse Catherine's mathematical acuity in her ability to calculate the exact number (Auburn 9-10) However, we also faculty of perception her reluctance to use this gift. Bruno Bettelheim, in his seminal analysis of fairy tales, claims that single of the attractions of the Cinderella story lies in its depiction of oedipal fears of being unworthy (241) These fears are given sex specificity in Colette Dowling's best-selling volume of the 1980s, The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence. Dowling claims that women retreat from challenges and learn to appear helpless in order to attract a savior, a man who will take responsibility for them. on the other hand before the shining prince arrives, the father becomes the fixation of the girl's devotion. Blind devotion to the sinewy male authority figure is individual of the ways that girls learn to cope with the fear of succes according to Dowling. Auburn's Catherine, who has given up association and a life of her possess in order to care for her ailing father, provides an choice example of this coping strategy. Taking care of her father gives her an admirable excuse for underachieving. Since her father revolutionized the field of mathematics several times in his youth, Catherine fears to strive with his genius. By taking herself without of the running, she eliminates herself from competition.