Eleanor was beautiful, of course. We have to give her that much if the rest of the story is going to make any sense. Like her step-sisters, she had been brought up as a child of the relatively prosperous merchant class, which ensured that she had been well-enough nourished as a babe to have grown up with good teeth and glossy hair and strong, straight bones—unlike the peasants, who were often afflicted with rickets and other vitamin-deficiency diseases.
No doubt she had breasts and legs, like other young women, but whether her breasts were large or small, whether her legs were long or squat, is impossible to tell at this distant point in time.
We can tell from the story, though, that she was considered to be striking, and perhaps a bit unusual; so, since no-one knows what she really looked like, let’s cater to the tastes of our own time and say that she was tall and coltish, with long lovely legs and small—but not too small—breasts, a contrast to many around her upon whom a diet consisting largely of potatoes and coarse black bread had imposed a dumpier sort of physique.
Since this tale is set in that part of Central Europe that had changed hands dozens of times in the past few hundred years and was destined to change hands again a few times more before the century was out, with every wave of raping-and-pillaging Romans, Celts, Goths, Huns, Russians, Mongols, and Turks scrambling the gene-pool a bit further, let’s also say that she had red hair and green eyes and a pale complexion, a rare but possible combination, given the presence of Russian and Celtic DNA in the genetic stew. That should make her sufficiently distinctive. (It’s possible, of course, that she really looked like a female Russian weight-lifter, complete with faint mustache, or like a walking potato, and you’re welcome to picture her that way instead if you’d like—but if so, you must grant at least that she was a striking and charismatic weight-lifter or potato, one who had had men sniffing around her from the time she started to grow hair in places other than her head.)
In truth, like most “beautiful” women, who often are not really even pretty if you can catch them on those rare occasions when their faces are in repose, her allure was based in large part on her charisma and elan, and a personality that remained vital and intense in spite of a life that increasingly tried to grind her down.
Eleanor didn’t wait on the others to the degree shown in the Disney version, of course—this was a hard society, and everyone had to work, including the step-mother and the two step-sisters. Much of the cost of maintaining the house (which was not a working farm, regardless of what the stories tell you, too close to the center of town, although they may have kept a few chickens) was defrayed by revenues from land that Eleanor’s father had owned elsewhere, but those revenues had slowly declined since the father’s death, and in order to keep a tenuous foot-hold on the middle-class, they had been forced to take in seamstress work, which occupied all of them for several hours a day.
It’s true, though, that since her father died, two years before, and since revenues had declined enough to preclude keeping servants, that much of the rest of the work of maintaining the household had fallen on Eleanor’s shoulders, in addition to her seamstress chores.
She found it bitterly hard, as would you; in fact, spoiled by modernity, we’d find it even more onerous than she did, and suffer even more keenly. Housework was hard physical labor in those days, especially in the backward hinterlands of Central Europe, where even the (from our perspective) minimal household conveniences that might be available to a rich family in London would not arrive for a long lifetime, or maybe two. Housework was brutal and unrelenting labor, stretching from dawn until well after dusk, the equivalent in its demands on someone’s reserves of strength and endurance of working on a road-gang or in a coal mine; it was the main reason, along with the rigors and hazards of childbirth, why women wore out so fast and died so young. Not for nothing did the phrase “Slaving over a hot stove” come into existence; doing laundry was even worse, a task so grueling—pounding the clothes, twisting them dry, starting over again—that it was rarely tackled more than once a week even in households where there were several women to divide the work up amongst them; and scrubbing, inside or out, was done on your knees in any and all weathers, with a stiff-bristled brush and raw potash soap that stung your nostrils and blistered your hands.
Of course, every other woman in this society, except for the very richest, had to deal with these kind of labors as well, so there was nothing unique about Eleanor’s lot, or any reason to feel sorry for her in particular, as the stories sometimes seem to invite us to do…the subtext pretty obviously being that she is an aristocrat-in-hiding, or at least a member of the prosperous upper class, being forced to do the work of a peasant. Think of that! Being made to work just like a common, ordinary girl! As if she wasn’t any better than anyone else! (Oddly enough, this reaction of indignation usually comes from people who have to work for a living every day themselves, not from whatever millionaires or members of the peerage might be lurking in the audience.)
In fact, though, Eleanor had also been spoiled, not by modernity but by her father, sheltered by his money from most of the chores even a child of the merchant class would usually have had to become inured to…so perhaps she did feel it more keenly than most women of her day would have. Her father had also spoiled her in other, more significant ways, teaching her to read (something still frowned upon, if no longer actively forbidden by law), teaching her to love books and learning, teaching her to dream. Teaching her to be ambitious for what purpose? She had a good mind, and her father had given her the beginnings of a decent education, but what was she supposed to ambitious—butdo with it? Further formal schooling was out of the question, even if there had been money for it—that was for men. All the professions were for men as well. There was nothing she could do, no way her life could change. She was doomed to stay here in this once-loved house she had come to hate, working like a slave day and night for people she didn’t even like, much less consider to be family, until her youth and strength and beauty drained away like water spilled in the street, and she woke up one day to find herself spavined and old.
She could feel this doom closing in around her like a black cloud, making every day a little more hopeless and bitter and grim. She could feel herself dying, a little bit every day, her mind dulling, her strength and resiliency waning.
Somehow, she had to get out of here.
But there was no way out…
After several months of this bleak circle, she decided at last that there was only one possible way to escape: she would trade sex for a better life—or at least a more comfortable one.
It was a choice that untold thousands of young women—and not a few men—had made before her, and that thousands more would make after her. She’d looked her situation over with cold-eyed clarity, and realized that she had no commodity to offer that anyone would ever value except for youth, beauty, and virginity—and that none of them were going to last long. A few more years of constant grinding toil would take care of the youth and beauty, and sooner or later one of the men who had been circling her with increasing persistence would corner her in the stables or behind a market stall or in an alley somewhere and rape her, and that would be the end of her virginity (a valuable commodity ever since syphilis had started to ravage Europe a few centuries back) as well. If he got her pregnant, she’d be stuck here forever.