A Disney Princess: Damsel-in-Distress to Heroine

Last Thanksgiving, Disney released the film Enchanted. It’s the tale of a classic Disney damsel named Giselle who falls in love at first sight with Prince Edward of Andalasia. She’s about to marry him when Queen Narissa, afraid she might have the throne taken from her, takes Giselle and banishes her to present day New York City. During her time in New York, Giselle transforms from a classic Disney damsel-in-distress waiting for her prince, to a modern damsel who takes matters into her own hands to save the man she loves from the claws of a dragon (and this man is not the prince of Andalasia, but a divorce lawyer who helps her when she arrives to the city). It takes about an hour and a half to make that transformation in the movie. However, it took years for the Disney Company to move away from their classic damsel-in-distress to the kind of heroine that was brave enough to save those she loves. The journey started with Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, who were damsels waiting to marry their true love within seconds after meeting them. It moves into the late 80’s and early 90’s with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, where the damsels acquire a sense of adventure and defiance. It culminates with Pocahontas and Mulan, the women who are strong enough to fight for what want.
Disney’s first full-length animated feature was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It’s the story of a Princess who was so beautiful that it made her stepmother jealous, so she dressed her in rags and made her into a servant. When she realizes that she can’t make her any less beautiful, she sends a huntsman to kill her. The huntsman warns Snow White about it and she runs away to a cottage in the woods where seven dwarves live, and there, she waits for the Prince she’s dreamed of to come. One of the early scenes in the film has Snow White singing to a wishing well and all the animals around her where she says she’s wishing for “the one I love to find me today”. The Prince hears her voice and appears in the well’s reflection next to her. As she runs back into the castle, he sings to her, and they instantly fall in love. We don’t see this Prince again until the end, but we do get a song in the middle where Snow White tells the dwarves that someday he will come. The old Disney heroines were defined by these kinds of scenes. In these films, love is reduced to a single, magical, lustful moment that could last a lifetime. Another curious thing about her is that she is an expert at cleaning. It appears that Disney is selling the image that a woman’s place is in the home. Snow White cleans the dwarves’ cottage as soon as she enters, and tells all her friend to whistle while they work. She’s a maiden ready for a husband.
Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are similar cases. Both of these ladies have a song in which they dream of a prince. Aurora, from Sleeping Beauty, sings in the woods about a Prince she met “Once Upon a Dream”, and while she sings with these animals, she meets Prince Philip. Aurora doesn’t know she’s a princess and already engaged to him, but it’s love at first sight. They sing together, marriage is discussed within minutes of this meeting, and a plan is set up to meet that very night. The climax of that movie is the Prince cutting through a forest of spines and fighting a dragon to get to the castle, to the highest room of the tallest tower, to kiss the Princess and wake her from her spell (much the same way it happens in Snow White, curiously). In Cinderella, the Prince (who is not even given a name) doesn’t quite save her, but she still needs to be saved by someone, and in this case, that’s her Fairy Godmother and all her animal friends who come to the rescue. She does, however, meet the Prince in the ball, and they immediately say they are in love with their duet “So This Is Love”. They only meet once, and they are already talking about marriage. Kathi Maio, in her article Disney Dolls, describes this type of women as “natural-born happy homemakers who lie in a state of suspended animation until a man gives them a life.”
After Disney’s Death, his company produced a bunch of films about animals that didn’t include any of these princesses. The first Disney princess to reach the screens after his Death was a little different than the ones that Disney used to make. For one, she had the tail of a fish and lived underwater, but that was not the only thing that was different about her. She was more independent than any of these women. Her dream was to seek adventure in the human world. Like the previous Disney princesses, she has a musical number that expresses her wishes, except her musical number is called “Part of That World”, which basically expresses her need to live in a different place. And, unlike the previous Disney princesses, she never sticks to her duties or obeys her superiors. She does, however, fall into the early Disney trap of falling in love at first sight. Faith Larson talks about this in her essay “Romance: Just Like In the Movies”, “’But Daddy, I love him’ says Ariel of Prince Eric, a young man who has never even spoken to her. How did she know that she loved him? She knew because he was a prince, of course! Though at times the princess movies show love for what it really is, most of the time they convey false messages about love and being in a relationship.” Their next film, however, would finally avoid this trap.

Their next heroine wasn’t exactly a princess, but she does fall in love with a prince. The difference here is, she doesn’t fall for him immediately. In fact, she is initially repulsed by this prince and wants to stay as far away from him as possible, but she can’t go anywhere, because she’s his prisoner. This heroine is Belle, the daughter of a crazy old inventor who lives in a small town in France. The town expects her to be like Snow White and Cinderella, but she’s much smarter and cultured than that, which makes her into the town outcast, and she finds shelter in the adventures found in her books. Her song expresses the wish “I want much more than this provincial life”. She does get much more when her father wanders into the woods and ends up in a castle where he’s taken prisoner by a prince who was turned into a Beast. Belle trades her father’s freedom for her own and lives in the castle as the Beast’s prisoner. The Beast accepts her trade as a final, desperate attempt to earn a woman’s love and break the spell that turned him into a Beast. Belle is initially taken aback, not just by the Beast’s appearance, but also by his uncontrolled, short temper. As the Beast grows to love her and tries to win her heart, she’ll discover that the Beast has a kind heart of his own and will eventually break the spell. This is the first Disney film where a love story unfolds and we see the characters getting to know one another before they fall in love (with human characters anyway, since you can make a case for Lady and the Tramp).
Disney’s next film, Aladdin, shows a similar relationship. Princess Jasmine isn’t looking for a prince. She’s a feisty girl who won’t just marry anyone who lays eyes on her. There is, unfortunately, a law that states that she must marry a prince by her next birthday (which is three days away), but she’s reluctant to obey this law if she doesn’t like the Prince she’s marrying. She meets Aladdin when she runs away to the marketplace in disguise, and he saves her from a guard. He becomes attracted to her, even before he finds out she’s a princess, but that won’t stop him from trying to impress her. He finds a lamp with a Genie who disguises him as a prince. Jasmine is not impressed with him originally. She is repulsed by the arrogance and empowerment he’s portraying, but it is after he takes her to see the world on his magic carpet that she’s won over by his honest charm and free spirit.
Ariel, Belle and Jasmine are women who break the conventions of the worlds that surround them in order to find their own version of happily ever after. But these women still became damsels in distress when a dangerous situation came about, which is something that would change with the company’s next few films.
In 1995, we were introduced to a woman who discovers a new world colliding with her own and will stop at nothing to discover this new world, and protect her own if she must. This woman is Pocahontas, a Native American woman living in Virginia when a British ship arrives to find gold beneath the ground. Pocahontas meets and falls in love with Captain John Smith, a celebrated sailor looking to explore this new land and conquer it. Pocahontas teaches John Smith that conquering the land will only kill the beauty that already inhabits it. It is this lesson that allows her to fall in love with a stranger, and ultimately convince her father as well as all the men from England that fighting each other will only lead to an ugly path. When John Smith is falsely accused of killing a Native American warrior, he is nearly put to Death, and the British prepare for a battle against them. Pocahontas rescues Prince John from Death by lying next to him and saying she loves him. She defies her people and everything they believe in to protect them and save the man she loves, which is proves the right thing to do when John Smith saves the Chief from a gunshot. Pocahontas is shown as a brave woman, but maybe not as brave as the one that came to the screen three years later.

Her name is Mulan, and she is a Chinese girl who defies the expectations of her village to become a housewife and enlists in the Army as a man. She would probably belong in the culture she was born in if she was more like Snow White or Cinderella, but she’s just not like that. She tries to bring honor to her family (or so they say in her village) by acting like she could be the perfect woman she’s expected to be, but when she’s alone, she looks into the well at her reflection, and sings, “when will my reflection show who I am inside”. When the Huns invade China, the Emperor asks for one man from each family to join the Army. Mulan’s family has only one man, and that is her aging father who is now barely fit to walk without a cane, so to save his life, Mulan dresses as a man and enlists in the Army. Mulan is a new type of Disney heroine. She’s not looking for romance, and she’s not looking to discover new places. She’s a woman who cares about the people she loves and will do anything to protect them. She takes matters into her own hands the way no heroine before her would. The film introduces one love interest for Mulan (in the form of General Li Shang), but the film never focuses on their story, and therefore, Mulan never becomes a damsel-in-distress. She becomes the damsel that takes all the men out of distress when she uses her wits and everything she learned in training to fight the Huns.
One last thing to note about these women from the early years to the later Disney movies is their appearance. Heidi Herberich compares Snow White to Ariel in her essay Body Image and Sexuality in Disney Princesses. “Snow White has an hourglass figure, but it is not accentuated. She is not voluptuous; in fact, in many scenes her chest looks nearly flat. She is slender, but her arms (and I suppose legs, if we could see them) are not overly thin. Ariel, on the other hand, wears nothing but two seashells. Her body is quite mature for a teenager, with cleavage showing nearly all the time. Her arms (and legs, when she gets them) are markedly thinner than Snow White’s. And her small waist creates a much more accentuated hourglass figure.” It’s interesting to think about how the earlier Disney films tried to avoid sexuality almost completely. If you look at Aurora and Cinderella, most of the time they wear dresses that cover up their chest completely, so we don’t see a hint of them having one, yet later on, Belle wears a yellow dress that bares her shoulders and shows some cleavage, Jasmine has a very sexy Arabian outfit that uncovers her navel, and Mulan is shown nearly naked in a few scenes (to emphasize the humor of her situation, but Disney would not have allowed this). Also, as they get sexier, they also get thinner. I spoke to a few kids once that told me that the worst thing is to be fat (their parents were outraged at this) and this can be shown with the image that is being sold in magazines, and even cartoon princesses. Heidi Herberich expresses her own concerns by saying, “In a day in which anorexia and bulimia are common plagues in every junior high and high school, it is important for parents to help their girls understand that the female body image presented in Disney movies is not realistic.” She’s also concerned about younger girls worrying about their breasts and asking for plastic surgery.
There was a time when a heroine in a Disney movie couldn’t get out of any situations on her own and had to wait for a handsome prince, or a gang of cute forest animals to come and save her. In Disney’s views, a woman was helpless, so he left the heroics to the men and left women in the home by making them good at cleaning houses. As the world and its image of women evolved, Disney heroines went to become women looking for adventures, until they were finally allowed to be brave. These women have entertained kids for years, and they may not notice the changes within these characters when they see them. I didn’t notice them when I first saw these films while I was growing up, but now that I’m older, I’ve noticed how ridiculous the love stories are in the older Disney movies, but I see them in the context of when the stories were first told, as well as the stories that came out while I was growing up. This may not sound important to people who only see these princesses as cartoons, but one thing to remember is that children are exposed to these films every day, and for better or worse, they are role models for little girls. Their views on beauty, love, bravery, adventure and certain other values may come from these hand-drawn women that were first introduced by a man named Walt Disney, and whose legacy continues today.

Links:
Reflections on Disney Princesses
http://scots.covenant.edu/faculty/davis/Disney%20Princesses/links.htm
“The Internet Movie Database” www.imdb.com
“Rotten Tomatoes” www.rottentomatoes.com
“Romance: Just Like In the Movies” by Faith Larson, http://scots.covenant.edu/faculty/davis/Disney%20Princesses/romance.htm
“Body Image and Sexuality in Disney Princesses” by Heidi Herberich,
http://scots.covenant.edu/faculty/davis/Disney%20Princesses/body%20image.htm
“Disney Dolls” by Kathi Maio
http://www.newint.org/issue308/dolls.html