Television interview: The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

Talking Princess Culture on Life Matters, Radio National

To coincide with the release of Disney's new Cinderella film, I was a guest on Radio National's 'Life Matters' last Friday. I joined host Natasha Mitchell in a talkback session on the subject of girls and princess culture, along with Samantha Turnbull, author of the Anti-Princess Club series of books and children's author and school principal John Marsden.

Listen in to the podcast for a variety of perspectives on what wanting to be a princess means, not only for girls, but for boys too.

A Battle for an Unconventional Princess: "Saving" Disney's Merida

Left: Merida as she appeared in Brave (2012) and
Right: a  promotional image from Merida's induction
into the Disney Princess range.

Why would over 240,000 people feel compelled to sign a petition asking a multi-national, mass media corporation to alter the design of an animated film character as she appears in their merchandise, including clothing and dolls? In the past three weeks, A Mighty Girl, a site that promotes books, movies and toys that celebrate "smart, confident and courageous girls", has promoted the "Keep Merida Brave" campaign. Those  who have signed the petition are disappointed that an unconventional girl heroine, who is confident wielding a bow and arrows yet uncomfortable in a fancy dress, has been homogenised in order to enter the Disney princess stable. (The Disney princesses are a lucrative merchandising phenomenon, until now based on the characters of Ariel [The Little Mermaid], Aurora, [Sleeping Beauty], Pocahontas, Snow White, Mulan, Rapunzel, Belle, Jasmine [Aladdin], Cinderella and Tiana [The Princess and the Frog].)

Everyone from Jon Stewart to Brave writer and director Brenda Chapman  has criticised aspects of Merida's makeover, including her noticeably thinner build, her dress's lower neckline (indeed the very choice to place her in the more formal dress that she despises in the film), the use of make-up, taming of her unruly hair, and, most significantly of all, the removal of her bow and arrows. Here is one "princess" heroine who does a little more than wait for her prince to come, and yet in her leap from film to Disney's merchandise machine, she has lost most of the qualities that made her distinctive.

Merida merchandise in the Disney store,
Manchester, England

It is astonishing to see so many people mobilise, even if only via an online petition, to preserve what they see as a more inspiring role model for girls in popular culture. There will always be comments that call debates about the representation of girls and women a "first-world problem". However, the view that endless depictions of passive girls and women in fiction plays at least some part in limiting options for them in reality has gained widespread acceptance.

While Brave was not quite a Disney production, in that it was produced by Pixar Animation Studios, Disney has owned Pixar since 2006. Though Pixar may have found a way to present a heroine who breaks convention (although in some fairly typical ways, such as through her fiery red hair, the signifier of "different" yet beautiful girl heroines since Anne of Green Gables), it is unthinkable that the homogenising force of the Disney Princess entity would not take some steps to make Merida conform to its brand.

Merida as a baby-face doll for young girls and sparkly
gold sandals from the range

The photograph above, which I took yesterday in the Manchester Disney store, shows a shirt that depicts something closer to the film's original image of Merida. The slogan that accompanies it describes her as "boldly beautiful". The adjective that describes Merida is "beautiful": her appearance is her most important quality. She is unique in that, as the adverb indicates, she is beautiful in a way that is bolder than the likes of Cinderella or Belle, but she's not sufficiently different to be "beautifully bold". Like other princesses in the range, Merida needs to be adapted to sell items like wigs (also available for Rapunzel) and shoes (like the sequinned sandals shown above). These items relate to transforming a girl's appearance in a way that a Merida set of bow and arrows do not. Merida's bow and arrows were not available in the store I visited in England, yet they are currently sold out at the Disney online store for America. The Merida tiara, puffy, sequinned pale blue dress, which bears no resemblance to Merida's preferred dress, and gold gladiator sandals (intended for girls to "embark on a courageous fashion adventure") seem to be in plentiful supply.

Merida dolls in two styles of dress.

Though Merida dolls in both the plain and more ornate dress are available in UK stores packaged with sets of bows and arrows, the overwhelming direction of the Disney princess juggernaut has been toward a particular vision of princesses, even as it has made superficial moves to accommodate diversity. Mulan and Pocahontas may have been granted admission into the pantheon of princesses, yet there are no costumes for these princesses to be found on the US Disney site (however problematic they might be if they did exist there). You can find a Mulan headband, complete with orchid leaves, and a Pocahontas jewellery set, but there is no way for girls to emulate these characters in the same way as they can dress as Cinderella or Rapunzel (who has several costume dresses, both regular and "wedding" edition).

It is still clear that a Disney princess means one particular model or ideal of being feminine, which originated with Snow White in 1937. Individual characters in recent films may break convention in some ways, such as The Princess and the Frog's Tiana, who aspires to own her own restaurant, yet the Disney princess- as an object to be consumed- minimises difference and unique qualities as an integral part of maintaining a brand.

While Disney has clearly been taken by surprise by this social media campaign, it is hard to imagine that the world of Disney princesses will ever expand to fully embrace a natural-faced girl heroine with a drab dress and messy hair. An average appearance and focus on skill rather than beauty is not the dream that Disney sells to small girls and, presumably, their mothers. While the campaign to keep Merida as she appears in Brave shows strong public support for different fictional role models for girls, the ongoing popularity of the generic Disney princess shows that she will be hard to dislodge from her throne.

What "Fairy Tale" Endings Meant, Once Upon a Time

'Little Red Riding Hood', Maxfield Parrish, 1897

Fairy tales are badly misunderstood. When we talk about 'fairy tale' romances, as Chloe Angyal did in The Age recently, we ignore the darker and more subversive history of these ubiquitous stories and the essential part of the women who originally told them. If you only know fairy tales from the simpering princesses in Disney films, then you're missing out on cross-dressing swordswomen, defecating girls and sexually active maidens.

While it is 200 years since the Grimms collected fairy tales as an academic exercise to preserve the folklore of Germany, the passing of time has made us forget that it is not the Grimms who invented them. Fairy tales were usually told by the fireside in the evening as people, mostly women, worked at essential chores such as spinning. It is no surprise then that the tales the women spun, such as Rumpelstiltkin, often included the spinning wheel as a symbol of their labour.

These oral tales were not specifically intended for children and early versions are frequently crude and highly sexual. In one version of 'Little Red Riding Hood' collected by the Grimms, but later made wholesome when the second edition of their Children's and Household Tales was published for a wider audience, the heroine escapes the wolf by telling him she has to go outside to "make a load". Before the Grimms removed references to sex, the witch who keeps Rapunzel imprisoned in a tower knows her not-so-innocent prisoner has been letting down her hair for a man when her clothes become too tight because she is pregnant.

'Rapunzel', Wanda Gag, 1936

Various cultures have their own variants of these tales that are perhaps not 'as old as time' as Disney suggested in their 'Beauty and the Beast', but which have a far longer history than we afford them. The Chinese equivalent of Cinderella, Yeh-hsien, dates from AD 850. In place of a fairy godmother, a ten-foot long fish rewards her with gold, pearls, dresses and food. 

In seventeenth century France, it was women who pioneered the literary fairy tale that adapted oral tales for educated adult salon audiences. History has erased these women from public view, such as Madame d'Aulnoy who coined the term contes de fées (fairy tales) and wrote several volumes of them. We tend to only acknowledge Charles Perrault, who wrote the version of 'Cinderella' (minus Walt Disney's pumpkin) that we know today.

French fairy tale writers created many stories that did not survive the process of sanitising fairy tales for children that the Grimms began in the nineteenth century. Women were not helpless princesses waiting for Prince Charming in these fairy tales. In Marie-Jeanne LʼHéritier's 'Marmoisan' (which I read recently at the Monash Fairy Tale Reading Group), the heroine, Leonore, dresses as her twin brother, Marmoisan, to take his place in war and distinguishes herself in battle. Marmoisan died in disgrace after he attempted to scale a rope ladder to rape a married woman and was impaled upon her waiting husband's sword. 

These literary fairy tales and many of the oral versions do not show women as victims and men and heroes as we expect today. Passive and obedient heroines have been gradually introduced by male collectors and re-tellers of the tales across the past two-hundred years, especially as they have sought to socialise children into masculine and feminine roles. The glittery Disney collection of princesses obscures the way that fairy tales often showed girls as mentally or physically strong. They also criticised and punished men for their exploitation of women.

While Little Red Riding Hood can kill the wolf in a pot of boiling sausage water in one early version, by the time of Perrault's first written adaptation in 1697, she is relegated to his dinner. The Grimms then transformed what was often a bawdy story to one entirely about female dependence. Their version introduces the figure of the huntsman who saves Red by cutting the wolf open with a pair of scissors.

The Grimms also excised all traces of sexuality from their heroines and instead promoted stifling ideas of feminine innocence and purity. While this is partially understandable given their intent to revise the tales for children, at the same time as deleting the sex, they ramped up the gory violence in ways not present in the oral tales they were supposedly recording. In their second edition of tales, they decided to punish Cinderella's step-sisters by having their eyes pecked out by birds. 

Paradoxically, if we want our culture to present girls and women with empowering models of femininity, in the main, the seventeenth century versions of fairy tales are better candidates than those of recent times. Some literary writers such as Angela Carter have already rewritten fairy tales in a way that returns power to their heroines. Yet the current crop of film and television fairy tale adaptations, such as Mirror, Mirror and Once Upon a Time, have the potential to overturn the popular trend of passive heroines in fairy tales in the past two centuries on a wider scale.

If we look to the history of fairy tales, we can see amid the hundreds of variants of each tale how much they have changed across time and place. The pink princess culture that absorbs many girls today is something that they have internalised from more recent conservative, sanitised versions of fairy tales that suggest that a woman's greatest achievement is to be innocent and beautiful. If we returned to telling the fairy tales of old, aspiring to be a fairy tale princess wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing.

As part of the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival, the Monash University Fairy Tale Reading Group is hosting a fairy tale salon inspired by those of 17th Century France on 23 June at Monash Caulfield.

The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

I've been a one-woman media blitz today commenting on the Royal Wedding and princess culture for girls. The video above is from a TV spot on ABC's News Breakfast program. And here is an article in The Conversation that allows me to say what I really mean without the pressure of live-to-air television.

Yesterday I did an interview on Life Matters for ABC Radio and you can hear the audio at this link. It's a shame there's not a Royal wedding more often as I'm finally getting the hang of talking about it. I'm actually amazed that Australians are so interested in it, given our usual blase attitude to the monarchy. Then again, we have wrangled Fitzy and Dame Edna into the commentary so it's not exactly reverent adoration.

Disney's 'Dreams Come True' Exhibition

Yesterday I visited Disney's 'Dreams Come True' exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was a different experience to the recent Tim Burton exhibition in that it was not packed to the point of queueing to view display cases. In fact, I was surprised by how few people were wandering about the exhibition on the Thursday late-night opening given Disney's domination of children's entertainment in the 20th century.

I know all that is wrong with Disney, from the sweatshop clothing to the dubiousness of the race, class and gender politics of many films. And then there's the pinkified Princess commercial juggernaut. I know that traditional tales have been plundered from a range of cultural traditions and have had the complexity and challenging elements vacuumed right out of them. I know that The Little Mermaid really ends sadly with her turning to foam on the sea. I know that fairy tales are not always about dreams coming true. But in Disney animated features dreams do come true and gruesome story elements are neatly traded for anthropomorphosised animal helpers.

The exhibition focuses on the fairy tale features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to the most recent adaptation of Rapunzel, Tangled (whose heroine seems to take more visually from a Bratz doll than the traditional Disney princess). Despite all of the critical lenses I could wear, I was still a helpless victim of nostalgia from the first section of cels from Snow White. (I always preferred her because she was dark-haired, unlike the usual parade of fair-haired virtuous maidens.)

There were some surprising snippets of information revealed throughout the exhibit, including unused sketches of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty with an ominous pet panther and footage of a deleted scene from Snow White in which she instructs the seven dwarfs in the most polite way to eat soup, like an animated June Dally-Watkins.

Apart from a few sections of video (such as the soup sequence and an intriguing look at the multi-plane camera used to add depth to painted backgrounds presented by Walt himself) and some maquettes, it was a largely "wall-based" exhibition. Well, apart from the welcome presence of fairy tale books sourced by Disney in Europe that were used as visual references by his animators. A broader exhibition encompassing other animated films and shorts and the Disney theme parks would no doubt have appealed to a larger audience, but perhaps it could never be contained within any viable exhibition space.

With physical progress through the exhibit, which was ordered chronologically, came a sense of declining magic in the animation process. Cels were no longer hand-inked by the 1990s and the laborious and fascinating techniques of old are gradually being superseded by computer animation. It seems telling that this change in production coincides with the decline in popularity of the Disney-fied earnest fairy tale musical. Disney has signalled its intent to leave fairy tales aside in future animated features, but perhaps rather than a turn away from these stories, Disney might be wise to return to more authentic versions of them, complete with enough shock and awe to compete with contemporary children's entertainment that does not promote the Disneyfied idea of childhood innocence, dreams always coming true, and the homogeneity of 'dreams' as simply a desire for a girl to be married.

Fairy and Princess Indulgence: When Wishes Shouldn't Come True

Monica Dux, a fine former Melbourne Uni-ite, has written a piece in today's Age about the madness that is the pre-school girl obsession with fairies and princesses. Called "Girls Can't Thrive in a Puff of Pink" she muses on why fairy princesses abound at every pre-school turn. As she points out, there's certainly nothing wrong with young girls who genuinely covet pink frippery breaking it out for special occasions or dress-ups, but why do we see so many fairy princesses tagging along for the weekly grocery shop? It's not like the lone boy who insisted on going along to Safeway in his Spiderman pyjamas, there are fairy-ballerina-princesses, complete with wands, at every suburban Westfield Shoppingtown at this moment.

As the poor baby above, weighed down by an oversized crown that she doesn't seem to particularly want there, suggests, this trend perhaps is a reflection of parental attitudes to femininity rather than the children themselves. If girls do begin to desire wings and tiaras, it seems that it is often because we have told them that they should. This is not a new cultural effect, as we've been through the "why are girls given toy ironing boards and kitchenettes while boys get power tools and earthmovers" discussion many times before. I wonder if the fairy and princess obsession is borne out of parental consideration of their child as unique. There is a well-known tendency in children's literature for child protagonists to discover that they are "special". A heroine (or hero)'s uninteresting regulation parents prove not to be her own and the story reveals that she actually has royal lineage or a special magical quality. Just think of Harry Potter discovering that he is really a wizard and can escape (at least for most of the year) dull (and abusive) suburban life with the Dursleys.

Many children have the fantasy that they are just biding time with an ordinary Mum and Dad before their supernatural or magical parents make themselves known. Are the parents of these little princesses and fairies enacting a slightly different form of this typically childhood fantasy? One in which their daughter is actually a princess. A real princess can't be displayed in public in a tracksuit, but must be shown off in a highly feminine, impractical-for-toddlers outfit.

I visited Disneyland Paris last month and was surprised to see so many little girls making their visit to the park dressed in Disney Princess dress-up gowns. Perhaps it was one occasion where a little indulgence would not be inappropriate but I wonder how far the fantasy is indulged and for whose benefit. I can hear the mums of my mother's generation saying "don't be ridiculous" if their girls demanded to go to the shops in a fairy costume. I can't help but thinking it's parenting style rather than girls themselves that are primarily responsible for fairy rings sprouting across suburbia.

As a footnote, the child in the top-right photo is part of a kind of anti-princess photoshoot.