Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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in the history and creations of the studio increased thanks to the emergence of film studies and animation studies as academic disciplines, one of the major roadblocks which eventually arose in undertaking a study of characterisations of femininity by the Disney studio has been the Disney organisation itself. The first logical place to go as a source of information on Disney films and on Walt Disney himself would be the archives at Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California. Though earlier researchers were able to do this (amazingly, Richard Shale, author of the 1982 book Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, wrote almost apologetically in his book’s introduction for having to rely so heavily on the Disney archives and primary sources as a source for his research materials!1), recent years have witnessed a change in the Disney company’s attitude toward anyone – including academics – wishing to undertake research in the studio’s archives. For a time, even using the name “Disney” or images from Disney was prohibitively problematic. As the editors of From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture were told in correspondence with the Disney Company before the publication of their book (which they had originally entitled Doing Disney: Critical Dialogues in Film, Gender, and Culture): “... Disney does not allow third-party books to use the name ‘Disney’ in their titles – this implies endorsement or sponsorship by the Disney organization”.2 The letter continued: “As you know, all of our valuable properties, characters, and marks are protected under copyright and trademark law and any unauthorized use of our protected material would constitute infringements of our rights under said law”.3 The hint of threat this statement contains is not there by accident. Over the course of its history, the Walt Disney Company has grown suspicious of outside interest and, as a consequence, has become unusually protective of itself. It could be hypothesised that this protectiveness has its roots in the 1928 theft of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit by Disney’s distributor, Charles Mintz, but this seems unlikely, given that this protectiveness reached its height during Michael Eisner’s leadership of the corporation. Whether academic research in the archives will be allowed in the future, now that Eisner has left, remains to be seen. It can only be hoped, however, that the value of permitting scholarly access to the archives will be realised, and that the treasure trove of information they contain will be offered up once more for professional intellectual analysis.
By the late 1990s, however, it had become impossible simply to make an appointment to see the Disney archives. Scholars first had to write a detailed letter to the Disney Archives’ Permissions Department stating the nature, purpose, and ultimate intentions (i.e. whether publication was intended) of the research that was being undertaken, and then had to wait and hope that access would be granted. Only after first being granted permission to enter the archives were scholars allowed to make an appointment to conduct research. Furthermore, they were still not allowed complete access to the archives. When I enquired as to the existence of audience polls on the reception of Disney’s films, I was told that, while these polls had, in fact, been conducted, “Unfortunately, after checking with our Legal departments, it seems that the audience poll information is still considered proprietary and confidential, so it is not available to people outside of The Walt Disney Company”.4
I myself was denied the use of the archives when, in 1997, I wrote for permission to see such materials as existed showing the evolution of the various character portrayals. The reply I received stated that “While we recognize the purpose you have in mind, unfortunately, I am placed in the unenviable position of having to advise you that we cannot grant you the permission you have requested”.5 Moreover, when I e-mailed Dave Smith, the chief archivist at Disney, on 7 June 1999, he informed me, as part of an answer to a enquiry about the content of the archives, that the Disney archives were no longer open to outside researchers, and were, to his knowledge, to remain closed indefinitely.6 Therefore, for most of my Disney sources, I have been forced to utilise such data that has made it out of the Disney archives and into a variety of other archives, libraries, and the public domain. While this was not an ideal situation for undertaking original research, it has nonetheless forced me to extract as much information as possible from the available sources.
Despite this handicap, however, my sources themselves have been extensive, varied in nature, and sometimes rather untraditional. First of all, I relied upon the Disney films themselves as the basis for detailed textual analysis. My copies of the Disney films on which I focused in my study were all purchased VHS or DVD copies of the films, obtained in both the United States and the United Kingdom. All were officially produced and licensed Disney videos/DVDs released by Walt Disney Pictures. The other films referred to in this study were obtained both from purchased tapes and DVDs and from US and UK television broadcasts which I personally recorded. Another important source was the collection of books published by the Disney-owned press, Hyperion. Because of Disney’s careful control over the copyrights of its trademarked images and artwork, books published by Hyperion are amongst the few available sources for them outside of the Disney Studio’s archives. An incredibly rich source of previously unpublished materials such as studio memos and personal correspondence was found on the CDrom-based “biography” of Walt Disney, Walt Disney: An Intimate History of the Man and his Magic, published by the Walt Disney Family Educational Foundation, Inc.7 Also, the writings of other scholars on the subjects of Walt Disney, the Disney studio and its films, the theme parks, and animation history generally were useful, both for their information and as examples of the range of attitudes and approaches to the subject of Disney. As for the primary sources I used in this study (apart from the films), the collection of “Personality Ephemera” on Walt Disney in the possession of the British Film Institute proved to be very useful. Also, copies on the internet of such of important documents as Walt Disney’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the United States Supreme Court decisions on various cases connected with the Hollywood film industry were very useful for me in researching this book. Amongst my other primary sources, I relied upon period magazines, books, articles, and film reviews. Secondary sources were the increasing numbers of books and articles about Disney. Of all of these sources, arguably my most important has proved to be the films themselves, which I relied upon to carry out my original textual analysis of the films which my study has covered.
This book, in its emphasis on textual analysis within a historical context, falls within a tradition in film history and film studies of opening up new areas of scholarly enquiry through in-depth analysis both of individual films and of the genre to which they belong. Jeanine Basinger’s 1993 study of the women’s film genre, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960,8 is an example of this line of scholarly enquiry, although it is not the first study of women’s films during the period 1930 to 1960. It combines detailed textual analysis with an analysis of various aspects of the genre as a whole in a way which sees film texts as being more akin to historical documents, which require an examination of the elements they contain and the factors surrounding their production and reception as forms of popular entertainment. As Martin Barker writes in From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis,
“We can’t deduce ‘harm’ (or ‘good’ for that matter) from analysis of films. We can’t place films along some supposed dimension of political or ideological acceptability, from conservative/reactionary to radical/subversive. Most importantly, we cannot read off possible influences upon an unnamed, ‘vulnerable’ audience. And part of the reason for that is that films don’t contain ‘messages’ plus message-launching devices in the way that much analysis has supposed.”9
The spirit of Basinger’s study is, in a number of ways, the model for the approach taken here. Like A Woman’s View, this book strives to examine both the films as individual texts and the patterns formed by these texts when looked at as examples of a genre.
Depictions of women in American culture
On the face of it, cultural images of American women have changed considerably in the last two centuries. For many years, the reigning paradigm in women’s history was that of the ‘separate spheres’ of work and home. Barbara Welter, based on an examination of early nineteenth-century didactic literature – the cultural conditioning of its day – argued that, at least in middle-class families, the roles of each marriage partner were clearly defined along gendered