If Sabrina can be seen as a reworking of the Cinderella Story, and Maid in Manhattan as a more contemporaneous reworking of this cultural narrative, then it might be helpful to look at the additions and deletions that the process of making contemporary (and apparently, more 'politically progressive') involved. Merissa is Italian, a (dedicated) single-mother and a (law-obeying) paid worker. The ugly sisters are of course, still around. What also stays is the crucial physical transformation that brings visibility to Merissa (just as it had for Cinderella and Sabrina). And this transformation is associated with a personal narrative of 'rebellion' in each case, the success of which lies in the securing of the affections of the good and rich bachelor. In case of Maid, rebellion is posited against the demands of motherhood, and it seems to include - her trying on Caroline's Dolce & Gabbana attire, her refusing to be a house-cleaner after being fired, and her pursuing a romance with an aspiring senator Chris Marshall. Her rebellion is articulated through the capitalist ethic of 'going up'. However, it's not insignificant that she is the unwilling subject of two of these actions - they are in fact engineered by others. She forcefully expresses only her refusal to being a housecleaner to her mother - and the latter and her choice seem to be the target of this angry repudiation. Some other moments which approximate a political critique are - her fierce and public confrontation with the 'class-prejudiced' receptionist; and her 'frank' (and hackneyed) denunciation of the housing projects in the Bronx in response to Chris' campaign.

Merissa's playful putting on of the D & G attire (which in effect sets the plot going), is comparable to Audrey Hepburn's donning of haute couture in Sabrina. With the superficial Caroline and her 'over the hill', xenophobic friend as foils, Merissa shows off her natural taste, beauty as well as intelligence. In Gaylyn Studlar's analysis of the deployment of high fashion in women's films and romances in 1950s Hollywood, this successful transformation may invite admiration from the female audience members for 'the heroine's enviable ability to use fashion as a traditional feminine path to social improvement and, of course, romantic happiness'. However, prior to the successful masquerades, Merissa's fellow-maids play the fairy godmother - and transform her into the perfect object of beauty. Of course, none of them could have taken her place - because they are probably not 'exotic', 'mediterranean', but fairly white, young single-mothers with a tongue. Neither are they competitors for the position of manager. There seems to be an over-investment that these women surrounding her seem to make in Merissa, they prance around dreamily in the locker-room, and she lives out the dream. Charlotte Herzog underscores the ways in which fashion and modelling (both, the nature of attire as well as use of the female body) were equated with the offer of commercial sex, in the fashion show film. I feel that these resonances are retained in Merissa's association with fashion in Maid. While her wearing these outfits reveal her 'natural taste', it is also important that she doesn't own them and is not identified with them. The fact that she can't afford these becomes a kind of proof of her 'virtue', while Caroline is tainted by her class position and the film gives her ample opportunity to display her 'dumb blonde dimwittedness'. Thus, underlying this flimsy kind of 'class critique' is a deeper current of misogyny that seems to require no justification.

It might be interesting to look at the ways in which Jennifer Lopez's femininity may be read in contrast to the other prevailing models of femininity. To me, her championing of a different 'ethnic' and 'fuller' body, in opposition to the thin, white female body can be read as being dual in its implications (much like Audrey Hepburn's youthful, flatter, slightly butch look) - as both an 'alternative' body-type as well as a reassertion of the older, sexualized, 'mammary-mad' femininity.