Rags to Riches

The rags to riches trope is a popular one, driven by everyone desire to be able to become wildly successful no matter where they are in life now. Two examples of this motif are Disney's Cinderella and the film Pretty Woman.

Cinderella is a classic story that most people know, and the Disney version is the most common version you'll see referenced in the present day. In it, Cinderella lives with her stepmother and stepsisters who abuse and neglect her. Eventually she manages to escape with the help of her fairy godmother and the grace of a prince, and goes on to live happily. Pretty Woman is a notably more risqué version of the trope, as the female lead Vivian Ward is a hooker on the streets of Los Angeles. Eventually she manages to rise above her current station when she's hired by wealthy businessman Edward Lewis, who falls for her.

Both of these stories focus heavily on the idea of someone rising above their less than favorable station through the aid of a romantic beneficiary. Of the two, Pretty Woman focuses much more on the characters involved, with Edward Lewis serving as a deuteragonist rather than a plot device wrapped up as a character. Though both feature love as the primary factor through which the female lead rises up, but this is a substantially more significant role in Cinderella where the prince falls in love over a single night, abiding by fairy tale-esque rules.

The rags-to-riches motif is, at its core, wish fulfillment. Everyone wants to become wealthy and successful beyond their wildest dreams, and often wish to do so with little effort on their part. The lottery is a perfect example of this, where people seek to gain great wealth purely through luck, and this mindset is reflected in tales like Cinderella where the prince falls in love after a single meeting and then goes out of his way to help her.

This is not impossible in real life, and Wikipedia even has a page dedicated solely to tracking instances of this. However, this is far less common than it once was. Economic and social factors in modern day America make it very difficult for someone to rise out of the economic segment they were born into, much less become rich. That is not to say it is impossible, but such cases are usually dependent on factors that cannot simply be overcome through hard work alone.