Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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care of the home, raised the children, saw to the day-to-day needs of her family, and was subordinate to her husband in terms of overall authority within the family.
By the late twentieth century, the ways in which gender was constructed in the media were, ostensibly, very different. The division of labour in family relationships (where a traditional family could be found) was no longer so clear-cut. Both partners might work and share child-rearing responsibilities equally. The female might work outside the home and the male see to the household, or vice versa. In theory, the choices available to women (or, at least, the outward appearance of the availability of these choices) had vastly increased. Yet, accompanying the apparent growth in women’s freedom and their legal and social equality with men, there was also strong evidence of more conservative, less liberated views of women disseminated throughout popular culture.
Tabloid newspapers and magazines have consistently depicted women as objects for the male gaze (as have men’s magazines, often to an exaggerated extent). Some women themselves, moreover, seem to have colluded in the production and dissemination of fundamentally conservative gender stereotypes. Even beyond the obvious examples of the women who pose nude (or nearly so) in various male-targeted weekly and monthly publications (and, surprisingly, in many of the daily tabloid newspapers published in Britain), women’s magazines, mainly written by women for a female audience, have continually reminded women (through articles, fashion advice, beauty tips, and pictorial advertisements) that they should pay particular importance to their looks and general physical attractiveness. Many such magazines, by the last decades of the twentieth century, were also propagating the positive message that women should be proud of their femininity and comfortable with expressing their sexuality. Yet their general tenor was still to reinforce the patriarchal view that women are meant to be valued more for their beauty than their brains, and that this new sexual “freedom” meant making themselves more available to men, rather than giving women the freedom to be more choosey in their choice of (or refusal to choose) a sexual partner.
Women’s magazines can generally be divided into two principal groups: those concerned with childcare and the various aspects of home-making, and those predominantly aimed at helping women find a partner/husband. The notion that women must find a marriage partner is deeply engrained in American (and Western) history and a variety of cultural formations. It is fore-grounded by women’s magazines, advice books, films, advertisements, and television programmes. One of the latter offered an even more specific reason for the phenomenon. In a 1998 episode of Ally McBeal, the following dialogue took place between the lead character and her roommate on their return home from being bridesmaids at a wedding:
ALLY McBEAL: Seriously, Renee, this thing about being married. Why do you think women ...?
RENEE RADICK: We’re brainwashed. The first stories we hear as babies – Snow White, Cinderella – [are] all about getting a guy, being saved by the guy. Today it’s Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas. All about getting a guy.
ALLY: So basically we’re screwed up because of ...
RENEE: (throws her bridesmaid’s dress on the open fire) (scornfully): Disney!11
This dialogue takes place in the opening sequence of an episode from a show which is all about a sad, lonely, slightly strange Generation X-er who cannot find satisfaction in her life – despite her good friends and successful career – because she has been wounded in love once and has yet to find true love since. While trivial in itself, the dialogue quoted above does raise certain issues of relevance to this book.
There are a number of reasons why Disney as a subject has become an increasingly prominent topic of public discourse in recent years. Firstly, Disney itself – during the late 1980s and the 1990s – became much more visible both as a movie studio and as a corporation. In 1987, a retail chain (the Disney Store) was established, Walt Disney World was expanded with the addition of the Disney/MGM Studio theme park in 1989, a new Disney theme park was opened near Paris, France, in 1992, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom was opened in 1998. During these years, Disney animated films became available for purchase on video, and, although they were only hesitantly released by the studio at first, they quickly began to dominate the children’s video market. Secondly, Walt Disney’s and the Disney studio’s places in both American society and other cultures began to receive both popular and scholarly attention. This ranged from highly critical “popular” biographies of Disney, such as that by Marc Eliot,12 through attacks on anything and everything Disney in works such as Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan’s Deconstructing Disney13 and anthropological polemics such as Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World by a group calling themselves “The Project on Disney”,14 to romanticised accounts of Disney’s life in Bob Thomas’ biography Walt Disney: An American Original,15 more serious academic studies such as Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells’ From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture16 and, finally, truly scholarly, self-confident works such as Steven Watts’ The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life17 and Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960.18 However, despite the claims made by writers and commentators for thoroughness and fair-mindedness, many of them have reflected many misconceptions and misunderstandings of Walt Disney, the studio which bears his name and, more often than not, have contributed more to the myths surrounding Disney than they did to an accurate understanding.
In her criticism of Disney in the above dialogue, for example, Ally’s roommate, Renee, alleges that Disney films from “Snow White [to] Cinderella - [are] all about getting a guy, being saved by the guy. Today it’s Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas. All about getting a guy.” This itself emphasises two common misconceptions: that all of Disney’s human female characters are princesses (certainly, all of the films she cites have princesses in them, though there are a much larger number which do not) and that all of Disney’s female characters – past and present – are weak, passive figures who sit around waiting to be “saved by the guy”. Even in just the last three films she cites – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Pocahontas – if there is one thing the three main female characters are not doing, it is sitting around waiting to be “saved by the guy”. In all three of these films, in fact, the heroine actively saves the hero’s life in some way or another at least once. And their motivation to do what they do is never solely romantic love. Ariel (The Little Mermaid) is motivated by love more than either of the other two, but she is also heavily influenced by her deep-seated curiosity about humans, the human world and her fascination with anything and everything human. This aspect of her personality is highlighted well before she ever lays eyes on Prince Eric. In Aladdin, Jasmine, although she is a princess and is beloved by her father, feels stifled by her life and is desperate for adventure in the larger world. It is only because she finally decides to break free of her life as a princess and disguises herself as a peasant that she and Aladdin are ever able to meet. Also, her refusal to marry for any reason other than love and her insistence that the man she marries be someone who, above all, treats her with honour and respect – indeed, it is these qualities in Aladdin which make her fall in love with him – are paramount in Jasmine’s portrayal. Likewise, in Pocahontas, Pocahontas’ love for John Smith is only a small part of her motivation for her actions in the film, as its narrative development makes clear. In fact, she is motivated predominately by her desire to prevent war; in the end, she says good-bye to Smith in order to take up her place as a leader amongst her people.
These are all strong female characters with strong, positive aspects to their depictions. They are also typical of the kinds of female characters to be found in the Disney films of the 1990s. Furthermore, such strong, active women were to be seen in Disney animated films of the late 1970s and 1980s, and instances of such independence and energy are to be found even amongst some of the characters of the first era of the Disney studio’s feature animation production (characters such as Slue-Foot Sue and, to a lesser extent, Katrina van Tassel are examples of strong, less-than-passive characters from Disney’s earlier years). Yet, because two of the most famous classic Disney characters from two of its most popularly successful films – Snow White