I Just Wanted to Be a Princess

Now, I'm not trying to bash on Disney movies here because like I'm sure many of you can agree, they were a huge part of my childhood. I literally watched Beauty and the Beast everyday for a year when I was 3. It's my favorite Disney princess movie because Belle is prickly, smart, curious, and unsatisfied with her village life, exclaiming early on in the movie that "There must be more than this provincial life." She is also a brunette, which I came to appreciate after Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty's popularity. I'm not sure that I really need to provide a recap for everyone, but for those of you who haven't popped it in the DVD player in a while, this Disney movie is a tale about a wicked, selfish prince who, as a price for being mean to a sorceress, is doomed to live his life as an ambiguous "beast" unless he can find a woman to love him before the last petal of an enchanted rose falls. His entire household is transformed into various items that talk (teapots, feather dusters, candlesticks, etc) and his castle becomes overgrown deep in the heart of the forest as the years pass and he remains a beast. Enter Belle, a beautiful, intelligent village girl with an eccentric father. She is an avid reader and longs for adventure and romance, resisting the everyday boredom of village life as well as the aggressive advances of the brainless village heartthrob Gaston. Her father stumbles upon the beast's castle when he becomes lost on his way to the county fair, the beast is enraged when he finds Maurice sitting in his parlor, throws him in a dungeon. Belle goes searching for him, ends up in the castle, volunteers to take his place as prisoner, winds up stuck in the castle. Eventually the beast is tamed by Belle's prickly charm and they fall in love, hopefully you guys know the rest of the story, but the curse is broken and the beast turns back into a prince and they live happily ever after.

There are just so many things to address here. First, I'll address the obvious--this story could not exemplify more perfectly Galician's Love Myth #7 as discussed in Bader's study on love songs: "The love of a good and faithful true woman can change a man from a 'beast' into a 'prince'" (2007, p. 149). The beast and Belle argue and yell at each other, but despite everything they grow into mutual respect and love--not because the beast is necessarily a good person, but because Belle is patient, kind, and strong. In a way, their relationship pattern follows Ward's finding that "the work of relationships is [...] the exclusive domain of women" (2003, p. 356). It is not a partnership; it is Belle who breaks through the beast's angry exterior to literally uncover his true self--that it's a handsome, fabulously wealthy prince is just a bonus. I'm worried about the effect this had on young girls like myself who ate this stuff up in our youth. Literally this movie is showing us that it's totally okay to stick with a jerk who lashes out at you and frightens you because there's probably a really great guy deep down there and it's up to you to bring that out of him. In real life, some guys are just really terrible people and no amount of patient, kind love will bring out a "prince" that isn't there. If today's young women are experiencing bad relationships, this is the type of movie that told us our bad relationships are our own fault and it's our responsibility to fix the relationship or the man. Clearly I have no data to back up my speculations--but it's been proved time and time again in media studies that heavily consumed media such as the Disney Princess franchise will have some time of effects on the audience.

Another aspect I'd like to mention is the character of Gaston, the brainless village heartthrob. He is quite stereotypically a chauvinistic meathead who seeks the most beautiful girl (Belle, unfortunately) to marry, so that she might remain his stay-at-home wife, cooking and cleaning all day and taking care of the sons they will have together. Just so many things going on here. We've got Kim et al's male heterosexual script codes of actively pursuing sexual relationships, treating women as sexual objects, sexual prowess as masculinity, and showing off physical strength (2007, p. 147-148). Gaston takes every opportunity to present his over-the-top manliness, talking about his hunting and fighting skills, his ability to eat, his huge muscles, and the fact that every inch of his body is covered with hair in the song "Gaston." Surprisingly Gaston actively pursues Belle for marriage, which is completely against the stereotype that men are afraid of commitment (Kim et al, 2007, p. 148), although because this is a Disney movie aimed at children I think they substituted Gaston's desire to bang Belle with his desire to marry her. Gaston is clearly a bad choice for any woman in the movie to choose as her partner, but is the beast really any better? Gaston is, in a way, also a beast; why couldn't Belle's patient and kind love transform him from a beast to a prince?

I love this movie and always will, but I think it's interesting to consider the Disney princess movies that were coming out in the early 90's  in terms of the effects on my generation of women, the young girls who probably consumed these movies the most heavily during their heyday. This movie challenged the traditional Sleeping Beauty-Snow White-Cinderella notions of waiting to be saved by Prince Charming, portraying its lead character as a smart, strong young woman who wanted more out of her life than just marriage and babies. She gets her adventures, to some degree, during her stay at the beast's castle, but in the end of the movie Belle ends up married to Prince Charming anyway. What happened to her dreams? The progressiveness of Belle's character almost hits the mark but falls short at the end of the movie when she finds herself happy with wearing pretty dresses and dancing in the arms of her prince. If you look at the other popular princesses of the same time, we've got other curious, stronger female characters (Ariel, Pocahontas, Jasmine) that, with the exception of Pocahontas, end up happy because they end up with Prince Charming despite their smarts and desire for more out of life than just royalty. But, as a 3-year-old girl, I wanted to see these princesses with their true loves in their pretty dresses--so who's to say Disney did anything wrong?