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Aug. 16th, 2015 05:22 amMaddy's discovered Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. I'd seen them, respectively at 5 and 27, without catching any of the subtext.
Cinderella's seems innocently carried over from Perrault? It's much more 1650s France than 1950 California: if you've got few material prospects you can still catch a rich man if you have a good enough puberty fairy, but you won't have many years before the free stuff fades, so use that time to inspire love. You'll be remembered fondly for it after, thus won't have to either grow old in service to your irate family or starve on the roads (the latter's left implicit, but explains the inability to leave). Harsh stuff, but maybe relevant enough as street wisdom for its place and time.
Little Mermaid's much more self-conscious, revising what seems to have been slut-shaming in Andersen (harsh but maybe wise in 1850) into a late '80s-friendlier pubes parable. A suburbs-y, virgin-protective environment that excises sexual concerns - possible because populated by pre-sexual kids and (to appearances) post-sexual parents - is safe and fine and all but kind of boring, so the virgin heroine and her friends pore over all available relics from the exciting outer world. When she meets a leggy lad her lurking Auntie Timebomb entrances her (not a fair contract because she doesn't grasp what's up) into accepting Z-Z Top-style "legs" of her own in exchange for her voice, i.e. her ability to express her concerns and desires. Andersen gets thrown overboard here, though, because she's perfectly happy in the new life, and even fairly appropriate once she gets her sea legs on those land legs. She's estranged from her father (family, tradition, rule) but only because of his fear of this change in her - he's become blinded by the environment he's created to its very pupal purpose. The evil witch seems at first to represent some sexualized female degraded endpoint, late '80s Glenn Close meets post-'20s Mae West, that the mervirgin's in danger of reaching. She turns into a darker-haired version of Ariel and takes over the affection of the shore prince using that stolen voice - post-adolescent bad girl wiles suppressing pre-adolescent niceness. But the latter rallies, and it turns out wasn't in much danger anyway. The father was: he sacrifices his power to get Ariel her voice back, and in doing so becomes a weed, but the new power enables the witch to grow and grow. I unpack this as patriarchal authority coming around on condoning natural but unsanctioned romantic unions, doing which risks the waning of sanctioning authority period - tradition etc. Permitting one trangressing girl to be accepted back into the fold of the normal creates the frightening possibility that their example will lead others to slut about sans consequence, leading to who knows what. But the blown-up misognynist's nightmare gets readily popped by a boat with a point on it, the phallo-yonic sea/land new home of Ariel and her prince. I.e. the puffed up fears of the old daddy order are destroyed by the experienced reality of protected but porous and realistic child-raising environments, with sex regulated in the light of day in accord with empirically-determind rather than inherited boundaries. Her father blesses his union by not just giving her her legs back but providing her with a magical gleaming dress (im/modesty being in the eye of the beholder, this in part represents the new leeway in his beholding of her, something like a one-way censorial black box, where she's allowed to be a sexual adult being and he's allowed to not worry about it). He puts the gleam of her dress on her crown in the next, post-wedding scene, right before she sails off as co-monarch of her boat. Seems kind of self- immolative for a Disney princess movie - a profounder shift than Vatican II, and arguably affecting as many lives. "Living together" and related newcomers to the social norm pavilion (there's some interracial romance subtext) don't seem like live issues now, but they of course still are in a lot of places, and it's interesting to see the threshold moment of their acceptance noot just reflected in but on in a mass culture spectacle like this.
Anyway. Definitely odd to see all this sexual politicking kicking around in these princess products, and wondering how much is live enough to disturb my newly Disney-addicted daughter. We haven't seen Sleeping Beauty yet but I'm now dreading it. Nothing good can be embedded in that one.
Cinderella's seems innocently carried over from Perrault? It's much more 1650s France than 1950 California: if you've got few material prospects you can still catch a rich man if you have a good enough puberty fairy, but you won't have many years before the free stuff fades, so use that time to inspire love. You'll be remembered fondly for it after, thus won't have to either grow old in service to your irate family or starve on the roads (the latter's left implicit, but explains the inability to leave). Harsh stuff, but maybe relevant enough as street wisdom for its place and time.
Little Mermaid's much more self-conscious, revising what seems to have been slut-shaming in Andersen (harsh but maybe wise in 1850) into a late '80s-friendlier pubes parable. A suburbs-y, virgin-protective environment that excises sexual concerns - possible because populated by pre-sexual kids and (to appearances) post-sexual parents - is safe and fine and all but kind of boring, so the virgin heroine and her friends pore over all available relics from the exciting outer world. When she meets a leggy lad her lurking Auntie Timebomb entrances her (not a fair contract because she doesn't grasp what's up) into accepting Z-Z Top-style "legs" of her own in exchange for her voice, i.e. her ability to express her concerns and desires. Andersen gets thrown overboard here, though, because she's perfectly happy in the new life, and even fairly appropriate once she gets her sea legs on those land legs. She's estranged from her father (family, tradition, rule) but only because of his fear of this change in her - he's become blinded by the environment he's created to its very pupal purpose. The evil witch seems at first to represent some sexualized female degraded endpoint, late '80s Glenn Close meets post-'20s Mae West, that the mervirgin's in danger of reaching. She turns into a darker-haired version of Ariel and takes over the affection of the shore prince using that stolen voice - post-adolescent bad girl wiles suppressing pre-adolescent niceness. But the latter rallies, and it turns out wasn't in much danger anyway. The father was: he sacrifices his power to get Ariel her voice back, and in doing so becomes a weed, but the new power enables the witch to grow and grow. I unpack this as patriarchal authority coming around on condoning natural but unsanctioned romantic unions, doing which risks the waning of sanctioning authority period - tradition etc. Permitting one trangressing girl to be accepted back into the fold of the normal creates the frightening possibility that their example will lead others to slut about sans consequence, leading to who knows what. But the blown-up misognynist's nightmare gets readily popped by a boat with a point on it, the phallo-yonic sea/land new home of Ariel and her prince. I.e. the puffed up fears of the old daddy order are destroyed by the experienced reality of protected but porous and realistic child-raising environments, with sex regulated in the light of day in accord with empirically-determind rather than inherited boundaries. Her father blesses his union by not just giving her her legs back but providing her with a magical gleaming dress (im/modesty being in the eye of the beholder, this in part represents the new leeway in his beholding of her, something like a one-way censorial black box, where she's allowed to be a sexual adult being and he's allowed to not worry about it). He puts the gleam of her dress on her crown in the next, post-wedding scene, right before she sails off as co-monarch of her boat. Seems kind of self- immolative for a Disney princess movie - a profounder shift than Vatican II, and arguably affecting as many lives. "Living together" and related newcomers to the social norm pavilion (there's some interracial romance subtext) don't seem like live issues now, but they of course still are in a lot of places, and it's interesting to see the threshold moment of their acceptance noot just reflected in but on in a mass culture spectacle like this.
Anyway. Definitely odd to see all this sexual politicking kicking around in these princess products, and wondering how much is live enough to disturb my newly Disney-addicted daughter. We haven't seen Sleeping Beauty yet but I'm now dreading it. Nothing good can be embedded in that one.
