After a blissful night of lovemakin...

After a blissful night of lovemaking with her handsome prince, Catherine room for expectations to share her magical clandestine In her second assertive action, she casually propels Hal the key to the desk drawer. The phallic imagery here surpasses Bettelheim's Freudian analysis of an active Cinderella slipping her phallic base into the vaginal slipper as it is held by the agency of the prince.7 In Proof, Catherine takes the phallic solution that she has on a chain around her neck and tosses it to Hal. She make knowns him to try it in the bottom drawer of her father's desk Hal scuds off to insert the explanation into the tiny hole that unbolts the secret compartment, but here the [i]clavis[/i] is not the metaphoric clew to Catherine's heart. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space claims that drawers, particularly drawers in desk and filing cabinets, are metaphors for repositories of rational fancy (74-75). Catherine's father, according to Hal, "invented mathematical techniques for studying rational behavior" (Auburn 17) What Catherine has hidden in the drawer of her father's desk is a mysterious mathematical trial of great significance. She moves Hal her rational mind, not her heart, as the innermost treasure that she has kept hidden from all others.

Catherine's revelation at the extremity of Act One that she, and not her father, wrote this trial is her declaration of the superiority that she kept hidden beneath the filth and tattered garments. She usurps phallic power according to providing the key and then by the agency of claiming to have devised the magical attestation written in one of the notebooks that she earlier provided for her father to fill with his meaningless scribbles and in a hand that cannot be distinguished from his. Is the proof-sheet hers or her father's? Claire present the appearances willing to dismiss Catherine's claim of authorship, if it be not that she is not a mathematical wizard. She and Catherine deflect to Hal for judgment; he fails the touchstone that Catherine has set for him. Bettelheim claims that the resultant castration anxiety that might arise from Cinderella's assertive action of putting her have a title to foot into the glass shoe is alleviated by means of the prince's acceptance of her symbolic desires: