Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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share with their children those films they enjoyed during their own childhoods. However, if elements within these films had become so outdated that parents re-evaluated their fondness for these films and changed their minds about sharing them with offspring, or, if the children had found nothing within them to which they could relate, then the films would have faded from popularity, lingering in popular memory only because of their nostalgic value, not because of their importance as cultural icons. But the significance of Disney’s animated films is that, by and large, they did not disappear. While some were more popular than others, and while some have either increased or declined in mainstream popularity since their initial releases, most of Disney’s films are still highly popular, highly successful, and even decades (in some cases) after their initial releases, still highly profitable for their studio. As they continue to find new audiences in each up-coming generation, it seems reasonable to assume that these films have more than simply a nostalgic appeal: they must, in some way, still hold relevance for modern audiences.
Molly Haskell, in the introduction to the classic text From Reverence to Rape, noted that “Most of the popular novels, plays, short stories of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties have all but disappeared, but the films based on them have survived to tell us more vividly than any new or old journalism what it was like, or what our dream life was like, and how we saw ourselves in the women of those times”.30 This is especially true of the films of Walt Disney. If people are asked to describe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they are very likely to start talking about Sleepy, Dopey, and the rest of the dwarfs. If informed that, in the Grimms’ version of the tale, the dwarfs did not have individual names, many are generally (and genuinely) surprised. Those who consider themselves to be “well-read” may not like to admit it, but, so far as many such traditional stories are concerned, we are usually content to let “Uncle Walt” tell us “his” versions of the stories and trust that they have been told fairly and faithfully.
A factor which is just as important, however, in any evaluation of Disney’s role as cultural mirror is an examination of the individual characterisations within the stories themselves, as well as the types of stories which were selected to be made into films. The early films – the stories for which were chosen (and all of which were given final approval) predominately by Walt himself – are simple in their plot-lines, with easily-defined concepts of good and evil. This preference for more straightforward narratives seems to have been influenced, in large part, by the fact that such narratives seemed easier (both to Walt and to his staff) to adapt into animated feature films.31 This was particularly true in the earlier history of animation, when technological and artistic innovations were just beginning to find ways to allow for more complex animation such as would support more complex storylines and plots. It is certainly the case that, mostly, they are tales in which highly archetypal, even stereotypical portrayals of women are likely to be found. Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora/Briar Rose – all are good, simple, kind; they are what Virginia Woolf once dubbed “the angel in the house”.32 Many of the female characters from this period are counterbalanced within each one’s story by some evil, obsessive, and (most likely) sexually-unfulfilled older woman: the evil queen, the wicked step-mother, Maleficent the evil fairy, and Cruella deVil.33 It should be noted, however, that there are a couple of exceptions in this period. In the later periods of Disney’s films, only Penny (in The Rescuers, 1977) and Ariel (in The Little Mermaid, 1989) are directly threatened by an older, vindictive woman. By the time Atlantis was released in 2001 (twelve years later), the female villain, Helga, was depicted as a young, attractive, alluring woman at her peak, and is a far cry (both in looks and in complexity of motivation) from her villainess predecessors.
As feminist critics have noted, Hollywood has traditionally reinforced the patriarchal, largely Victorian value system which has dominated Western culture throughout the history of cinema. “As the propaganda arm of the American Dream machine”, declared Molly Haskell,
Hollywood promoted a romantic fantasy of marital roles and conjugal euphoria and chronically ignored the facts and fears arising from an awareness of The End – the winding down of love, change, divorce, depression, mutation, death itself. ... The very unwillingness of the narrative to pursue love into marriage (except in the ‘woman’s film’, where the degree of rationalization needed to justify the disappointments of marriage made its own subversive comment) betrayed a certain scepticism. Not only did the unconscious elements obtrude in the films, but they were part of the very nature of the industry itself.34
In 1978, Brandon French noted that, particularly within women’s roles (both in film and television) of the 1950s, there was a substantial degree of subversion of the notion that women were happiest in these traditional roles.35 This subversion, however, in combination with the more traditional representations of women finding fulfilment in marriage, still reflects the mood of their era: it is just that they reflect an era of change, albeit change which was still in its earlier stages of development.
In Disney’s films – in particular, those made during what is referred to in this book as “The Classic Period” (films made during Disney’s lifetime, between 1937 and 1966) – this traditional interpretation of the roles of love and marriage is without question the most prevalent. Heroes and heroines meet, fall in love, go through a separation and hardship (which no doubt serves in some sense as a test of their devotion and pureness of heart), are reunited, marry, and live happily ever after. What exactly that “happily ever after” entails is a mystery, and we as spectators are led to believe that it will be simply a continuation of their love and happiness – of their exact emotions – at the time of their marriage. For many individuals within both child and adult audiences, such a future seems not only bright and lovely but possible. There is nothing in most films (Disney or otherwise) to indicate that love, even when it lasts, can change, or lose its intensity without losing its strength. Some recent writers and pundits have criticised this tendency to focus on the “happily ever after” as one of the roots of marital instability in the late twentieth century. As one such writer, working in the increasingly popular so-called “self-help” genre, would complain, “Because romantic tales usually end at the wedding (whole years eclipsed by the lying words: ‘and they lived happily ever after’) and because there has been scant attention paid to the question of how to live together in the increasingly complex state of marriage or long-term cohabitation, most people are naive about what it entails”.36 However, given that, in the case of Disney films, most of these stories were decades or centuries old by the time they were put on film, and that the narrative structures they rely upon have been the framework for countless stories both past and present, when accounting for the increase in failed marriages and difficult or failed long-term relationships in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, it seems peculiar to think that so much of the blame can be laid at the feet of fairy tales and the movies.
For some spectators, these depictions of love and marriage – stereotypical and essentially Victorian in sensibility though many of them are – served as a valued and valuable form of escapism.37 This notion becomes particularly heightened when one remembers that the films with which this study is concerned, animated Disney feature films based mostly upon traditional fairy tales, are films which can be seen as doubly escapist due to their source material (fairy stories, with which many within the audience would have been familiar since childhood) and their medium (animation being a format which allows for amazing and otherwise impossible characters and depictions of fantasy and mythology). As Norman Klein notes:
Much has been made of the psychological advantages of function in fairy tales; it presumably enables the listener to externalize deeply felt anxiety. It reifies forgotten moments in a person’s intimate development (stages in childhood; family crises; sexual fears), or the social meanings of taboos in a community (like kin or incest). Function penetrates forgotten fears.38
What is it in these tales the Disney studio tells which carries out this “function” in fairy tales? When strong, sexually-mature women are portrayed as frustrated, maniacal, bloodthirsty demons and witches, what are these portrayals saying about perceptions on the part of the film-makers of women’s sexuality? Most of all, perhaps, how large a