Cinderella's Hearth: The Sea Glass Slipper by Kelly Jarvis

No fairy tale symbol is more iconic than Cinderella’s glass slipper. One glint of a glass heel clicking across a ballroom floor plunges us directly into a Cinderella story, so it may be a surprise for some readers to learn that in most variants of Cinderella, the shoe that acts as an identifier of the true bride is not made of glass. In Rhodopis, an Egyptian story often cited as an early variant of the fairy tale, the famous footwear is a leather sandal, and in Yeh-Shen, an early Chinese version of Cinderella, the slippers are “woven of gold threads, in a pattern like the scales of a fish.” Even the Brothers Grimm give Cinderella slippers made of silver and gold, but while all of these precious materials are no doubt beautiful, they fail to capture our imagination like the sparkling slippers crafted of cold, hard glass. 

Charles Perrault’s Cinderella (which inspired the classic Disney film), may be the only traditional fairy tale heroine to don glass slippers, but she isn’t the only one associated with the beauty of glass. Snow White spends her enchanted sleep in a glass casket, and it is a looking glass that serves as a magic mirror to her step-mother, allowing the queen to see who is ‘the fairest one of all.” The Beast gives Beauty a magic looking glass so she can peer across the miles that separate them, and many of Beauty’s folkloric cousins must search for their own lost husbands at the tops of glass mountains. Even Cinderella’s step-sisters have “looking glasses so large that they could see themselves at their full length from head to foot” (Perrault). Glass items echo through fairy tales because we are naturally drawn to their aesthetic qualities. We delight in the dancing light which glints off glass surfaces and wonder at its reflective properties.

Sea Glass, Pixabay

Like the protagonists of fairy tales, I have long been drawn to sparkling things, and, in the summertime, I spend hours combing the shoreline looking for pieces of sea glass with miraculous stories to tell. Glass is first created when sand, soda ash, and limestone are heated to a liquid and shaped by human breath. Discarded bottles and drinkware then find their way to the sea where they are tumbled by the ocean waves until their edges are smoothed and their surfaces frosted. When a piece of sea glass finally reaches the beach, its jade, aqua, teal, blue, or white color shimmers in the salty sea foam, a rare jewel among the shells and stones. I collect each piece of sea glass I find, marveling at its transformative journey as I place it in a crystal jar on my windowsill. When the jar is touched by the sun’s rays, my sea glass sends prisms of color across my ceiling and walls, bringing me memories of summer and recollections of the sea.

The beauty of Cinderella’s glass slipper has no doubt anchored it in our minds as a symbol of her fairy tale, but the glass slipper may also be synonymous with Cinderella because it shares her transformative qualities. Created from humble substances and shaped by human artistry into something beautiful, glass slippers are sturdy, but fragile, like Cinderella herself. And, although Charles Perrault never mentions sea glass in his fairy tale, I think sea glass is especially evocative of the girl who rises from the ashes to become a royal princess. Sea glass, which is created from discarded materials, proves that even when we shatter, our sharp pieces can be softened by the endless the swirl and tumble of time. Like Cinderella, sea glass shows us that broken things can be beautiful if we transform them with a touch of nature’s magic.

Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her first novella, Selkie Moon, comes out in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/