I loved Norway. The real one. I also loved the Norway attraction at Epcot. So imagine my dismay on learning that the restaurant has been turned over to, of all things, Disney princesses. Even setting aside the irony of the history of Norway vis-à-vis princessness, the mind boggles. I guess there weren’t enough people visiting WDW who wanted to sample different herring, so an extra added attraction was needed to pull them in. Disney princesses. Oy.
If I am steeped in anything I am steeped in the critical literature on Disney. For a variety of reasons Disney is a major weenie on the cultural studies landscape, and the women’s issues of Disney are, as a result, heavily covered. Again, without doing an academic analysis of the literature, it is interesting to look at the general situation.
Disney (and I’m concentrating now on the Disney that informed the baby boomers, and therefore the Disney corporation that existed under Walt Disney, and not the diffuse corporate entity that has evolved in the generation since his death) gets a heavy rap for its portrayal of women. Looking only at the animated features, which makes sense, one is surprised to see that they are not all princesses and evil stepmothers, given one’s presumptions about the oeuvre. Still, excepting only Fantasia and Lady and the Tramp, one can see similar threads.
Snow White: orphan princess vs evil stepmother queen/witch, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end.
Pinocchio: virtual orphan redeemed through divine female intervention to become child of single parent (a good father)
Dumbo: child of single parent (a good mother)
Cinderella: Orphan vs evil stepmother (Lady Tremaine is, by far, the scariest villain in all of Disney history, having no power aside from sheer unadulterated malice), divine female intervention, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end at which point she becomes a princess
Alice in Wonderland: No parents in sight but definitely there’s an evil queen.
Peter Pan: No parents in sight, a rare male villain (usually the same actor as the father in the play, although Barrie had originally planned for the role of Hook to be played by the mother!) and divine female intervention.
Sleeping Beauty: Virtual orphan vs evil queen/witch, divine female intervention (times three), into the arms of Prince Charming at the end.
101 Dalmations: Threat of dogs becoming fur coats at hands of (virtual) evil witch
Sword in the Stone and Jungle Book: No princesses but orphan heroes.
(One probably should throw in the latest incarnations of Disney Ps just for coverage: Ariel, single male parent, evil witch, into the arms of Prince Charming at the end; Jasmine, single male parent, evil wizard, into the arms of boy who becomes Prince Charming at the end; Belle, single male parent, into the arms of beast who becomes Prince Charming in the end—the Disney Renaissance films are nothing if not identical, which is one reason why the South Park film parody was so funny.)
Mary Poppins: Only semi-animated, but I just throw this one in to point out another world of absent parents and divine female intervention.
So, as often as not, evil in the Disney universe is personified by a female. The critical literature tends to highlight this over most other aspects of the works. Personally I think they’re reading too much into it (duh!), because all children’s literature plays with the absolutely prime idea of child/parent relationship. A child is totally reliant on parents, so stories with no parents or evil parents play on the core of what children are interested in, even if only subconsciously. You will have to work to list classic children’s literature featuring fully “functional” traditional families. That the mother (or mother surrogate) is the evil one simply fits into the model discussed yesterday of the perfect family, with the father out working and the mother at home raising the family. The storyteller has more of a field day with the mother gone bad because the mother is a more key figure in the existing family circle. Dad is out all day hunting or accounting or whatever, and is already a tangential figure to the child. Mom, on the other hand, is omnipresent. Make mom evil, and you have omnipresent evil. What more could a storyteller want?
So I’m reluctant to accept that the evil women in Disney are representative of an anti-female sentiment and thus worthy of much feminist interest. They are more of a storytelling device used in all the comparable literature or fairytales and children’s books. Disney simply played with the same material in roughly the same way. No surprise there. The idea of the divine female intervention is not particularly interesting either in a feminist sense, although I’m surprised to see so much of it. Some are elderly, and there’s a bit of Joseph Campbell in that: in male stories, we have the Gandalfs. In female stories, we have the Fairy Godmother. Both are surrogates, the wise old grandparent (and for that matter, in much children’s storytelling we literally have the wise old grandparent), and we have one sex or another simply because our hero is a boy or a girl, and boys have boy old-timers and girls have girl old-timers mostly for convenience’s sake. I wouldn’t bother exploring that too deeply. A sage is a sage is a sage.
Which leaves the redemption of the poor, helpless heroine falling into the arms of the masterful Prince Charming and living happily ever after. At least, that’s what the critical literature would have us believe. And more importantly, that was the gist of the material from the point of view of the baby boom feminists. And it was twofold, the poor, helpless heroine plus the resolution with Prince Charming. These two, in fact, are the underlying evil. Young women are, one, helpless and two, meaningless without husbands. Your classic Disney princesses do indeed fit this mold: Snow White (a little ditz who sings to the sparrows and is innocence personified), Cinderella (whose clothes are made either by mice and sparrows or a Fairy Godmother), and Sleeping Beauty (who, simply, sleeps through the whole enterprise). In the world of classic Disney, the classic Princesses are not female role models by any measure. In the world of Disney 2.0, Ariel, Belle and Jasmine are pointedly females of wherewithal. They have brains, spunk, character (although as an aside, the spunkiest female character of all time is Dorothy in the rather large library of Oz books; Baum should be a hero to feminists everywhere), as a clear response to the lack thereof in their predecessors. Presumably Jeffrey Katz gets credit for that one. And getting back to the underlying evil there are, secondly, all those Charming husbands, which haven’t really gone away (Ariel, Belle and Jasmine all get one) but are perhaps less objectionable than the characterless heroines. After all, your most avid feminist is not anti-male in that sense, i.e., the paradigm of feminism is not virulent anti-male lesbianism (although many anti-feminists have painted it as such). So it’s those blank-headed heroines that are the main problem, and not necessarily their husbands who were forced to attempt a happy life forever afterwards with some blank-headed bimbo.
And therein is the key to much anti-Disney sentiment among baby boomer feminists, the portrayal of heroines as good-looking blanks. Much talk was conducted about women not setting Prince Charming as their goal in life, but more importantly we are talking about women who were raised with, at least in this arena, a serious lack of role models, and who therefore revolted against one of the most obvious sources of that lack of role model, the Disney princess. To pretend to be a Disney princess, therefore, is to aspire to, as I’ve put it, ditzy, incompetent somnambulance. It was to design your life to be a good-looking blank, and to consider yourself to have failed if you weren’t good-looking or blank. Brains were frowned upon. Non-beauty was a non-starter. With this in mind, how will you raise your daughters?
Any wonder why I won’t be signing up for a character lunch with the Disney princesses at the Norwegian restaurant?
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