Disney Princesses: Traditional Gender Conventions And Tropes
In this essay, firstly, I will be addressing the impact media and marketing has on society, in particular children, and how female heroines shown through these methods can conflict with what we want to be representing as a ßrole model. I will then be analysing the evolution of Disney princesses and their representation of females in 20th and 21st century post-feminist ideologies. I will start from 1937, all the way to the last release in 2013. I will be deciphering their progression and examining whether there has been successful change in these heroines to break traditional gender conventions and tropes.
Disney is arguably one of the most successful companies in the world, titling as the ‘world’s largest media conglomerate by market value’, …show more content…
(Siklos, 2009) averaging at around $142.92 billion (Forbes 2014) and ‘Hollywood’s biggest single movie producer’ (Maney 1995: 163-164). The films they create are shared ‘intergenerationally’ and are extremely popular amongst young children.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation Report(1999), on average children watch 3 hours of television per day, or nearly 20 hours per week. Children spend more time watching films and television than teenagers (Bryant, 2001; Mares, 1998). While adults are educated in an easier manner through written information, for example textbooks, children learn the greatest amount from auditory and video sources. (Walma van der Molen and van der Voort (2000)). In fact, in Mummes research, he found that children as young as one year of age are affected by the people around them, replicating their emotions and actions, even if these are only observed and learnt from the television. (Mumme 2003)
However, the creation of such popular films that are categorically mostly shown to infants and young children are creating ideological damage in our society. These stereotypes do not exist due to the reality of inequality in our society, but instead are cluttered amongst our screens due to a continuous induction of ‘societal members categorized based on the persons genitalia and the cultures norms’.
Media provides an ‘effective way to mass-produce cultural concepts and norms’ and is evidently ‘key in reproducing and legitimating gender systems and gender inequality ‘.(McCabe, Fairchild, Grauerholz, Pescosolido, Tope, 2011). Butler argues that gender is understood as a ‘performance, a set of codes, gestures and adornments used, rather than a real aspect of individual identity’. (Butler, 1990)
Psychologist Shaw discusses media in his 1988 article ‘Sexual Harassment and
Gender Bias’ analysing gender dichotomy in relation to children; ‘Children are not passive observers’. Shaw develops his view arguing that within childrens’ lives they look for structure, and are ‘driven by an internal need’ to fit it. By observing the world and everything around them, including the gestures and adornments seen in the media, they create and develop rules they can relate to varied circumstances that they are situated in. Children thus develop their own gender identity, as they learn the implications surrounding their sex and what it stereotypically ‘means to be a boy or a girl’. (Gooden, pg 90)
Constructivism is a theory arguing that humans are educated through their everyday interactions and experiences (Wikipedia). Elizabeth England states that this approach indefinitely suggests that children ‘develop beliefs about the world based on their interpretations of observations and experiences’ (England, 557), with Sherryl Graves also arguing that this ‘constructivist approach and the cultivation theory both suggest there may be an effect of viewing gendered stereotypes upon children” (557)
Thus, critics attack the Disney Corporation for what they believe is having a damaging impact on young children in our society and modern culture itself. Giroux (1999), cautions that we recognise that ‘the pleasure that Disney provides should not blind us to the realization that Disney is about more than entertainment.’ ( p. 5)
As Diana Damean writes, we are providing ‘images and figures that spectators can imitate and identify with. These images play an important part in socializing and educating individuals using social and sexual role models… that value certain patterns of behaviour and a certain style, while discouraging any others.’ (90) (PG18) Damean continues, expressing her belief that it is important for children to have ‘a variety of role-models’ to construct their image around. However, she denies that they are given this opportunity due to the limited options media allows for, especially for women.(93)
For example, Disney’s female characters, in particular the ‘princesses’, are considered to be beautiful, passive, illogical and overemotional. (I. Broverman, Vogel, D. Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972). They possess little agency and sacrifice everything for men. While there are certainly exceptions to this, the majority rules, creating a norm for young female characters to follow. The stories enforce a patriarchal nature, rejecting the idea that women are autonomous or have any vision in their lives other than marriage with the opposite sex.
Furthermore, the amount of male characters versus female characters is disproportional and something that needs to be addressed if we are prepared to use fictitious characters as potential role models. According to Judith L. Meece, gender conceptions are vital for understanding not only the self but also the behaviour of others. (pg38) Thus, the preponderance of old females acting in a villainous role, for example the old witches in Snow White and Brave, should be changed in fear that it will affect children having a loving relationship with elders.
The representation of stereotypical personalities in female roles is strikingly worrying, but it is also the bodies that create concern. Orenstein draws into these issues, warning parents that a ‘preoccupation with body and beauty is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health’.(Orenstein). Characters’ attributes are enhanced in animation, resulting in the commodification and objectification of their biological attributes. Traditionally, the Disney Princesses are attractive, and if they possess power in any form, they are normally represented as ugly and cruel.
However, destroying the gender tropes of female objectification can be difficult, as Fenstermaker believes that these enhancements of physicality are to be expected to help represent and differentiate gender. (West and Fenstermaker 1995).
Nevertheless, Ostman defends the Walt Disney Company, stating that it has ‘shown a continuing willingness to respond to public concerns’ such as reinventing the conventional Disney princess to conform to a more contemporary ‘strong’ female role. (1996 p. 86).
However, in Wiersma’s analysis of sixteen Disney films, she found that the changes in society are not being represented efficiently, claiming that gender stereotypes have not evolved since the first animated Disney film in 1937.(Wiersma 2001)
In the twentieth century, the princess movement diminished due to an inconsistency between strength and decline in the women’s movement ‘reflecting the compulsion to regulate, and subsequently de-fang female sexuality through visual media’. (Stover)
However, unfortunately, the postmodern resurgence of Disney films is incompatible with the increasing autonomy and power of women in our current culture. (Stover) With second-wave feminism, equality has risen in an unparalleled manner, yet Disney continues to portray their characters as indisputably fragile and flawlessly beautiful.
While studying Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mulan, Brave and Frozen in particular, it is evident to see that some of the more recent princesses possess more agency then their predecessors, but unfortunately, they still conform to fundamentals of the anti-feminist backlash agenda that pursued the regulation and empowerment of female characters in the media around 1980’s.
SNOW WHITE
“…the film follows the classic ‘sexist’ narrative about the framing of women’s loves through a male discourse. Such male framing drives women to frustration and some women to the point of madness. It also pits women in competition for male approval…“ (Zipes, J. 1995)
The first Disney Princess film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) featured a female protagonist who fit the domestic expectations of pre-World War II women. (Rosen 1973) Snow White exemplifies the traditional passively beautiful female figure. The story follows Snow White, whose step mother is so envious of, she poisons with an apple leaving her lifeless. Before this cruel act, Snow White runs away and lives with seven dwarfs, for whom she cooks and cleans relentlessly.
Snow White has no definite personality; she exists only as a character to be ultimately victimized and struck, to thus wait for her Prince Charming to rescue her.
The film is indisputably anti-feminist, but this is used as the perfect originating princess film, in which Disney can develop its conventions and stereotypes for the better.
Snow White is docile, submissive and obedient; without question she automatically accepts her role of as ‘a fervent housekeeper’. As Jack Zipes encapsulates, she is the ‘virginal housewife’ who spends her life singing about the day her prince will come. She needs a ‘dashing male saviour to order her and become whole’. (Zipes 2002: 128) She does nothing but imagine a life of perfection in which her Prince will protect her. She is shown as naïve and her ‘saccharine romanticism’ is extremely distinct when she believes that by biting into an apple her dreams will come true. (Singh …show more content…
2012)
But here is a child whose stepparent envies her and wishes to kill her; here is a woman willing to transform herself into a hideous hag in her desire for beauty and supremacy.
The image of the wicked Queen (initially conceived as a raven-haired glamour girl, and the epitome of late-1930's sophistication) who drinks an aging potion and then shrivels, sprouting warts and claws, turning before our eyes from a sexy, voluptuous creature into a frightening old crone, must leave as powerful an impression on the audience as Snow White's chirpy femininity. (Indeed, there's a grown-up version of this nightmare, with Jack Nicholson embracing a young beauty who turns ugly and ancient as he holds her, in ''The Shining.'') As ''Snow White'' returns to help shape a new generation of eager little viewers, only those of us already under its influence will fully appreciate the range and depth of the impression this classic makes. Lighthearted as these figures may be, there are some of us whom Snow White taught everything about idealized prettiness. The dwarfs epitomized teamwork, good humor and masculine protectiveness. The forest creatures, ever frolicsome and friendly, helped to further the sense of an alert and sympathetic universe. And if some of this film's lessons trouble the mind, they go straight to the heart for each new audience, and they always will. Snow White will always make scrubbing and scouring seem the pleasantest of chores. She will always make marriage seem a girl's only
option.
According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, frequently connected with the feminine perspective, the story is dominated by patriarchal repression, staging the difficulties women face to attain a psychic balance in a patriarchal dominated society. With the masculine voice inhabiting the mirror and its concepts completely internalized by the women, an actual male presence becomes obsolete. The King therefore haunts the tale and directs it onto a conflict between two archeo(stero)types: the angle-woman and the monster-woman. In this way, Snow White embodies the angelical patriarchal daughter that the Queen rejects and actively tries to eliminate. Gilbert and Gubar further argue that the two women represent two conflicting aspects of the same psyche, each attempting to overthrow the other in order to survive.
On one side is the docile, childish and submissive Snow White while on the other stands the subversive creativity of the Queen, she who orchestrates plots and propels the narrative. Their duel leads to an unhappy end: the Queen dies and Snow White becomes imprisoned in domesticity, an end that only a patriarchal view of female happiness would consider satisfactory (Bacchilega 1988: 2-3; Barzilai 1990: 519-521). Following a similar reasoning, Tatar suggests the catatonic Snow White to represent the folklore’s ideal woman, further warning that the father’s passivity and negligence only appear benevolent when compared to the Queen’s plain aggressiveness. Actually, if in a version he eventually rescues Snow White in another he helps the Queen (Tatar 2003: 146, 148-149, 151, 154). Such diversity of actions prevents a fixed interpretation and helps understand why folk and fairy tales render themselves to a variety of uses and revisions.
Another variable aspect is the Queen’s identity, now commonly remembered as a stepmother but once known as Snow White’s own mother.
Indeed, in the first edition of the Grimms’ collection she was presented as a biological mother, only becoming a stepmother in the second edition when the Grimms were already actively trying to adapt their work for children (Warner 1995: 210-211; Tatar 2003: 36-37). Disney later helped perpetuating the stepmother’s malice (Warner 1995: 207, 222), conjuring up two stepmothers both wicked and terrifying: the Evil Queen, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Lady Tremaine, in Cinderella (1950).15 This tendency to propagate and vilify stepmothers, apart from attributing too great a demonization to adoptive and step-parents thus turning them into fearful antagonists, weakens the importance and complexity of such a marvellous and potentially problematic relationship as that of mothers and daughters.
A film in accordance with Walt Disney’s own personality: an artistically visionary modernist in conflict with a Victorian sentimental (Watts 1995: 87),19 who seems to conceive women as either autonomous, destructive monsters or dependent, mellifluous angels.
Leading women and feminine prosperity excelled after the 1930’s when the newly-won suffrage took place. Female characters in media, thus, were increasingly censored, which resulted in embrace of Snow White’s ‘pure maiden innocence’. (Rosen 1973, 190) By 1990’s, Disney travelled towards a "New Wave" of princess films, which supposedly converted the conventional damsel into a figure of power with desire for change.
This new approach took place between two decades of active heroines, with progressive individual traits that resembled perfectly the increase in adequate gender roles in a society where women hold the same jobs as men. (Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor 2011) If Snow White exemplified the traditional Disney female as a docile, beautiful commodity waiting for her Prince Charming, then detractors argue that new princesses such as Mulan are in complete contrast to this: focused, ambitious, and in Mulan’s case literally heroic, and not dependent on men. (Stover)
Disney is arguably one of the most successful companies in the world, titling as the ‘world’s largest media conglomerate by market value’, …show more content…
(Siklos, 2009) averaging at around $142.92 billion (Forbes 2014) and ‘Hollywood’s biggest single movie producer’ (Maney 1995: 163-164). The films they create are shared ‘intergenerationally’ and are extremely popular amongst young children.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation Report(1999), on average children watch 3 hours of television per day, or nearly 20 hours per week. Children spend more time watching films and television than teenagers (Bryant, 2001; Mares, 1998). While adults are educated in an easier manner through written information, for example textbooks, children learn the greatest amount from auditory and video sources. (Walma van der Molen and van der Voort (2000)). In fact, in Mummes research, he found that children as young as one year of age are affected by the people around them, replicating their emotions and actions, even if these are only observed and learnt from the television. (Mumme 2003)
However, the creation of such popular films that are categorically mostly shown to infants and young children are creating ideological damage in our society. These stereotypes do not exist due to the reality of inequality in our society, but instead are cluttered amongst our screens due to a continuous induction of ‘societal members categorized based on the persons genitalia and the cultures norms’.
Media provides an ‘effective way to mass-produce cultural concepts and norms’ and is evidently ‘key in reproducing and legitimating gender systems and gender inequality ‘.(McCabe, Fairchild, Grauerholz, Pescosolido, Tope, 2011). Butler argues that gender is understood as a ‘performance, a set of codes, gestures and adornments used, rather than a real aspect of individual identity’. (Butler, 1990)
Psychologist Shaw discusses media in his 1988 article ‘Sexual Harassment and
Gender Bias’ analysing gender dichotomy in relation to children; ‘Children are not passive observers’. Shaw develops his view arguing that within childrens’ lives they look for structure, and are ‘driven by an internal need’ to fit it. By observing the world and everything around them, including the gestures and adornments seen in the media, they create and develop rules they can relate to varied circumstances that they are situated in. Children thus develop their own gender identity, as they learn the implications surrounding their sex and what it stereotypically ‘means to be a boy or a girl’. (Gooden, pg 90)
Constructivism is a theory arguing that humans are educated through their everyday interactions and experiences (Wikipedia). Elizabeth England states that this approach indefinitely suggests that children ‘develop beliefs about the world based on their interpretations of observations and experiences’ (England, 557), with Sherryl Graves also arguing that this ‘constructivist approach and the cultivation theory both suggest there may be an effect of viewing gendered stereotypes upon children” (557)
Thus, critics attack the Disney Corporation for what they believe is having a damaging impact on young children in our society and modern culture itself. Giroux (1999), cautions that we recognise that ‘the pleasure that Disney provides should not blind us to the realization that Disney is about more than entertainment.’ ( p. 5)
As Diana Damean writes, we are providing ‘images and figures that spectators can imitate and identify with. These images play an important part in socializing and educating individuals using social and sexual role models… that value certain patterns of behaviour and a certain style, while discouraging any others.’ (90) (PG18) Damean continues, expressing her belief that it is important for children to have ‘a variety of role-models’ to construct their image around. However, she denies that they are given this opportunity due to the limited options media allows for, especially for women.(93)
For example, Disney’s female characters, in particular the ‘princesses’, are considered to be beautiful, passive, illogical and overemotional. (I. Broverman, Vogel, D. Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972). They possess little agency and sacrifice everything for men. While there are certainly exceptions to this, the majority rules, creating a norm for young female characters to follow. The stories enforce a patriarchal nature, rejecting the idea that women are autonomous or have any vision in their lives other than marriage with the opposite sex.
Furthermore, the amount of male characters versus female characters is disproportional and something that needs to be addressed if we are prepared to use fictitious characters as potential role models. According to Judith L. Meece, gender conceptions are vital for understanding not only the self but also the behaviour of others. (pg38) Thus, the preponderance of old females acting in a villainous role, for example the old witches in Snow White and Brave, should be changed in fear that it will affect children having a loving relationship with elders.
The representation of stereotypical personalities in female roles is strikingly worrying, but it is also the bodies that create concern. Orenstein draws into these issues, warning parents that a ‘preoccupation with body and beauty is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health’.(Orenstein). Characters’ attributes are enhanced in animation, resulting in the commodification and objectification of their biological attributes. Traditionally, the Disney Princesses are attractive, and if they possess power in any form, they are normally represented as ugly and cruel.
However, destroying the gender tropes of female objectification can be difficult, as Fenstermaker believes that these enhancements of physicality are to be expected to help represent and differentiate gender. (West and Fenstermaker 1995).
Nevertheless, Ostman defends the Walt Disney Company, stating that it has ‘shown a continuing willingness to respond to public concerns’ such as reinventing the conventional Disney princess to conform to a more contemporary ‘strong’ female role. (1996 p. 86).
However, in Wiersma’s analysis of sixteen Disney films, she found that the changes in society are not being represented efficiently, claiming that gender stereotypes have not evolved since the first animated Disney film in 1937.(Wiersma 2001)
In the twentieth century, the princess movement diminished due to an inconsistency between strength and decline in the women’s movement ‘reflecting the compulsion to regulate, and subsequently de-fang female sexuality through visual media’. (Stover)
However, unfortunately, the postmodern resurgence of Disney films is incompatible with the increasing autonomy and power of women in our current culture. (Stover) With second-wave feminism, equality has risen in an unparalleled manner, yet Disney continues to portray their characters as indisputably fragile and flawlessly beautiful.
While studying Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mulan, Brave and Frozen in particular, it is evident to see that some of the more recent princesses possess more agency then their predecessors, but unfortunately, they still conform to fundamentals of the anti-feminist backlash agenda that pursued the regulation and empowerment of female characters in the media around 1980’s.
SNOW WHITE
“…the film follows the classic ‘sexist’ narrative about the framing of women’s loves through a male discourse. Such male framing drives women to frustration and some women to the point of madness. It also pits women in competition for male approval…“ (Zipes, J. 1995)
The first Disney Princess film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) featured a female protagonist who fit the domestic expectations of pre-World War II women. (Rosen 1973) Snow White exemplifies the traditional passively beautiful female figure. The story follows Snow White, whose step mother is so envious of, she poisons with an apple leaving her lifeless. Before this cruel act, Snow White runs away and lives with seven dwarfs, for whom she cooks and cleans relentlessly.
Snow White has no definite personality; she exists only as a character to be ultimately victimized and struck, to thus wait for her Prince Charming to rescue her.
The film is indisputably anti-feminist, but this is used as the perfect originating princess film, in which Disney can develop its conventions and stereotypes for the better.
Snow White is docile, submissive and obedient; without question she automatically accepts her role of as ‘a fervent housekeeper’. As Jack Zipes encapsulates, she is the ‘virginal housewife’ who spends her life singing about the day her prince will come. She needs a ‘dashing male saviour to order her and become whole’. (Zipes 2002: 128) She does nothing but imagine a life of perfection in which her Prince will protect her. She is shown as naïve and her ‘saccharine romanticism’ is extremely distinct when she believes that by biting into an apple her dreams will come true. (Singh …show more content…
2012)
But here is a child whose stepparent envies her and wishes to kill her; here is a woman willing to transform herself into a hideous hag in her desire for beauty and supremacy.
The image of the wicked Queen (initially conceived as a raven-haired glamour girl, and the epitome of late-1930's sophistication) who drinks an aging potion and then shrivels, sprouting warts and claws, turning before our eyes from a sexy, voluptuous creature into a frightening old crone, must leave as powerful an impression on the audience as Snow White's chirpy femininity. (Indeed, there's a grown-up version of this nightmare, with Jack Nicholson embracing a young beauty who turns ugly and ancient as he holds her, in ''The Shining.'') As ''Snow White'' returns to help shape a new generation of eager little viewers, only those of us already under its influence will fully appreciate the range and depth of the impression this classic makes. Lighthearted as these figures may be, there are some of us whom Snow White taught everything about idealized prettiness. The dwarfs epitomized teamwork, good humor and masculine protectiveness. The forest creatures, ever frolicsome and friendly, helped to further the sense of an alert and sympathetic universe. And if some of this film's lessons trouble the mind, they go straight to the heart for each new audience, and they always will. Snow White will always make scrubbing and scouring seem the pleasantest of chores. She will always make marriage seem a girl's only
option.
According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, frequently connected with the feminine perspective, the story is dominated by patriarchal repression, staging the difficulties women face to attain a psychic balance in a patriarchal dominated society. With the masculine voice inhabiting the mirror and its concepts completely internalized by the women, an actual male presence becomes obsolete. The King therefore haunts the tale and directs it onto a conflict between two archeo(stero)types: the angle-woman and the monster-woman. In this way, Snow White embodies the angelical patriarchal daughter that the Queen rejects and actively tries to eliminate. Gilbert and Gubar further argue that the two women represent two conflicting aspects of the same psyche, each attempting to overthrow the other in order to survive.
On one side is the docile, childish and submissive Snow White while on the other stands the subversive creativity of the Queen, she who orchestrates plots and propels the narrative. Their duel leads to an unhappy end: the Queen dies and Snow White becomes imprisoned in domesticity, an end that only a patriarchal view of female happiness would consider satisfactory (Bacchilega 1988: 2-3; Barzilai 1990: 519-521). Following a similar reasoning, Tatar suggests the catatonic Snow White to represent the folklore’s ideal woman, further warning that the father’s passivity and negligence only appear benevolent when compared to the Queen’s plain aggressiveness. Actually, if in a version he eventually rescues Snow White in another he helps the Queen (Tatar 2003: 146, 148-149, 151, 154). Such diversity of actions prevents a fixed interpretation and helps understand why folk and fairy tales render themselves to a variety of uses and revisions.
Another variable aspect is the Queen’s identity, now commonly remembered as a stepmother but once known as Snow White’s own mother.
Indeed, in the first edition of the Grimms’ collection she was presented as a biological mother, only becoming a stepmother in the second edition when the Grimms were already actively trying to adapt their work for children (Warner 1995: 210-211; Tatar 2003: 36-37). Disney later helped perpetuating the stepmother’s malice (Warner 1995: 207, 222), conjuring up two stepmothers both wicked and terrifying: the Evil Queen, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Lady Tremaine, in Cinderella (1950).15 This tendency to propagate and vilify stepmothers, apart from attributing too great a demonization to adoptive and step-parents thus turning them into fearful antagonists, weakens the importance and complexity of such a marvellous and potentially problematic relationship as that of mothers and daughters.
A film in accordance with Walt Disney’s own personality: an artistically visionary modernist in conflict with a Victorian sentimental (Watts 1995: 87),19 who seems to conceive women as either autonomous, destructive monsters or dependent, mellifluous angels.
Leading women and feminine prosperity excelled after the 1930’s when the newly-won suffrage took place. Female characters in media, thus, were increasingly censored, which resulted in embrace of Snow White’s ‘pure maiden innocence’. (Rosen 1973, 190) By 1990’s, Disney travelled towards a "New Wave" of princess films, which supposedly converted the conventional damsel into a figure of power with desire for change.
This new approach took place between two decades of active heroines, with progressive individual traits that resembled perfectly the increase in adequate gender roles in a society where women hold the same jobs as men. (Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor 2011) If Snow White exemplified the traditional Disney female as a docile, beautiful commodity waiting for her Prince Charming, then detractors argue that new princesses such as Mulan are in complete contrast to this: focused, ambitious, and in Mulan’s case literally heroic, and not dependent on men. (Stover)