What actually is a princess, anyway (part 1)?
When I ask Kira what she thinks a princess is, she replies without hesitation: “It’s a very fancy woman who gets her own way.” But a few weeks later, we’re at the part in A Little Princess where Sara Crewe learns that her father has died penniless and that she is now at the mercy of the horrible Miss Minchin. Kira protests indignantly that being a princess has nothing to do with having nice things but with being a kind and good person.
Modern princesses, both real and fictional, are symbols at war with their own symbolism. The commonplace that every girl is a princess has morphed into the expectation that every princess be an everygirl: from Rapunzel to Anna to the Duchess of Cambridge. Her delight in life’s simple pleasures contains an equal measure of contempt for its more sophisticated ones. The platonic everyprincess as imagined by Disney is a girl of simple tastes: She loves hot dogs but hates aspic, loves ball games but hates opera. She is baffled by silverware placement. She talks, acts, and comports herself like a middle-class American teen, or a reality-show contestant. She contains all the princess tropes as well as their inverse opposites. She’s not just an idea made flesh, she’s the history of an idea made flesh: the personified record of our relationship to the archetypal princess. A princess, real or fictional, must project a persona that is active, independent, spunky, free-thinking, unpretentious, approachable, accomplished, inherently democratic, and intrinsically cool. That is, she has to be these things, if she wants to go on being loved by the taxpaying, ticket- and tabloid-buying public. For a princess to maintain her sovereignty and/or her market dominance in a society that can tolerate pretty much any degree of unfairness (as long as it’s not made to confront how insurmountable the unfairness is), she must reject the role of the princess and act instead like a celebrity: lucky, grateful, and humble, the beneficiary not of privilege but of random, unbiased, equitable chance.
The clearest indication that Anna is Frozen’s protagonist, for instance, is that she is presented as the “normal” sister: ordinariness, in the popular culture, is the most exalted condition to which a girl can aspire. If Elsa is locked away from view and told to conceal her powers and repress her ice-triggering emotions, Anna not only seems to have been the victim of an unconscionable level of neglect, she also appears to have received no education whatsoever. It’s not Anna’s lack of magical ice powers that distinguishes her from Elsa but rather her inexplicable discomfort with her position. Anna’s every endearing quirk underscores a neurotic uneasiness with authority. Despite having been born in a castle and remaining there her whole life, Anna talks, acts, and generally behaves like a tween in a Disney Junior show. This makes more sense when a princess is a commoner who marries a prince and gets to experience the life of a princess without inhabiting the role. But the qualities that make Anna “common,” “likable,” and “relatable” (her vulnerability, low self-esteem, eagerness to please, and insecurity) are actually maladaptive and ultimately counterfeit, because they are born from her being systematically deprived of the truth of her situation. No one tells her about Elsa’s powers or about why she and her sister have been locked away from the world. Her parents are trying to protect her, but by not cluing her in to the truth, they’ve set her up to make herself vulnerable to anyone who shows her an ounce of affection, like the nefarious Prince Hans, who tries to use Anna to usurp Elsa’s throne.
Pop culture now operates on an infinite, self-referential, constantly accelerating feedback loop. Meaning is contested almost as quickly as it’s produced, and the amalgam becomes the new meaning, which is contested almost as quickly as it’s produced. Eventually, there comes a point when an archetype is subverted so many times that it ceases to mean anything. As Peggy Orenstein relates in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, Disney executives were deliberate in making sure that the concept of princess was defined broadly enough so that it could mean anything or that “it actually has no meaning.” Or if the meaning is that a princess is no longer to be defined by her marriage or her lineage or her manners or her duties, then how is she to be defined? By her beauty, her sexiness, her finery, her jewelry, her isolation, her sadness, her lack of power.
What actually is a princess (part 2)?
Once, Kira and I waited in line for more than an hour at Disneyland to go through a princess receiving line, after which she darted back to Cinderella to ask, “Are you princesses real?” The girl playing Cinderella held out her arm for Kira to touch, which struck me as a brilliantly evasive move. How else to answer the question? Kira dutifully stroked the proffered limb, but I could tell she was disappointed. It’s not what she was asking. She wanted to know if the mystique was real. She was trying to reconcile the story with reality.
The highly processed femininity is fascinating, because it’s so obviously fake and put-on. Yet it’s precisely this unabashedly artificial, performed femininity of Disney princesses that adults don’t like and little girls love. It’s like candy. The more artificial, fantastical, exaggerated, and abstracted, the better. It’s not enough for candy to be candy. It has to symbolize candy, too.
Removed from their social and historical context, fairy tales are transvalued as human nature, but using “Snow White” as an object lesson in gender is kind of like using the Venus of Willendorf for anatomical reference. “When history falls away from a subject,” Marina Warner writes in her book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, “we are left with Otherness, and all its power to compact enmity, recharge it and recirculate it.”3 The story becomes another delivery system for ideology passed off as truth. It becomes a narrative system, a feedback loop, recursive and inescapable.
What was a fairy tale originally?
In her book, Warner writes about the origins of fairy tales as cautionary tales for girls. Until they were collected, recorded, and published by academics and writers like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, fairy tales (the word fairy, in the Romance languages, has etymological roots in fate) were the domain of old women—grandmothers, nurses, and servants—charged with caring for children. Stories like “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty”—with their often nameless or descriptively named archetypal characters, their generic and remote backdrops and vague time periods, and their magical, terrifying, flamboyantly implausible plots—served a pedagogical function: to wise up a girl by dramatizing some of the real-life scenarios she might encounter, like losing her mother, or encountering a hostile mother-in-law in her new husband’s house, or losing her father and finding herself in competition for resources with his second wife. Warner describes fairy tales as “successfully involv[ing] their hearers or readers in identifying with the protagonists, their misfortunes, their triumphs” while presenting “pictures of the perils and possibilities that lie ahead” and pointing to “possible destinies, possible happy outcomes.”
Fairy tales were old wives’ tales for soon-to-be new brides, at once universalizing and disguising certain inescapable realities. They were a way of giving girls the lowdown and a heads-up, as Warner writes, “us[ing] terror to set limits on choice and offer consolation to the wronged, draw[ing] social outlines around boys and girls, fathers and mothers, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, point[ing] out the evildoers and garland[ing] the virtuous,” and “stand[ing] up to adversity with dreams of vengeance, power, and vindication.” They reflected the experience of being a young girl in a patriarchal system. They testified to the powerlessness, injustice, and exclusion that were par for the course, and offered strategies for self-protection. Marriage was a way, if it worked out, of transcending these conditions. If it didn’t, it would become those conditions themselves.
Literary fairy tales—that is to say, fairy tales that have been collected in books or made into films for wide audiences—since their appearance in sixteenth-century Italy, have always played a significant role in the acculturat
ion of children. With their simple, stock characters, their fantastical plots, and their indeterminate, ahistorical settings, they have relied on the appearance of childish fantasy to mask their ideology. But whether they have been selected and modified to shape and mirror the social and political realities of the times or to subvert, critique, and challenge them, they’re almost always prescriptive. Fairy tales set down norms for behavior and make clear the consequences of conforming to or rejecting the established codes of conduct. Such clarity naturally appeals to children and helps them think about what their place and function in the world will be when they grow up.
So, then, what do people mean when they call something a fairy tale now?
Oh, now, what we are usually describing is an unrealistic fantasy that only a very naive or ignorant person really believes in. To call something a fairy tale is to dismiss it as a naive, frivolous dream; lazy magical thinking; a promise of romance and rescue that can’t be kept that allows a princess to stay a princess forever and never grow up to be a queen. Fairy tales involving princesses are also among the few popular entertainments made for girls that feature girls as protagonists.
“It is significant,” Warner writes, “that when the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp analyzed the wonder tale, he broke the form down into seven spheres of action, to which correspond different functions of the dramatis personae: the villain, the hero, the donor, the helper, the princess and her father, the dispatcher, and false hero.” The indivisibility of the princess and her father, plus the absence of the mother, Warner notes, reveals “unwittingly, the patriarchal character of traditional marriage plots.” The princess is leverage used to reinforce her father’s power in alliances that pit women against other women. “The effect of these stories is to flatter the male hero; the position of the man as savior and provider in these testimonies of female conflict is assumed, repeated and reinforced.”
On a podcast on screenwriter John August’s website, the screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna asks Frozen screenwriter Jennifer Lee why Elsa’s transformation had to be so sexy. McKenna says, “What I had sort of admired until then was how kind of sporty they were, especially Anna, how sporty she was. And then all of a sudden she [Elsa] was sort of pageanty and she has the slit and everything. Tell me about that.” And Lee replies, “Well, I can tell you. What’s interesting, that actually we did a lot of push and pull. There were two things we were feeling. One is that freedom moment where you strut and you just go for it. And I was fine with that and that was great. There was a lot of pull, I will say, from the guys, of loving her as the—every man in the studio, and some of the women, were in love with Elsa.”
We used to joke, like, “Just put Anna in a closet. Just push her.” There was one shot where someone was, like, “Can you push Anna further back, further back?” And I was, like, “Just take her off, just get her out of the stick. Just go stick her outside.” Because Elsa was—everyone was seduced by her. And so there was this tug of war I think, a bit, of letting people have a little—people who wanted to have that a little and not be afraid of it, but not make it a sexual statement. It’s more a moment of, for me, it was like you strut and you say nobody is looking, this is what I’m going to—I’m not going to be afraid of my sexuality. I’m not going to be afraid of who I am. I’m not going to be afraid of anything about myself.4
“But her sexuality is definitely part of it,” McKenna replies. “It’s text.”
“I think what we have found is [that] the reaction to it”—she was referring to Elsa’s transformation into a sexy showgirl on ice—“has been bigger than what we had thought it was,” Lee tells McKenna. “But, that’s OK. It’s a moment that was—so many people worked on it that it was, yeah.”
“Well, what’s fascinating is it’s a sexual outfit,” August insists, “but she’s not actually a sexual character.”
“No,” Lee says, “she’s not.”
“She doesn’t even talk to a boy other than Hans for a brief second,” August continues. “So, it’s not that she’s trying to seduce a man. There’s no man around for her to seduce.”
If, as Marina Warner wrote, fairy tales were meant to help identify their hearers with the protagonists—their misfortunes and their triumphs—while at the same time giving them a sense of the good and bad things that awaited them, “universalizing and disguising certain inescapable realities,” and generally validating the experience of being a young girl in a man’s world, then what did Elsa have to teach us? What did Elsa have to tell little girls in 2013 about what to expect?
Elsa’s parents’ response to their daughter’s awesome powers is to fear them and lock her up. As a young princess, Elsa is kept in solitary confinement. As a young adult, she goes into self-exile on the remote North Mountain. Later, she is captured by the evil Prince Hans and imprisoned in a tower. And finally, she is returned to Arendelle, where she entertains the populace with glittering ice flurries, like a party magician. This presumed newfound freedom is confusing, too. When Elsa runs away from Arendelle, she replicates the conditions from which she escaped almost exactly (castle, gown, isolation). In fact, her transformation is a rather astonishing and unexpected dramatization of Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that “one is not born but becomes a woman.” When she finally gets in touch with her “authentic self,” the persona that emerges is a sashaying, bedroom-eyed Celine Dion impersonator. And her song—the heartfelt expression of her deepest feelings—is rendered into a performance for an internalized audience.
Whatever. Elsa still makes no sense to me as a character. What does she actually want? What exactly is she “letting go” of, her perfectionism? her desire for approval? her internalized self-loathing? her rightful claim to the throne? her concern for what other people think of her? her superpowers? It really could be anything. Is she submitting or rebelling? “Let it go” isn’t what anybody says when they want to encourage you to own your strength. It’s not really ever used as an incitement to let loose your creative or destructive powers. It’s what people say to other people when they want them to get over themselves, to move on, give up. “Let it go” is silencing. Maybe the makeover scene means nothing and was simply conceived as an attractive backdrop for the show-stopping musical number. It’s supposed to signal that the heroine has finally come into herself by running away, giving herself a makeover in isolation, and putting on a show for nobody. What is she doing?
Well, it would seem to indicate that, rather than waking up to reality, Elsa is finally breaking with it. She’s not awakened after all but split off into her own inner fantasy world. Maybe Elsa is not only Disney’s first neurotic princess, but its first psychotic one, too.
Maybe it was all the mixed messages that did it. For example:
Girls can be powerful, but their parents won’t be happy about it.
Girls are too emotional to be trusted with power. Look at Elsa. Her powers are linked to her feelings, and her feelings are out of control. She is fear of a female president personified. A monster who could unleash a snow monster on the Senate while on her period.
Power is perhaps the most unnatural trait for a girl to possess, but other characteristics are problematic, too—creativity, especially. Spending vast quantities of time alone, doing your own, creative thing, will only make you weird and miserable. The sooner you accept this and focus your efforts on making yourself useful and doing nice things for others—for instance, building them a lovely skating rink in the courtyard of your castle—the happier you will be.
Although it’s nice to make yourself useful to others, a girl’s greatest mission in life is to make herself as attractive as possible in the most impractical way possible. What is considered most attractive in a girl involves limited range of mobility (the skirt is tight and the shoes look murderous), extreme discomfort (she says the cold never bothered her, but she’s far more bundled up in Arendelle before her escape than she is in the frozen North Mountain), self-abnegation (Where is the food in that castle? Where are t
he beds?), and crazy expense (clearly, the outfit, the hair, and the makeup cost a fortune). Natural prettiness is nice, but highly stylized hotness (available to anyone who really puts her mind and money to it) sends the message that you really care what everybody thinks of you. It demonstrates how transforming yourself into a trophy is a good outlet for any strength of will or creativity you may have been cursed with at birth, and helps ensure that you will not be excluded from your community or abandoned by your loved ones. It teaches girls that self-objectification is a great strategy for neutralizing the qualities others may find threatening, and deflects attention away from them. It also communicates that you have your priorities straight.
It says that the exceptional girl may be admired, but it is unlikely that any one person will love her, because she will be too intimidating. Should this happen, your best option is to make yourself useful—again, maybe by building the populace a nice skating rink?
That’s it?! That’s messed up.
I know. Frozen was sometimes talked about as a feminist princess movie because it did not end with a wedding. But, if anything, it was a feminist movie in that its heroine is being gaslit and put into one impossible double bind after another. It was not so feminist in the way independence is conflated with solitude and loneliness, and creativity and power with madness. Despite her rehabilitation, Elsa still bears all the vestiges of the Disney villainess, but she isn’t bad. She just does bad things. She can’t help it. She can’t control her powers, because she can’t control her terrifying feelings. It’s her feelings that are dangerous.
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