Are you a good princess, or a bad princess?

Anybody who's read more that two of my posts knows by know that I have a young daughter at home, and she absolutely loves the Disney princesses, and Disney movies in general.  Like a lot of blue-state, liberal-arts, post-feminist people, I have mixed feelings about this.  I worry about the influence these types of cultural cues have on children, especially girls, and the movies are a mixed bag of good and bad lessons. I want to take a minute and evaluate a few of them.

Sigh.  I was going to write another long essay-form rant on the subject, a la my earlier entry on The Little Mermaid, but couldn't decide how to frame it coherently, so instead, I'm making my second list in the (admittedly very short) history of Caught Without a Parachute (the first, somewhat lackluster list is here).


By the way, there's plenty of people out there attacking Disney movies and princesses pretty much indiscriminately - for advocating a rigid heteronormative viewpoint and so on - but I am not one of them.  There are problems posed by the films (and I'm not even going to talk about the merchandising), but some of them are better and worse than others.  Which brings us to the first section of our list.

Bad Princesses

Snow White, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs



Bite it! Please oh please bite it!

So a young lady is taken in by a group of older men, who come to love her (platonically of course) because she cooks and cleans for them.  She may be simultaneously patronizing and staggeringly naive, and have a voice like a bar stool being dragged across tile, but as long as she keeps the soup coming, it's all good.  You see what I'm saying.

On top of that, Snow White features the lamest Prince in the history of lame Disney Princes, who appears for about two minutes at the opening (long enough to fall in lust love, I guess), and then swoops in all deus-ex-machina at the end, to rescue Snow White and carry her off without a word.  The dwarfs don't seem to mind that she's abandoning them, though, or that this dude they've never met is kidnapping her.  Maybe that voice really was getting on their nerves.


Aurora, from The Sleeping Beauty


Aurora, in one of her brief moments of wakefulness.



Aurora, aka Briar Rose,  might be the least interesting princess the Disney studios has ever created.  She simply doesn't do anything, she's the MacGuffin, with no personality and barely any lines. What lines she does have are all about ;her dreams of falling in love with the man who will carry her away to happiness - no effort on her part required.  Must be nice to be pretty. 

I can't put her on top of the bad princess list, though, for pretty much the same reason.  She just dances around and then falls asleep, so barely registers as a role model at all.  Sleeping Beauty also gets credit for having one of the top five villains of any Disney movie (the magnificent Maleficent), and a Prince who isn't a total dud.

Cinderella, from Cinderella

This one's not a screen shot,
the original is here.



I just re-watched this one with my daughter a little while ago, and my primary impression was: "Wow, this is really boring".  It seems to be mostly about the mice.  Cinderella has a few things going for her - she's kind, even to the sadistic cat (a redundancy, I know), and a hard worker, but you have to wonder about her pliable nature.  She, like Aurora, pretty much just lets things happen to her; she's the object, not the subject.  I know that if I were a teenage girl being forced into indenture by my stepmother, I'd probably put up a stink.  Cinderella's just a little too tolerant for my liking, is what I'm saying.  And she falls for another nonentity of a Prince, simply because he is a prince.  There's a common theme there between Snow White and Cinderella: go for the rich guy, even if he does bore you to tears.

Okay Princesses

I'm on the fence about these princesses; they have some positive attributes, and some things that set my teeth on edge.

Rapunzel from Tangled


She is in every way a better person than him,
but at least he's not boring.

 My daughter loves this movie, I love this movie (and I am totally secure with that, thank you), Rapunzel is spunky, complex, and totally relatable.  I just have one little quibble.  At the very end, Eugene is summarizing the denouement, with a bit of voice-over that goes like this:

Eugene: ...but I know what you're wondering, did Rapunzel and I ever get married?  Well, I'm happy to report that after months of asking and asking and asking ... I finally said yes.

Rapunzel: Eugene.....

Eugene:  All right. I asked her.

Why the qualification?  Why couldn't Rapunzel have proposed?  Honestly it feels like maybe that's how it originally ended and then the studio wussed out and decided they needed to add the extra dialogue making it clear that he had asked her.  That would be the heteronormative thing to do, after all, and that's what Disney's all about, right?

Ariel from The Little Mermaid


He's really handsome, and...um... really handsome.

 I've already discussed The Little Mermaid at length, mostly in a positive way.  And overall, I think it carries a positive message, for both girls and their parents.  I guess my real problem with it is the same as a lot of princesses on this list, namely, really really really superficial taste in men.  I know it has to do with the whole fantasy of love at first sight, but love at first sight seems to me to be a recipe for disaster.  That's why, given a choice of narrative cliches, I much prefer stories where the protagonists start out hating each other.



Eat something!



Jasmine from Aladdin



All the Princesses are thin.  Like, unachievable in the absence of a corset and a team of clydesdales to cinch it up, but Jasmine's bare midriff just emphasises the point. Let me put it this way, turn on Safe Search and Google each of the princesses.  In the image results for all of them, you'll find a few pictures of Halloween costumes.  Most are being worn by four or five year-olds.  Not Jasmine.  All grown women.  Very grown women, if you follow me.

I like Aladdin, it's fun and goofy and good humored, and I like Jasmine, who's a spark plug and another quintessential teenager like Ariel, but her body habitus really bothers me.

Also, a girl I know once told me that the scene where Jasmine's chained to Jaffar's throne had a major influence on her sex drive, but that's a whole other post.

Good Princesses



Can it be?  Yes! A princess with a book!



Belle from Beauty and the Beast

 Belle is one of Disney's best characters, she's bookish and ambitious, not easily flustered, and willing to do what she needs doing.  Instead of waiting around as the damsel in distress, she's the one who does the rescuing.  Twice, actually, first her father (in an act of self-sacrifice that no father would find acceptable), and then the Beast.  It's a cliche that an uncouth male can be tamed by the civilizing influence of a good woman, but it's not necessarily a bad one. 
I love the Gaston character too, because he possesses all the qualities of the Prince Charmings the bad princesses fall for: handsome, dark hair, with a high opinion of himself, and not a functional neuron in his pretty head.  Belle turns him down flat.  You go girl.

Tiana from The Princess and the Frog


Another prince rendered incoherent
and clumsy by a good woman.

 If Tiana were a real person, she'd end up on the cover of Business Week.  She's driven, maybe excessively so, a workaholic, and she's a really really good cook (not that that is in any way a requirement for inclusion on the good princess list. Sheesh, relax!).  She just needs to learn to have a little fun, and you know, not be a frog anymore. 

Remember how I said I liked it better if the two romantic leads hated each other at the beginning?  The Princess and the Frog has that plot down.  Tiana and Prince Naveen hate each other, and it's loads of fun.  Tiana's perseverance is an example to us all, and man can she sing.  Awesome.



Kick-ass.



Mulan from Mulan

Technically not a princess, but marketed as one by Disney and Mattel, so I'm willing to go with it.  (I'm pretty sure they use her to fill the "Asian" slot in the diversity checklist.) Mulan is hands-down Disney's most kick-ass female character ever. She defies convention, takes the man's role because why the hell shouldn't she, and wins the respect of a fiercely traditionalist and patriarchal society.  What's not to love?


One thing that stands out about this list, of course, is that the 'bad' princesses are all in much older movies than the 'good' princesses  (1937, 1959, and 1950 respectively vs. 1991, 2009, and 1998).  Obviously ideas about women's role in society has changed a bit since the intervening forty-odd years.  Disney's not in the business of challenging social norms, so these princesses are all reflections of outside reality, not an attempt to shape it.  Still, when you look at these princesses through the years, the changes are striking.  We might as well get used to it guys, the future belongs to the princesses.