I have always been a defender of the Disney Princesses, and
Disney in general. Disney is a big deal for me. But it’s really about more than
loving the movies; it’s about respecting them for what they are and what they
taught me growing up.
The Disney Princesses get a lot of harsh criticism about
everything from the designs of their bodies to their personalities, but the
thing that they’re criticized for most often is the supposed negative messages
they give to little girls. People see the first three (Snow White, Cinderella,
and Sleeping Beauty) and instantly think, “These movies tell girls that all
they have to do is wait around for a man to come and save them.” That’s an
obvious view to take if you don’t look any deeper, but more on that in another
post. There are two Princess movies specifically which came out back to back
that get a HUGE amount of criticism for their heroines’ actions; The Little
Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. I’ll look at each one individually to start.
(And just so you know, this criticism really
does upset me. My face was hot by the time I was half way through writing
this.)
The Little Mermaid
So, let’s set up the story first. A young mermaid named
Ariel who is obsessed with human culture wishes that she could become a human
herself. She’s constantly going up to the surface to watch them and collecting
their artifacts, even though this gets her in trouble. One day, she sees a ship
passing overhead and goes go up to the surface to check it out. On the deck,
she sees and instantly falls for a handsome human prince named Eric. When a
storm suddenly comes up and Eric is thrown overboard, she saves him from
drowning and returns home, wishing now more than ever that she could be a human
so that they could be together. Her somewhat over protective father finds out
about her hoard of human things and after trying again to dissuade her
fascination with humans. After she blurts out that she’s in love with the human
prince, he decides that the only way to get through to her is to destroy all of
her collection, including the life-sized statue of the prince that also fell off
of Eric’s ship, leaving her devastated. An evil sea witch named Ursula uses
Ariel’s emotional state to trick her into trading her voice for the ability to
be a human for three days. If she can get the prince to fall in love with her
and kiss her by the third day, she’ll remain a human. If not, she’ll turn back
into a mermaid. Ursula obviously has ulterior motives for doing this, but we’ll
skip that for now. So Ariel agrees, gets turned into a mute human, and ends up
being taken back to the prince’s castle when he finds her in distress on a
beach. During the course of two days, it’s pretty obvious that Prince Eric is
falling for her, but he is stubbornly intent on finding the girl who rescued
him and sang to him (which he obviously thinks can’t be Ariel, because she can’t
talk). But just when he’s decided to give up the search and let himself fall in
love with her, Ursula decides to stop Ariel from getting that oh so important
kiss by transforming herself into a human and using Ariel’s voice to magically
entice Prince Eric into marrying her. Hilarious hijinks ensue when Ariel’s
aquatic friends stop the wedding, Ariel gets her voice back, Ursula’s spell on
Eric is broken, and he realizes that Ariel really was the girl he was searching
for all along. But unfortunately, it’s too late, and Ariel turns back into a
mermaid and is taken back under the sea by Ursula for a final battle for
control over the ocean. Ariel and Eric take turns saving each other, the good
guys win, and Ariel’s father, sees that she really does love Eric and that maybe
humans aren’t really that bad. He uses his power to turn her back into a human,
and the two live happily ever after.
Now, there are a lot of great lessons one can take away from
this movie; There’s the typical good triumphs over evil and love conquers all, but
what about other, more subtle messages, like when you stop looking for who you
think is the perfect person for you, you might see that you already have that perfect
person standing right in front of you? Or how about don’t be afraid to go after
what you truly want?
But what message do the haters take away from this movie?
Really? THAT’S message you see?
First of all, let me clear something up here. Ariel wanted
to be a human BEFORE she even knew that Prince Eric existed. She sings a whole
damn song about how much she wants to be a human and have human experiences
like walking and dancing and wants to be “Part of Your World”. THEN she sees
Eric and falls in love with him, and that’s the extra umph that Ursula needs to
get her to agree to make the deal. Secondly, Eric fell in love with her as a
human, yes, but he never knew she was a mermaid before that. He only saw her
head and upper body, not her tail. He thought she was a human from the
beginning. But when he watched her turn into a mermaid right before his eyes,
he didn’t go “OMG GROSS WHAT WAS THAT HALF FISH THING I ALMOST KISSED?” He
said, “I lost her once, I’m not going to lose her again,” and went into the water
after her to save her and her father from Ursula (how he held his breath that
long I’ll never know). And then afterwards, he woke up on the beach to her as a
human and they were married. He never said to her, “Girl, I think you’re hot,
but only from the waist up. If you want to be with me, you’re going to have to
do something about that tail.” He didn’t ask her to change for him. You never
know, maybe he was ready to be a merman for her but she beat him to the punch.
Let’s move on to the second movie.
Beauty and the Beast
Again, we’ll set up the story: We get an exposition about a
young prince who was turned into a beast for being “spoiled, selfish, and
unkind.” This spell was cast on the entire castle and everyone who lived there,
and the only way that the spell could be broken is if the prince could learn to
love someone other than himself, and get her to love him in return, within a
time limit. Fast-forward to present day, and we meet a young woman named Belle.
She lives in a small town where everyone thinks she’s weird because she reads
all the time and doesn’t think that the town hottie Gaston is all that great,
because he’s an egotistical jerk. One day, her father, who is apparently her
only living relative, gets lost in the woods and stumbles upon the enchanted castle,
and the Beast promptly puts him in his dungeon for trespassing. When the family
horse returns home without her father, Belle decides to go looking for him, and
the horse brings her to the castle. She goes in, and even after seeing how
terrifying this beast is, she willingly takes her father’s place as the Beast’s
prisoner so that her older, sickly father can live. The Beast is obviously affected
by her selflessness, but doesn’t really know how to respond to it, other than by
not locking her in the dungeon and giving her a room and free reign of the
palace, with one exception; she can’t go into the west wing, which is apparently
his private sulking grounds. Belle breaks this exception, and he (to put it
mildly) loses his temper with her. She flees from the castle, and he realizes
that he’s just blown it with probably the one person who he could get to break
the spell. He decides to go after her, which is a good thing, because when he
finds her, she’s about to be ripped apart by wolves. He saves her, getting very
badly hurt in the process. When he falls over unconscious, Bell starts to get
back on her horse and head for home, but realizes that this guy just saved her
life, she can’t leave him there to die in the snow. So she somehow gets him up
on her horse and takes him back to the castle. She starts nursing him back to
health, and they get into a fight about who’s fault his injuries were. Now the
Beast has never been called out on his shit before, so he’s kind of taken aback
by it, but then starts to soften up. They start spending more time together,
and she notices that he’s changing, becoming more gentle and acting less like
an animal and more like a person. He realizes that he’s falling in love with
her, and that he’s never felt this way about anyone before and doesn’t know what
to do. So he gives her the castle’s library, knowing how much she loves books. After
a night of dinner and dancing, the Beast asks Bell if she’s happy there with
him. She says yes, but that she misses her father. He shows her is magic
mirror, which shows Belle her father, lost in the woods yet again after attempting
to come back and rescue her. The Beast tells her to go and find her father,
that’s she’s no longer his prisoner (although it’s clear that he hasn’t thought
of her as that for a while). She thanks him and leaves, taking the mirror with
her so that she can remember him. Watching Belle leave, the enchanted objects
in the castle realize that he’s finally learned what it means to love someone.
After Belle returns home with her father, incites a mob riot to go kill the
Beast, and breaks out of the basement she was locked in, she returns to the
castle to stop Gaston from killing the Beast. Once he sees that she came back
for him, the Beast loses his ‘just go on and kill me’ attitude and starts fighting
back. He gains the upper hand, but rather than following his animal instincts
and dropping Gaston off of the side of the castle, he puts him down and tells
him to get lost. But just as the Beast gets to Belle, Gaston stabs him, and
ends up falling off of the castle anyway. The Beast apparently dies in Belle’s
arms, but she tells him that she loves him just before the spell’s timer runs
out, and he’s transformed back into his human self, along with everyone else in
the castle, and they live happily ever after.
So, what are the lessons we can take away from this movie? Again,
good triumphs over evil and love conquers all? Sometimes you have to really
look to see the good in people? Don’t judge a book by its cover? If you let
down the walls you’ve built to keep people away, you might let the love of your
life in? Don’t be afraid to be different? Don’t be a selfish ass hole or an
enchantress will make you learn your lesson the hard way?
Nope.
First of all, Stockholm syndrome is a form of traumatic bonding, “which describes ‘strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.’ One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat” (source: Wikipedia.org). I don’t really see Belle going through that much trauma or abuse, and I don’t see the Beast as an aggressor. She wasn’t violently kidnapped or forced to stay in the palace, she willingly gave up her freedom to take her father’s place. And yes he freaked out on her when she went into the West Wing, but he didn’t do anything more than yell at her and scare her. I really don’t think those are grounds for a Stockholm Syndrome diagnosis for Belle. And okay, I get it that it’s a little awkward that she starts out their relationship as his prisoner. But she really stops being a prisoner the first time she leaves the castle. After he saves her, she almost gets on her horse and books it again. It’s her compassion that makes her stop and think about what it would mean to leave him bleeding and unconscious in a snow storm. And she could have plopped him back on the bed and said, “Well, I’ve done my good deed, I’m peacing out before he gets up”, but she starts nursing him back to health because she is a good person and wants to thank him for saving her life, and THEN begins to fall in love with him when she notices the change in him.
And look at the Beast. Here’s a man who was turned into a “hideous
beast” when he was eleven years old (Yes, eleven. Do the math people. The rose
will bloom until he’s 21, and Lumiere sings “Ten years we’ve been rusting”) for
being selfish and mean. And we never hear any mention of his parents, so he’s either
an orphan, or they were taken away from him as part of the curse. Can you
imagine all that as an eleven-year-old? I don’t blame him for being angry and
bitter! Then Belle comes along and she is
the first person who isn’t a servant and afraid of him to treat him with any
sort of kindness in ten years, if not more. Because of her kindness and
compassion, he falls in love with her, and becomes a better person. And Belle
falls in love with him because she recognizes that he’s changing and making an
effort for her, and that under that terrifying exterior and bad temper he truly
has a good soul.
(The other argument against this movie that I’ve heard is
that Belle doesn’t know about the curse, and falls in love with a beast,
therefore it’s a movie about beastiality. And to that argument I say fuck you,
stop trying to ruin childhood for everyone. She’s in a castle were almost every
inanimate object talks, ruled over by a beast who talks, wears clothing, and has
a portrait of a human in his west wing, where she’s not allowed to go. She’s a
smart girl, and I think she can put two and two together.)
We’re always told that relationships are an equal
partnership, and that they require compromise. So in the first movie, we have a
girl who makes a compromise to be with the man she loves. And it’s not like she
gave up a lifelong dream because her new boyfriend didn’t like it, it really was
a question of logistics. One of them would have to do something if they wanted
to be together, otherwise they’d have to build some kind of pool/river system
in the castle. But we criticize her for making that compromise (and fulfilling
a dream of hers in the process). Then in the second movie we have a woman who
is selfless and compassionate, and a man who recognizes that and wants to
change his selfish ways and become a better person for her because he loves
her, and we STILL FEEL THE NEED TO CRITICIZE THE WOMAN! Why don’t we criticize
the Beast the same way we criticize Ariel?
Because the Beast’s change is seen as a positive one because
he did it for a woman, and because Ariel’s change is seen as a negative one
because she did it for a man.
Double standards are alive and well, people. Even in something
as simple as how you react to a children’s movie. And even if they are geared towards empowering women by saying that she shouldn't have to change for a man to love her, it's still a double standard if you say that it's ok for a man to change for a woman to love him.
